New Releases by Barbara Miller

This handbook assists educators in improving the links among civic education curriculum, instruction, and assessment. First-person accounts detailing teachers'' thoughts present a basis for tracing the evolution of assessment tasks and rubrics for evaluation. Samples of student work are provided to stimulate thinking and discussion. Activities for staff development programs and for individual teachers are included. There are 11 chapters divided into three sections. Section 1, "Getting Started," contains the chapters: (1) "Defining Authenticity in Civic Education"; (2) "Defining Essential Learnings in Civic Education"; (3) "Designing an Assessment Task and Scoring Rubric"; and (4) "Using Student Work to Revise an Assessment and Instruction." Section 2, "Exploring Assessment Tasks," includes the chapters: (1) "Public Issues Discussion as an Authentic Assessment"; (2) "Assessing Socratic Seminars and Structured Academic Controversy"; (3) "Performance Assessment: Mock Trials, Moot Courts, Simulated Legislative Hearings, and Town Meetings"; (4) "Assessing Student Writing"; (5) "Assessing Student-Created Products or Projects"; and (6) "Portfolios." Section 3, "Looking Ahead," contains the chapter "Issues and Challenges." Teacher profiles are appended. (EH)

A look at relationships whereby both people retain their individuality, their independence, their personal ambitions, their individual friendships and pursuits, but resonate with each other by consciously renewing the connections that brought them together.

Lesson 5: Improving the Constitution

These lesson plans on the First Amendment are designed to help secondary school students to understand the history and meaning of the First Amendment and its importance in today''s society. The manual has two sections, one for middle school, the other for high school. Ten lessons for middle school students cover the following topics: (1) Throwing our rights away; (2) Using the First Amendment; (3) Free expression: what should be protected?; (4) Expression at school; (5) Religion at school; (6) Privacy and the First Amendment; (7) Your right to know: the privacy triangle; (8) Should the Bill of Rights be amended?; (9) First Amendment rights; and (10) The First Amendment in posters (evaluation). Subjects covered by the 10 lessons for high school students are: (1) Students and rights: beliefs and realities; (2) First Amendment freedoms survey; (3) Life without the First Amendment; (4) An established church in America?; (5) Free exercise of religion; (6) Freedom of speech; (7) Freedom of the press; (8) Freedom of assembly; (9) Petitioning government; and (10) The First Amendment in its third century. Each lesson contains an introduction and information on objectives, time required, materials and preparation involved, procedure, and extension/enrichment activities. A bibliography follows each set of lessons. Both the middle school and high school sections of this manual provide a description of the Education for Freedom Project, a First Amendment background paper, and a general introduction to the materials used. (DB)

A study of the future for children, youth, and adults. The topic is multidisciplinary in nature and congenial to many subjects in the curriculum.

Traces the history of the struggle of women to achieve equality in American colleges from Colonial times to the present

For use with multi-handicapped children who are delayed in language and/or conceptual development.

In 1992 the massive files of East Germany''s infamous Ministry for State Security, the Stasi, were made publicly available and thousands of former East Germans began to confront their contents. Finally it was possible for ordinary citizens to ascertain who had worked for the Stasi, either on a full-time basis or as an "unofficial employee," the Stasi''s term for an informer. The revelations from these documents sparked feuds old and new among a population already struggling through enormous social and political upheaval. Drawing upon the Stasi files and upon interviews with one-time informers, this book examines the impact of the Stasi legacy in united Germany. Barbara Miller examines such aspects of the informer''s experience as: the recruitment procedure; daily life and work; motivation and justification. She goes on to consider the dealings of politicians and the courts with the Stasi and its employees. Her analysis then turns to the way in which this aspect of recent German history has been remembered, and the phenomenal impact of the opening of the files on such perceptions of the past. The Stasi Files Unveiled: Guilt and Compliance in a Unified Germany offers important new perspectives on the nature of individual and collective memory and is a fascinating investigation of modern German society. Barbara Miller graduated from the University of Glasgow in 1991 with a degree in German and psychology. She taught and researched in Germany and Austria before completing her doctoral thesis in Glasgow in 1997. She is now based in Sydney, Australia.