With the national reform and research agendas occurring in teacher education, one of the most important areas needing theoretical analysis and empirical research is assessment and evaluation. New initiatives in the education of teachers and new roles in professional practice demand new means to assess both learning and performance. In recognition of this demand, this book is designed to examine how students can best be selected for and evaluated while in teacher education programs. The book reviews and synthesizes the existing knowledge in teacher education assessment, as well as presents new inquiry to extend and deepen this knowledge.

The anticipatory logic of speculation and preemptive politics of risk are increasingly gaining significance in a globalizing neoliberal world. This study traces risk and speculation as aesthetic and political-economic strategies in factual and fictional discourses emerging at the North American Pacific Rim within a decade around 2000. Its exemplary close readings in particular focus on three fictional texts (Kathryn Bigelow's Hollywood film "Strange Days", 1995, Karen T. Yamashita's novel "Tropic of Orange", 1997, and Larissa Lai's novel "Salt Fish Girl", 2002) whose intricate aesthetics pass perceptive critique on concurrent political-economic discourses and their subtle reconfiguration of race, class, and gender. The speculative near-future scenarios projected by these artifacts expose the rise of risk as a new rationality of governance. At the same time they illustrate neoliberal speculation as a new paradigm of subject formation at a hyper-capitalist, millennial Pacific Rim.

Shrill, beefy, drilled - hard bodies populate pop culture and science books alike. The essays in this volume trace the flexing muscles of the hard body in various disciplines and spatio-temporal contexts: from the medieval wooer in tights to the soldier in a bombsuit, from sculpted marble bodies to the treacherous images of German Terrormadels, from 19th century self-improvement manuals to 21st century technoporn, from Ballets Russes to Charlie's Angels, from Afro-Brazilian male sleeping beauties to the black female war machine. (Series: American Studies in Austria - Vol. 11)

With the national reform and research agendas occurring in teacher education, one of the most important areas needing theoretical analysis and empirical research is assessment and evaluation. New initiatives in the education of teachers and new roles in professional practice demand new means to assess both learning and performance. In recognition of this demand, this book is designed to examine how students can best be selected for and evaluated while in teacher education programs. The book reviews and synthesizes the existing knowledge in teacher education assessment, as well as presents new inquiry to extend and deepen this knowledge.