New Waves, New Spaces: Estonian Experimental Cinema of the 1970s

Using the label of “new wave” in the context of Estonian cinema is highly problematic and controversial because, unlike in France or, to take a more similar socio-political framework, in Czechoslovakia, the (Soviet) Estonian filmic arena did not see a creative outburst synchronous with and comparable to, both in scope of innovative production and international acclaim, the cinematic practices adorned with the adjective “new” elsewhere in Europe. While the heyday of various new waves, both in Western Europe and in the Soviet bloc, is normally limited to the period between the mid-1950s and the ruptures of 1968, in Estonia, as the local literary critic Mart Velsker (1999: 1211) has accurately argued, the essence of the innovative 1960s “is manifested in its most vivid form some time between 1968 and 1972, that is, at the end of the decade and partly even beyond it.” Compared to other artistic genres, however, Estonian cinema was severely lagging behind, both in achievement and in reputation. The true “Estonian New Wave” has been defined by local critics as born and burgeoning in the end of the 1970s and the beginning of the 1980s (Orav 2003: 54ff; Kärk 1995: 117; Kirt 1980: 33-4), when a new generation of young filmmakers entered the stagnated cinematic stage with bravado, finally inverting the low ebb that had lasted nearly a decade. Yet, in the midst of the ebbing waters of the early 1970s, a dark horse emerged, whose artistic contribution to Estonian cinematic heritage deserves to be identified as a new wave in miniature, a veritable diamond, albeit perhaps rough-cut. This author was Jaan Tooming, an actor and a theatre director, whose films constitute a fundamentally unprecedented phenomenon in Estonian cinema. His controversial, stylistically and semantically rich output, composed of unceasingly intriguing visual utterances, provides a fascinating order of spatial representations, which reconfigure Estonian cinematic territories in several respects and, at the same time, re-evaluate and criticize quite provocatively the historical and conceptual framework of imagining national, social and personal identities. The following investigation of Tooming’s films will concentrate chiefly on the spatial representations and practices, with digressions into the domain of re/constructing identities, both personal and collective

Complicated Choices: Struggling to Meet NCLB Requirements AND Remain Faithful to a School's Educational Vision and Practice

In an era of high-stakes accountability, school leaders often face contradictory pressures as they strive to improve student performance. They must meet the federal mandate of NCLB for student achievement; at the same time, many believe that NCLB constrains their professional judgment about how to best teach and assess students in the context of their own schools. The case of Baker, a K-8 school in Philadelphia, is illustrative. The case study discusses the complicated choices school leaders made as they attempted to meet the needs of all students. As Baker implemented the school district's highly prescriptive approach to curriculum and instruction, using a Managed Instruction System, it struggled to maintain its progressive educational philosophy and 'best' practices. The school's pedagogical goals included: student-centered and project-based learning, teaching for life-long learning, performance-based assessments, and an emphasis on higher order thinking. Baker was a successful learning community for students and adults, whose significant accomplishments were obscured by the fact that it never had made AYP. If the U.S. Department of Education had permitted the state to use its valued-added growth model, the Pennsylvania Value-Added Assessment, as an alternative to the status achievement metric that focused on the percentage of proficient students, Baker would have made AYP in 2006-07, the last year of this research

Decisions regarding infringements of sponsoring provisions

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The dimension of some affine Deligne-Lusztig varieties

We prove Rapoport's dimension conjecture for affine Deligne-Lusztig varieties for GL_h and superbasic b. From this case the general dimension formula for affine Deligne-Lusztig varieties for special maximal compact subgroups of split groups follows, as was shown in a recent paper by Goertz, Haines, Kottwitz, and Reuman.Comment: 13 pages, some small mistakes corrected, author's last name changed from Mierendorff to Viehman