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My friend Sarah is co-editing a special issue of Radical Teacher on teaching and technology, and is looking for submissions. Read the full call here.

Possible topics include:

* Classroom deployments of digital tools such as blogs and microblogs (e.g., Twitter), wikis, video, and other digital and new media technologies to enhance or encourage radical teaching.
* The implications of changing forms of digital labor in the academic environment, including demands to build technology skills, learn software packages, contribute intellectual material to university-owned and/or commercial databases, creating and populating online learning environments, etc.
* How to harness technologies for their empowering potential, including supporting and training students to be active users of technology.
* Commodification of intellectual material, including the modularization and "just in time" delivery of teaching material via commercial courseware on university-owned servers.
* The surveillance and control of teachers and students when learning takes place in digital environments.
* The ethical implications of the underlying political and ethical logics we teach when we use technology in our instruction and research.
* Limitations on material and other types of access; or when "One Laptop Per Child" is simply not enough.
* Demands on instructors to provide vocational training for careers to students; training them to use commercial software packages and delivering a labor force that skilled in technology, as opposed to having support, space and resources for the teaching of academic material.
* The lopsided funding of technology projects over all else in academic institutions over the past decade and a half, and the collusion of academic institutions with high-tech business on joint ventures and for-profit activities.
* The relationship between contingent labor and on-line teaching.
* The relationship between technology and assessment.
* Classroom and institutional use of open source and noncommercial softwares (e.g., Drupal) as alternatives to privatized and for-profit technologies.

Feel free to circulate this!

Newsweek has an article about the differences between Randi Weingarten, president of the American Federation of Teachers, and Michelle Rhee, chancellor of D.C. schools. Anyone familiar with Rhee's work can see where this is going; as chancellor, she has become (in?)famous for her almost single-minded determination to "demand accountability" in schools — read: blame and fire teachers. As head of one of the country's largest teachers' unions, Weingarten predictably disagrees.

Both women are also known for their uncompromising personalities. I have my misgivings about both of their stances on educational reform and labor issues; I'm sure I'm not alone there. But I'm also capable of recognizing this argument for what it is, which is a professional disagreement. Newsweek, however, seems to think it's a sequel to Mean Girls. Under the headline Schoolyard Brawl, we get a story that might as well come with a cartoon of them pulling each other's braids in the girls' bathroom. It's creepy and it's sexist. To wit:

Rhee has a chance to set a strong example for weeding out incompetent teachers—if she doesn't overplay her hand against Weingarten, who is a formidable foe. "You have two strong-willed and very smart and determined women with very different agendas," says Chester Finn Jr., a former assistant secretary of education and a senior fellow at Stanford's Hoover Institution. "It has an almost gladiatorial aspect to it."

"Gladiatorial"? Really?

I think what's really going on here is the Bechdel test playing out in real life. The Bechdel test is an idea from an old Dykes to Watch Out For comic, in which a character says she will only watch a movie if it has 1) at least two women 2) who talk to each other 3) about something other than a man. It's amazing how many movies fail.

Out in the real world, we're accustomed to seeing women in the public eye when they're in fields where their bodies are paramount (actors, athletes), and, increasingly, in politics (Hillary Clinton, Nancy Pelosi). But how often do we see a woman engaged in a public debate with another woman, over ideas?

Rhee and Weingarten, who first tangled about five years ago when Weingarten was running the New York City teachers' union and Rhee was testifying against her as the head of a nonprofit organization promoting school reform, clearly dislike each other.

Well I would hope so! It would be hard to have much integrity if they were having tea every week.

This isn't Jennifer and Angelina. It's a debate about one of the thorniest problems in school reform: how to get rid of bad teachers without any fair and reliable measure of what constitutes bad teaching. Rhee and Weingarten occupy the extreme ends of the argument. In a field that is overwhelmingly female, but where administrative positions are still largely held by men, it is refreshing to see women in leadership roles. As I said, I disagree with both of them on any number of issues. But it would be nice if those ideas could be discussed without falling back on stupid gendered stereotypes.

• California school moves to ban THE DICTIONARY; rest of world succumbs to despair about the state of American education: http://bit.ly/5Jw9WP #

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• Newsflash, rich people are meaner: http://bit.ly/5Mjlev #
• Interesting. Religious respondents (of any faith) have a more favorable view of Muslims than do the non-religious: http://bit.ly/51rQiE #
• "The hatred towards Muslims has grown to a level that defies all logic and is an affront to British values." http://bit.ly/81mULb #
• Texting and chat-speak actually improve children's spelling skills: http://bit.ly/5RBURZ #
• Realizing that one's intelligence may be improved may improve one's intelligence: http://bit.ly/5m1c6Q #

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• College admissions still overwhelmingly favor elite: http://bit.ly/6e1v35 #
• Liberty Clinic. Do you have a question about your rights? http://bit.ly/8yBeiq #
• The history of monotheism, if it were fanfiction: http://bit.ly/8t9HJ1 #

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• Conservatives re-write textbooks in Texas; all US students given same books: http://www.washingtonmonthly.com/features/2010/1001.blake.html #
• What makes a great teacher? TFA releases 20 years of data: http://www.theatlantic.com/doc/201001/good-teaching #
• Survey: South Asian languages taught in the US at the K-12 level http://desilearn.us/ #
• Are AP classes overenrolled? http://bit.ly/8uYF0C #

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• Why is feminism still so divisive? http://bit.ly/6uR3JS #

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Alternative classroom approaches to teaching Thanksgiving

• US taking wrong lessons from Chinese schools: http://bit.ly/JKKjJ #
• The king's son and the fish: http://bit.ly/1VxAFi #

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New program will teach students about 9/11

The 9/11 curriculum, believed to be the first comprehensive educational plan focusing on the attacks, is expected to be tested this year at schools in New York City, California, New Jersey, Alabama, Indiana, Illinois and Kansas.

It was developed with the help of educators by the Brick, N.J.-based Sept. 11 Education Trust, and was based on primary sources, archival footage and more than 70 interviews with witnesses, family members of victims and politicians, including Giuliani and U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, a New York senator at the time of the attacks.

The curriculum is taught through videos, lessons and interactive exercises, including one that requires students to use Google Earth software to map global terrorist activity.

Teaching Students About 9/11

At a press conference on Tuesday at a hotel blocks from the World Trade Center site, Giuliani said the program can help students think critically about the attacks as both a historic event and one that shapes the present, noting the continued threat of terrorism and the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq.

Teachers say that today's middle and high school students might be too young to have strong memories of the attacks, so the program can help them develop insight into what actually happened.

"Students are getting progressively younger as we move further and further away from the events," says Torres. In a few years, students who are taught about the attacks will not even have been alive when they occurred, adds Anthony Gardner, executive director of the Education Trust, whose brother died in the World Trade Center.

9/11 as a Lesson, Not a Memory

Eight years later, this is an example of what Sept. 11, 2001, has become for a generation that's too young to remember much, if anything, about that day: It is an educational DVD, a 167-page textbook, a black binder of class handouts titled "A National Interdisciplinary Curriculum." In Room C215 at Lincoln High School, images of the collapsing Manhattan skyline are now a classroom "warm-up exercise." "Militant," "imploding" and "rubble" are boldfaced vocabulary words for students to memorize. Homework assignments and essay questions ensure that Sept. 11 will indeed be remembered by millions of schoolchildren, if with a new sense of detachment.

More:
The September 11 Education Program
The September 11 Education Trust

A federal court recently ruled that Ashcroft can be held personally responsible for the wrongful detention of an innocent American.

It's something. We'll see where it goes from here.

• Do teachers need education degrees? (Part 1) http://bit.ly/4itlF #
• The value of education degrees: teachers respond http://bit.ly/2aMN2J #
• Eduwonk: Responses to the NYT on reinventing teacher ed programs http://bit.ly/2JZYn #

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• You can judge a school by the boys' bathroom: http://bit.ly/njA7C #
• Lazy journalists and Detroit's "ruin porn": http://bit.ly/Ie6wf #

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For the last month I've been researching American K-12 textbooks and looking at how they depict immigrant groups, especially religious minorities. Today I found this gem, from an 18th-century public school textbook:

Fifteen Christians and 15 Turks bound at sea in one ship in a terrible storm, and the pilot declaring a necessity of casting one half of these persons into the sea, that the rest might be saved, they all agreed that the persons to be cast away should be set out by lot in this manner, viz., the 30 persons should be placed in a round form like a ring and then, beginning to count at one of the passengers and proceeding regularly every ninth person should be cast into the sea until of the 30 persons there remained only 15. The question is, how these 30 persons ought to be placed that the lot might fall infallibly upon the 15 Turks, and not upon any of the 15 Christians.

• Feminist Hawks: http://bit.ly/s7gX4 #
• "The Curse of Knowledge" – Excellent analogy to teaching: http://bit.ly/HWIXl #

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