"Since the highly acclaimed Courageous Conversations About Race offered educators a frame work and tools for promoting racial equity, many schools have implemented the Courageous Conversations Protocol. Now ... in a book that's rich with anecdote, Singleton celebrates the successes, outlines the difficulties, and provides specific strategies for moving Courageous Conversations from racial equity theory to practice at every level, from the classroom to the school superintendent's office"--Back cover.
In this collection, local experts use personal narratives and empirical data to explore the history of Mexican American and Puerto Rican education in the Chicago Public Schools (CPS) system. The essays focus on three themes: the historical context of segregated and inferior schooling for Latina/o/x students; the changing purposes and meanings of education for Latina/o/x students from the 1950s through today; and Latina/o/x resistance to educational reforms grounded in neoliberalism. Contributors look at stories of student strength and resistance, the oppressive systems forced on Mexican American women, the criminalization of Puerto Ricans fighting for liberatory education, and other topics of educational significance. As they show, many harmful past practices remain the norm--or have become worse. Yet Latina/o/x communities and students persistently engage in transformative practices shaping new approaches to education that promise to reverberate not only in the city but nationwide. Insightful and enlightening, Latina/o/x Education in Chicago brings to light the ongoing struggle for educational equity in the Chicago Public Schools.
In this galvanizing book for all educators, Kristin Souers and Pete Hall explore an urgent and growing issue--childhood trauma--and its profound effect on learning and teaching. Grounded in research and the authors' experience working with trauma-affected students and their teachers, Fostering Resilient Learners will help you cultivate a trauma-sensitive learning environment for students across all content areas, grade levels, and educational settings. The authors--a mental health therapist and a veteran principal--provide proven, reliable strategies to help you * Understand what trauma is and how it hinders the learning, motivation, and success of all students in the classroom. * Build strong relationships and create a safe space to enable students to learn at high levels. * Adopt a strengths-based approach that leads you to recalibrate how you view destructive student behaviors and to perceive what students need to break negative cycles. * Head off frustration and burnout with essential self-care techniques that will help you and your students flourish. Each chapter also includes questions and exercises to encourage reflection and extension of the ideas in this book. As an educator, you face the impact of trauma in the classroom every day. Let this book be your guide to seeking solutions rather than dwelling on problems, to building relationships that allow students to grow, thrive, and--most assuredly--learn at high levels.
In 2012, Chicago's school year began with the city's first teachers' strike in a quarter century and ended with the largest mass closure of public schools in U.S. history. On one side, a union leader and veteran black woman educator drew upon organizing strategies from black and Latinx communities to demand increased school resources. On the other side, the mayor, backed by the Obama administration, argued that only corporate-style education reform could set the struggling school system aright. The stark differences in positions resonated nationally, challenging the long-standing alliance between teachers' unions and the Democratic Party. Elizabeth Todd-Breland recovers the hidden history underlying this battle. She tells the story of black education reformers' community-based strategies to improve education beginning during the 1960s, as support for desegregation transformed into community control, experimental schooling models that pre-dated charter schools, and black teachers' challenges to a newly assertive teachers' union. This book reveals how these strategies collided with the burgeoning neoliberal educational apparatus during the late twentieth century, laying bare ruptures and enduring tensions between the politics of black achievement, urban inequality, and U.S. democracy.
