Theme (narrative)

About: Theme (narrative) is a research topic. Over the lifetime, 13050 publications have been published within this topic receiving 159511 citations. The topic is also known as: narrative theme.

The Freedom to Remember: Narrative, Slavery, and Gender in Contemporary Black Women's Fiction

Abstract: "Angelyn Mitchell's extraordinary study is rich in detail and analysis, confidently mediating our ways of re-membering the narratives of slavery as well as the ways of women--as writer and as character--bearing courageous witness. The Freedom to Remember is scholarship at its very best and will surely be one of the essential books in critical and cultural studies." --Karla Holloway, William R. Kenan Jr. Professor of English, Duke University The Freedom to Remember examines contemporary literary revisions of slavery in the United States by black women writers. Recent studies have investigated these works only from the standpoint of victimization. Angelyn Mitchell changes the conceptualization of these narratives, focusing on the theme of freedom, not slavery, defining these works as "liberatory narratives." Mitchell shows how the liberatory narrative functions to emancipate its readers from the legacies of slavery in American society by facilitating a deeper discussion of the issues and by making them new through illumination and interrogation. Angelyn Mitchell is an associate professor of English at Georgetown University. She is the editor of Within the Circle: An Anthology of African American Literary Criticism from the Harlem Renaissance to the Present.

The Filipino seafarer : a life between sacrifice and shopping

Abstract: This thesis is about the seaman and his family. A returning theme in every part of this work, is how the Filipino overseas seafarer is interwoven with his family. Both in the sense that the family ...

The Classroom Impact of High-Stress Testing

Abstract: Introduction Since the early 1980s, much of the conversation about reform in American education has been driven by a conservative political agenda, a major part of which has been to frame the debate in terms of how to safeguard the nation's economic power (e.g., A Nation at Risk, 1983). To this end, a number of eloquent spokespersons have misstated or misinterpreted statistics and even suppressed government-sponsored research which demonstrated that the premise of poor achievement in public schools is at least arguable (Berliner & Biddle, 1995). Nevertheless, the presentation of this ideology has been very successful, and most of the 50 states have moved toward implementation of high-stakes testing. It is not uncommon these days for individual schools within a district to be publicly labeled as "exemplary" or "low-performing", and there are rewards and sanctions that follow such designations. In some states, the "best" schools are given cash awards that may be distributed to teachers as bonus pay. The "poorest" schools face not only public approbation, in some cases the local administration may be replaced by agents of the state. Thus, the concept of "educational bankruptcy" which was once associated with a few urban districts in New Jersey is now becoming a routine policy for school reform throughout the United States. Part of the Ideology Triumphant is the notion that teachers are ill-prepared for their jobs, that they are deficient in quality and need more rigorous preparation. On the job, teachers should be held strictly accountable for student achievement, which is almost universally described as functional proficiency in basic skill areas. The result has been a dramatic increase in what Wise (1979) called "legislated learning," an attempt to teacherproof curriculum by establishing tight links between instruction and testing. Such an approach contradicts research on effective school reform which, as Kirst notes, shows that real improvement takes place "when those responsible for each school are given more responsibility rather than less" (Sunday Express News, 1984). Darling-Hammond and Wise (1983) maintain that highly standardized prescriptions lead to dissatisfied professionals, those who would feel, in DeCharms' (1968) terminology, more like "pawns" than "origins." On the other hand, Foucault (1988) would argue that the state has an inherent interest in leading its citizens to define their interests as coterminous with those of the state, i.e., to raise the level of the state's prosperity along with the prosperity of individual members of the state. It has been unclear to what extent teachers see themselves and their principals as being controlled by the state's authority or to what extent they themselves have embraced the ideology of authority. Methodology The purpose of this study was to interview teachers specifically about the felt impact of state testing upon their classroom, as well as the legitimacy of the state's purpose in imposing such a program. Focus groups were selected from volunteers at two kinds of schools in the same state - those highly successful on mandated tests, and those quite unsuccessful. Each of the eight groups consisted of seven to nine members; as is typical of the teaching force in American public schools, the majority of the members were white and female. Teachers were assured of anonymity, and the discussions were taped, transcribed, and analyzed for emergent themes. Findings The first theme that emerged was that the pressure of the state testing program, whether direct or indirect, was always present. "The first thing they told us this year was when the testing would be done. We were told to put those dates in our plan books and work back from there," said one veteran teacher. Another added that she had thought about changing schools to work at one where a friend had become principal, but all she could talk about was test scores and how they had to do better this year. …