Robert J. Graham

Bio: Robert J. Graham is an academic researcher. The author has contributed to research in topics: Semiotics & Irish. The author has an hindex of 1, co-authored 1 publications receiving 6 citations.

The Irish Readers Revisited: The Power of the Text(book).

Abstract: The Irish Readers, the first textbooks authorized for use in Upper Canada (1846), provide evidence of deeper social-historical processes of knowledge production. A study of the pedagogy, form, and content of representative lessons uncovers an ideological matrix meant to reproduce society on fixed lines of race, class, and gender. Such class-specific social theory silently structures textbooks, giving precedence to certain forms of knowledge. A critical semiotics of the textbook would counter common assumptions about knowledge and its dissemination.

Teachers and Texts: A Political Economy of Class and Gender Relations in Education

Abstract: Introduction 1.The Politics of Teachers and Texts. Teachers 2. Controlling the Work of Teachers 3. Teaching and 'Women's Work'. Texts 4. The Culture and Commerce of the Textbook. 5. Old Humanists and New Curricula. 6. Educational Reports and Economic Realities. 7. Is the New Technology Part of the Solution or Part of the Problem in Education? Conclusion 8. Supporting Democracy in Education.

"Happy Consciousness": Ideology and Hidden Curricula In Literacy Education

Abstract: The content of five widely-used ABE reading series was analyzed 13 years ago by Gerald Coles (1977). Coles found racism, sexism, and socioeconomic stereotypes to "abound" in these materials. Using the same categories of racism, sexism, and the socioeconomic categories employed by Coles, this investigation reconstructed the Coles study to determine if hidden curricula still exist and, if so, to what extent. Findings indicate that today's most popular reading texts have improved since 1977, but only slightly. Cultural and political reproduction comprise two of the guiding ideologies for literacy education in the 1990s.

Textual Erasures of Religion: The Power of Books to Redefine Yoga and Mindfulness Meditation as Secular Wellness Practices in North American Public Schools

Abstract: This essay argues that books, broadly defined to include print and internet publications, played a crucial role in the cultural mainstreaming, including adoption by public schools, of non-Christian religious practices such as yoga and meditation. Promotional books, tactically and ironically, played on the textual bias of Christianity, and especially Protestantism, to re-brand practices borrowed from religious traditions such as Hinduism and Buddhism, as scientific techniques for exercise and stress-reduction, thereby reintegrating religion into public education. The essay begins with a brief history of religion in U.S. and Canadian public education, explains the textual bias of North American assumptions about religion, and analyzes how twentieth-century promoters of practice-centered religions tactically wielded books to increase public acceptance of non-Christian religious practices. The essay focuses on two twenty-first-century examples of religion-based, textually mediated public-school curricula: the Sonima Foundation’s Health and Wellness program of Ashtanga yoga and The Hawn Foundation’s MindUP program of mindfulness meditation.