Amy Harom has a great piece in the August 23, 2008 New York Times on a Florida teacher engaged in teaching evolutionary life science to a high school class that includes religiously committed skeptical students. The article is unusual in looking at the issues as matters of curriculum, requiring knowledgeable responses by educators, and not [...]
Category Archives: Disciplines
Discourses, genres, and other “form fields”
February 24, 2008 – 8:31 pm
From physics, we know about magnetic fields, gravitational fields, electrical fields, and other fields of physical force.
If curriculum is the semiosic activity or course of experience in which human being comes to form, then curriculum theory and curriculum studies must be concerned with the fields of semiosic forms guiding the formation of human persons, [...]
Zimmerman on Historians and the Public
December 13, 2006 – 11:03 am
Zimmerman to fellow historians: If we really want to improve historical understanding in this country, we’ll create new venues—and new incentives—for public engagement and instruction. Or we can continue to speak exclusively with each other, acting shocked—shocked!—when nobody else understands us.
“Researcher” says humans to evolve into 2 subspecies
October 19, 2006 – 12:49 am
This story has circulated globally today. Jay Leno used it in his monologue tonight (October 18), although he did not mention the “2 subspecies” idea.
You can expect the anti-evolution folks to attack this as an example of evolutionary science.
I don’t have time to write a proper article now. I may expand this later; but I [...]
Time now for a new Constitutional Convention?
October 13, 2006 – 3:19 pm
Jeff Weintraub’s post Re: Jefferson, Madison, & Burke on the US Constitution includes his own comments, followed by the text of a review by Cass Sunstein in The New Republic of a book by Sanford Levinson on how the US Constitution is and has been viewed, and used, from the contrasting views of Jefferson and Madison to the present day. I think there’s a lot here (in the book, review, and commentary) that could be put to great use in social studies.
It’s not a matter of disallowing talk about ID
August 22, 2006 – 7:41 pm
In a post on Jonathan Wells’ Politically Incorrect Guide™ to Darwinism and Intelligent Design, Chris Mooney (author of The Republican War on Science) says on his blog that he agrees with Wells on the point that (quoting Wells) “Anyone who studies American history knows that telling people they are not allowed to talk about something [...]
Is(n’t) all biology “evolutionary”?
August 22, 2006 – 6:57 pm
On Panda’s Thumb, Matt Brauer comments on a news article by Sam Kean in the Chronicle of Higher Education, which reports that the list of majors eligible for the SMART grant omits only the code for “evolutionary biology” among all the biological disciplines.
Does this reflect a way of thinking in which those in the other sub-disciplines [...]
