Professional Readings with Reflection and References

Making and Molding Identity in Schools
Student Narratives on Race, Gender, and Academic Engagement

Ann Locke Davidson is a Research Associate at the Learning Research and Development Center, University of Pittsburgh. She is co-editor, with Patricia Phelan, of Renegotiating Cultural Diversity in American Schools.

Summary

“Delves into the lives and words of adolescents to examine how they assert their ethnic and racial identities within school settings.”

Making and molding identity in schools delves into the lives of adolescents to examine how youths assert ethnic and racial identities in the face of policies, discourses, and practices that work both to reproduce and challenge social categories.

Detailed case studies illuminate adolescent voices and perspectives, revealing that identity and academic engagement emanate not just from societal and cultural forces, but also from ordinary, day to day interactions and experiences within school settings. Drawing on contemporary social theory, the author emphasizes the political and relational nature of race and ethnicity, and illustrates the potential for identities and ideologies to vary over time and across school settings. The book provides a needed expansion of theories that link youth identities and ideologies solely to cultural, economic and political forces, and provides insight into settings that allow students to engage without discarding their ethnic and racial selves.

“Don't wait for the Last Judgment.  It happens every day.” 

~Albert Camus, The Fall, 1956

Leaving Children Behind

Angela Valenzuela is a Professor of Curriculum and Instruction and Mexican American Studies at the University of Texas at Austin.

Summary

“Argues for a more valid and democratic approach to assessment and accountability.”

            The federal government has based much of its education policies on those adopted in Texas. This book examines how "Texas-style" accountability—the notion that decisions governing retention, promotion, and graduation should be based on a single test score—fails Latina/o youth and their communities. The contributors, many of them from Texas, scrutinize state policies concerning high-stakes testing and provide new data that demonstrate how Texas' current system of testing results in a plethora of new inequalities. They argue that Texas policies exacerbate historic inequities, fail to accommodate the needs and abilities of English language learners, and that the dramatic educational improvement attributed to Texas' system of accountability is itself questionable. The book proposes a more valid and democratic approach to assessment and accountability that would combine standardized examinations with multiple sources of information about a student's academic performance.

References

Davidson, A. (1996). Making and Molding Identity in Schools. United States of America.

Valenzuela, A. (2004). Leaving Children Behind. University of Texas, Austin.

Reflection

Teaching Profession is important in order for the teachers and even the parents to know the basic knowledge on how to proper care or teach and the pupils using different principles from reliable persons in the world of education. They have theories which explain the different problems in school which may be effective to the situation where the teachers may be handling. These books are foundation of theories which everybody can use in dealing the different problems in the context of education.

In the book of Anderson, Making and Molding Identity in Schools she and explains the major problems in implementing President Bush's No Child Left Behind law. The richness of the contributions by major Latino scholars to this analysis should help us understand the tremendous need to diversify our faculties if we are to understand our changing society and its schools.

According to Apple one of the critics of her book, if all of the emphasis on accountability and testing in their schools, there are too many of them have forgotten to ask what the real effects of such movements actually are. Leaving Children Behind is a powerful analysis of why such questions must be asked by anyone who cares about the relationship between current school reforms and the production of inequalities.

In addition, Valenzuela suggests what has to change in fundamentally for real reform to occur. This ethnography highlights teacher practices that need to be emulated and rewarded. There are models for becoming an effective teacher with Latinola and other minority students.

Therefore professional readings are really essential in all areas of education where it serves as an eye openers to all individuals who concerns about the education of the 21^st century learners and teachers.