Berkeley Review of Education

Introduction to Volume 6, Issue 1.

In the late 1980s, the Chinese government instituted massive educational reforms to promote competition between schools and between students. By the late 1990s, however, educational reforms shifted to regulating and reducing competition in primary and secondary education. Why did a rapid policy swing occur? What was the rationale for the policy change? This article examines the Chinese discourse of competition in education by presenting a textual analysis of 101 commentary articles published by Chinese educators between 1986 and 2014. It reports two different views of competition among Chinese educators, one of which strongly prevailed throughout the 28 years. It also documents historical change in the authors’ perceptions of competition: in the late 1980s, as a powerful solution to the educational and social problems facing China, and, by the late 1990s, as a major educational problem itself.

Drawing from Espino, Vega, Rendón, Ranero, and Muñiz (2012), the authors of this article utilize dialogue partners to develop collaborative testimonios of Latino male faculty. We center the importance of engaging in vulnerability while embracing peer support to address issues of isolation, marginalization, and other challenges that Latino male faculty experience in higher education. We then develop and discuss the implications of a homebodied intellectual manhood, which we define as an identity that has emancipatory potential related to self-authorship, knowledge creation, negotiation of power in academia, and pursuit of social justice-oriented practices.

Given the upsurge of political demonstrations by Black students in response to the highly publicized killings of unarmed Black people, this paper explores student engagement theory through the racialized experiences of Black students at Historically White Institutions (HWIs). Employing autoethnography and analyzing secondary literature on historical and contemporary experiences of Black students in higher education, this paper argues that traditional readings of student engagement theory fail to capture the complexities of Black student engagement. In confronting anti-Blackness, these students pay an invisible tax that manifests in the mental, physical, and emotional resources that could be allocated to promote success in the campus environment but are instead utilized to merely survive as students. Black students experience a set of inherent dilemmas; they are both invested in higher education for social uplift, and they simultaneously employ Black nationalist ideals through their student organizing—these challenges are present within the broader trajectory of Black education.

The purpose of the study was to use model-based clustering to identify adolescent time attitude profiles in a sample of students from an urban high school using Adolescent Time Inventory-Time Attitude (ATI-TA) scores and to examine the association of ATI-TA profiles with demographic variables and grade point average (GPA). Three ATI-TA profiles were identified— Positives, Ambivalent, and Conflicted—two of which were similar to clusters identified in previous studies. Results indicated that gender and grade were not associated with cluster membership. However, socioeconomic status, ethnicity, and GPA were related to cluster membership. Although overall effect sizes for socioeconomic status and ethnicity were small, post-hoc analyses suggested that differences among ethnic groups should be investigated further. There were substantial GPA differences between some clusters (Cohen’s d = .36 – 1.27). Future directions for research on adolescent time attitude profiles should include in-depth studies examining the relationship between profile membership and achievement and longitudinal studies to observe whether time attitude profile membership changes over time.