Research Into Practice: Making Equity a Reality in Classrooms

1993 ◽  
Vol 41 (2) ◽  
pp. 110-113
Author(s):  
Patricia F. Campbell ◽  
Cynthia Langrall

The NCTM's Curriculum and Evaluation Standards for School Mathematics (1989) speaks of the necessity of providing effective mathematics education for all students. Noting that “the social injustices of past schooling practices can no longer be tolerated” (p. 4), the standards document calls for a mathematics content that is “what we believe all students will need if they are to be productive citizens in the twenty-first century. If all students do not have the opportunity to learn this mathematics, we face the danger of creating an intellectual elite and polarized society” (p. 9), Similarly, the National Research Council's Mathematical Sciences Education Board noted that two themes underlie current analysis of American education: “equity in opportunity and… excellence in results” (1989. 28–29). Although the NCTM's standards and other reform documents have been critiqued as addressing the issue of equity in terms of “enlightened self-interest” as opposed to seeking justice (Secada 1989), these documents have called attention to educational disparity. The issue today is how to make the goal of equity a reality in classrooms. To do otherwise would be to assign “mathematics for all” to the status of a slogan, a catchy phrase but having no meaning in practice.

2021 ◽  
Vol 5 (2) ◽  
pp. 66-87
Author(s):  
Sida Liu

Abstract In his book on legal reform in China after Mao, Stanley B. Lubman adopted the metaphor “bird in a cage” to describe the status of Chinese law at the turn of the twenty-first century. This article offers some general reflections on the social transformation of Chinese law since 1999, with the objective of explaining (1) how the legal bird has become a cage, and (2) how this new legal cage has been used to trap birds in Chinese society. It first traces the transformation of the legal bird into a cage in China’s reform era and then tells the stories of four species of birds currently confined in the legal cage, namely, hawks (state officials), crows (rights activists), sparrows (netizens), and ostriches (ordinary citizens). Laws related to the four species are concerned with combating corruption, political stability, internet control, and everyday life, respectively. By focusing on the four species of birds in the legal cage, this article offers a fresh understanding of how law interacts with various individuals and social groups in Chinese society and a sociolegal explanation of the social transformation of China’s legal system from 1999 to 2019.


Slavic Review ◽  
1964 ◽  
Vol 23 (1) ◽  
pp. 117-124 ◽  
Author(s):  
Lewis S. Feuer

The status of sociology and philosophy in the Soviet Union is radically different from that of the physical and mathematical sciences. The sociologists and philosophers are still regarded by the government as ideologists, whereas the mathematicians and physicists are considered scientists; and the ideologist is in low repute in the Soviet intellectual community. Thirty years ago, Nikolai Bukharin observed in a remarkable essay that the cultural style of the current Soviet period would be technicism, and that the humanities and historical sciences would be relegated to the background. He believed that this “one-sidedness“ was founded on the economic requirements of the time. Probably, however, the hollowness in the life of the Soviet ideologist is equally responsible for his low estate. The sociologists and philosophers are not regarded as independent thinkers; their job as ideological workers is to provide a documentation and footnoted commentary on the decisions of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union. Young men of ability consequently tend to avoid choosing a life work in the social sciences and philosophy. Why, they say, should they sacrifice their intellectual independence at the outset of their lives?


1986 ◽  
Vol 13 (2-3) ◽  
pp. 323-342
Author(s):  
Robert A. Kaster

Summary The Latin grammarians of late antiquity seem to personify the cultural stagnation and decline that have commonly been thought to typify the age. Resting upon conceptual foundations that had been laid centuries earlier and repeating the same doctrine from generation to generation, their texts appear by and large to be wholly untouched by originality. This paper addresses the question: why was this so? To suggest one answer to this question, the argument begins from the premise that the tradition remained as stable as it did because it continued to satisfy certain needs; the paper then goes on to consider these needs and their interaction. First, there are the needs of the grammarians themselves. From the beginnings of the profession’s history in the first century B.C. and first century A.D., when the grammarians’ schools first emerged as distinct institutions at Rome, the grammarians’ doctrine, with its emphasis on the rational analysis of the language’s ‘nature’, provided them with the authority they needed to prescribe correct speech for the social and cultural elite that they served. Once this exercise of reason had made a place for the grammarians as relative newcomers to the world of liberal letters, the doctrine was something to be prized and defended: the vivid instruction of the late antique grammarian Pompeius shows us a man fortified and buoyed up by his profession’s tradition, eager to assert its soundness or to add an improving touch here or there – and without the least wish or incentive to attempt some fundamental innovation; for to do so would be to tamper with the honorable social position that the profession provided. At the same time, the mainstream of the educated elite – the second group whose needs must be considered – would themselves have had little reason to encourage innovation: since a liberal education, based of course on grammar, had come to be one of the most important marks of social – and even moral – status, the honorable position of the elite was as much tied as the grammarians’ to the maintenance of the traditional doctrine. As a result, when the interests of the grammarians and the educated elite met in the institution of patronage, on which all teachers depended, the stability of the tradition was reinforced: for patrons did not seek innovative brilliance in their dependents, nor did they even look primarily for technical competence; they rather looked first for traditionally valued personal qualities like modesty and diligence, and other such qualities that would tend to preserve the status quo.


Religions ◽  
2019 ◽  
Vol 10 (9) ◽  
pp. 534
Author(s):  
Eleanor Nesbitt

Over a period of two centuries, western women—travellers, army wives, administrators’ wives, missionaries, teachers, artists and novelists—have been portraying their Sikh counterparts. Commentary by over eighty European and north American ‘lay’ women on Sikh religion and society complements—and in most cases predates—publications on Sikhs by twentieth and twenty-first century academics, but this literature has not been discussed in the field of Sikh studies. This article looks at the women’s ‘wide spectrum of gazes’ encompassing Sikh women’s appearance, their status and, in a few cases, their character, and including their reactions to the ‘social evils’ of suttee and female infanticide. Key questions are, firstly, whether race outweighs gender in the western women’s account of their Sikh counterparts and, secondly, whether 1947 is a pivotal date in their changing attitudes. The women’s words illustrate their curious gaze as well as their varying judgements on the status of Sikh women and some women’s exercise of sympathetic imagination. They characterise Sikh women as, variously, helpless, deferential, courageous, resourceful and adaptive, as well as (in one case) ‘ambitious’ and ‘unprincipled’. Their commentary entails both implicit and explicit comparisons. In their range of social relationships with Sikh women, it appears that social class, Christian commitment, political stance and national origin tend to outweigh gender. At the same time, however, it is women’s gender that allows access to Sikh women and makes befriending—and ultimately friendship—possible.


Author(s):  
Alexander Blaszczynski

Abstract. Background: Tensions exist with various stakeholders facing competing interests in providing legal land-based and online regulated gambling products. Threats to revenue/taxation occur in response to harm minimisation and responsible gambling policies. Setting aside the concept of total prohibition, the objectives of responsible gambling are to encourage and/or restrict an individual’s gambling expenditure in terms of money and time to personally affordable limits. Stakeholder responsibilities: Governments craft the gambling environment through legislation, monitor compliance with regulatory requirements, and receive taxation revenue as a proportion of expenditure. Industry operators on the other hand, compete across market sectors through marketing and advertising, and through the development of commercially innovative products, reaping substantial financial rewards. Concurrently, governments are driven to respond to community pressures to minimize the range of negative gambling-related social, personal and economic harms and costs. Industry operators are exposed to the same pressures but additionally overlaid with the self-interest of avoiding the imposition of more stringent restrictive policies. Cooperation of stakeholders: The resulting tension between taxation revenue and profit making, harm minimization, and social impacts creates a climate of conflict between all involved parties. Data-driven policies become compromised by unsubstantiated claims of, and counter claims against, the nature and extent of gambling-related harms, effectiveness of policy strategies, with allegations of bias and influence associated with researchers supported by industry and government research funding sources. Conclusion: To effectively advance policies, it is argued that it is imperative that all parties collaborate in a cooperative manner to achieve the objectives of responsible gambling and harm minimization. This extends to and includes more transparent funding for researchers from both government and industry. Continued reliance on data collected from analogue populations or volunteers participating in simulated gambling tasks will not provide data capable of valid and reliable extrapolation to real gamblers in real venues risking their own funds. Failure to adhere to principles of corporate responsibility and consumer protection by both governments and industry will challenge the social licence to offer gambling products. Appropriate and transparent safeguards learnt from the tobacco and alcohol field, it is argued, can guide the conduct of gambling research.


1970 ◽  
pp. 53-57
Author(s):  
Azza Charara Baydoun

Women today are considered to be outside the political and administrative power structures and their participation in the decision-making process is non-existent. As far as their participation in the political life is concerned they are still on the margins. The existence of patriarchal society in Lebanon as well as the absence of governmental policies and procedures that aim at helping women and enhancing their political participation has made it very difficult for women to be accepted as leaders and to be granted votes in elections (UNIFEM, 2002).This above quote is taken from a report that was prepared to assess the progress made regarding the status of Lebanese women both on the social and governmental levels in light of the Beijing Platform for Action – the name given to the provisions of the Fourth Conference on Women held in Beijing in 1995. The above quote describes the slow progress achieved by Lebanese women in view of the ambitious goal that requires that the proportion of women occupying administrative or political positions in Lebanon should reach 30 percent of thetotal by the year 2005!


2019 ◽  
Vol 28 (1) ◽  
pp. 52-66
Author(s):  
Julie Bates

Happy Days is contemporaneous with a number of seminal contributions to the concept of the everyday in postwar France. This essay suggests that the increasingly constrained verbal and physical routines performed by its protagonist Winnie constitute a portrait of the everyday, and goes on to trace the affinities between Beckett's portrait and several formulations of the concept, with particular emphasis on the pronounced gendering of the everyday in many of these theories. The essay suggests the aerial bombings of the Second World War and methods of torture during the Algerian War as potential influences for Beckett's play, and draws a comparison with Marlen Haushofer's 1963 novel The Wall, which reimagines the Romantic myth of The Last Man as The Last Woman. It is significant, however, that the cataclysmic event that precedes the events of Happy Days remains unnamed. This lack of specificity, I suggest, is constitutive of the menace of the play, and has ensured that the political as well as aesthetic power of Happy Days has not dated. Indeed, the everyday of its sentinel figure posted in a blighted landscape continues to articulate the fears of audiences, for whom the play may resonate today as a staging of twenty-first century anxiety about environmental crisis. The essay concludes that in Happy Days we encounter an isolated female protagonist who contrives from scant material resources and habitual bodily rhythms a shelter within a hostile environment, who generates, in other words, an everyday despite the shattering of the social and temporal framework that conventionally underpin its formation. Beckett's play in this way demonstrates the political as well as aesthetic power of the everyday in a time of crisis.


Author(s):  
Yaroslav Skoromnyy ◽  

The article reveals the conceptual foundations of the social responsibility of the court as an important prerequisite for the legal responsibility of a judge. It has been established that the problem of court and judge liability is regulated by the following international and Ukrainian documents, such as: 1) European Charter on the Law «On the Status of Judges» adopted by the Council of Europe; 2) The Law of Ukraine «On the Judicial System and the Status of Judges»; 3) the Constitution of Ukraine; 4) The Code of Judicial Ethics, approved by the Decision of the XI (regular) Congress of Judges of Ukraine; 5) Recommendation CM/Rec (2010) 12 of the Cabinet of Ministers of the Council of Europe to member states regarding judges: independence, efficiency and responsibilities; 6) Bangalore Principles of Judicial Conduct. The results of a survey conducted by the Democratic Initiatives Foundation and the Razumkov Center, the Council of Judges of Ukraine and the Center for Judicial Studios with the support of the Swiss Agency for Development and Cooperation based on the «Monitoring of the State of Independence of Judges in Ukraine – 2012» as part of the study of the level of trust in the modern system were considered and analyzed, justice, judges and courts. It is determined that a judge has both a legal and a moral duty to impartially, independently, in a timely manner and comprehensively consider court cases and make fair judicial decisions, administering justice on the basis of legislative norms. Based on the study of the practice of litigation, it has been proven that judges must skillfully operate with various instruments of protection from public influence. It has been established that in order to ensure the protection of judges from the public, it is necessary to create special units that will function as part of judicial self-government bodies. It was proposed that the Council of Judges of Ukraine, which acts as the highest body of judicial self- government in our state (in Ukraine), legislate the provision on ensuring the protection of the procedural independence of judges.


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