A critical resource for pre-service and practicing teachers, this book addresses what happens when new teachers try to enact inquiry-based and dialogical pedagogy within standardized schools. Exploring the narratives from beginning ELA and humanities teachers when they encounter challenges and obstructions, this book explores moments of wobble—key events that called attention to practice in the context of inflexible schooling systems—that the teachers shared with their peers via an oral in...

This book invites readers to explore the complexity of becoming a teacher through the stories of two novice ELA teachers, Emelio and Rachel, over the course of their first two years. The authors’ detailed, empathetic, and ethnographic approach allows space for the teachers to reveal little-seen and often overlooked "wobble moments." These moments illuminate the complexity and nuances that confront, confound, and compel teachers to remain in dialogue with practice. Documenting the journeys ...

Many educators feel caught between mandates to meet literacy standards and the desire to respond to individual students’ interests, skills, and challenges. This book illustrates how a dialogical approach to practice will enable teachers to meet the needs of today’s diverse student population within a standardized curriculum. Chapters highlight the efforts of four high school teachers to create dialogical classroom space, documenting both the possibilities of and impediments to such a...

This is the story of a white high school English teacher, Bob Fecho, and his students of color who mutually engage issues of literacy, language, learning, and culture. Through his journey, Fecho presents a method of “critical inquiry” that allows students and teachers to take intellectual and social risks in the classroom to make meaning together and, ultimately, to transform literacy education. Features the voices, beliefs, and struggles of urban adolescents and their teachers.“Th...

“In this age of unparalleled accountability, our students seem to get lost in the shuffle of standards-driven curricula and other external factors. . . . Have we forgotten what authentic teaching and learning look and sound like? Have we forgotten that students must always be at the center of our teaching? Bob Fecho hasn’t, and this beautiful and thought-provoking book is proof.” —From the Foreword by Deborah Appleman, Hollis L. Caswell Professo...

A no-holds-barred assault on outdated teaching methods—with dramatic and practical proposals on how education can be made relevant to today's world.Praise for Teaching As a Subversive Activity“A healthy dose of Postman and Weingartner is a good thing: if they make even a dent in the pious . . . American classroom, the book will be worthwhile.”—New York Times Book Review“Teaching and knowledge are subversive in that...

This book builds on two current developments in psychology scholarship and practice. The first centers on broad discontent with the individualist tradition in which the rational agent, or autonomous self, is considered the fundamental atom of social life. Critique of individualism spring not only from psychologists working in the academy, but also from communities of therapy and counseling. The second, and related development from which this work builds, is the search for alternatives to i...

Most of us have become so immersed in a book or game or movie that the activity temporarily assumed a profound significance and the outside world began to fade. Although we are likely to enjoy these experiences in the realm of entertainment, we rarely think about what effect they might be having on us. Precisely because it is so pervasive, entertainment is difficult to understand and even to talk about.To understand the social role of entertainment, Caught in Play looks cl...

Praise for What Our Stories Teach Us"In her new book What Our Stories Teach Us, Linda Shadiow invites college faculty to use their personal and professional stories to reflect more critically and meaningfully on their teaching practice. Guiding her readers with a gentle but sure hand, Shadiow painstakingly shows that by systematically examining our educational and pedagogical biographies from a range of perspectives, we gain deeper insight into th...

In Writing Ethnographic Fieldnotes, Robert M. Emerson, Rachel I. Fretz, and Linda L. Shaw present a series of guidelines, suggestions, and practical advice for creating useful fieldnotes in a variety of settings, demystifying a process that is often assumed to be intuitive and impossible to teach. Using actual unfinished notes as examples, the authors illustrate options for composing, reviewing, and working fieldnotes into finished texts. They discuss different organizational and ...

Wisdom that's been inspiring, motivating, and guiding teachers for two decadesThe Courage to Teach speaks to the joys and pains that teachers of every sort know well. Over the last 20 years, the book has helped countless educators reignite their passion, redirect their practice, and deal with the many pressures that accompany their vital work.Enriched by a new Foreword from Diana Chapman Walsh, the book builds on a simple premise: good teaching can...

The co-author of the internationally bestselling The Rebel Sell brings us "slow politics": promoting slow thought, slow deliberation and slow debate.Over the last twenty years, the political systems of the western world have become increasingly divided--not between right and left but between crazy and non-crazy. Whats more, the crazies seem to be gaining the upper hand. Rational thought cannot prevail in the current social and media environment, where ele...