Author: Ronald Swartz Publisher: IAP ISBN: 1681235544 Category : Education Languages : en Pages : 471
Book Description
In From Socrates to Summerhill and Beyond: Towards a Philosophy of Education for Personal Responsibility, Ronald Swartz offers an evolving development of fallible, liberal democratic, self?governing educational philosophies. He suggests that educators can benefit from having dialogues about questions such as these: 1). Are there some authorities that can be consistently relied upon to tell school members what they should do and learn while they are in school? 2.) How should the imagination of social theorists be both used and checked in the development and implementation of innovative educational reforms? 3.) How can teachers in personal responsibility schools help their students learn? These questions are representative of problems that Swartz raises in his book. Swartz identifies four educational programs as personal responsibility schools. These are Little Commonwealth (Homer Lane); Summerhill (A.S.Neill); Orphans Home (Janusz Korczak) and Sudbury Valley School (Daniel Greenberg). Swartz then suggests that these learning environments create social institutions that are liberal, democratic, and self?governing and therefore endorse the policy of personal responsibility. This policy states: All school members, students included, are fallible authorities who should be personally responsible for determining their own school activities and many policies that govern a school. Schools which incorporate this policy can interchangeably be referred to as personal responsibility, self?governing, or Summerhill style schools. In providing an historical and philosophical understanding of Summerhill style schools, Swartz suggests that these educational alternatives have intellectual roots in the ideas associated with Socrates as portrayed in Plato’s Apology. Specifically, in personal responsibility schools teachers are not viewed as authorities who attempt to transmit wisdom to their students. Rather, self?governing schools follow the Socratic tradition which claims that teachers can be viewed as fallible authorities who attempt to engage students in dialogues about questions of interest to students. The interpretation of Plato’s works used by Swartz can be found in Karl Popper’s The Open Society and Its Enemies. Swartz has also been significantly influenced by the educational writings of Bertrand Russell and Paul Goodman. Goodman’s Compulsory Miseducation makes it clear that schools which follow in the tradition of Summerhill compete with the educational programs that are an outgrowth of John Dewey’s writings. In summary, Swartz’s book aims to engage educators in dialogues that will lead to improved educational theories and practices.
Author: Kerry McDonald Publisher: Chicago Review Press ISBN: 1641600667 Category : Family & Relationships Languages : en Pages : 193
Book Description
Education has become synonymous with schooling, but it doesn't have to be. As schooling becomes increasingly standardized and test driven, occupying more of childhood than ever before, parents and educators are questioning the role of schooling in society. Many are now exploring and creating alternatives. In a compelling narrative that introduces historical and contemporary research on self-directed education, Unschooled also spotlights how a diverse group of individuals and organizations are evolving an old schooling model of education. These innovators challenge the myth that children need to be taught in order to learn. They are parents who saw firsthand how schooling can dull children's natural curiosity and exuberance and others who decided early on to enable their children to learn without school. Educators who left public school classrooms discuss launching self-directed learning centers to allow young people's innate learning instincts to flourish, and entrepreneurs explore their disillusionment with the teach-and-test approach of traditional schooling.
Author: Nimrod Bar-Am Publisher: Springer ISBN: 3319576690 Category : Science Languages : en Pages : 584
Book Description
This volume features forty-two essays written in honor of Joseph Agassi. It explores the work and legacy of this influential philosopher, an exciting and challenging advocate of critical rationalism. Throughout six decades of stupendous intellectual activity, Agassi called attention to rationality as the very starting point of every notable philosophical way of life. The essays present Agassi’s own views on critical rationalism. They also develop and expand upon his work in new and provocative ways. The authors include Agassi's most notable pupils, friends, and colleagues. Overall, their contributions challenge the received view on a variety of issues concerning science, religion, and education. Readers will find well-reasoned arguments on such topics as the secular problem of evil, religion and critical thinking, liberal democratic educational communities, democracy and constitutionalism, and capitalism at a crossroad.“/div>divTo Joseph Agassi, philosophy is the practice of reason, where reason is understood as the relentless search for criticisms of the best available explanations that we have to the world around us. This book not only honors one of the most original philosophers of science today. It also offers readers insights into a school of thought that lies at the heart of philosophy.
Author: Walter S. Gershon Publisher: IAP ISBN: 1641135832 Category : Education Languages : en Pages : 217
Book Description
The sensuous is the human experience, unfolding our everyday experiences and articulating our affects. Without sensory information, we could neither know nor be. This is because we gain information through our senses and interpret that information as perceptions, the sociocultural frames used to analyze that input. This is the case regardless of how a sensorium is constructed, a more limited Western five senses model for example. It is also the case no matter how senses are defined, they ways they are expressed, or the ways in which they are understood to function. Further, because there are often greater differences between members within a particular group than divergences between groups, how one attends to and acts in light of sensory information is always a polyphonic tapestry constructed on the warp of the sociocultural and the weft of individualism. Education, the transfer of information between people, animals, things, and ecologies, is therefore a sensory endeavor. Sensuous curriculum is one means of describing this deeply layered intersection of educational ways of being and knowing. In many ways inverting how questions of curriculum are often framed, Sensuous Curriculum: Politics and the Senses in Education foregrounds how sensory understandings are forms of educational, relational politics. Bringing the depth and complexity of sensory studies firmly into curriculum and foundational studies of education, contributors to this volume address this educational and political intersection from a wide variety of theoretical and practical perspectives that are always embodied and material. Approached in an academic yet accessible manner, Sensuous Curriculum addresses key questions about what it means to educate and the ideas and ideals render those understandings sensible. This variety, depth, and accessibility combine to make Sensuous Curriculum an important resource for those interested in critical studies of the senses in educational ecologies and holistic education. It is a text as at home in theory and methods doctoral courses as it is in undergraduate courses for preservice teachers and will be of interest to those searching for rich ways to conceptualize education outside of a standards-centric perspective. Praise for Sensuous Curriculum: "This collection engages and challenges readers to think more deeply about questions of curriculum in connection to the sensuous in ways not typically considered, existing multi-dimensionally in transdisciplinary, interdisciplinary, and cross- disciplinary work. This compelling, intellectually stimulating, exhilarating volume is a canonical contribution everyone must study." Theodorea Regina Berry Professor and Chair, African American Studies College of Social Sciences, San Jose State University "Dr. Gershon’s edited collection, Sensuous Curriculum: Politics and the Senses in Education, makes the case for corrective action. By exploring the sensory as human experience, curriculum, and political, the authors of this volume offer iterations and variations for interrupting the ignor(anc)es of the sensorium in education and the body in making sense." M. Francyne Huckaby Associate Dean, TCU School of Interdisciplinary Studies Professor, Curriculum Studies, TCU College of Education & Center for Public Education "I thoroughly enjoyed sensing this book. This collection defies the conventional popular trends that sit inside the classic curriculum vinyl on our bookshelves. And in Aokian fashion, Walter Gershon has successfully brought together an ensemble of curriculum scholars who dare us to improvise and replay the possibilities and limitations of educational research as a tantalization of our senses. The research put forth in this collection not only promises to the break barriers of our thinking, but also makes significant contributions to and beyond post-humanism, new materialism, curriculum and affect theory. All serious scholars—artists, teacher educators, teachers, graduate students, community activists—of curriculum studies will want to purchase a copy of this carefully, crafted, curated sensuous collection. Without reservation...put the needle on their record, cause I am one of their biggest fans." Nicholas Ng-A-Fook Professor, Director of Teacher Education, Indigenous Teacher Education Co-Director of the Réseau de Savoir sur l’Equité/Equity Knowledge Network Faculty of Education, University of Ottawa
Author: Wade Tillett Publisher: IAP ISBN: 1681238489 Category : Social Science Languages : en Pages : 279
Book Description
In Living the Questions: Dispatches From a Life Already in Progress, Wade Tillett takes up the question of how to live – not in some abstract sense, but in the urgent present. Tillett realizes that how to live is a question that each of us is already asking – and answering – moment-by-moment. These texts offer surprising discoveries of how we are already inventing solutions to living in multiple and discontinuous worlds through our daily actions. By examining small specific pieces of daily life, Tillett explores how we navigate through tentative, multiple, and often contradictory positions. Among the many situations artistically explored are visiting a church, narrating a family movie, exposing students to a nearby school, re-working a found sculpture, taking a licensure exam, attending a protest, and waiting for the El. By juxtaposing multiple voices and images, he attempts to see how, in both method and content, the texts themselves act on the worlds and lives they describe. Tillett narrates from many perspectives: teacher, researcher, writer, artist, architect, activist, parent, theorist, and struggling protagonist of his own life. As such, many readers sharing such roles will immediately find connections within the book. For researchers struggling to find workable qualitative methodologies after poststructuralism, the experimental methods employed here may provide welcome inspiration. However, the book seems aimed not so much at particular disciplines but at anyone who, like Tillett, is actively searching for how to live. Anyone involved in such a search will likely find hope and ways forward in his methods that look at life as we are already living it.
Author: Sheldon Richmond Publisher: Cambridge Scholars Publishing ISBN: 1527549224 Category : Science Languages : en Pages : 221
Book Description
Computers are supposed to be smart, yet they frustrate both ordinary users and computer technologists. Why are people frustrated by smart machines? Computers don’t fit people. People think in terms of comparisons, stories, and analogies, and seek feedback, whereas computers are based on a fundamental design that does not fit with analogical and feedback thinking. They impose a binary, an all-or-nothing, approach to everything. Moreover, the social world and institutions that have developed around computer technology hide and reinforce the lack of alignment between computers and people. This book suggests a solution: we do not have to accept the way things are now and work around the bad social and technical design of computers. Rather, it proposes a diverse, distributed, critical discussion of how to design and build both computer technology and its social institutions.
Author: Robert Lake Publisher: IAP ISBN: 1623962676 Category : Education Languages : en Pages : 163
Book Description
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.
Author: Dana Compton McCullough Publisher: IAP ISBN: 1648024904 Category : Science Languages : en Pages : 269
Book Description
This book is a theoretical inquiry into alternative pedagogies that challenge current standardized practices in the field of science education. Through Mandy Hoffen, a fictional persona, Dana McCullough, the author, explores how stories of Henrietta Lacks become part of a conspiracy to change science education. Mandy Hoffen, however, never expected to find herself in the middle of a conspiracy. As a science teacher of 20 plus years, she worked diligently to meet the needs of her charges, who are currently ninth and tenth grade biology students in an age of standardized testing. The author also creates imaginary dialogues which serve as the theoretical framework for each chapter. Each chapter unfolds in a form of a play with imaginary settings and events that bring Henrietta Lacks back from the grave to participate in conversations about science, society, and social justice. The imaginary conversations are based on the author’s experiences in graduate courses, direct quotations from philosophers of science, historians of science, science educators, curriculum theorists, and stories of students in their study of Henrietta Lacks in a high school biology classroom. The play describes the journey of a graduate student/high school teacher as she researches the importance of the philosophy of science, history of science, science curriculum and social justice in science education. Through reflections on fictional conversations, stories of Henrietta Lacks are examined and described in multiple settings, beginning in an imaginary academic meeting, and ending with student conversations in a classroom. Each setting provides a space for conversations wherein participants explore their personal connections with science, science curriculum, issues of social justice related to science, and Henrietta Lacks. This book will be of interest to graduate students, scholars, and undergraduates in curriculum studies, educational foundations, and teacher education, and those interested in alternative research methodologies. This is the first book to intentionally address the stories of Henrietta Lacks and their importance in the field of curriculum studies, science studies, and current standardized high school science curriculum.
Author: Saundra Murray Nettles Publisher: IAP ISBN: 1623963338 Category : Education Languages : en Pages : 145
Book Description
In Necessary Spaces: Exploring the Richness of African American Childhood in the South, Saundra Murray Nettles takes the reader on a journey into neighborhood networks of learning at different times and places. Using autobiographical accounts, Nettles discusses the informal instructional practices of community “coaches” from the perspective of African American adults who look back on their childhood learning experiences in homes, libraries, city blocks, schools, churches, places of business, and nature. These eyewitness accounts reveal "necessary spaces,” the metaphor Nettles uses to describe seven recurring experiences that converge with contemporary notions of optimal black child development: connection, exploration, design, empowerment, resistance, renewal, and practice. Nettles weaves the personal stories with social scientific theory and research and practical accounts of community-based initiatives to illuminate how local communities contributed human, built, and natural resources to support children’s achievement in schools. The inquiry offers a timely and accessible perspective on how community involvement for children can be developed utilizing the grassroots efforts of parents, children, and other neighborhood residents; expertise from personnel in schools, informal institutions (such as libraries and museums); and other sectors interested in disparities in education, health, and the quality of physical settings. Grounded in the environmental memories of African American childhood, Necessary Spaces offers a culturally relevant view of civic participation and sustainable community development at the local level. Educational researchers and policy makers, pre-service and in-service teachers, and people who plan for and work with children and youth in neighborhoods will find this book an engaging look at possibilities for the social organization of educational resources. Qualitative researchers will find a model for writing personal scholarly essays that use the personal to inform larger issues of policy and practice. In Necessary Spaces, local citizens in neighborhoods across the United States will find stories that resonate with their own experiences, stimulate their recollections, and inform and inspire their continuing efforts to create brighter futures for children and communities.
Author: Ronald Swartz
Author: Kerry McDonald
Author: Nimrod Bar-Am
Author: Walter S. Gershon
Author: Wade Tillett
Author: Sheldon Richmond
Author: Robert Lake
Author: Stumpf
Author: Dana Compton McCullough
Author: Saundra Murray Nettles