Workshop on Textbook Controversies
Abstracts & Biographies
Friday, February 8, 2008
423 ILR Conference Center, Cornell University
Abstracts and Bios in pdf format
Panel 1: Frameworks
Conflict, Controversy, and Collective Action in the Collegiate Curriculum
Mikaila Mariel Lemonik Arthur, Sociology, Hamilton College
Over the past 150 years, collegiate education in the United States has been transformed from an elite province of men destined for the ministry and studying a classical curriculum of theology, languages, and philosophy to a system diverse in enrollments and areas of study. Across that century and a half, the movement of new groups of people and new areas of study into the university has almost always been met by conflict, controversy, and collective action. This paper considers the ways in which collective action has been an integral part of the emergence of new disciplines, such as collegiate science education, ethnic studies, and women’s studies, as well as the ways that such disciplinary initiatives produce or are produced by the changing student body.
Mikaila Mariel Lemonik Arthur is a Visiting Assistant Professor of Sociology at Hamilton College. She earned her Ph.D. at New York University; her dissertation was titled “Getting Away from the Basics: Competing Explanations for Curricular Change.” Her current research projects include work on insider activism in organizations; movements for curricular change in higher education; neoinstitutional and diffusion effects on organizational change; and processes of racialization in the United States.
Strategic Scholars and Policy Outcomes: Causal Knowledge in Language of Education Policy Debates
Ericka A. Albaugh, Political Science, Duke University
This paper explores how academic experts influence language of instruction policy in Africa. It points to the ideational connections that continue to pervade the relationship between France and its former colonies. Francophone African states are changing their language policies in primary education, using local languages as a medium of instruction, rather than only French. These changes result in part from a new idea transmitted from French foreign ministers to African policymakers. Once viewing African languages as competitors to French, French leaders are now welcoming these languages openly in African schools. This is a dramatic policy reversal, and it contradicts expectations of path dependency and public policy inertia. The French policy-makers’ conversion can be traced to the writing and advocacy of a strategic scholarly community, which began exercising influence over the leadership of France and la Francophonie in the 1990s. Their influence changed the perception of French leaders regarding the utility of local languages in education and caused them to include this element consistently in their education strategy for Africa. In contrast, a lack of comparable agreement within the intellectual communities of the Anglophone world has led to ambivalence in support for mother tongue education emanating from the North, and an irregular application of indigenous language policies in Anglophone Africa. Unlike traditional accounts of epistemic communities, this study focuses on the strategic political activity of scholars. And unlike traditional accounts of policy diffusion, it reveals ideational linkages between strong and weak states, identifying the phenomenon of intellectual dependency
Ericka A. Albaugh received her Ph.D. in Political Science from Duke University in 2005, after earning a Master’s Degree from the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy in 1998. Her dissertation, based on field research in Senegal, Cameroon, Ghana, and France, considered the influences on language policy outcomes in African education. Currently, she is a visiting professor at Duke University, teaching courses on African politics, Comparative Politics, and Ethnic Conflict. She is married with two children.
Panel 2: Controversial Histories
Creating Modern Citizens and Workers: The Struggle to Define the Curriculum of the “New Education”
Tracy Steffes, Education, Brown University
In the early twentieth century, schools underwent dramatic expansion, deepening, and transformation as a variety of reformers sought to create a “new education” to meet the needs of the modern nation. Nowhere did reformers wrestle more self-consciously with the new goals and responsibilities of the school than in the reforms of curriculum. In defining the curriculum of the “new education,” reformers had to articulate the broad aims of education and define the kind of modern individuals and society they desired to create. This paper traces the development of two new subjects at the center of the “new education”: civics and vocational education. While schools in the nineteenth century had prepared youths for citizenship and work by infusing lessons in character and basic skills throughout the curriculum, reformers in the twentieth century argued that modern schools must take a more deliberate, systematic, and intensive approach to these goals in the interests of both the individual and society itself. Yet the popularity of these reforms sometimes obscured the significant disagreements between supporters in their social assumptions and visions of the good citizen and the good worker. At issue in the debates that characterized the implementation of these new studies was often the crucial but unacknowledged question of whether the new education should seek to create citizens and workers to accept and live in the world that existed or aim to equip them with the skills and commitments to transform it. Schools, charged with often inconsistent goals of cultivating equal, democratic citizens and workers for a stratified, differentiated economy thus struggled with the extent to which education must necessarily reinforce the status quo or be agents of transformation.
Tracy Steffes is an Assistant Professor of Education and History at Brown University. She recently completed her dissertation, “A New Education for a Modern Age: National Reform, State-Building, and the Transformation of American Schooling, 1890-1933” in the history department at the University of Chicago. She has received numerous grants, including fellowships from the Miller Center for Public Affairs and the Social Science Research Council, and conducted research for the American Bar Foundation, Newberry Library, and the National History Center.
The Impact of Historiographical Preferences in Textbook Controversies in Postwar Japan and Germany
Julian Dierkes, Sociology, University of British Columbia
(West) German and Japanese textbooks are a central case in the literature on postwar or post-upheaval reconciliation through education because of their treatment of recent ignominious national history. In public debates, German and Japanese textbooks are frequently measured on the basis of their inclusion of particular elements (portrayals of “National Socialism” and the Holocaust, and of the Asia Pacific War, respectively). Comparisons between these cases typically come to the conclusion that while Germany is acknowledged to have made significant progress in striving for a forthright account of recent German history, such attempts have been insufficient and lacking in sincerity in Japan. On the basis of an examination of German and Japanese textbooks over 60 years, I conclude that German portrayals shift from a grand national narrative to a more analytical, social-scientific historiography in the 1960s which allows for a discussion of the roots of “National Socialism.” In contrast, Japanese textbooks retain a strictly empiricist historiography that does not attempt to analyze the causes of historical developments. The portrayals of controversial historical episodes in the two cases is thus conditioned by the overall purpose attributed to history education, rather than being a reflection on some generalized reluctance to address at best, “whitewash” at worst, “unpleasant” historical episodes.
Julian Dierkes is an assistant professor and the Keidanren Chair in Japanese Research at the Institute of Asian Research of the University of British Columbia. He has examined portrayals of the nation in history education in postwar Japan and the Germanys, as well as the organizational structure of large U.S. corporations and legal education in Japan. Julian’s current research focuses on “shadow education” (juku) in Japan. Julian received his Ph.D. in sociology from Princeton University.
Panel 3: Teaching Science
Biology Textbooks and the Early Antievolution Movement
Adam R. Shapiro, History, University of British Columbia
The controversies over the teaching of evolution movement are typically framed as the results of an essential controversy between Darwinian natural selection and Protestant Fundamentalism. But there was no sudden realization of this half a century after the Origin of Species was published, that prompted calls in the 1920's to outlaw the teaching of evolution in high schools. The early (pre-Scopes trial) antievolution movement can be best understood by understanding the state of education, and more specifically, the state of biology textbook consumption in the South in the early 1920's. This era had seen the development of a bifurcated publication strategy that had developed separate biology textbooks for urban and rural schools, while publishers largely ignored a nearly simultaneous trend towards statewide regulation of textbooks in much of the American South. As compulsory high schooling expanded in the rural South, antievolution laws gained support as part of a protest against the perceived imposition of a curriculum that was seen by many as urban, industrial, and Northern. The school antievolution movement, though often justified by religious rhetoric, emerged primarily as a controversy over science education, and the textbooks that were the primary tools used in teaching.
Adam R. Shapiro is a postdoctoral fellow in the history department at the University of British Columbia. His research focuses on the intersections of the histories of science, religion and education, and his recently completed dissertation (Chicago, 2007) examined the intersection of textbook publishing and regulation with the antievolution controversies surrounding the Scopes trial. He has also worked as a textbook editor with the University of Chicago School Mathematics Project.
The Coverage of Human Evolution in the High School Biology Textbooks of the 20th Century
Gerald Skoog, Education, Texas Tech University
Evidence that textbooks both catalyze and reflect cultural and educational controversies within communities is documented convincingly by the minimal coverage of evolution and, more specifically, human evolution in high school biology textbooks published prior to the 1960s when the NSF-funded Biological Sciences Curriculum Study (BSCS) developed three different textbooks that gave human evolution unprecedented emphasis. Increased emphasis then occurred in other biology textbooks. Antievolutionists responded with various and sometimes successful attempts to eliminate, weaken, or neutralize this increased emphasis, and as a result, word changes, deletions, and omissions in the textbooks of the 1970s and early 1980s weakened the coverage of both evolution and human evolution. Judicial decisions, increased involvement of scientists, science teachers, and professional organizations, and the emergence of state science education standards that emphasized evolution provided needed support to editors, publishers, educators, and policy-makers, and in the mid-1980s the textbook coverage of evolution and human evolution increased significantly. As a result, current biology textbooks tend to give human evolution comprehensive treatment. However, evidence that the teaching of evolution and human evolution is still being resisted and restricted is reflected in the failure of most state science education standards to include human evolution and the steady call of antievolutionists for textbooks and teachers to “teach the controversy” that surrounds evolution.
Gerald Skoog, Paul Whitfield Professor and Dean emeritus at Texas Tech University, is a science educator with experience as a high school science teacher, author of secondary science textbooks, and director of several federally-funded science education projects. He was President of the National Science Teachers Association (NSTA) in 1985-86 and received awards from this and other major organizations for his leadership in science education and his research concerned with evolution education.
