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Around the world, you will hear complaints that people are losing their culture and their heritage. This study explores what is triggering this sense of cultural loss, to what ends this rhetoric gets deployed, and how anthropologists deal with their own feelings of nostalgia.
The UNESCO World Heritage Convention of 1972 set the contemporary standard for cultural and natural conservation. Today, a place on the World Heritage List is much sought after for tourism promotion, development funding, and national prestige. Presenting case studies from across the globe, particularly from Africa and Asia, anthropologists with situated expertise in specific World Heritage sites explore the consequences of the World Heritage framework and the global spread of the UNESCO heritage regime. This book shows how local and national circumstances interact with the global institutional framework in complex and unexpected ways. Often, the communities around World Heritage sites are constrained by these heritage regimes rather than empowered by them.
Nostalgia is intimately connected to the history of the social sciences in general and anthropology in particular, though finely grained ethnographies of nostalgia and loss are still scarce. Today, anthropologists have realized that nostalgia constitutes a fascinating object of study for exploring contemporary issues of the formation of identity in politics and history. Contributors to this volume consider the fabric of nostalgia in the fields of heritage and tourism, exile and diasporas, postcolonialism and postsocialism, business and economic exchange, social, ecological and religious movements, and nation building. They contribute to a better understanding of how individuals and groups commemorate their pasts, and how nostalgia plays a role in the process of remembering.
Drawing on their extensive research, Nichols and Berliner document and categorize the ways that high-stakes testing threatens the purposes and ideals of the American education system. For more than a decade, the debate over high-stakes testing has dominated the field of education. This passionate and provocative book provides a fresh perspective on the issue and powerful ammunition for opponents of high-stakes tests. Their analysis is grounded in the application of Campbell’s Law, which posits that the greater the social consequences associated with a quantitative indicator (such as test scores), the more likely it is that the indicator itself will become corrupted—and the more likely it...
"Twenty-eight eminent essayists remind our nations parents, educators, school board members and politicians that our democracy is in jeopardy and that our nation's system of free universal public education is also under attack. If that attack succeeds, American democracy itself would be further imperiled. That is because American democracy rests on a belief that the power of our government comes from the people, and the diffusion of knowledge and the enlightenment of the people has been a cornerstone of our democracy since the founding of our republic. America's public schools, therefore, have a special mandate"--
Over the past decade a rising chorus of critics - from William Bennett to Allan Bloom - has decried the supposedly dire state of our public schools. Kids aren't learning what they should, violence and chaos reign in the classroom, and bureaucracy strangles attempts at reform. But how much of that grim image is really true? In The Manufactured Crisis, two prominent scholars, prize-winning educational psychologist David C. Berliner and leading social psychologist Bruce J. Biddle, fight back with the good news. They debunk a whole series of familiar but untrue statistics about public schools - that SAT scores have been dropping, when for many groups they are in fact rising; that illiteracy is u...
Demoralized: Why Teachers Leave the Profession They Love and How They Can Stay offers a timely analysis of professional dissatisfaction that challenges the common explanation of burnout. Featuring the voices of educators, the book offers concrete lessons for practitioners, school leaders, and policy makers on how to think more strategically to retain experienced teachers and make a difference in the lives of students. Based on ten years of research and interviews with practitioners across the United States, the book theorizes the existence of a “moral center” that can be pivotal in guiding teacher actions and expectations on the job. Education philosopher Doris Santoro argues that demora...
Introducing the study of econostalgias through a variety of rich ethnographic cases, this volume argues that a strictly human centered approach does not account for contemporary longings triggered by ecosystem upheavals. In this time of climate change, this book explores how nostalgia for fading ecologies unfolds into the interstitial spaces between the biological, the political and the social, regret and hope, the past, the present and the future.
This volume is comprised of contributions from leading scholars in education and psychology. In part one of the book the authors provide insight into the psychology of change, examining: What factors work as catalysts for change in environments, institutions and people What factors hinder change When change is deemed beneficial In the second part of this volume the authors turn their attention to the issue of peace education. They examine the types of problems that societies and scholars should identify and try to solve in hopes of building more peaceful environments. The final chapter is a biography honoring Professor Gavriel (Gabi) Salomon, a significant contributor to the vast literature on change. This book is appropriate reading for professors, students and academics who are dedicated to fostering change to benefit institutions, environments and people.
With an increasing emphasis on creativity and innovation in the twenty-first century, teachers need to be creative professionals just as students must learn to be creative. And yet, schools are institutions with many important structures and guidelines that teachers must follow. Effective creative teaching strikes a delicate balance between structure and improvisation. The authors draw on studies of jazz, theater improvisation and dance improvisation to demonstrate that the most creative performers work within similar structures and guidelines. By looking to these creative genres, the book provides practical advice for teachers who wish to become more creative professionals.