Grant Wood's "American Gothic," intended to represent the Depression Era, Midwestern farmer, has been regarded by many as the stereotypical representation of a true American farmer for decades. While this painting does represent farmers in the early part of the 20th century, the author feels obliged to say that it is time to drop this…

Campbell Loughmiller (1906-1993) is widely recognized as a leader in therapeutic work with troubled youngsters in outdoor settings. Rejecting punitive or institutional models of intervention, Loughmiller set out to demonstrate that every young person has strengths, desires to make positive changes, can grow in responsibility, and contribute to…

In this paper, I analyze the theorization of adolescent femininity within three popular cultural texts about girls and schooling written by women and published in the United States during the 1990s. The books, referred to as "Ophelia narratives," include Lyn Mikel Brown and Carol Gilligan's (1992) "Meeting at the Crossroads," Mary Pipher's (1994)…

The point of this article is to make a case for teachers of moral disposition without regard for the moral development of students. The article concludes that there are multiple reasons for wanting teachers of good disposition and moral character; that teachers' dispositions are best conceived as modifiers to the methods that they employ; and that…

Many myths about adolescence have been refuted by research, but similar myths have grown up in recent years around emerging adulthood. This essay addresses three of those myths: the claim that they suffer from a normative "crisis"; the accusations that they are "selfish"; and their alleged reluctance to "grow up" and become adults. For each issue,…

In this article, the author contemplates two books dealing with developing a teaching persona. These books are Elaine Showalter's "Teaching Literature" and Jay Parini's "The Art of Teaching". Showalter and Parini present very different perspectives on the issue. Showalter addresses it in a section called "Personae: The Teaching Self," in which she…

In this chapter, the author offers a historical overview of constructions of risk in the context of schooling for nondominant groups and how communities have organized schooling in ways that support resiliency in the face of these risks. She discusses an expansive orientation to understanding how people learn to respond to risks that is rooted in…

As a teacher the author often wishes that his students were more curious. Yet, Alice Ramos (this issue) proposes that curiosity can be a vice. She writes that there are times when a student might be motivated by a "blamable desire for knowledge." Ramos bases this claim on a distinction made by Thomas Aquinas, the thirteenth-century Aristotelian…

People are often presumed to be vulnerable to a desirability bias, namely, a tendency to be overoptimistic about a future outcome as a result of their preferences or desires for that outcome. In this article, this form of wishful thinking is distinguished from the more general concepts of motivated reasoning and overoptimism, and the evidence for…

Teachers generally agree that curiosity is a good thing that needs to be fostered: that the student who is curious is more desirous of knowledge, more attentive, and more interested in learning than the student who is less inquisitive. However, there are instances of curiosity which harbor a blamable desire for knowledge. The medieval philosopher…

Twelve years after the 1994 genocide, Rwanda remains a beautiful, but wounded nation. It is a nation full of hope--one comprised of resilient people working to rebuild a nation that was largely destroyed, when 800,000 Tutsis and moderate Hutus were murdered in some 90 days during what is known as the machete genocide. In this article, the author…

Review of the research literature on the characteristics of creative individuals finds them to be concentrated in artistic and investigative occupations. Individuals in different arts and investigative fields differed considerably in personality traits, and more creative individuals did not differ from the less creative in the same ways across…

This article presents comments on "The Heroism of Women and Men" by Selwyn W. Becker and Alice H. Eagly. Their article specifically addressed the "cultural association of heroism with men and masculinity . . . in natural settings." Becker and Eagly evidenced roughly equivalent rates of heroism by women and men in a variety of settings. However,…

The trait-based perspective of leadership has a long but checkered history. Trait approaches dominated the initial decades of scientific leadership research. Later, they were disdained for their inability to offer clear distinctions between leaders and nonleaders and for their failure to account for situational variance in leadership behavior.…

In this issue of "The Counseling Psychologist," Smith presents an array of important strength-related literature and offers propositions, stages, and counseling recommendations to foster resilience among youth. This article argues, however, that the strength-based counseling model is not sufficiently operational or clearly distinguishable from…