Authors: William Ayers
ISBN-13: 9780807744604, ISBN-10: 0807744603
Format: Paperback
Publisher: Teachers College Press
Date Published: March 2004
Edition: 1st Edition
These essays follow a veteran teacher educator and school reform activist as he tries to understand an enterprise he calls "mysterious and immeasurable." By focusing on the authentic experiences of teaching and learning that he has lived over the past 15 years, Bill Ayers reconsiders, argues, reflects, and searches for ways to break through the routine and the ordinary to see teaching as the important and extraordinary work it is. Covering a range of issues -- standards, equity, testing, professionalism -- this book shows us teaching as an achingly personal calling, and ultimately as a social and a political act. With these essays, Bill Ayers invites teachers into a wonderful conversation about the meaning of teaching as craft, as art, as vocation. He reminds us that an active kind of hope is at the core of teaching -- seeing things both as they are and as they could be.
Preface | ||
1 | Introduction: Teaching as an Ethical Enterprise | 1 |
Pt. I | Contemporary Conditions of Schooling and Teaching | |
2 | Teaching for Justice and Care | 17 |
3 | Classroom Spaces, Teacher Choices | 23 |
4 | Savage Inequalities: Children in America's Schools | 31 |
5 | Schools That Work | 33 |
6 | Ten Ways to Be a Good School | 37 |
Pt. II | Teaching in Today's Schools | |
7 | Teaching City Kids | 45 |
8 | Sometimes a Shining Moment | 48 |
9 | Learning from Children | 53 |
10 | "We'll Have Fun Great If It Stops Raining": Reflections on Seventh-Grade Camp | 59 |
11 | To the Bone: Reflections in Black and White | 63 |
Pt. III | Teacher Professionalism and Teacher Education | |
12 | Rethinking the Profession of Teaching: A Progressive Option | 83 |
13 | Fact or Fancy: The Quest for a Knowledge Base in Teacher Education | 87 |
14 | The "Long Trip": An Exploration of Progressive Public Schools | 93 |
15 | Headaches: On Teaching and Teacher Education | 102 |
16 | About Teaching and Teachers | 113 |
Pt. IV | Teaching | |
17 | Teaching as an Act of Hope | 119 |
18 | Teaching and the Web of Life | 123 |
19 | Work That Is Real | 130 |
Conclusion | 144 | |
References | 147 | |
Index | 151 | |
About the Author | 161 |