When Huston Diehl began teaching a fourth-grade class in a "Negro" elementary school in rural Louisa County, Virginia, the school’s white superintendent assured her that he didn't expect her to teach "those children" anything. She soon discovered how these low expectations, widely shared by the white community, impeded her students' ability to learn. With its overcrowded classrooms, poorly trained teachers, empty bookshelves, and meager supplies, her segregated school was vastly inferior to the county's white elementary schools, and the message it sent her students was clear: "dream not of other worlds." In her often lyrical memoir, Diehl reveals how, in the intimacy of the classroom, her students reached out to her, a young white northerner, and shared their fears, anxieties, and personal beliefs. Repeatedly surprised and challenged by her students, Diehl questions her long-standing middle-class assumptions and confronts her own prejudices. In doing so, she eloquently reflects on what the students taught her about the hurt of bigotry and the humiliation of poverty as well as dignity, courage, and resiliency. Set in the waning days of the Jim Crow South, Dream Not of Other Worlds chronicles an important moment in American history. Diehl examines the history of black education in the South and narrates the dramatic struggle to integrate Virginia's public schools. Meeting with some of her former students and colleagues and visiting the school where she once taught, she considers what has--and has not--changed after more than thirty years of integrated schooling. This provocative book raises many issues that are of urgent concern today: the continuing social consequences of segregated schools, the role of public education in American society, and the challenges of educating minority and poor children.
In this book, H. James Garrett inquires into the processes of learning about the social world, populated as it often is with bewildering instances of loss, violence, and upheaval. In such learning, interactions invite and enliven our passionate responses, or prompt us to avoid them. Interpreting and working with these often emotional reactions is critical to social studies education and developing strategies for individuals to participate in democracy. Garrett illustrates ways that learning about the world does not occur in absence of our intimate relations to knowledge, the way learning sometimes feels like our undoing, and how new knowledge can feel more like a burden than an advantage.
New Pedagogies for Deep Learning (NDPL) provides a comprehensive strategy for systemwide transformation. Using the 6 competencies of NDPL and a wealth of vivid examples, Fullan re-defines and re-examines what deep learning is and identifies the practical strategies for revolutionizing learning and leadership.
With an outspoken and penetrating afterword by Darko Suvin, the contributors to this study convey the essence of cognitive estrangement in relation to science fiction and utopia. All the contributors have been influenced by Suvin's ideas and beliefs.
Radicalizing Learning calls for a total rethinking of what the field of adult education stands for and how adult educators should assess their effectiveness. Arguing that major changes in society are needed to create a more just world, the authors set out to show how educators can help learners envision and enact this radical transformation. Specifically, the book explores the areas of adult learning, training, teaching, facilitation, program development, and research. Each chapter provides a guide to the different paradigms and perspectives that prevail across the field of theory and practice. The authors then tie all of the themes into how adult learning for participatory democracy works in a diverse society.
Designed to promote conversation about how to educate students for a rapidly changing, innovation-based world, this comprehensive and illuminating book from international education expert Vivien Stewart focuses on understanding what the world's best school systems are doing right for the purpose of identifying what U.S. schools--at the national, state, and local level--might do differently and better.
Algorithmic Learning in a Random World describes recent theoretical and experimental developments in building computable approximations to Kolmogorov's algorithmic notion of randomness. Based on these approximations, a new set of machine learning algorithms have been developed that can be used to make predictions and to estimate their confidence and credibility in high-dimensional spaces under the usual assumption that the data are independent and identically distributed (assumption of randomness). Another aim of this unique monograph is to outline some limits of predictions: The approach based on algorithmic theory of randomness allows for the proof of impossibility of prediction in certain situations. The book describes how several important machine learning problems, such as density estimation in high-dimensional spaces, cannot be solved if the only assumption is randomness.
This book provides state-of-the-art contemporary research insights into key applications and processes in open world learning. Open world learning seeks to understand access to education, structures, and the presence of dialogue and support systems. It explores how the application of open world and educational technologies can be used to create opportunities for open and high-quality education. Presenting ground-breaking research from an award winning Leverhulme doctoral training programme, the book provides several integrated and cohesive perspectives of the affordances and limitations of open world learning. The chapters feature a wide range of open world learning topics, ranging from theoretical and methodological discussions to empirical demonstrations of how open world learning can be effectively implemented, evaluated, and used to inform theory and practice. The book brings together a range of innovative uses of technology and practice in open world learning from 387,134 learners and educators learning and working in 136 unique learning contexts across the globe and considers the enablers and disablers of openness in learning, ethical and privacy implications, and how open world learning can be used to foster inclusive approaches to learning across educational sectors, disciplines and countries. The book is unique in exploring the complex, contradictory and multi-disciplinary nature of open world learning at an international level and will be of great interest to academics, researchers, professionals, and policy makers in the field of education technology, e-learning and digital education. The Open Access version of this book, available at www.taylorfrancis.com, has been made available under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives 4.0 license.
The 21st century has brought about changes in every aspect of life through ubiquitous technology and Internet-based social media. The distances between cultures and continents have narrowed, the world has become flat, and multicultural work-teams composed of members from different countries have become a daily reality in global businesses. However, in many ways these global changes in work practices have only just begun to have an impact on education. To better prepare students for the information age, researchers and policy makers largely agree about the skills needed for shared knowledge construction. Indeed, the education systems in several different countries have begun to integrate these skills into teaching and learning and are placing a strong emphasis on their implementation (Melamed et al, 2010; Resta et al, 2011). In 2015 the OECD PISA exam for the first time, included assessment of collaborative problem-solving in its country-by-country comparison. Collaborative learning is not a trivial challenge nor is it intuitive for all teachers and learners. One must acquire and practice the essential skills in order to successfully work in a team. Consequently it is essential to train teachers in collaborative teamwork, as they must serve as role models for students. In addition, new tools and practices become available at a rate that outpaces the abilities of many higher education institutions to adopt and implement. This book surveys the current state of the field and provides theoretical guidance and practical examples to help meet the gaps in research, development and practice.