Product Description: This innovative book gives voice to the challenges and rewards of transformative teaching through 17 first-person narratives by a panoply of diverse authors who have made a life of advocating for all students. These essays showcase the barriers, biases, and fears that must be overcome in the process of developing a personal and professional identity as an educator...read more

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Responding to the conservative agenda of high-stakes testing, charter schools, and vouchers, Pockets of Hope offers an alternative vision of education reform. It provides an intimate portrayal of day-to-day teaching and learning in six educational projects that span both classroom and community-based settings, thereby giving readers a genuine understanding of the possibilities inherent in democratic education.The six projects examined herein demonstrate the ways in which education can be an empowering experience for students, providing them with the academic, social, and political knowledge and skills they need to become active, engaged democratic citizens. Competent, creative, and courageous, the teachers in these projects challenge their students to think critically about provocative academic questions, political dilemmas, and social issues, and their students rise to the occasion, responding with curiosity and insight. By purposively connecting the world in which they and their students live with the work of their democratic classrooms, these teachers encourage students to explore how they can contribute to their communities, making learning relevant and exciting. The stories of teachers and students told here will inspire educators, students, parents, and others concerned with the future of education as they seek to counter the conservative rhetoric that shapes educational reform today. (view table of contents)

Product Description: What can teachers learn from classrooms that erupt into violence, recalcitrant students who thwart course goals, and service-learning projects that lead to more logistical nightmares than democratic breakthroughs? Incidents like these are bound to happen when English teachers attempt to change the status quo...read more (view table of contents, read Amazon.com's description)

Product Description: Using critical theory as a foundation, Alternatives in Education posits psychology's role in educating at-risk youth as the number one ingredient for student success. To reach and teach disaffected youth, the best psychological practices must be wedded to modern, multicultural perspectives...read more (view table of contents, read Amazon.com's description)

Grounded in the work of liberation theologians, this book considers peace, love and social justice within a democratic curriculum and underscores the importance of integrating critical discourses with Catholic education.

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Product Description: This work provides insights into the nature of the emancipatory process of transformative learning which involves intuitive and reflective thought, validating rational discourse in a community of knowers and social action. It helps to demystify consciousness-raising as the process of knowing central to transformative learning...read more