What is trauma and what does it mean for the literacy curriculum? In this book, elementary teachers will learn how to approach difficult experiences through the everyday instruction and interactions in their classrooms. Readers will look inside classrooms and literacies across genres to see what can unfold when teachers are committed to compassionate, critical, and relational practice. Weaving her own challenging experiences into chapters brimming with children’s writing and voices, Dutro emphasizes that issues of power and privilege matter centrally to how attention to trauma positions children. The book includes questions and prompts for discussion, reflection, and practice and describes pedagogies and strategies designed to provide opportunities for children to bring the varied experiences of life, including trauma, to their school literacies in positive, meaningful, and supported ways. “This stunning book about trauma interrogates the very notion. Dutro excels at interweaving her stories with those of teachers and students and at challenging readers to find their way into the fabric. I recommend this book to teachers so that they might accept her challenge to explore and understand the importance of both witnessing and testimony in relation to trauma in literacy curriculum and pedagogy.” —Mollie Blackburn, The Ohio State University

The book is interdisciplinary in focus and centers on enlarging teachers understanding of how reading and writing can change lives and how the language arts can contribute significantly to and change educational processes in the twenty-first century. Implicit in its argument is that although the emphasis on science and math is crucial to education in the digital edge, it remains vitally important to keep reading and writing, language and story, at the heart of the educational process. This is particularly true in a democratic society because shaping stories through human language can enhance the quality of our lives, and teach us something important about what it means to be human and vulnerable. In this sense, stories allow for self-reflection and an increased opportunity to enhance and understand emotional intelligence and human community.

#1 NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • Brené Brown has taught us what it means to dare greatly, rise strong, and brave the wilderness. Now, based on new research conducted with leaders, change makers, and culture shifters, she’s showing us how to put those ideas into practice so we can step up and lead. Don’t miss the five-part HBO Max docuseries Brené Brown: Atlas of the Heart! NAMED ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY BLOOMBERG Leadership is not about titles, status, and wielding power. A leader is anyone who takes responsibility for recognizing the potential in people and ideas, and has the courage to develop that potential. When we dare to lead, we don’t pretend to have the right answers; we stay curious and ask the right questions. We don’t see power as finite and hoard it; we know that power becomes infinite when we share it with others. We don’t avoid difficult conversations and situations; we lean into vulnerability when it’s necessary to do good work. But daring leadership in a culture defined by scarcity, fear, and uncertainty requires skill-building around traits that are deeply and uniquely human. The irony is that we’re choosing not to invest in developing the hearts and minds of leaders at the exact same time as we’re scrambling to figure out what we have to offer that machines and AI can’t do better and faster. What can we do better? Empathy, connection, and courage, to start. Four-time #1 New York Times bestselling author Brené Brown has spent the past two decades studying the emotions and experiences that give meaning to our lives, and the past seven years working with transformative leaders and teams spanning the globe. She found that leaders in organizations ranging from small entrepreneurial startups and family-owned businesses to nonprofits, civic organizations, and Fortune 50 companies all ask the same question: How do you cultivate braver, more daring leaders, and how do you embed the value of courage in your culture? In this new book, Brown uses research, stories, and examples to answer these questions in the no-BS style that millions of readers have come to expect and love. Brown writes, “One of the most important findings of my career is that daring leadership is a collection of four skill sets that are 100 percent teachable, observable, and measurable. It’s learning and unlearning that requires brave work, tough conversations, and showing up with your whole heart. Easy? No. Because choosing courage over comfort is not always our default. Worth it? Always. We want to be brave with our lives and our work. It’s why we’re here.” Whether you’ve read Daring Greatly and Rising Strong or you’re new to Brené Brown’s work, this book is for anyone who wants to step up and into brave leadership.

About This Book: Joyful Literacy Interventions describes a research-based, comprehensive classroom intervention approach that promises over 90% literacy success for all children by the end of third grade when implemented in its entirety.The stage is set in a playful primary classroom learning environment. While play is critical in early learning classrooms where child development theories must prevail, vulnerable children need more than play. Play is simply not enough! This book is also about explicit skill instruction in preschool, kindergarten and first and second grade-as a top priority. What makes this book unique is that Janet describes how to implement a skill-mastery model invisibly in a play-based environment through games, play, inquiry and targeted small group instruction. Janet's passion and determination to make a difference for disadvantaged children shines through in Joyful Literacy Interventions. Her book is based on the most recent literacy research such as the NELP (National Early Literacy Panel, 2008) report, which is a meta-analysis of 500 exemplary literacy studies conducted in the last decade. This compelling research highlights the factors that have the most lasting effect on future reading success if implemented in the early years. Alphabetic principles, phonological awareness, shared reading and shared writing, rapid automatized naming, and use of children's names as a key instructional strategy are featured prominently.In Joyful Literacy Interventions Janet has merged the recommendations of the NELP Report with her 40 years of experiences as a primary teacher and administrator; her recent PhD in Language, Literacy and Early Learning and the experiences of 200 classroom sites where her approach was field-tested.She has designed a unique assessment and tracking system that facilitates skill development and differentiated instruction in the midst of a playful and inquiry-based learning center classroom. It elegantly provides the teacher with detailed data to inform daily instruction for small "like-need" groups. Vulnerable children get the "catch-up" instruction they require while feeling safe and happy. Janet describes how to joyfully implement play and the essential literacy skills so that vulnerable children will thrive in classroom-based interventions. The book weaves nine essential research-based components into practical classroom applications. Each chapter describes essential skills, concepts and experiences needed for literacy success for all children. Implemented together the result is a holistic classroom experience that promises literacy success for many disadvantaged children.The first seven chapters provide the reader with: Janet's wisdom that evolved over 40 years in her experiences as teacher, principal, superintendent and professor; a synopsis of the latest, persuasive research; key references to other popular authors; teacher implementation stories from Janet's pilot sites; hundreds of practical ideas for the reader to implement; and colored photos throughout the book that illustrate possibilities and results. The chapters' topics address: a dynamic classroom environment; assessment and tracking; the essential literacy skills; learning center design; word recognition; shared reading and writing; and involving families in practice literacy activities at home.Chapter 8 provides a checklist that describes the ideal classroom by listing the research-based criteria and observable indicators in a classroom when full implementation is achieved. Chapter 9 describes a district and a classroom case study from Janet's 200 pilot sites. Joyful Literacy Interventions weaves the essential components together into practical classroom applications that are already proving to be highly effective for disadvantaged children.This book is a "must-read" for advocates of vulnerable children.

Educators must both respond to the impact of trauma, and prevent trauma at school. Trauma-informed initiatives tend to focus on the challenging behaviors of students and ascribe them to circumstances that students are facing outside of school. This approach ignores the reality that inequity itself causes trauma, and that schools often heighten inequities when implementing trauma-informed practices that are not based in educational equity. In this fresh look at trauma-informed practice, Alex Shevrin Venet urges educators to shift equity to the center as they consider policies and professional development. Using a framework of six principles for equity-centered trauma-informed education, Venet offers practical action steps that teachers and school leaders can take from any starting point, using the resources and influence at their disposal to make shifts in practice, pedagogy, and policy. Overthrowing inequitable systems is a process, not an overnight change. But transformation is possible when educators work together, and teachers can do more than they realize from within their own classrooms.

Spirituality, Action, & Pedagogy: Teaching from the Heart invites the reader to participate in a personal exploration of what it means to consciously seek the heart of education. The authors in this collection - practitioners in higher education and teaching in such diverse areas as educational foundations, communication, theater, sociology, reading and literacy, and performance studies - respond to this challenge by striking the most personal chords of their lived experience. As they relate their tales of spirituality and teaching, the reader will be coaxed into confronting the question of what it means to teach. Spirituality, Action, & Pedagogy addresses the integration of spirituality into pedagogical practice by providing cutting-edge examples of applications in classroom settings.

The purpose of this text is to elicit discussion, reflection, and action specific to pedagogy within education, especially higher education, and circles of experiential learning, community organizing, conflict resolution and youth empowerment work. Vulnerability itself is not a new term within education; however the pedagogical imperatives of vulnerability are both undertheorized in educational discourse and underexplored in practice. This work builds on that of Edward Brantmeier in Re-Envisioning Higher Education: Embodied Pathways to Wisdom and Transformation (Lin, Oxford, & Brantmeier, 2013). In his chapter, “Pedagogy of vulnerability: Definitions, assumptions, and application,” he outlines a set of assumptions about the term, clarifying for his readers the complicated, risky, reciprocal, and purposeful nature of vulnerability, particularly within educational settings. Creating spaces of risk taking, and consistent mutual, critical engagement are challenging at a moment in history where neoliberal forces impact so many realms of formal teaching and learning. Within this context, the divide between what educators, be they in a classroom or a community, imagine as possible and their ability to implement these kinds of pedagogical possibilities is an urgent conundrum worth exploring. We must consider how to address these disconnects; advocating and envisioning a more holistic, healthy, forward thinking model of teaching and learning. How do we create cultures of engaged inquiry, framed in vulnerability, where educators and students are compelled to ask questions just beyond their grasp? How can we all be better equipped to ask and answer big, beautiful, bold, even uncomfortable questions that fuel the heart of inquiry and perhaps, just maybe, lead to a more peaceful and just world? A collection of reflections, case studies, and research focused on the pedagogy of vulnerability is a starting point for this work. The book itself is meant to be an example of pedagogical vulnerability, wherein the authors work to explicate the most intimate and delicate aspects of the varied pedagogical journeys, understandings rooted in vulnerability, and those of their students, colleagues, clients, even adversaries. It is a work that “holds space.”