Philosophers and educators come together to address contemporary issues in education.Teachers and Philosophy showcases the potential of education practitioners and philosophers of education working and writing together. Following Mary Louise Pratt, this meeting space is referred to as a "contact zone," and contributors demonstrate the power and benefit of writing from this liminal space. Introductory and concluding chapters provide an argument for the valu...

What does it mean to teach for human dignity? How does one do so? This practical book shows how the leaders at four urban public schools used a process called Descriptive Inquiry to create democratic schools that promote and protect human dignity. The authors argue that teachers must attend to who a child is and find a way to create classrooms that allow everyone to feel safe and express ideas. Responding to the perennial question of how to cultivate teachers, they offer an approach that a...

A methodology for using philosophy to guide teaching preparation and practice

Even from the earliest grades, children have the rights to read and write—not just in dominant American English, but also in their own languages and dialects.Young children make meaning and make sense from the earliest years. They read facial expressions, engage in interactions, and read symbols across a variety of named languages. Historically narrow definitions of reading and writing, however, often prevent children of color and immigrants from having access to t...

This first volume of Special Issues: Trauma-Informed Teaching gathers some of the most compelling and practical recent articles across NCTE journals, addressing the importance of trauma-informed teaching and its recent developments in the field.We live in a time that requires attention to trauma. Educators and students are learning how to move forward in this precarious time, which in many ways has amplified preexisting health, racial, economic, and educat...

Naming What We Know: Threshold Concepts of Writing Studies, published in 2015, contributed to a discussion about the relevance of identifying key concepts and ideas of writing studies. (Re)Considering What We Know continues this conversation while simultaneously raising questions about the ideas around threshold concepts. New contributions introduce additional concepts, investigate threshold concepts as a framework, and explore their use within and beyond writing....

In this open access book, Timothy Aylsworth and Clinton Castro draw on the deep well of Kantian ethics to argue that we have moral duties, both to ourselves and to others, to protect our autonomy from the threat posed by the problematic use of technology. The problematic use of technologies like smartphones threatens our autonomy in a variety of ways, and critics have only begun to appreciate the vast scope of this problem. In the last decade, we have seen a flurry of books making “self-he...

Literally translated as “self-culture-writing,” autoethnography—as both process and product—holds great promise for scholars and researchers in writings studies who endeavor to describe, understand, analyze, and critique the ways in which selves, cultures, writing, and representation intersect. Self+Culture+Writing foregrounds the possibility of autoethnography as a viable methodological approach and provides researchers and instructors with ways of understanding, crafting, and te...

Since its inception, action research has been the subject of confusion and controversy. Can something be research if it doesn’t «prove» anything? Can something be action research if it’s a project run by an expert who does not consider participants co-researchers? Questions multiply when the general term is limited to critical action research. What makes critical action research different from action research generally?Can the action research project of a classroom teacher intended ...

An equity-conscious, culturally sustaining approach to literacy education.Every student comes to the classroom with unique funds of knowledge in addition to unique needs. How can teachers celebrate and draw upon the valuable literacies each child already possesses to engage them more effectively in school literacy practices?In Literacy for All, Shawna Coppola shows how a literacy pedagogy founded on anti-oppressive principles can transform the expe...

This work establishes a contemporary profile of virtue in professional media practice. Author Patrick Lee Plaisance examines the experiences, perspectives, moral stances, and demographic data of two dozen professional exemplars in journalism and public relations. Plaisance conducted extensive personal "life story" interviews and collected survey data to assess the exemplars’ personality traits, ethical ideologies, moral reasoning skills and perceived workplace climate.The chosen pr...

Public education, once considered a dogmatic institution in the 20th century, now finds itself challenged at almost every level in todays sociopolitical environment. New realities, as evidenced by the political complexities of the global village, widespread technological advances that undermine established educational practices, and ever mounting pressures on the curriculum to appease corporate interests have altered the face of public education forever, leaving educators seemingly strande...