Developing Knowledge Communities through Partnerships for Literacy


Book Description

Developing Knowledge Communities through Partnerships for Literacy explores the development of knowledge communities - safe spaces on the educational landscape - where research and professional development with literacy teachers and writers can unfurl.




Writing in Knowledge Societies


Book Description

The editors of WRITING IN KNOWLEDGE SOCIETIES provide a thoughtful, carefully constructed collection that addresses the vital roles rhetoric and writing play as knowledge-making practices in diverse knowledge-intensive settings. The essays in this book examine the multiple, subtle, yet consequential ways in which writing is epistemic, articulating the central role of writing in creating, shaping, sharing, and contesting knowledge in a range of human activities in workplaces, civic settings, and higher education.




Integrating Community Service into the Curriculum


Book Description

The book contributes to an understanding of an educational shift prevalent in our society toward creating humanizing conditions though pedagogy, that will seek co-existence within the lines of policy while influencing system-wide change.




Why Knowledge Matters


Book Description

In Why Knowledge Matters, E. D. Hirsch, Jr., presents evidence from cognitive science, sociology, and education history to further the argument for a knowledge-based elementary curriculum. Influential scholar Hirsch, author of The Knowledge Deficit, asserts that a carefully planned curriculum that imparts communal knowledge is essential in achieving one of the most fundamental aims and objectives of education: preparing students for lifelong success. Hirsch examines historical and contemporary evidence from the United States and other nations, including France, and affirms that a knowledge-based approach has improved both achievement and equity in schools where it has been instituted. In contrast, educational change of the past several decades in the United States has endorsed a skills-based approach, founded on, Hirsch points out, many incorrect assumptions about child development and how children learn. He recommends new policies that are better aligned with our current understanding of neuroscience, developmental psychology, and social science. The book focuses on six persistent problems that merit the attention of contemporary education reform: the over-testing of students in the name of educational accountability; the scapegoating of teachers; the fadeout of preschool gains; the narrowing of the curriculum to crowd out history, geography, science, literature, and the arts; the achievement gap between demographic groups; and the reliance on standards, such as the Common Core State Standards, that are not linked to a rigorous curriculum. Why Knowledge Matters makes a clear case for educational innovation and introduces a new generation of American educators to Hirsch’s astute and passionate analysis.




Funds of Knowledge


Book Description

The concept of "funds of knowledge" is based on a simple premise: people are competent and have knowledge, and their life experiences have given them that knowledge. The claim in this book is that first-hand research experiences with families allow one to document this competence and knowledge, and that such engagement provides many possibilities for positive pedagogical actions. Drawing from both Vygotskian and neo-sociocultural perspectives in designing a methodology that views the everyday practices of language and action as constructing knowledge, the funds of knowledge approach facilitates a systematic and powerful way to represent communities in terms of the resources they possess and how to harness them for classroom teaching. This book accomplishes three objectives: It gives readers the basic methodology and techniques followed in the contributors' funds of knowledge research; it extends the boundaries of what these researchers have done; and it explores the applications to classroom practice that can result from teachers knowing the communities in which they work. In a time when national educational discourses focus on system reform and wholesale replicability across school sites, this book offers a counter-perspective stating that instruction must be linked to students' lives, and that details of effective pedagogy should be linked to local histories and community contexts. This approach should not be confused with parent participation programs, although that is often a fortuitous consequence of the work described. It is also not an attempt to teach parents "how to do school" although that could certainly be an outcome if the parents so desired. Instead, the funds of knowledge approach attempts to accomplish something that may be even more challenging: to alter the perceptions of working-class or poor communities by viewing their households primarily in terms of their strengths and resources, their defining pedagogical characteristics. Funds of Knowledge: Theorizing Practices in Households, Communities, and Classrooms is a critically important volume for all teachers and teachers-to-be, and for researchers and graduate students of language, culture, and education.




Decolonising Curriculum Knowledge


Book Description

This book offers a unique blend of writing from a broad range of international perspectives, showing interdisciplinary research approaches to decolonising curriculum knowledge. With a focus on the intellectual, emotional, economic, and political reversal of colonial injustices, the decolonial research and writing in this book challenge dominant viewpoints and assumptions of curriculum knowledge by amplifying and disseminating the knowledge and perspectives of peoples that curriculum knowledge has historically silenced and marginalized. The chapters in this book allow the reader to learn from the historical, social, political, cultural, and educational contexts of the UK, Nepal, South Africa, Namibia, Australia, Colombia, Canada, Thailand, Mauritius, Poland, Russia, Norway, and the Netherlands. This internationality provides the reader with a multitude of research themes and critical analytical perspectives for seeing how epistemic power permeates as cultural imperialism in education policies and practices across the world.




Assignments across the Curriculum


Book Description

In Assignments across the Curriculum, Dan Melzer analyzes the rhetorical features and genres of writing assignments through the writing-to-learn and writing-in-the-disciplines perspectives. Presenting the results of his study of 2,101 writing assignments from undergraduate courses in the natural sciences, social sciences, business, and humanities in 100 postsecondary institutions in the United States, Assignments across the Curriculum is unique in its cross-institutional breadth and its focus on writing assignments. The results provide a panoramic view of college writing in the United States. Melzer's framework begins with the rhetorical situations of the assignments—the purposes and audiences—and broadens to include the assignments' genres and discourse community contexts. Among his conclusions is that courses connected to a writing-across-the-curriculum (WAC) initiative ask students to write more often, in a greater variety of genres, and for a greater variety of purposes and audiences than non-WAC courses do, making a compelling case for the influence of the WAC movement. Melzer's work also reveals patterns in the rhetorical situations, genres, and discourse communities of college writing in the United States. These larger patterns are of interest to WAC practitioners working with faculty across disciplines, to writing center coordinators and tutors working with students who bring assignments from a variety of fields, to composition program administrators, to first-year writing instructors interested in preparing students for college writing, and to high school teachers attempting to bridge the gap between high school and college writing.




Curriculum Making, Reciprocal Learning, and the Best-Loved Self


Book Description

This book revolves around curriculum making, reciprocal learning, and the best-loved self. It draws on extensive school-based studies conducted with teachers in the United States, China, and Canada, and weaves in experiences from other cross-national projects, keynote addresses, archival research, and editorial work. The elucidation of the ‘best-loved self’ drives home the point that teachers are more than the subject matter they teach: they are students’ role models and allies. Curriculum making and reciprocal learning relationships enrich teachers’ and students’ being and becoming as they live curriculum alongside one another—with the goal of more satisfying lives held firmly in view.




Diverse Approaches to Teaching, Learning, and Writing Across the Curriculum


Book Description

this collection documents a key moment in the history of Writing Across the Curriculum, foregrounding connection and diversity as keys to the sustainability of the WAC movement in the face of new and long-standing challenges.




Places of Curriculum Making


Book Description

Focusing on school as place where curriculum is made to realizing the ways children and families are engaged as curriculum makers in homes, in communities, and in the spaces in-between, outside of school, this book investigates the tensions experienced by teachers, children and families as they make curriculum attentive to lives.