Imagining the possibilities explores approaches to creative methods on how to teach various orientation and mobility (O & M) techniques to people who are blind or visually impaired, including those with multiple disabilities. This is a hands-on teaching resource for preservice and practicing O & M specialists. It offers materials, samples, and creative teaching strategies that will effectively help students. Each chapter in Imagining the possibilities provides specific examples and strategies for assessment and instruction in O & M, including Idea Boxes with teaching tips, sample lesson plans, and appendices that give sample materials.
Recent and increasing efforts to standardize young children’s academic performance have shifted the emphases of education toward normative practices and away from qualitative, substantive intentions. Connection to human experience, compassion for societal ailments, and the joys of learning are straining under the pressure of quantitative research, competition, and test scores, exemplified by federal funding competitions and policymaking. Disrupting Early Childhood Education Research critically interrogates the traditional foundations of early childhood research practices to disrupt the status quo through imaginative, cutting-edge research in diverse U.S. and international contexts. Its chapters are driven by empirical data derived from unique research projects and a variety of contemporary methodologies that include phenomenological studies, auto-ethnographic writings, action-oriented studies, arts-based methodologies, and other innovative approaches. By giving voice to marginalized social science researchers who are active in learning, school, and early education sectors, this volume explores the meanings of actionable and everyday approaches based on the experiences of young children, their families, and educators.
To every girl that needs an extra push, the girl that was told she wasn't good enough or ever felt that she couldn't or wouldn't accomplish her dreams because of what someone said or her upbringing. This book is for you! Tap into your thoughts and control them. Realize that you have a power inside of you that has authority to thrive. Never give up on whatever it is you hope for. Use your imagination and zone out. Get in your zone and use your imagination. Never stop, never stop planning, never stop talking about it, never stop wishing for it... Never! To all the young women that love themselves so hard that they refused to listen to the haters, the men that caused havoc or the family members that didn't believe in you. You don't owe anybody! This life is for YOU to live.
Foundations of Orientation and Mobility, the classic professional reference and textbook has been completely revised and expanded to two volumes by the most knowledgeable experts in the field. The new third edition includes both the latest research in O&M and expanded information on practice and teaching strategies. Volume 1, History and Theory, includes the bases of O&M knowledge, including perception, orientation, low vision, audition, kinesiology, psychosocial issues, and learning theories, as well as chapters on technology, dog guides, orientation aids, and environmental accessibility. A section on the profession of O&M includes its international history; administration, assessment and program planning; and a chapter on research in O&M. No O&M student or professional can afford to be without this essential resource.
Enter into the world of two young girls, each diagnosed with congenital heart disease, and witness how their unique paths translate into an instant connection between them. Their rare journeys, complete with surgeries at young ages and other complexities difficult for children to process, lends itself to forging a friendship that has given them the confidence to endure the lifelong fight against their CHDs and the emotional challenges that follow. The rainbows and storms the girl face side-by-side creates a special bond that helps carry them through challenges, yet also normalizes their childhood, including embracing their warrior zipper scar. Faith, hope, and love is instilled in the girls from their mothers and proves to be the anchor of all the uncertainty and their roadmap for learning to support each other along the way.
Imagined Communities and Educational Possibilities focuses on three main themes: imaged communities expand the range of possible selves, technological advances in the last two decades have had a significant impact on what is possible to imagine, and imagination at even the most personal level is related to social ideologies and hegemonies. The diverse studies in this issue demonstrate convincingly that learners and teachers are capable of imagining the world as different from prevailing realities. Moreover, time and energy can be invested to strive for the realization of alternative visions of the future. Research in this special issue suggests that investment in such imagined communities offers intriguing possibilities for social and educational change.
In the early 1990s, people predicted the death of privacy, an end to the current concept of 'property,' a paperless society, 500 channels of high-definition interactive television, world peace, and the extinction of the human race after a takeover engineered by intelligent machines. Imagining the Internet zeroes in on predictions about the Internet's future and revisits past predictions—and how they turned out. It gives the history of communications in a nutshell, illustrating the serious impact of pervasive networks and how they will change our lives over the next century.
La Clase Mágica: Imagining Optimal Possibilities in a Bilingual Community of Learners vividly captures the social and intellectual developments and the promises of an ongoing after-school project called La Clase Mágica. It is a blow-by-blow description of the early transformations of a project that began as an educational activity and slowly but deliberately turned into a social action project whose aim was to serve those with low economic and political means and little access to educational resources. This multivocal account details research in action for effectively serving Spanish-English bilingual speakers from a Mexican origin community, as well as--on a broader level--the diverse populations that increasingly characterize American society today. The focus is on the early foundational work of the project between 1989-1996, though attention is also given to the national and international recognition the project has subsequently received, the college-going patterns of its long-term participants, and the transplantation of the project to other cultural communities. The book speaks out from the "zones of contact" between the university and a language minority community about new ways to extend and intersect theory and practice in many areas of the educational enterprise. Contact is defined not only in the physical sense of face-to-face interaction but also as symbolic interaction between languages, cultures, histories, and epistemologies. Thus, Vásquez speaks of optimal possibilities situated in the middle grounds, or more technically speaking, in the borders between Spanish and English, Mexican and mainstream culture, minority and majority designations, and between school and community contexts where contact is made and new arrangements are imagined. This account uses the reflections of participants at times to take readers from the scientific to the everyday, to make real and concrete the theoretical conceptualizations that box in human behavior. In this way, it defines the theories, methods, and philosophies for linking multiple disciplines, institutions, and participant groups into a concerted effort with potential to reframe the educational opportunities of under-served populations. A close look is provided into the intricacies and the fundamental principles for building and sustaining effective learning environments and institutional relations necessary for enhancing the potential of learners of all ages. In the process, the book also suggests ways in which community members and institutional agents can play an active and integral role in creating learning opportunities that serve both constituencies. Educators and policymakers will find the systems approach for pursuing parent and community involvement in the educational enterprise useful. In sum, the book offers researchers, practitioners, and policymakers much needed guidance, insight, and perhaps inspiration for rethinking educational goals and objectives.
This volume, first published in 2000, is about the development of human thinking that stretches beyond the ordinary boundaries of reality. Various research initiatives emerged in the decade prior to publication exploring such matters as children's thinking about imaginary beings, magic and the supernatural. The purpose of this book is to capture something of the larger spirit of these efforts. In many ways, this new work offers a counterpoint to research on the development of children's domain-specific knowledge about the ordinary nature of things that has suggested that children become increasingly scientific and rational over the course of development. In acquiring an intuitive understanding of the physical, biological or psychological domains, even young children recognize that there are constraints on what can happen. However, once such constraints are acknowledged, children are in a position to think about the violation of those very same constraints - to contemplate the impossible.
Now in paperback, a bewitching collection of stories and novellas that are “suspenseful, thought-provoking, mystical, and haunting” (Publishers Weekly) Ranging from the seventeenth century to the present, and crossing multiple continents, Counternarratives draws upon memoirs, newspaper accounts, detective stories, and interrogation transcripts to create new and strange perspectives on our past and present. “An Outtake” chronicles an escaped slave’s take on liberty and the American Revolution; “The Strange History of Our Lady of the Sorrows” presents a bizarre series of events that unfold in Haiti and a nineteenth-century Kentucky convent; “The Aeronauts” soars between bustling Philadelphia, still-rustic Washington, and the theater of the U. S. Civil War; “Rivers” portrays a free Jim meeting up decades later with his former raftmate Huckleberry Finn; and in “Acrobatique,” the subject of a famous Edgar Degas painting talks back.
