Showing papers in "Elementary School Journal in 1975"

A Danish Experience

Abstract: University of South Dakota Vermillion, South Dakota A visit to a small nation like Denmark that cares much about people, and especially children, can be a revelation. As the leader of a universitysponsored early childhood education study tour to Europe this past summer, I had a marvelous opportunity to observe some of the provisions the Danes make for their young children. We met first with an education

Ready to Write

Abstract: During a social visit, a mother said, \"My four-year-old daughter can write her name. But,\" the mother continued, \"I'm concerned because she forms some of her letters backwards and can't write in an even line.\" This mother was expressing a belief that appears to be widespread in the USA among parents and professional educators alike; the very young should master formal skills, and the sooner the better. The emphasis on early teaching of formal skills forces the child to write before he has the

Sexism in Picture Books: What Progress?

Abstract: some time been angry that Mother is often portrayed in an apron, standing contentedly before a stove, ministering to her family's needs. Such critics make convincing demands for changes in books that help shape children's concepts of sex role. To learn whether such criticisms are more than rhetoric, a study of women's roles in picture books was undertaken. The study, made in 1972, showed that the books examined featured highly unrealistic presentations of women's roles (1). With the increasing emphasis on women's rights and on more realistic presentation of roles in instructional materials, one might assume that trade books would by now feature women, particularly those outside the home, in a wide variety of roles. Instead of finding Mother working happily at the stove, we should now expect to find her busy in the lab solving nuclear problems, or on the site supervising building construction, or in the auditorium leading a symphony. Is such the case?

Bibliotherapy to Help Children Solve Problems

Abstract: Sam's parents are getting a divorce; Pamela is a fat, awkward fourthgrader; Cheryl is the first black girl ever to attend Pinecrest School; and ten-year-old Mike has already moved twelve times. As children like Sam, Pamela, Cheryl, Mike and the boys and girls in your classroom grow and mature, they encounter a multitude of problems that stem from a multitude of sources-cultural conflicts, religious differences, sibling relationships, family mobility, hospital confinement, parental separation, and myriad others. As Patricia Cianciola (1) notes, stress for children stems from two sources-external, when events happen to them, and internal, when problems arise from within (1: 897). For the most part the situations that Sam, Pamela, Cheryl, and Mike face are examples of external stress. Internal stress may result from a disparity between a child's ability and his goals, from physical or psychological shortcomings, or from lack of love and approval. Stress has its effect on the child, whether the source is internal or external.

Multiage Classrooms: An Analysis of Verbal Communication

Abstract: we think is going on in the open classroom is truly going on there (1). Too often educators equate open education with administrators knocking down walls and with children wandering from learning center to learning center. Disappearing walls and wandering children are not infallible tests of open education. Often so-called traditional practices-fixed ability grouping, for example-are used in "de-walled" and multicentered set-

Processes Underlying the Learning of Printed Words.

Abstract: Many researchers, whether or not they are involved in the study of reading, believe that word-learning is essentially associational in nature. Kohlberg, for example, writes cavalierly, "Because reading and writing (especially reading) are relatively low-level sensorimotor skills, there is nothing in the cognitive structure of the reading task which involves any high challenge to the older child" (2: 1038). To the contrary, however, recent studies of word-learning suggest that learning to read demands an active structuring and integration of new task materials into pre-existing structures rather than the passive building of associations through drill, repetition, and reinforcement.

Teacher's Expectations: Prime Mover or Inhibitor?

Abstract: Storerooms, closets, and libraries are bursting at the seams with the "forgotten relics of fads and nostrums" (1: 1) that promised, if only briefly, to remedy our educational ills. Our easy seduction by "snake-oil remedies, fake cancer cures, perpetual motion contraptions and old wives' tales" (1: 1) is, in large measure, a result of our confusion of myth with reality. Our instructional practices have been further confounded by misconceptions regarding key and facilitating variables in children's learning. This confusion between myth and reality, key and facilitating factors, has rendered us susceptible to bandwagon panaceas. Our quest for easy solutions to educational problems is manifested in extravagant architectural designs in school buildings. Children attend classes in conventional structures and

Some Classroom ABC's: Research Takes a Closer Look

Abstract: jobs effectively. Some of the pressures for accountability do stem from sources hostile to or ignorant of established values in early childhood education. Unfortunately, however, in these days of extremely tight money, when teachers have to justify their practices and beliefs to parents, teachers are frequently unable to explain clearly what they do and why they do it. Too often they operate from a set of assumptions about which they are hazy and for which they can offer little or no support from research. It can be genuinely helpful to teachers to examine the assumptions underlying their goals and methods. Consider, for example, teachers' assumptions about class size and child-teacher ratio. Most teachers be-

Ethnocentrism toward Foreign Culture in Elementary Social Studies

Abstract: Many social studies curriculums that are being used in the elementary school present the basic concepts for an anthropological study of a foreign culture. Often the stated objectives of these culture studies are to provide the learner with a model for looking at general human culture and to illustrate the concept of human universality. Children who use the ethnographic materials in these curriculums, however, often express ridicule, condescension, or disgust at certain characteristic behaviors in the culture

Are Your Sex Stereotypes Showing

Abstract: There is ample evidence that sexstereotyped attitudes persist in our society and that they influence career aspirations and job opportunities. The attitudes are proving costly not only to individuals but also to society as a whole. The school is in a position to modify these attitudes and needs to make a more systematic effort to do so. Recent U.S. Department of Labor statistics show that about 15 per cent of our unemployed are male youth between the ages of eighteen and twenty-four who lack marketable skills. For many of these unemployed youth, certain careers are not held out as viable choices because of job-role stereotyping. To illustrate, the demand for secretarial jobs has remained stable through ups and downs in the economy. The secretarial job is regarded as a high status position offering a fairly good starting salary. However, few males choose this career because it has acquired a sexual identity. Seemingly, school, home, and community experiences do little to eliminate job-role stereotypes. Educators generally agree that one major objective of the school is to help children develop career awareness. Advocates of this objective stress the importance of job-role freedom with unrestricted exposure to all fields of work. Teachers and parents often ask children what they want to be when

Equal Opportunity or Lip Service? Sex- Role Stereotyping in the Schools

Abstract: The differential treatment of males and females in our society is pervasive and persistent. Sex-role stereotyping exists; the fact is well documented in the literature (1). Knowing that sexrole stereotyping exists is only the first step to becoming aware of how it works, what issues are involved, how it is perpetuated, and what the repercussions are. Our schools play a crucial role in socialization. What role do they play in sex-role stereotyping? The most recent federal legislation concerning sex discrimination in education is Title IX of the Education Amendments of 1972 (Higher Education Act). Title IX states that "no person shall, on the basis of sex, be excluded from participation in, be denied benefits of, or be subjected to discrimination under an education program or activity receiving federal financial assistance." Almost all public educational institutions receive federal aid in one form or another and are bound by such federal legislation. Still, differential treatment between the sexes goes on in these institutions every day in overt as well as subtle ways. Schools pay lip service to the democratic goal of equality of opportunity, but many of them do not go beyond lip service. Educators might well consider the adage, "As the twig is bent, the tree will grow." The schools are in a good position to become catalysts for necessary social change,

Make Way for Children

Abstract: A partner in this enterprise is the publishing industry, many representatives of which commit a large part of their energies to the selection, publication, and criticism of reading materials for young children Increasingly within recent years, publishers have solicited and encouraged the publication of books that display artistic creativity, use color boldly, and exhibit good design Book critics have justifiably commended the design of these books, especially praising the winners of the Caldecott prize, which is awarded for artistic merit The

The Myth of the Label Learning Disabled Child

Abstract: The learning disabled child is different things to different people. Any definition of the learning disabled child poses as many questions as it answers. However, the label, learning disabled child, usually includes children who have difficulty in understanding or in using spoken or written language. Assorted labels, or definitions, have been used to describe these children. Here is a brief sample from a long list:

Teaching with Artists

Abstract: ing of the creative and expressive arts in the schools. The program, it was believed, would lend verve and excitement to classroom teaching and learning and enhance the direct, personally significant experiences of children. Such experiences in the arts conceivably could establish a humanistic base for individual growth; and the program as a whole, it was hoped, would reinforce the arts as vital and imaginative elements in the elementary-school curriculum.

Requiem for a Reform

Abstract: 1968 presidential election when the Republican Administration began dismantling the programs of the Great Society. Others, flushed with the excitement of the sixties, saw education continuing in a heightened position on our nation's list of priorities. If schools were to improve, changes in teacher education were imperative. It was the royal road to improvement in the quality of schooling. Recent events have undercut these heady visions. Most reforms cost money. Fundamental change in an occupational group, such as teachers with two and a half million individuals, means big money. It seems unlikely that a nation such as ours in the midst of what is, at the very least, a severe recession will be putting fresh resources into teacher education. Teacher education, like public schools, is financed with public monies and must compete for funds in the public arena. In recent years it has become clear to the public and its representatives that we have a large surplus of unemployed teachers. For the 1974-75 school year we had 221,000 teachers and 118,000 openings. In 1974 only a little more than three million children were born (as opposed to a little more than four million ten

Child-Created Television in the Inner City.

Abstract: Children from poor families generally watch more television than middleclass children do (1). Commercial television programming in the USA and Canada, however, tends to reflect the aspirations and the life-styles of the affluent (2); this is true of children's programming as well as any other type; even \"Sesame Street,\" originally created for poor urban children, portrays a life-style that unrealistically reflects life in the urban core. Children whose homes or communities are scenes of drugs, hostility, violence, alcoholism, and crime may find it difficult to identify with \"Sesame Street,\" as is suggested by the fact that middle-class children are more frequent viewers of \"Sesame Street\" than their less fortunate peers (3). The disadvantaged child may also find it hard to identify with characters in most commercial children's programming, which is created as if an inner-urban culture did not exist. What is usually portrayed is an affluence that innercity children have little hope of attaining. Television's inadequate response to the needs of minority children is largely a question of control. The control of the commercial television indus-

Moral Education Through Diagnostic-Prescriptive Teaching Methods

Abstract: Back in the \"good old days,\" when every child in our class came from a home with no plumbing and went to community-wide gatherings for social activity, it might have been sensible, because our pupils had similar backgrounds, to use whole-class intruction as the major teaching method. But as teachers today we know that our classes are becoming more heterogeneous. Children come to school from a world

On Children and Television.

Abstract: television on their children is that they do not know or understand the distinction between content and form (to use terms from literature and the arts), between program and medium. Failure to distinguish between content and medium leads to a superficial evaluation of television. Programs can be good or bad in content and therefore explicitly good or bad. But there is a hidden message, a hidden or implicit content that is carried and communicated by television as a medium. In fact, the most important content communicated by television has nothing to do with programming: it is solely a result of the medium. McLuhan has written that "societies

Meet the Rechargeable Humanoid Mark III Electric Teacher

Abstract: and the practical, a little of this and a little of that. Let me expand my thoughts on these three ideas. Teaching is helping another to develop and to learn. In the past ten years, there has been a flood of writing on what teaching is, and what it is not, and what it should be. One can read fiction and nonfiction about teachers in an English boarding school (3), in an infant school in New Zealand (4, 5), in a one-room school in Appalachia (6), and in ghetto schools in America's large cities (7-9). One of my earliest impressions of what a teacher should be-all things to all children-is described in the short story "I Sing the Body Electric" by Ray Bradbury. A family in which the mother has died decides to buy a robot to help rear the children. The mechanical perfection I sought at the beginning of my teaching experience is expressed in a description of the robot who was to mother the children: ... for you who have worried over inattentive sitters, nurses who cannot be trusted with marked liquor bottles, and well-meaning Uncles and Aunts ... we have perfected the first humanoid-genre minicircuited, rechargeable AC-DC Mark V Electrical Grandmother. .... The Toy that is more than a Toy, the Fantoccini Electrical Grandmother is built with loving precision to give the incredible precision of love to your children. The child at ease with the realities of the world and the even greater realities of the imagination is her aim. She is computerized to tutor in twelve languages simultaneously, capable of switching tongues in a thousandth of a second without pause, and has a complete knowledge of the religious, artistic, and socio-political histories of the world seeded in her master hive. ... Above all, ... this human being, for human she seems, this embodiment in electro-intelligent facsimile of the humanities, will listen, know, tell, react, and love your children insofar as such great Objects, such fantastic Toys, can be said to Love, or can be imagined to Care. This Miraculous Companion, excited to the challenge of large world and small, inner Sea or Outer Universe, will transmit by touch and tell, said Miracles to your Needy [10: 155]. Many of the books I read at that time reinforced the description. Having given up, at least on a conscious level, this view of teaching as being humanly impossible, I find it easier to appreciate simpler definitions. I especially like the one in The Rasberry Exercises: How To Start Your Own School and Make a Book (11). The book offers a collection of ideas and suggestions for one's own free school. Here is one definition of a teacher from that book: "A teacher is a person who accepts you completely as you are while still being a model of a more skilled, more conscious, more aware, and more living person" (11: 18). Here is another definition-a less personalized description: a teacher is "a person who, or a situation which, helps another person learn something more quickly and easily than he could by himself" (12: 16). Note that the emphasis here is on the learner's learning rather than on the teacher's teaching. This idea surfaces a basic assumption of mine. A teacher sets the design of an educational environment, but at some point responsibility for learning must pass from teacher to pupil. Sometimes this shift of responsibility is frustrating to the teacher, who feels guilty about ab-

Are Open Middle Schools Really Open

Abstract: a dynamic and active school environment in which students could learn free from unnecessary restraint. a revitalized curriculum that included the analytical, the personal dynamics, and the expressive arts. grouping based on the rate of mental, physical, social, and emotional growth. activity programs in which boys and girls might take part separately and collectively. flexible schedules that support learning. guidance patterns that involve the entire staff in counseling. In short, the new middle school would build on the best of the junior high school movement but have few, if any, of its weaknesses. While educators were creating a \"new\" middle school, some educational planners were considering the effects of the physical environment on teaching and learning. Some of these educators and planners argued for an open-space school. They saw it as the best setting for anticipated changes such as team teaching, teaching machines, educational television, nongraded classes, the new math, and new curriculums. Alan Baas wrote:

Dialect in the Language of Inner-City Children.

Abstract: Brooklyn College of The City University of New York Brooklyn, New York This paper is addressed to three questions related to the language of black first-graders in the inner city. What are some of the characteristics of their vocabulary? Do they produce grammatically acceptable sentences? How frequently do black dialect features occur? The questions were formulated to find guidelines for planning reading instruction.

Creativity for the Elementary School

Abstract: The word creativity is surrounded by chaos. There is a need to bring order to this chaos and to establish definitions that can be related to classroom experience. Artists' and teachers' definitions of creativity tend to be vague; however, three major themes can be discerned in conflicting opinions on the subject. The first school of thought assumes that the creative individual is cognizant of the accepted forms or norms of intellectual activity that surround him but manages to establish new patterns of thinking that eventually supersede the old. Academic comments on this type of creativity suggest that it can occur only as a reaction to a constrained set of conditions. One author

Guidelines for Selecting Effective Instructional Products.

Abstract: The selection of instructional products is an extremely important task. Schools selecting textbooks are usually concerned with content and cosmetics. School decision-makers ask: Are the authors well known? Are the illustrations colorful and dynamic? Are the content and the approach up-to-date? Are the materials durable? Is the reading level appropriate? Schools, in spite of their efforts, often end up disappointed with the materials selected. Teachers complain. Pupils are bored. The newspapers eventually tell us that school children are learning very little. Fortunately, the situation is changing. Educators throughout the country are realizing that if instruction is to be effective, more is needed than a textbook or a set of attractively packaged materials. When instructional materials are being considered, hard questions need to be asked-hard questions that demand hard answers. Those who select instructional materials need to