Educational Management Administration & Leadership

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Book Reviews
Geoffrey Walford Educational Management Administration & Leadership 1999 27: 209 DOI: 10.1177/0263211X990272008 The online version of this article can be found at: http://ema.sagepub.com/content/27/2/209.citation

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BOOK REVIEWS

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pleased the authors will doubtless be. Meanwhile we owe them our gratitude for having done the very considerable work of putting this collection together. Benjamin Levin Dean, Continuing Education Division, The University of Manitoba

Changing Education for Diversity, by David Corson. Buckingham: Open University Press, 1998. 268 pp. 15.99 (pbk), 50.00 (hbk). ISBN 0335195873 (pbk), 0335195881 (hbk).
This is a thought-provoking book that is well worth reading. But it is also an infuriating book. The introductory chapter covers many areas too briey. In among a Cooks Tour of some of the ideas of authors as diverse as Foucault, Gramsci, Fairclough, Bourdieu, Habermas and Bhaskar, the author advocates a more open and accepting treatment of people of diversity. Corson argues that school decisions about fair practice and fair policies need to be taken as close as possible to the actual settings where the practices and policies have their impact (p. 12), which he believes is possible through emancipatory leadership and a process of critical policy making. This last concept is the focus of the second chapter which argues for a far greater mutual engagement between the school and its local environment, where it is sometimes necessary for schools to reduce the inuence that other agencies outside the local community have over the schools operation. His aim is for a community-based education where the members of the local community become self-oriented participants in the creation of the learning environment that the school offers. In chapter 3, the author shows that his model for the reform of all education, such that diversity is valued, is the reform of aboriginal education. Giving extended examples of Norwegian S ami, Canadian First Nation and Inuit, New Zealand Maori, Australian Aboriginal, American Indian, Alaskan Native and Native Hawaiian minority groups, Corson argues the need for changes in such areas as classroom practices, teacher interaction styles, oral language use and literacy practices, and assessment and evaluation. In this and the following two chapters on changing the education of girls from immigrant cultures and changing the education of the urban poor, one of the major problems of the analysis emerges. Corson tries to make the book applicable to the whole English-speaking worlda term which does not appear to include any of Africa. He draws upon his own experience in New Zealand, Australia, England and Canada and upon a wide range of research and other academic writing from these countries. However, the result is that terms such as immigrant girls and the urban poor are used as if similar problems and remedies are applicable in a wide range of countries and particular situations within those countries. There is little consideration of the vastly differing socio-historical contexts in which diversity has developed, and little regard given to the specic economic and structural constraints within which schools and educators work. Further, while there are many illuminating points that can be drawn from a study of the reform of aboriginal education, it makes a poor model for understanding, for example, ethnic and linguistic diversity in parts of Birmingham, England. Indeed it is impossible to begin to understand diversity within England without a consideration of religion. Yet this book, which has a great deal of discussion of linguistic diversity, has no discussion of religious diversity at all. The word religion is simply mentioned in passing, and is not even in the index. Corsons focus on change in aboriginal education leads him to write as if the major difculties to be overcome are those between the school and its local community. The language employed is one of bias and stereotype. For Corson, the beliefs and values of the local community are to be valorized, and the school brought into closer alignment with them. There is much less focus on the diversity to be found within any local community, or on any negative aspects of local community

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EDUCATIONAL MANAGEMENT & ADMINISTRATION 27(2)

control of schools. In England, schools now have greater local control (although nowhere near as much as Corson advocates), yet we have seen schools act to exclude minorities rather than include them. If schools are given some degree of power over which children they select, it is not clear what is meant by the local community. Minorities may well become more excluded rather than less. Perhaps it is signicant that anti-racism and anti-sexism are given hardly a mention in this book, for such policies have often been initiated by agencies outside the immediate environment of the school. Diversity within sexuality receives no discussion at all. Are we to believe that local communities with control over their schools will all automatically introduce anti-homophobic policies? One further problem is that there is uncertainty about the exact audience aimed for. The author states that the book is designed for pre-service and serving teachers, yet in places the argument is dense, while in others many problems are glossed over. Complex ideas are frequently reduced to bullet point lists which are presented in a very unquestioning way. In contrast, each chapter ends with a list of discussion starters which are very open-ended. It is not clear how these could be used unless the text were to be made compulsory reading for a groupwhich is very unlikely. To return to where I startedI found this an infuriating book, but one worth reading because it is so thought-provoking. Geoffrey Walford Reader in Education Policy, University of Oxford

Gender and Management Issues in Education: an International Perspective, edited by Pat Drake and Patricia Owen. Stoke-onTrent: Trentham Books, 1998. 145 pp. 13.95 (softback). ISBN 085856087X.
The editors, Pat Drake and Patricia Owen, were co-directors of a British Council international seminarGender and Management Issues in Educationwhere senior managers in education from 15 countries met in Brighton in December 1995. This book grew out of that meeting. It is unusual to nd a book which addresses, as this does, the conuence of several different discourses: international perspectives on women in educational management. Many readers may be familiar with literature about women and management in education, but few will have had the opportunity to read such vibrant accounts of the application of some of those theoretical frameworks to international settings. This is not just about getting more women into management in education, but how more women might change current concepts of management, and about different lived realities for women managers in different countries. To quote from the introduction (p. 8): The rst section: Gender and Democracy deals with concepts of management and leadership in a democratised world, and debates the gendering of these concepts within political climates. The second section Schooling and Work considers the interaction between gender in schools and gender in vocational settings, especially in the context of donor programmes in developing countries. In the third section: Women as Managers, women managers experiences in three different parts of the world are considered: in Indonesia, the West Indies and South America. The style here is auto-biographical and the womens stories are told largely in their own words. I have decided to list the contributors and to summarize their contributions to show the reader the quality of thought and the range of issues covered. Lyn Davies captures the subtlety of the shifting and

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