This paperback reprint of the 1994 edition is a highly regarded curriculum development book by one of the most prominent figures in the field. It is designed to help readers understand the major approaches to curriculum planning and the formation of educational goals. In this edition, Eisner provides a conceptual framework that shows learners the different ways in which the aims of education can be regarded...and, describes their implications for curriculum planning and teaching practices. Coverage is grounded in the belief that the appropriateness of any given educational practice is dependent upon the characteristics and context of the school program, and the values of the community that program serves. Chapter titles include: Schooling in America: Where Are We Headed; Some Concepts, Distinctions, and Definitions; Curriculum Ideologies; The Three Curricula That All Schools Teach; Educational Aims, Objectives, and Other Aspirations; Dimensions of Curriculum Planning; On the Art of Teaching; The Functions and Forms of Evaluation; Reshaping Assessment in Education; Some Examples of Educational Criticism; and A Criticism of an Educational Criticism. For teachers and anyone else involved in planning educational curriculums.
The educational imagination is the capacity to think critically beyond our located, daily experiences of education. It breaks away from the immediacy of personal understanding by placing education within wider, deeper and longer contexts. Boundaries of the Educational Imagination develops the educational imagination by answering six questions: What happens when we expand continuously outwards from one school to all the schools of the world?; What happens if we go inside a school and explore how its material equipment has changed over the past 300 years?; What is the smallest educational unit in our brain and how does it allow an almost infinite expansion of knowledge?; What is the highest level of individual development we can teach students to aspire towards?; What role does education play in a world that is producing more and more complex knowledge increasingly quickly?; How do small knowledge elements combine to produce increasingly complex knowledge forms? Each question goes on a journey towards limit points in education so that educational processes can be placed within a bigger framework that allows new possibilities, fresh options and more critical engagement. These questions are then pulled together into a structuring framework enabling the reader to grasp how this complex subject works.
The Educational Imagination explores the current state of American education and provides a historical view of earlier efforts to reform our schools. It describes the ideological positions of those who wish to shape the aims and content of school programs in ways that reflect their values.
In a time when it seems like we've run into the limits on what Marx, Dewey, and Freud might hold for liberatory critique, this peculiarly uplifting book seeks to identify some promising thinking and teaching practices, especially for work in our contemporary “corporate university of excellence.” With auto-ethnography as a baseline for reflection on her personal teaching life in this troubling political era, as well as an insistence that all students are future teachers whether they seek formal work in classrooms or not, Barbara Regenspan selects insights descending from her horribly imperfect trinity (Marx, Dewey, and Freud), to revaluate what it means to have “obligations to unknowable others” in our complex and global reality. Drawing on an interdisciplinary cast of contemporary social theorists such as Avery Gordon, Deborah Britzman, Maxine Greene, Bill Readings, and Alain Badiou, this book traces hauntagogical thinking and related classroom practice–hauntagogy–pedagogy aimed to create wide-awakeness through the unearthing of acts of historical and interpersonal hauntings. Balanced between critique and hope, Regenspan offers the field of Educational Studies including teacher education, but also higher education more generally, a way of conceiving of the classroom as a place where contradictions in discourses are mined with and for our students who will be future teachers in the formal or informal sense. Here is a view of what historical materialism might hold for the relationship between democracy and education and what that relationship means for new, wild, conceptions of self, politics, and spirituality. “Barbara Regenspan combines the personal, the political, and the educational in creative ways in this volume. In the process, she provides a number of important insights into the human complexities and necessary commitments involved in struggling toward an education that is worthy of its name.” – Michael W. Apple, John Bascom Professor of Curriculum and Instruction and Educational Policy Studies, University of Wisconsin, Madison and author of Can Education Change Society? “So much of my experience as an American teacher fell into place while reading this book. Regenspan never veers far from the pragmatic and personal realities of being an American educator right now, grappling with indifference, short-sightedness and disillusionment of the system. Her deft, and often profound intellectual work is peppered with anecdotes, both personal and pedagogical, and these accounts of teaching and learning on the ground level make her case fierce and fresh. Haunting and the Educational Imagination is politically humane and intellectually electrifying.” – Tony Hoagland, Professor of Creative Writing at the University of Houston, National Book Award Finalist, teacher of high school English teachers, and author of Unincorporated Persons in the Late Honda Dynasty. Cover design by Madison Kuhn
A Curriculum of Imagination in an Era of Standardization In A Curriculum of Imagination in an Era of Standardization: An Imaginative Dialogue with Maxine Greene and Paulo Freire, a volume in Landscapes of Education [Series Editors: William H. Schubert, University of Illinois at Chicago & Ming Fang He, Georgia Southern University], Robert Lake explores with the reader what is meant by imagination in the work of Maxine Greene and Paulo Freire and their relevance in an era of increasingly standardized and highly scripted practices in the field of education. The author explores how imagination permeates every aspect of life with the intent to develop capacity with the readers to look beyond the taken-for-granted, to question the normal, to develop various ways of knowing, seeing, feeling, and to imagine and act upon possibilities for positive social and educational change. The principal aspect of the work illustrated in this book that distinguishes it from other work is that an “imaginary” dialogue between Maxine Greene and Paulo Freire runs through the book using actual citations from their work. Each chapter starts with such a dialogue interspersed with the works of others and the author’s critical autobiographical reflections. With a brief overview of the socio-cultural evolution of imagination from pre-literate times to the present, the author explores some of the current iterations of imagination including the eugenics movement and “dark” imagination, sensing gaps and creative/critical imagination, metaphors as the language of imagination and empathy as social imagination. Reflecting upon emerging tensions, challenges, and possibilities curriculum workers face in such an era of standardization, the author calls for a curriculum of imagination. After providing a brief overview of the socio-cultural evolution of imagination from pre-literate times to the present, the author looks at some of the current iterations of imagination, including the eugenics movement and “dark” imagination, sensing gaps and creative/critical imagination, metaphors as the language of the imagination, and empathy as social imagination. All of these ideas are then incorporated in a curriculum of imagination that is envisioned through Joseph Schwab’s four commonplaces of curriculum followed by a discussion of emerging tensions, issues and possibilities for praxis and scholarship in present and future inquiry.
Rick and William Ayers renew their challenge to teachers to teach initiative, to teach imagination, to “teach the taboo” in the new edition of this bestseller. Drawing from a lifetime of deep commitment to students, teaching, and social justice, the authors update their powerful critique of schooling and present classroom stories of everyday teachers grappling with many of today’s hotly debated issues. They invite educators to live a teaching life of questioning—to imagine classrooms where every established and received bit of wisdom, common sense, orthodoxy, and dogma is open for examination, interrogation, and rethinking. Teaching the Taboo, Second Edition is an insightful guide to effective pedagogy and essential reading for anyone looking to evolve as an educator. What’s new for the second edition of Teaching the Taboo! A deeper exploration of issues of white privilege and racism and war and peace. A more thorough examination of the problems with math and science education, including possible solutions. An expanded exploration of the importance of creative writing for validating individual and community experiences. A more thorough discussion of Freire’s work and comparison to the radical teaching projects of African American activists in the south during the Freedom Schools. An in-depth look at how students can be part of co-constructing historical narratives and analyses. An update on school struggles in Atlanta, Chicago, and Seattle. Praise for the first edition of Teaching the Taboo! “For those frustrated by the thrust of educational 'reform'…this book provides what can be described as both a challenge and a set of alternatives.” —Education Review “Drawing from a lifetime of deep thinking about education and courageous commitment to precious students, Rick and William Ayers have given us a marvelous book. Their devastating critique of the pervasive market models in education and their powerful defense of democratic forms of imagination in schools are so badly needed in our present-day crisis!” —Cornel West, Princeton University “Teaching the Taboo is provocative, challenging, funny in places, wild but sensible enough to be useful, inspiring, and practical for educators who are working to negate the educational madness that is infecting the schools.” —Herb Kohl, author of 36 Children and Painting Chinese Rick Ayers is a university instructor and founder of the Communication Arts and Sciences small school at Berkeley High School, and teaches at the University of San Francisco. William Ayers is a school reform activist and a Distinguished Professor of Education and Senior University Scholar at the University of Illinois at Chicago.
'What good is the study of literature? Does it help us think more clearly, or feel more sensitively, or live a better life than we could without it?'' Written in the relaxed and frequently humorous style of his public lectures, this remains, of Northrop Frye's many books, perhaps the easiest introduction to his theories of literature and literary education.
Making culture a more central concept in the texts and contexts of teacher education is the focus of this book. It is a rich account of the author's investigation of teacher book club discussions of ethnic literature, specifically ethnic autobiography--as a genre from which teachers might learn about culture, literacy, and education in their own and others' lives, and as a form of conversation and literature-based work that might be sustainable and foster teachers' comprehension and critical thinking. Dr. Florio-Ruane's role in the book clubs merged participation and inquiry. For this reason, she blends personal narrative with analysis and description of ways she and the book club participants explored culture in the stories they told one another and in their responses to published autobiographies. She posits that autobiography and conversation may be useful for teachers not only in constructing their own learning about culture, but also, by doing so, in participating in the transformation of learning within the teaching profession.
Inspired by papers developed for the 6th International Conference on Imagination and Education: Imaginative Practice, Imaginative Inquiry (Canberra, Australia, 2008), this book connects a cross-section of educators, researchers and administrators in a dialogue and exploration of imaginative and creative ways of teaching, learning and conducting educational inquiry. Imagination is a concept that spans traditional disciplinary and professional boundaries. The authors in this book acknowledge diverse theoretical and practical allegiances, but they concur that imagination will play an essential role in the building of new foundations for education in the 21st century. From our conception of human development through our ways of educating teachers to the teaching of mathematics, they argue for the centrality of imagination in the realization of human potential, and for its relevance to the most urgent problems confronting our world. Introduced by a wide-ranging literature review and extensively referenced, this volume makes an important contribution to a rapidly expanding field.
"This remarkable set of essays defines the role of imagination in general education, arts education, aesthetics, literature, and the social and multicultural context.... The author argues for schools to be restructured as places where students reach out for meanings and where the previously silenced or unheard may have a voice. She invites readers to develop processes to enhance and cultivate their own visions through the application of imagination and the arts. Releasing the Imagination should be required reading for all educators, particularly those in teacher education, and for general and academic readers." —Choice "Maxine Greene, with her customary eloquence, makes an impassioned argument for using the arts as a tool for opening minds and for breaking down the barriers to imagining the realities of worlds other than our own familiar cultures.... There is a strong rhythm to the thoughts, the arguments, and the entire sequence of essays presented here." —American Journal of Education "Releasing the Imagination gives us a vivid portrait of the possibilities of human experience and education's role in its realization. It is a welcome corrective to current pressures for educational conformity." —Elliot W. Eisner, professor of education and art, Stanford University "Releasing the Imagination challenges all the cant and cliché littering the field of education today. It breaks through the routine, the frozen, the numbing, the unexamined; it shocks the reader into new awareness." —William Ayers, associate professor, College of Education, University of Illinois, Chicago
