I have long admired the mythopoetic tradition in curriculum studies. That admiration followed from my experience as a high-school teacher of English in a wealthy suburb of New York City at the end of the 1960s. A “dream” job—I taught four classes of 15–20 students during a nine-period day—in a “dream” suburb (where I could afford to reside only by taking a room in a retired teacher’s house), many of these often Ivy-League-bound students had everything but meaningful lives. This middle-class, Midwestern young teacher was flabbergasted. In one sense, my academic life has been devoted to understanding that searing experience. Matters of meaning seemed paramount in the curriculum field to which Paul Klohr introduced me at Ohio State. Klohr assigned me the work of curriculum theorists such as James B. Macdonald. Like Timothy Leonard (who also studied with Klohr at Ohio State) and Peter Willis, Macdonald (1995) understood that school reform was part of a broader cultural and political crisis in which meaning is but one casualty. In the mythopoetic tradition in curriculum studies, scholars labor to understand this crisis and the conditions for the reconstruction of me- ing in our time, in our schools.
Devoted to and inspired by the late Maxine Greene, a champion of education and advocator of the arts, this book recognizes the importance of Greene’s scholarship by revisiting her oeuvre in the context of the intellectual historicity that shaped its formation. As a scholar, Greene dialogued with philosophers, social theorists, writers, musicians, and artists. These conversations reveal the ways in which the arts, just like philosophy and science, allow for the facilitation of "wide-awakeness," a term that is central to Greene’s pedagogy. Amidst contemporary trends of neoliberal, one-size-fits-all curriculum reforms in which the arts are typically squeezed out or pushed aside, Greene’s work reminds us that the social imagination is stunted without the arts. Artistic ways of knowing allow for people to see beyond their own worlds and beyond "what is" into other worlds of "what was" and "what might" be some day. This volume demonstrates Maxine Greene’s profound ability to illuminate the importance of the artistic world and the imaginary for development of the self in the world and for encouraging a "wide-awakeness" reflective of an emerging political awareness and a longing for a democratic world that "is not yet." This book was originally published as a Special Issue of The Review of Education, Pedagogy and Cultural Studies.
A bold call to deromanticize education and reframe universities as terrains of struggle between alternative modes of studying and world-making Higher education is at an impasse. Black Lives Matter and #MeToo show that racism and sexism remain pervasive on campus, while student and faculty movements fight to reverse increased tuition, student debt, corporatization, and adjunctification. Commentators typically frame these issues as crises for an otherwise optimal mode of intellectual and professional development. In Beyond Education, Eli Meyerhoff instead sees this impasse as inherent to universities, as sites of intersecting political struggles over resources for studying. Meyerhoff argues that the predominant mode of study, education, is only one among many alternatives and that it must be deromanticized in order to recognize it as a colonial-capitalist institution. He traces how key elements of education—the vertical trajectory of individualized development, its role in preparing people to participate in governance through a pedagogical mode of accounting, and dichotomous figures of educational waste (the “dropout”) and value (the “graduate”)—emerged from histories of struggles in opposition to alternative modes of study bound up with different modes of world-making. Through interviews with participants in contemporary university struggles and embedded research with an anarchist free university, Beyond Education paves new avenues for achieving the aims of an “alter-university” movement to put novel modes of study into practice. Taking inspiration from Black Lives Matter, Occupy Wall Street, and Indigenous resurgence projects, it charts a new course for movements within, against, and beyond the university as we know it.
Based on extensive literary and field research involving surveys, classroom observations, and interviews with faculty, students, and administrators in Roman Catholic, mainline and evangelical Protestant, and Reform and Conservative Jewish seminaries, Educating Clergy explores the influence of their historic traditions and academic settings in contemporary classroom and communal pedagogies. The book describes elements in classroom pedagogies shared across these religious traditions that distinctively integrate the cognitive, practical, and normative apprenticeships to be found in all forms of professional education.
The moment is right for critical reflection on what has been assumed to be a core part of schooling. In Ungrading, fifteen educators write about their diverse experiences going gradeless. Some contributors are new to the practice and some have been engaging in it for decades. Some are in humanities and social sciences, some in STEM fields. Some are in higher education, but some are the K-12 pioneers who led the way. Based on rigorous and replicated research, this is the first book to show why and how faculty who wish to focus on learning, rather than sorting or judging, might proceed. It includes honest reflection on what makes ungrading challenging, and testimonials about what makes it transformative. CONTRIBUTORS: Aaron Blackwelder Susan D. Blum Arthur Chiaravalli Gary Chu Cathy N. Davidson Laura Gibbs Christina Katopodis Joy Kirr Alfie Kohn Christopher Riesbeck Starr Sackstein Marcus Schultz-Bergin Clarissa Sorensen-Unruh Jesse Stommel John Warner
The work of teachers is not just to teach. We are also responsible for the basic needs of students. Helping students eat and live, and also helping them find the tools they need to reflect on the present moment. This is exactly in keeping with Paulo Freire's insistence that critical pedagogy be focused on helping students read their world; but more and more, we must together reckon with that world. Teaching must be an act of imagination, hope, and possibility. Education must be a practice done with hearts as much as heads, with hands as much as books. Care has to be at the center of this work.For the past ten years, Hybrid Pedagogy has worked to help craft a theory of teaching and learning in and around digital spaces, not by imagining what that work might look like, but by doing, asking after, changing, and doing again. Since 2011, Hybrid Pedagogy has published over 400 articles from more than 200 authors focused in and around the emerging field of critical digital pedagogy. A selection of those articles are gathered here. This is the first peer-reviewed publication centered on the theory and practice of critical digital pedagogy. The collection represents a wide cross-section of both academic and non-academic culture and features articles by women, Black people, indigenous people, Chicanx and Latinx writers, disabled people, queer people, and other underrepresented populations. The goal is to provide evidence for the extraordinary work being done by teachers, librarians, instructional designers, graduate students, technologists, and more - work which advances the study and the praxis of critical digital pedagogy.
For two thousand years countless people around the world viewed reality through a Christian lens that endowed their lives with meaning, purpose, and coherence. Today, in an era of unprecedented secularization, many have ceased to find meaning not only in Christianity but in life in general. In Converting the Imagination, Patrick Manning offers a probing analysis of this crisis of meaning, marshalling historical and psychological research to shed light on the connections among the disintegration of the Christian worldview, religious disaffiliation, and a growing mental health epidemic. As a response Manning presents an approach to religious education that is at once traditionally grounded in the model of Jesus' own teaching and augmented by modern educational research and cognitive science. Converting the Imagination is an invitation to transform the way we teach about faith and make sense of the world, an invitation that echoes Jesus' invitation to a fuller, more meaningful life. It is sure to captivate scholars and practitioners of religious education, ministers seeking to reengage people who have drifted away from the faith or to support young people suffering from existential anxiety, and anyone in search of deeper meaning in their religious traditions or in their own lives. Converting the Imagination was a finalist for the 2021 Lilly Fellows Program Book Award: https://www.lillyfellows.org/grants-and-prizes/book-award/
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.
Curriculum and Imagination describes an alternative ‘process’ model for designing developing, implementing and evaluating curriculum, suggesting that curriculum may be designed by specifying an educational process which contains key principles of procedure. This comprehensive and authoritative book: offers a practical and theoretical plan for curriculum-making without objectives shows that a curriculum can be best planned and developed at school level by teachers adopting an action research role complements the spirit and reality of much of the teaching profession today, embracing the fact that there is a degree of intuition and critical judgement in the work of educators presents empirical evidence on teachers’ human values. Curriculum and Imagination provides a rational and logical alternative for all educators who plan curriculum but do not wish to be held captive by a mechanistic ‘ends-means’ notion of educational planning. Anyone studying or teaching curriculum studies, or involved in education or educational planning, will find this important new book fascinating reading.
