"This book explores how technology-based learning can enhance student engagement, performance, and empowerment, offering insights from educational programs, classroom teaching, and theory-into-practice research, and places educational technologies appropriately in their social and cultural contexts"--
We want students to master academic standards, and we want them to be confident, adaptive, and socially responsible. Above all, we want them to find meaning and satisfaction in their lives. Achieving these goals requires a concerted focus on the social-emotional skills that empower students in and beyond the classroom. In Teaching to Empower, Debbie Zacarian and Michael Silverstone explore what an empowered student looks like in our increasingly diverse contemporary schools and prompt educators to examine their own relationship to empowerment. The book's evidence-based strategies and authentic examples show you how to foster an inclusive culture of agency, self-confidence, and collaboration that will give each of your students—regardless of race, culture, language, socioeconomic status, abilities, sexuality, or gender—the opportunity, responsibility, and tools to become an active learner, thoughtful community member, and engaged global citizen. Whether you're a preservice teacher, a classroom novice, or a veteran, you'll find the practical guidance you'll need to * Create inclusive and empowering physical learning spaces. * Set up self-directed learning and promote positive interdependence. * Promote student self-reflection. * Teach the skills of collaboration. * Foster the self-advocacy that fuels deeper, more autonomous learning. * Partner more effectively with families and the community to support student empowerment.
This book is about power -- power in the classroom, in our schools, and in our society. Schools, teachers, students, and teaching exist in a churning cauldron of interrelated institutions and social forces. Power relations in schools reflect these larger societal forces and the interconnections of our institutions. This book is also about empowerment -- the empowerment of teachers and students. It explores the process through which people develop more control over their lives and acquire the skills and dispositions necessary to be critical and effective participants in our society. The heart of this book, and Kreisberg's unique contribution to the empowerment literature, is his elucidation of the difference between power over and power with in his search to understand the nature of power that can empower individuals and communities. Kreisberg draws upon educational, political, feminist, and psychological theory, and, especially, the voices of teachers, in his framing of the question: What are the dynamics of power that we as teachers can create in our relationships with our students that will be empowering for both our students and ourselves?
Moral Empowerment is a groundbreaking recommendation that education systems and students can benefit from a new approach in learning - the development of the students capacity to pursue their own intellectual and spiritual growth, as well as the students active engagement in the long-term transformation of their communities. This illuminating idea is carried out on the basis of two central premises that we live in an age of transition from humanitys childhood to its maturity, and that a fundamental characteristic of this age is the growing consciousness of the oneness of humankind. Arbab explores the philosophical framework capable of guiding educational programs seeking the moral empowerment of students. Such efforts focus not only on the development of the students capacity to pursue their own intellectual and spiritual growth, but also on the students active engagement in the long-term transformation of their communities.
This book gathers a range of contributions from researchers and practitioners across borders with an emphasis on theoretical arguments and empirical data concerning teacher empowerment. It propels readers to explore powerful teaching practices that can further advance the profession as a continuing priority in the system when appropriately utilized. Further, it strives to capture teachers’ readiness to improve their professional skills and responsive practices as a form of accountability for their teaching and students’ learning, two aspects that are increasingly being judged by various stakeholders. The book argues that teachers’ autonomous participation and engagement in relevant decision-making activities and equitable access to continuing professional development opportunities are and should remain major priorities.
Schools have been traditionally defined as institutions of instruction, but the authors of this volume challenge that position in order to generate a new set of cultural categories and constructs through which the nature and process of schooling can be more appropriately understood. Giroux and McLaren develop a theory of schooling that takes into account not only the more traditional relationship between teaching and learning, but also the import of wider cultural dynamics such as language, mass culture, popular culture, the state, theories of readership, ethnographic research, and subcultural studies.
The purpose of this text is to elicit discussion, reflection, and action specific to pedagogy within education, especially higher education, and circles of experiential learning, community organizing, conflict resolution and youth empowerment work. Vulnerability itself is not a new term within education; however the pedagogical imperatives of vulnerability are both undertheorized in educational discourse and underexplored in practice. This work builds on that of Edward Brantmeier in Re-Envisioning Higher Education: Embodied Pathways to Wisdom and Transformation (Lin, Oxford, & Brantmeier, 2013). In his chapter, “Pedagogy of vulnerability: Definitions, assumptions, and application,” he outlines a set of assumptions about the term, clarifying for his readers the complicated, risky, reciprocal, and purposeful nature of vulnerability, particularly within educational settings. Creating spaces of risk taking, and consistent mutual, critical engagement are challenging at a moment in history where neoliberal forces impact so many realms of formal teaching and learning. Within this context, the divide between what educators, be they in a classroom or a community, imagine as possible and their ability to implement these kinds of pedagogical possibilities is an urgent conundrum worth exploring. We must consider how to address these disconnects; advocating and envisioning a more holistic, healthy, forward thinking model of teaching and learning. How do we create cultures of engaged inquiry, framed in vulnerability, where educators and students are compelled to ask questions just beyond their grasp? How can we all be better equipped to ask and answer big, beautiful, bold, even uncomfortable questions that fuel the heart of inquiry and perhaps, just maybe, lead to a more peaceful and just world? A collection of reflections, case studies, and research focused on the pedagogy of vulnerability is a starting point for this work. The book itself is meant to be an example of pedagogical vulnerability, wherein the authors work to explicate the most intimate and delicate aspects of the varied pedagogical journeys, understandings rooted in vulnerability, and those of their students, colleagues, clients, even adversaries. It is a work that “holds space.”
This book reframes questions about student diversity by probing the extent to which society serves the interests of all, and by examining the empowerment of members of oppressed groups to direct social change. It examines the empowerment of children who are members of oppressed racial groups, lower class, and female, based on the ideas of multicultural education. A series of ethnographic studies illustrates how such young people view their world, their power to affect it in their own interests, and their response to what is usually a growing sense of powerlessness as they mature. The authors also conceptualize contributions of multicultural education to empowering young people, and report investigations of multicultural education projects educators have used for student empowerment. Issues in teacher education are also discussed.
Are you ready to plan your best lessons ever? With so many demands and so much content available for teachers, we need to put a higher value on an often-overlooked skill: planning learning experiences that will both engage and inspire our students, by design, over time. Planning Powerful Instruction is your go-to guide for transforming student outcomes through stellar instructional planning. Its seven-step framework—the EMPOWER model—gives you techniques proven to help students develop true insight and understanding. You’ll have at your fingertips: the real reasons why students engage—and what you must do to ensure they do a framework to help you create, plan, and teach the most effective units and lessons in any subject area more than 50 actionable strategies to incorporate right away suggestions for tailoring units for a wide range of learners downloadable, ready-to-go tools for planning and teaching Whether you are a classroom teacher, an instructional leader, or a pre-service teacher, Planning Powerful Instruction will forever change the way you think about how you teach and the unique value you bring to your learners.
Teaching Questions is a book about teaching and learning in the performing arts. Its focus is on the inner dynamics of teaching: the processes by which teachers can promote - or undermine - creativity itself. It covers the many issues that teachers, directors and choreographers experience, from the frustrations of dealing with silent students, and helping young artists 'unlearn' their inhibitions, to problems of resistance, judgment and race in the classroom. Teaching Questions speaks to experienced teachers and beginning teachers in all disciplines, bringing essential insight and honesty to the discussion of how to teach.
