The concept of "funds of knowledge" is based on a simple premise: people are competent and have knowledge, and their life experiences have given them that knowledge. The claim in this book is that first-hand research experiences with families allow one to document this competence and knowledge, and that such engagement provides many possibilities for positive pedagogical actions. Drawing from both Vygotskian and neo-sociocultural perspectives in designing a methodology that views the everyday practices of language and action as constructing knowledge, the funds of knowledge approach facilitates a systematic and powerful way to represent communities in terms of the resources they possess and how to harness them for classroom teaching. This book accomplishes three objectives: It gives readers the basic methodology and techniques followed in the contributors' funds of knowledge research; it extends the boundaries of what these researchers have done; and it explores the applications to classroom practice that can result from teachers knowing the communities in which they work. In a time when national educational discourses focus on system reform and wholesale replicability across school sites, this book offers a counter-perspective stating that instruction must be linked to students' lives, and that details of effective pedagogy should be linked to local histories and community contexts. This approach should not be confused with parent participation programs, although that is often a fortuitous consequence of the work described. It is also not an attempt to teach parents "how to do school" although that could certainly be an outcome if the parents so desired. Instead, the funds of knowledge approach attempts to accomplish something that may be even more challenging: to alter the perceptions of working-class or poor communities by viewing their households primarily in terms of their strengths and resources, their defining pedagogical characteristics. Funds of Knowledge: Theorizing Practices in Households, Communities, and Classrooms is a critically important volume for all teachers and teachers-to-be, and for researchers and graduate students of language, culture, and education.

The Library owns the volumes of the American Jewish Yearbook from 1899 - current.

The 1958 New York Convention has been called the most effective instance of international legislation in the entire history of commercial law. However, the succinct text of the Convention leaves open a host of significant and complex questions, which may be, and have been, answered in a variety of ways; as difficult cases arise and demand solutions, they generate inconsistent outcomes. For all its remarkable success, the Convention has on occasion proved itself to be unreliable and unpredictable. This book simultaneously exposes the difficulties of the Convention and explores potential solutions. It examines each substantive article of the New York Convention in accordance with the following outline: • the text and its issues; • original intent; • the prism of the rules of interpretation of the Vienna Convention; • judicial outcomes; and • appraisal. By drawing on the Convention's drafting history in great detail, the book presents a coherent account of how the most frequently recurring interrogations about the text are reflected (or not) in judicial practice. The author studied more than 1,700 decisions rendered under the Convention since its inception in 1958 in order to provide a succinct selection of landmark cases per article. With its intense investigation of the complex reality underlying contracting States' commitment in principle and judicial application in fact, the author's judicial understanding of the Convention provides a clear conceptual framework that will help avoid outcomes at odds with the purposes of this important instrument. Lawyers and judges will rely on this book not only to situate the Convention in the national legal orders where it is intended to produce its effects, but also discover practical ways to respond to distinct questions of application.

An inside look into one of the most mythologized prisons in modern America--the Sing Sing death house In the annals of American criminal justice, two prisons stand out as icons of institutionalized brutality and deprivation: Alcatraz and Sing Sing. In the 70 odd years before 1963, when the death sentence was declared unconstitutional in New York, Sing Sing was the site of almost one-half of the 1,353 executions carried out in the state. More people were executed at Sing Sing than at any other American prison, yet Sing Sing's death house was, to a remarkable extent, one of the most closed, secret and mythologized places in modern America. In this remarkable book, based on recently revealed archival materials, Scott Christianson takes us on a disturbing and poignant tour of Sing Sing's legendary death house, and introduces us to those whose lives Sing Sing claimed. Within the dusty files were mug shots of each newly arrived prisoner, most still wearing the out-to-court clothes they had on earlier that day when they learned their verdict and were sentenced to death. It is these sometimes bewildered, sometimes defiant, faces that fill the pages of Condemned, along with the documents of their last months at Sing Sing. The reader follows prisoners from their introduction to the rules of Sing Sing, through their contact with guards and psychiatrists, their pleas for clemency, escape attempts, resistance, and their final letters and messages before being put to death. We meet the mother of five accused of killing her husband, the two young Chinese men accused of a murder during a robbery and the drifter who doesn't remember killing at all. While the majority of inmates are everyday people, Julius and Ethel Rosenberg were also executed here, as were the major figures in the infamous Murder Inc., forerunner of the American mafia. Page upon page, Condemned leaves an indelible impression of humanity and suffering.