A Research Survey in The Current Trends in Grouping For The Learning of Reading in The Elementary School

The organization of the classroom procedures will depend upon the objectives and aims of the school, the community, the administrators, the teachers, and the students. If one of the objectives is the development of responsible behavior the classroom planning and organization will be different from what it would be if the objectives were the acquisition of knowledge and skills. The newer and broader concept of education makes interaction and democratic living a part of any classroom program. With the ultimate goal of attaining the proper balance between learning necessary fundamentals and democratic behavior, three definite purposes for grouping in the classroom can be stated. The first is to teach democratic living; the second reason is to meet the differing needs with greater precision; and third, but no less important, is to make for a happier learning experience for the children

The political imagination: Writing the 1980s

The connection between imaginative writing and the political has always been contentious, and whilst many critics see literature as the creation of contemporary mythologies by which we negotiate our lived experience there are others who refute such a politicisation in favour of the singular aesthetic experience. This thesis will argue that the literary and the political are immutably bound in an undeniable relationship: a relationship which encompasses the construction of sexual, cultural and racial identities, questions of censorship and the concept of freedom and the mutual dependence of the individual subject and society. Like most epochs, the 1980s both invites and repels a tendency to organise its events into a single, understandable and easily internalised diachronic order, an order that will mask or efface the complex contradictions and multiplicity of possibilities that emerge. Through a series of close readings of arbitrarily selected literary and popular fictions, the thesis conducts an examination of the tensions, issues, conflicts and theoretical perspectives of this divisive decade. This project, however, is not just an attempt to chronicle a vast and fertile period of literature. It seeks to define the political imagination, to counteract the Bloomian claims that literature is a private space of imaginative production and passive aesthetic reflection, insisting that the political imagination is an inexorable part of social and cultural life which can neither be denied nor appropriated by a singular agenda or master code

Working class in British films 1950s-2000s : identity, culture, and ideology.

Britain was the first country to industrialize with the Industrial Revolution and therefore had the world\u27s first industrial working class. In the 20th century, the traditional British working class went through many social and political changes, represented especially by the post-war rise and a lasting decline since the 1970s, a fate which is worth academic study. Class matters not only in sociological sense, but also in cultural sense. This dissertation, through close text analysis of seven British social realist films--two New Wave ones, Room at the Top (Jack Clayton, 1959) and Saturday Night and Sunday Morning (Karel Reisz, 1960); three bleak ones by independent directors, High Hopes (Mike Leigh, 1988), My Beautiful Laundrette (Stephen Frears, 1985), and Sweet Sixteen (Ken Loach, 2002); and two commercial comedies, Brassed Off (Mark Herman, 1996) and The Full Monty (Peter Cattaneo, 1997), explores major themes in the screen representation of British working class from the 1950s to the present and analyzes the changes from the theoretical framework of British Cultural Studies, probing into the relationship between identity, power, the impact of ideology and cultural resistance behind the working-class identities. It also adopts an interdisciplinary approach to the understanding and evaluation of the cultural identity of British working class, with sociological and historical understanding of the issue of class and working class provided. The dissertation concludes that the British working class screen identity has transformed from an image of masculine energy, pride and dignity of the 1950s and 1960s to underclass collective shame and loss of respect in the 1990s and 2000s. The shift reflects changes in fundamental attitudes in British post-war society from welfare egalitarianism to the neo-liberal enterprise culture. The cinematic representation has reflected and reinforced dominant ideological position, but at the same time conveyed more left-wing progressive views. The dissertation therefore calls for cultural policy support for socially purposive British national cinema to keep social realism as a democratization of representation of national cultural life as well as a sustained concern for working-class dignity

Taking Fire: The Historical and Contemporary Politics of Indigenous Burning in Australia and the Western United States

Large bushfires in recent years around the world have sparked debate and interest in fire management; a world warming through industrial combustion is a world turning to Indigenous fire practices for solutions. Yet even as Indigenous Australians increasingly assert pyro-identities, non-Indigenous Australians have struggled to understand Indigenous burning practices and the nature of antipodean fire. This thesis examines the historical and contemporary politics of fire and how they relate to changing understandings of Indigenous burning in Australia and the United States in the 20th and 21st centuries. It examines public and institutional debates after large bushfires, discussions about management of public lands and shifting representations of Indigenous burning through analysis of royal commission transcripts, newspaper articles and other public discourse, policy submissions, institutional archives and academic published material. The thesis explores the relationship of environmentalism to fire and Indigenous burning, the contradictions of 'wilderness' and the politics of race and identity. It charts the development of competing understandings of fire and Indigenous burning in academic disciplines as well as the entanglement of Indigenous burning with the politics of land management and institutional rivalries. Through a comparison of the mutual entanglements and divergences of Australian and American fire management and conceptualisations of Indigenous burning, the thesis demonstrates the historical and transnational context of Australian fire. It argues for localised understandings of fire and fire management, perspectives that are attentive to cultural and ecological specificities. Perceptions of Indigenous burning have inspired policy-making and they have also been appropriated for legitimation, with profound consequences for cultural politics and ecological communities. Finally, the thesis charts how Indigenous burning has been transformed in the imagination and discourses of non-Indigenous Australia: from academic curiosity to political incendiary - and, increasingly, to a lived reality

Creating the Stalinist other: Anglo-American historiography of Stalin and Stalinism, 1925-2013

The Western historiography of Stalin and Stalinism produced in the period 1925 to the present day is a strikingly varied body of work in which the nature of Stalin, his regime and his role within his regime have been and continue to be the subject of debate. This characteristic is all the more striking when we consider that from the earliest years of the period under study there has been a general understanding of the nature of the Stalinist regime, and of the policies and leader which have come to define it. This thesis analyses the principal influences on research which have led to this body of work acquiring such a varied nature, and which have led to an at times profoundly divided Western, and more specifically Anglo-American, scholarship. It argues that the combined impact of three key formative influences on research in the West over the period of study, and their interaction with each other, reveal recurring themes across the whole historiography, while also accounting for the variety of interpretations in evidence. The first impact identified is the lack of accessibility to sources during the Soviet period, which posed a constant and real obstacle to those in the West writing on Stalin and Stalinism, and the impact of the removal of this obstacle in the post-Soviet era. The second is the influence of wider historiographical trends on this body of work, such as the emergence of social history. Finally the thesis argues that evolving Western attitudes to Stalin and Stalinism over this period have played a key role in constructions of Stalin and his regime, demonstrating an on-going historical process of the othering of Russia by the West. The extent and nature of this othering in turn provide a central line of enquiry of the thesis. Tightly intertwined with all three impacts has been the changing global political context over the period in question which provides the evolving and influential contextual backdrop to this study, and which has given this body of work a deeply political and personal character