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Telecommunication exchange projects are currently marketed as cur-riculum supplements that conveniently satisfy three key K-12 educa-tional reform objectives: better writing skills, enhanced multicultural awareness, and better job preparation for a rapidly expanding global economy. This paper analyzes the educational discourse surrounding telecommunication exchanges, and argues that much of the current research is contradictory, inconclusive, and possibly misleading. The paper also illustrates how the often overly optimistic claims about technology-based projects are problematic in light of the larger, ex-ceedingly complex role of technology in society. As more and more schools achieve Internet capabilities and as educational technology discourse increasingly promotes the necessity of technological com-petence and celebrates the promise of global connectivity, educators have been exploring ways to use--and rationalize the use of--the Internet in their class-rooms. A growing trend during the past decade, beginning with the advent of e-mail, has been the practice of global telecommunication exchange projects that encourage classroom connections between distant schools, oftentimes in differ-ent countries. As Berenfeld (1996) writes, "the ability for one class to easily and cheaply communicate with either another or many throughout the world was so powerful that educators developed a number of successful learning projects around email " (p. 76). Telecommunication exchange projects are often coordi-nated by individual teachers who locate distant partners on a number of educa-tion-oriented Internet sites. The majority of these projects occur in the public domain, where teachers are the sole organizers, but telecommunication exchanges are also sold to schools as hassle-free educational services provided by well-known corporations such as AT&T. Those who herald distant e-mail exchanges see them as an optimum way to satisfy three critical educational objectives in The authors gratefully acknowledge the invaluable suggestions and com-ments from Jim Marshall, Cynthia Lewis, and three anonymous reviewers.

In this chapter we will present an approach for rethinking English language instruction using an architectural metaphor. We will lay out a blueprint for infusing English language development (ELD) throughout the instructional program, and describe the design features and general instructional principles that underpin high

It is odd, very odd, to be writing about "transfer, " given that my imagination has been preoccupied of late by young schoolchildren like 6-year-old Denise, the author of the preceding text. Denise liked to play KMEL (the local hip hop radio station) and, along with her friend Vanessa, often displayed her sense of the rhythmic rhyming style of the current youth scene. She sometimes transferred this material from her unofficial school activities to her official ones, including her daily writing workshop entries. The text shown is an entry about an upcoming family move, and those familiar lines about family and sisters were quite deliber-ately taken from Whoopi Goldberg in the film Sister Act II (Steel, Rudin, & Duke, 1994). Although Denise and Vanessa were unique personalities, not so unique was the ease with which they transferred unofficial cultural materials to official school contexts (i.e., applied them in new ways). Cartoons, video games, recent films, and radio songs--as well as school reading materials--all were potential sources of genres, textual elements, and appealing utterances ("We are family") for child writing. In an ongoing project, I am focusing on what schoolchildren appropriate from textual practices located outside the official school world and, thus, the cultural, social, and semiotic negotiations that ensue inside the official world between and among children, teachers, and texts. In the midst of this work, then, comes an invitation to write about "transfer, " and I, of course, am at least partially oriented the wrong way around. In educational psychology circles, transfer has been set firmly within an official school frame: It involves learners ' possession of the necessary intellectual The research reported herein was supported in part by the Spencer Foundation. I would likc to thank my project research assistant, Soyoung Lee, and my consulting editors, Celia Genishi and Sonia Nieto. Although I have benefitted enormously from the thoughtful support of all named, the responsibility for the findings and opinions expresmd here rcsts solely with me. 141

In this article, we critically examine the nature of the “consensus ” reflected in educational standards used to orient high-stakes assessment programs. We analyze two complementary cases of practice in the assessment of teaching. One focuses on the discourse of standards creation and one examines how standards like these are typically used to orient assessment development and judgments about individual performance. We offer two (partially competing) theoretical perspectives that might illuminate and guide our practices in this currently undertheorized and underexamined area of standards development. One is based in the discourse ethics of Jürgen Habermas and one is based in critical elaborations of Hans-Georg Gadamer’s philosophical hermeneutics. We argue that conventional consensus-seeking approaches to the development and public review of educational standards tend to mask diversity and relinquish authority for consequential decisions to assessment developers who work in far less public circumstances. We draw on hermeneutic philosophy to offer a more pluralist approach that allows dissensus to be represented and taken into account in the assessment process.

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Professional development for teachers has increasingly become a significant factor in improving schools. In the past, professional development has often been left up to outside providers who conduct one-day workshops at a hotel or conference center, and the onus is on teachers to decide whether or not to integrate the newly

and fought for 5,000 years, the right to learn is undoubtedly the most fundamental…The freedom to learn…has been bought by bitter sacrifice. And whatever we may think of the curtailment of other civil rights, we should fight to the last ditch to keep open the right to learn, the right to have examined in our schools not only what we believe but what we do not believe; not only what our leaders say, but what the leaders of other groups and nations, and the leaders of other centuries have said. We must insist upon this to give our children the fairness of a start which will equip them with such an array of facts and such an attitude toward truth that they can have a real chance to judge what the world is, and what its greater minds have thought it might be.”

Note: Content of 4.1 and 4.2 were approved by unanimous vote of the College Assembly on 11/9/05; the Goals areas were approved by a unanimous vote of the College Assembly on 1/18/06. 1 CONTENTS

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