School leaders are constantly challenged by diverse students and conflicting interests between faculty and staff. They are often called upon to make sense of ethical quagmires, where rules might conflict with desired outcomes or personal values clash with professional obligations. Negotiating these dilemmas can be challenging, but democratic ethics can offer an effective process to work through them. Drawing from the writings of John Dewey, Leading Through the Quagmire advocates his notion that democracy is an appropriate response to the multitude (...) of conflicting interests, needs, and values in educational settings. Moreover, Enomoto and Kramer propose an inquiry method to harness democratic ethics for engaging in fair deliberation and conflict resolution. This book provides the foundation for understanding tensions, as well as the methods and applications to navigate through them. Stories and examples are provided to enable readers to understand such terms as utilitarianism, ethical tensions, religious attitudes, and eco-feminism in meaningful ways. (shrink)

Funded by the U.S. Department of Education, the Baltimore Learning Community project established a networked electronic learning community through the use of high-quality digital science and social studies resources and high-speed networking. The project will enable science and social studies teachers to access images, text, Web sites, and full motion video via high-speed connections to the Internet. Extending such multimedia configurations into urban schools has facilitated a rethinking of teaching and learning in content classes as well as a reconsideration of (...) how media and method are integrated. It facilitates teacher engagement in designing authentic classroom instruction framed by performance assessments and links project teachers and school site coordinators through a client server, thus promoting a network of teachers and students engaged in learning across schools. However, such a project is not without its challenges—human as well as technological. This article discusses the BLC project identifying technology possibilities, current situational constraints, and implications of creating networked learning communities across disciplines and beyond school walls. (shrink)

Latina immigrant women who work as nannies or housekeepers and reside in Los Angeles while their children remain in their countries of origin constitute one variation in the organizational arrangements of motherhood. The authors call this arrangement “transnational motherhood.” On the basis of a survey, in-depth interviews, and ethnographic materials gathered in Los Angeles, they examine how Latina immigrant domestic workers transform the meanings of motherhood to accommodate these spatial and temporal separations. The article examines the emergent meanings of motherhood (...) and alternative child-rearing arrangements. It also discusses how the women view motherhood in relation to their employment, as well as their strategies for selectively developing emotional ties with their employers' children and for creating new rhetorics of mothering standards on the basis of what they view in their employers' homes. (shrink)

This paper defends what the philosopher Merleau Ponty coins ‘the imaginary texture of the real’. It is suggested that the imagination is at work in the everyday world which we perceive, the world as it is for us. In defending this view a concept of the imagination is invoked which has both similarities with and differences from, our everyday notion. The everyday notion contrasts the imaginary and the real. The imaginary is tied to the fictional or the illusory. Here it (...) will be suggested, following both Kant and Strawson, that there is a more fundamental working of the imagination, present in both perception and the constructions of fictions. What Kant and Strawson failed to make clear, however, was that the workings of the imagination within the perceived world, gives that world, an affective logic. The domain of affect is that of emotions, feelings and desire, and to claim such an affective logic in the world we experience, is to point out that it has salience and significance for us. Such salience suggests and demands the desiring and sometimes fearful responses we make to it; the shape of the perceived world echoed in the shapes our bodies take within it. (shrink)

I expect every reader knows the hackneyed old joke: ‘What is matter? Never mind. What is mind? No matter.’ Antique as this joke is, it none the less points to an interesting question. For the so-called mind–body dichotomy, which has been raised to almost canonical status in post-Cartesian philosophy, is not in fact at all easy to draw or to defend. This of course means that ‘the mind–body problem’ is difficult both to describe and to solve—or rather, as I would (...) prefer, to dissolve. (shrink)

The word ‘freedom’ leads a double life. As a rallying cry in the mouths of politicians and publicists, it features in speech acts which inspire men to brave endeavours. Freedom or death are the proffered alternatives, and they are generally linked with fatiguing dispositions such as vigilance. As a philosophical concept , on the other hand, freedom is a territory in which battles are fought about such issues as positivity and negativity, virtue, determinism and the character of the will. There (...) is remarkably little connection between these two lives. Philosophers do not seem to take much interest in courage, and politicians do not tarry to specify whether it is negative or positive liberty they are talking about. (shrink)