Book by Fenstermacher, Gary D., Soltis, Jonas F.

Product Description: The revised fourth edition provides a broad perspective on the basic curriculum questions educators face regarding the purposes, content, design, and structure of educational programs. The authors deal with fundamental contemporary issues of curriculum theory and instructional practice...read more

Providing school administrators with a rigorous yet practical approach to the difficult dilemmas that so often arise in their profession, this volume covers-- Standards-- Assessment and evaluation-- Equal opportunity-- Multiculturalism-- Religious differences-- Due process-- Freedom of expression-- Personal liberty, and-- Authority. The new Third Edition features a totally new chapter that addresses diversity (emphasizing both religious and cultural differences) and new cases that discuss such current issues as sexual harassment and child abuse.

Product Description: This text has been expanded to include the most important ethical issues in contemporary schooling, including a new section on Professionalism and Teaching with Integrity and new cases that discuss such current issues as zero tolerance policies, curriculum mandates and teacher integrity, high-stakes testing, and curriculum distortion...read more

Rather than simply outlining the classical and modern theories of learning, the authors of this aim to work bring the material to life through case studies that engage students in debate about what really happens in classrooms. This expanded and revised edition allows students to test the strengths and weaknesses of various learning theories, helping them to formulate their own philosophies of teaching. Among the concepts that this edition explains are: the Platonic theory of learning - the logic of innate ideas and concepts; the competing empiricist, "blank slate", theory developed by John Locke; the basic features of behaviourism and operant conditioning; the "insight" learning theory of the Gestalters; John Dewey's theory that learning is an experientially active affair; a new chapter on the importance of social interaction and the work of Vygotsky; Piaget's biological model of the development of cognitive structures; and the emerging "cognitive science" approach, comparing the human mind with the computer and artificial intelligence. The power of this text lies in its insistence that pre- and in-service teachers need to understand the problematic nature of learning theory and continually question and develop their own "perspectives on learning".

This work is designed to stimulate thinking about, and offer differing perspectives on, problems related to school and society, including curriculum reform, social justice, and competing forms of research. This text tackles such questions as: do schools socialize students to become productive workers?; does schooling reproduce social class and pass on ethnic and gender biases?; can a teacher avoid passing on dominant social and cultural values?; and what besides subjects do students really learn in schools? Expanded to include important issues in contemporary schooling, new sections featured in this edition are: the postmodern move beyond functionalism and Marxism; Foucault on knowledge, power, sexuality and domination; and feminism as a form of conflict theory.