The View from Here
Lynne Fukuda

Techno Corner
Susan Jones (See Jones's column in future issues )

Low-No Tech Teaching: What we Lose on the Smart Classroom**

Katherine Weiss, Ph.D.
Assistant Professor of English
East Tennessee State University
E-mail: weisk01@etsu.edu

American universities have been implementing Smart Classroom Technologies to enhance instruction and learning. While these high-tech classrooms provide instructors with video projectors, smart-boards, and audience response systems, among other programs to assist in learning, much is lost in today’s classrooms. The hi-tech climate has minimized creativity and interaction among students and instructors. Incorporating recent debates and studies concerning Smart Classroom technologies and my own experience of working in the low-no tech university system in Poland, I will argue that returning to less tech-rich learning environments challenges students to use their creativity, ultimately improving student learning.

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Vygotskian Implications for Grammar Instruction

Reagan Nail
Masters Student and English Instructor
College of the Redwoods
E-mail:  reagannail@hotmail.com

Introduction

As exhibited by decades of past research, the necessity and efficacy of grammar instruction is still debated among academics.  Recently, I conducted an error elimination study with 11th-grade writers which implied that grammar instruction can reduce errors in student writing, but there are certainly other researchers who will argue the opposite.  Nonetheless, as Shaughnessy (1976) stated, “grammar still symbolizes for some students one last chance to understand what is going on with written language so that they can control it rather than be controlled by it” (p. 11).  Students want to understand grammar, and it is our job as language “experts” to try to give them that knowledge, especially when a lack of grammatical knowledge can hurt students. 

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Book Review: Foundations of Critical Race Theory in Education

Nicholas Daniel Hartlep, M.S.Ed.
Ph.D.  Student – Urban Education and Social Foundations of Education
Advanced Opportunity Program (AOP) Fellow
University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee
Email: nhartlep@uwm.edu

Taylor, E., Gillborn, D, & Ladson-Billings (Eds). (2009). Foundations of Critical Race Theory in Education: New York: Routledge

November 4, 2008, marked a historic day in United State government: the election of the first African American President, Barack Hussein Obama. Race relations have been relegated by many to something swept under the rug; however, with a prominent scholar like Harvard Professor Dr. Henry Louis Gates, Jr. being racially profiled, does it become an important enough topic for discussion by society/media? Sadly, instances of racial profiling and discrimination occur more frequently than most would believe, and the election of Mr. Obama does not disprove racism or bigotry. It is this social and racial subordination and unequal treatment of people of color that educators for social justice should be cognizant of.  Editors Taylor, Gillborn, and Ladson-Billings draw attention to these phenomena in Foundations of Critical Race Theory in Education. It is replete with powerful chapters that speak to how racism is endemic in U.S. education and suggests ways to tackle it head-on. The book is one that I argue will be a mainstay for Critical Race Theory (CRT) for decades to come and a book that all teachers for social justice must read and own.

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