Culture, Curriculum and Education

0 publications

Critical Praxis and Curriculum Guides

The Critical Praxis and Curriculum Guides is a curriculum-based series reflective of theory creating praxis. The series targets not only undergraduate and graduate audiences, but also tenured and “experienced” teachers of all disciplines. Research suggests that teachers need to have well-designed, thematic-centered curricula and lessons at their disposal. This is accomplished when the school works as a community to meet their own needs. Community in this sense includes working collaboratively with students, parents, and local community organizations to help build the curriculum. Practically, this means that time is devoted to professional development workshops, not exam reviews or test preparation pointers, but real learning. Together with administrators, teachers form professional learning communities (PLCs) to discuss, analyze, and revise curricula and share pedagogical strategies that meet the needs of their particular school demographics. This communal approach was found to be more successful than requiring each individual teacher to create lessons on her/his own. Ideally, we would love it if each teacher could create their own authentic lessons because only s/he truly knows her/his students – and we encourage it, because it is possible! However, as educators ourselves, we understand the realities our colleagues in public schools face, especially when teaching in high needs areas. The Critical Praxis and Curriculum Guides provides relief for educators needing assistance in preparing their lessons. When possible, and in the spirit of communal practices, the series welcomes co-authored books by theorists and practitioners or solo-authored books by an expert deeply informed by the field. Because we strongly believe that theory guides our practice, each guide will blend theory and curriculum chapters creating a praxis. All, of course, in a critical pedagogical framework. Ultimately, the guides will serve as resources for teachers to use, expand upon, revise, and re-create.

13 publications

Ecological Pedagogy, Curriculum and Scholarship

0 publications

Complicated Conversation

ISSN: 1534-2816

Reframing the curricular challenge educators face after a decade of school deform, the books published in Peter Lang's Complicated Conversation Series testify to the ethical demands of our time, our place, our profession. What does it mean for us to teach now, in an era structured by political polarization, economic destabilization, and the prospect of climate catastrophe? Each of the books in the Complicated Conversation Series provides provocative paths, theoretical and practical, to a very different future. In this resounding series of scholarly and pedagogical interventions into the nightmare that is the present, we hear once again the sound of silence breaking, supporting us to rearticulate our pedagogical convictions in this time of terrorism, reframing curriculum as committed to the complicated conversation that is intercultural communication, self-understanding, and global justice.

93 publications