Research on democratic representation and public opinion formation has largely ignored one another. Once one considers the reality of the political communication environment, a fundamental tension between these two literatures emerges. In this essay, I review work on each, highlighting problems with both how “quality opinion” is often defined and how representation is typically studied. I then offer a way forward.

Pathologies of Studying Public Opinion, Political Communication, and Democratic Responsiveness

Thesis (PhD (Curriculum Development Innovation and Evaluation))--North-West University, Potchefstroom Campus, 2013

Democratizing an online discussion forum at a higher education institution : from rationalistic exclusion to the recognition of multiple presences

participants may never see or work with a child must be reexamined and a more imaginative and practical approach devised." Similarly, certification standards for reading specialists have been reviewed and attacked many times (2, 4 , 10). In fact, a majority of the states have no certification standards for reading specialists, while the states that do have standards express them in time-in-course terms. It is interesting to note that the recently revised statement of the roles, responsibilities and qualifications of reading specialists, formulated by the Professional Standards and Ethics Committee of the IRA (9), described qualifications of reading specialists mostly in time-in-course terms, yet the roles and responsibilities were described in behavioral terms. Neither teacher preparation nor certification requirements in reading are meeting the needs of the twentieth century. A logical scheme for preparing teachers or reading specialists for particular roles and responsibilities, or behaviors, is to devise a performance curriculum. Stated simply, trainers of reading specialists must specify behavioral objectives by devising performance criteria with evaluation implicit, and provide appropriate instruction to meet the objectives. The concept of instructional objectives certainly is not a new one. Bloom (i), Krathwohl (5), and Mager (6) are becoming household words in teacher preparation institutions. Recently, Eisner (3) has added the concept of the expressive objective:

A Performance Curriculum for Training Reading Teachers.

We can begin this examination of rhetorical form with an artificial but helpful distinction between antilogic as a techne, or set of practical skills, and antilogic as praxis, a more general capacity for action We know from David Roochnik that the term techne was derived from the Indo-European root for “wood,” and that a tekton was a woodworker (1990, 18) Over time, the Greek term came to indicate specific skills “uniquely possessed by one member of the community,” especially those skills that required an ability for making intellectual calculations, so that the technai came to include arithmetic as well as carpentry Roochnik concludes that all such skills are relatively precise (e.g., medicine), have a determinate subject matter (woodworking, numbers), and are value neutral (can be used for good or ill; 20–21) With this working description, we can posit certain features of antilogic that could be classified as “technical”; but we should be careful in doing so, for an over-scrupulous attempt to calculate the precise form of antilogic runs the risk of diverting attention to the peripheral and hypostatizing what in actual practice is dynamic.

Olive S. Niles

Papers

The Essential Need.