This "provocative and personally searching"memoir follows one mother's story of enrolling her daughter in a local public school (San Francisco Chronicle), and the surprising, necessary lessons she learned with her neighbors. From the time Courtney E. Martin strapped her daughter, Maya, to her chest for long walks, she was curious about Emerson Elementary, a public school down the street from her Oakland home. She learned that White families in their gentrifying neighborhood largely avoided the majority-Black, poorly-rated school. As she began asking why, a journey of a thousand moral miles began. Learning in Public is the story, not just Courtney’s journey, but a whole country’s. Many of us are newly awakened to the continuing racial injustice all around us, but unsure of how to go beyond hashtags and yard signs to be a part of transforming the country. Courtney discovers that her public school, the foundation of our fragile democracy, is a powerful place to dig deeper. Courtney E. Martin examines her own fears, assumptions, and conversations with other moms and dads as they navigate school choice. A vivid portrait of integration’s virtues and complexities, and yes, the palpable joy of trying to live differently in a country re-making itself. Learning in Public might also set your family’s life on a different course forever.

The acclaimed exploration of how public education can cultivate innovators—with a foreword by Russlynn Ali, a leading advocate for remaking schools Dime-a-dozen ideas for reforming education seem to be everywhere these days but few actually transform the everyday experience of the 50-million-plus students who are regularly subjected to traditional lecturing, note-taking, and rote learning—often with dismal results. Enter Deeper Learning, "a fast read [that] will interest educators who want to produce self-motivated, passionate learners" (Library Journal). Offering "uplifting" (Kirkus Reviews) anecdotes in what Tom Carroll of the National Commission on Teaching and America's Future calls a "rare blend of inspiration and practical action," Deeper Learning provides a blueprint for creating flexible environments that put students at the helm of their own collaborative learning experience. This paperback edition includes a new foreword by renowned education advocate Russlynn Ali and will empower and inspire educators everywhere to address the need for schools to be genuinely innovative.

Education was decisive in recasting women's subjectivity and the lived reality of their collective experience in post-Revolutionary and antebellum America. Asking how and why women shaped their lives anew through education, Mary Kelley measures the significant transformation in individual and social identities fostered by female academies and seminaries. Constituted in a curriculum that matched the course of study at male colleges, women's liberal learning, Kelley argues, played a key role in one of the most profound changes in gender relations in the nation's history: the movement of women into public life. By the 1850s, the large majority of women deeply engaged in public life as educators, writers, editors, and reformers had been schooled at female academies and seminaries. Although most women did not enter these professions, many participated in networks of readers, literary societies, or voluntary associations that became the basis for benevolent societies, reform movements, and activism in the antebellum period. Kelley's analysis demonstrates that female academies and seminaries taught women crucial writing, oration, and reasoning skills that prepared them to claim the rights and obligations of citizenship.

Bringing together scholars, public intellectuals, and activists from across the field of education, the Handbook of Public Pedagogy explores and maps the terrain of this burgeoning field. For the first time in one comprehensive volume, readers will be able to learn about the history and scope of the concept and practices of public pedagogy. What is 'public pedagogy'? What theories, research, aims, and values inform it? What does it look like in practice? Offering a wide range of differing, even diverging, perspectives on how the 'public' might operate as a pedagogical agent, this Handbook provides new ways of understanding educational practice, both within and without schools. It implores teachers, researchers, and theorists to reconsider their foundational understanding of what counts as pedagogy and of how and where the process of education occurs. The questions it raises and the critical analyses they require provide curriculum and educational workers and scholars at large with new ways of understanding educational practice, both within and without schools.

Digital technologies have transformed cultural perceptions of learning and what it means to be literate, expanding the importance of experience alongside interpretation and reflection. Learning the Virtual Life offers ways to consider the local and global effects of digital media on educational environments, as well as the cultural transformations of how we now define learning and literacy. While some have welcomed the educational challenges of digital culture and emphasized its possibilities for individual emancipation and social transformation in the new information age, others accuse digital culture of absorbing its recipients in an all-pervasive virtual world. Unlike most accounts of the educational and cultural consequences of digital culture, Learning the Virtual Life presents a neutral, advanced introduction to the key issues involved with the integration of digital culture and education. This edited collection presents international perspectives on a wide range of issues, and each chapter combines upper-level theory with "real-world" practice, making this essential reading for all those interested in digital media and education.

Why is play important in the lives of children? What crucial aspects of learning are being neglected in the current near-elimination of recess time in public schools? Playing for Keeps, co-authored by the well-known writer and educational leader Deborah Meier and two colleagues with equally long experience in schools, explores these questions. Based on close observations on a public school playground, the book shows children at play in a relatively natural, unstructured environment. The reader is virtually there, seeing, listening in, able to appreciate the children’s curiosity, humor, intelligence, and inventiveness. Readers will recognize the children’s voices and ways of thinking, and perhaps be reminded of their own childhood, their own children, or the children they teach. The authors comment on the observations, adding to the reader’s own perceptions . This lively, engaging book makes a strong case for the importance of free exploration, wonder, imagination, and play to the learning and growth of children. It should contribute significantly to the understanding of all those concerned, professionally or personally, with the welfare of our school-age population.

Essays by popular children's authors reveal the books that shaped their personal and literary lives, explaining how the stories they loved influenced them creatively, politically, and intellectually.