Robert Major – författare

The need for outstanding university supervisors who balance the needs and interests of the student teacher, the university, and the K-12 school has never been greater. Teacher supervisors are the link between institutions of higher learning and public and private schools. This work is a practical guide for university supervisors that examines the supervisory process, the preparation necessary for supervision, the responsibilities of the university supervisor, the historical assumption underlying the supervisory role, and what research tells us about effective supervision.This work also provides background information on topics such as discipline in the schools and curricular concerns, and summarizes research about what the supervisor needs to know on the philosophical, psychological, and sociological foundations of education. Practical suggestions and sound advice are provided on major questions and issues such as: What should I tell the cooperating teacher about writing final evaluations? What should I tell the student teacher about presenting incorrect information? What do I look for while observing the student teacher? How do I conduct an effective conference? How should I plan a seminar? University supervisors will gain a better understanding of their own role and responsibilities in working with student and cooperating teachers as well as an appreciation of the work of the cooperating teacher. Likewise, student and cooperating teachers will gain similar understandings.

In many ways America is in worse shape than before the first Watts riots occurred over 25 years ago. Intolerance is still abundant; greed is very much alive; and hope held by many at the bottom has been dimmed, if not extinguished. For our country to become everything it is capable of becoming and everything our ancestors dreamed, education cannot continue as usual. Ours is a great country, but when even one of its citizens is made to feel less than human or is robbed of their dignity, something is wrong. Hope, Intolerance, and Greed: A Reality Check for Teachers encourages teachers to question the status quo and to reexamine their power to influence the direction our country takes into the 21st century. It also encourages teachers to acknowledge the realities that exist, teach the rejection of violence, and promote an awareness and understanding of people as individuals.

Antonine Gerin-Lajoie's Jean Rivard (1862-4) is recognized as a landmark novel in Quebec literature. It has come to be regarded as a typical mid-nineteenth-century example of the conservative and reactionary nationalism and patriotism into which French Canadians withdrew after the crushing of the Patriotes in 1837 and 1838. In this brilliant and iconoclastic study, which is an adaptation and translation into English of his 'Jean Rivard' ou l'Art de reussir: Ideologies et utopie dans l'oeuvre d'Antoine Gerin-Lajoie, published in 1991. Robert Major challenges this view of the novel and of the political and intellectual millieu in which it was produced. He suggests that Quebec culture in the nineteenth century was far richer and more diverse than the prevailing view allows. While Jean Rivard is a novel about settlement, the need to develop the virgin territories of Canada, Major contends that it also a success story based on the American model of Horatio Alger -- a novel which advocates economic liberalism and urbanization as well as rugged individualism. Through his analysis of Jean Rivard Major re-examines the attitudes to the United States common in the period and points to the way sin which the United States functioned in Quebec political imagery as an icon of democracy.