Education Restated: Getting Policy Right on Accountability, Teacher Pay, and School Choice offers the education policy community a roadmap for change in three hot-button policy areas. In each of these areas policy has been anchored around the wrong core values. By putting the right core values at the heart of policy, state governments can create more favorable conditions for education improvement at the local level. Education Restated takes a pragmatic approach to policy change, recognizing that the forces that created today’s policies have not gone away—and that on complex issues there are legitimate competing interests. This book harmonizes the best ideas of opposing policy camps and identifies opportunities to strengthen connections between K-12 and early childhood. For advocates seeking common ground with historical adversaries, Education Restated provides some ideas on where they might find it.
In the United States, people of color are disproportionally more likely to live in environments with poor air quality, in close proximity to toxic waste, and in locations more vulnerable to climate change and extreme weather events. In many vulnerable neighborhoods, structural racism and classism prevent residents from having a seat at the table when decisions are made about their community. In an effort to overcome power imbalances and ensure local knowledge informs decision-making, a new approach to community engagement is essential. In Resilience for All, Barbara Brown Wilson looks at less conventional, but often more effective methods to make communities more resilient. She takes an in-depth look at what equitable, positive change through community-driven design looks like in four communities—East Biloxi, Mississippi; the Lower East Side of Manhattan; the Denby neighborhood in Detroit, Michigan; and the Cully neighborhood in Portland, Oregon. These vulnerable communities have prevailed in spite of serious urban stressors such as climate change, gentrification, and disinvestment. Wilson looks at how the lessons in the case studies and other examples might more broadly inform future practice. She shows how community-driven design projects in underserved neighborhoods can not only change the built world, but also provide opportunities for residents to build their own capacities.
Spinoza is among the most pivotal thinkers in the history of philosophy. He has had a deep and enduring influence on a wide range of philosophical subjects, and his work is encountered by all serious students of Western philosophy. His Ethics is one of the seminal works of metaphysical, moral, religious and political thought; his Theological-Political Treatise inaugurated a novel method of biblical exegesis; and both his political works developed the pre-eminence of democracy above all other regimes. Nevertheless, the significance of Spinoza's philosophy is matched by its complexity. His system presents a considerable challenge for the modern student; his language is frequently opaque, while the esoteric themes explored in his work often require elucidation. Spinoza: Basic Concepts intends to overcome most of such difficulties. Each essay in this collection explores a key concept involved in Spinoza's thinking, relating it to his understanding of philosophy, outlining the arguments and explaining the implications of each concept. Together, the chapters cover the full range of Spinoza's interdisciplinary system of philosophy.
Literacy specialists Stephanie Harvey and Annie Ward demonstrate how to "table the labels" and use detailed formative assessments to craft targeted, personalized instruction that enable striving readers to do what they need above all - to find books they love and engage in voluminous reading.
In his work on metaphysics, Spinoza associates reasons with causes or explanations. He contends that there is a reason for whatever exists and whatever does not exist. In his account of the human mind, Spinoza makes reason a peculiarly powerful kind of idea and the only source of our knowledge of objects in experience. In his moral theory, Spinoza introduces dictates of reason, which are action-guiding prescriptions. In politics, Spinoza suggests that reason, with religion, motivates cooperation in society. Reason shapes Spinoza's philosophy, and central debates about Spinoza-including his place in the history of philosophy and in the European Enlightenment-turn upon our understanding of these claims. Spinoza on Reason starts with striking claims in each of these areas, which Michael LeBuffe draws from Spinoza's two great works, the Ethics and the Theological Political Treatise. The book takes each characterization of reason on its own terms, explaining the claims and their historical context. While acknowledging the striking variety of reason's roles, LeBuffe emphasizes the extent to which these different doctrines build upon one another. The result is a rich understanding of the meaning and function of each claim and, in the book's conclusion, an overview of the contribution of reason to the systematic coherence of Spinoza's philosophy.
The wide-ranging work of W. E. B. Du Bois, critical to understanding the role that race has played in creating the modern world we find around us, mostly has been ignored or hidden from sociological researchers until after the civil rights movement in the U.S. As a result, one of the key goals of The Oxford Handbook of W. E. B. Du Bois is to reclaim Du Bois from those efforts to marginalize his thought. The chapters of this volume explore, in a comprehensive manner, all aspects of Du Boisian sociology. It is organized into ten thematic sections: Social Theory, Change and Agency; Sociology; Social Science, Humanities, Public Intellectual; Women and Gender Studies; Methodologies and Archival Resources; Black Interiority and Whiteness; Color Line, Empire, Marxism, and War; Talented Tenth, and Black Colleges and Universities; Black Community, Religion, Crime and Wealth; Internationalism, Pan-Africanism, and Anti-Colonialism.
Imagine a world without beauty, myth, celebration or ritual. It seems that to feel fully and vibrantly alive, these experiences are essential to us. Devotional ritual speaks this language of the heart, but can be a confronting aspect of Buddhism for some people in the West. Skilfully steering us through the difficulties we may encounter, Sangharakshita leads us through the sevenfold puja, a sequence of devotional moods found in Tibetan and Indian forms of Buddhism
Going to college can be exciting, anxiety inducing, and expensive! You want your child to get the most out of their college experience—what advice do you give? Thriving at College by Alex Chediak is the perfect gift for a college student or a soon-to-be college student. Filled with wisdom and practical advice from a seasoned college professor and student mentor, Thriving at College covers the ten most common mistakes that college students make—and how to avoid them! Alex leaves no stone unturned—he discusses everything from choosing a major and discerning one’s vocation to balancing academics and fun, from cultivating relationships with peers and professors to helping students figure out what to do with their summers. Most importantly, this book will help students not only keep their faith but build a vibrant faith and become the person God created them to be.
Spinoza and Education offers a comprehensive investigation into the educational implications of Spinoza’s moral theory. Taking Spinoza’s naturalism as its point of departure, it constructs a considered account of education, taking special care to investigate the educational implications of Spinoza’s psychological egoism. What emerges is a counterintuitive form of education grounded in the egoistic striving of the teacher to persevere and to flourish in existence while still catering to the ethical demands of the students and the greater community. In providing an educational reading of Spinoza’s moral theory, this book sets up a critical dialogue between educational theory and recent studies which highlight the centrality of ethics in Spinoza’s overall philosophy. By placing his work in a contemporary educational context, chapters explore a counterintuitive conception of education as an ethical project, aimed at overcoming the desire to seek short-term satisfaction and troubling the influential concept of the student as consumer. This book also considers how education, from a Spinozistic point of view, may be approached in terms of a kind of cognitive therapy serving to further a more scientifically adequate understanding of the world and aimed at combating prejudices and superstition. Spinoza and Education demonstrates that Spinoza’s moral theory can further an educational ideal, where notions of freedom and self-preservation provide the conceptual core of a coherent philosophy of education. As such, it will appeal to researchers, academics and postgraduate students in the fields of philosophy of education, theory of education, critical thinking, philosophy, ethics, and Spinoza studies.