A Curriculum Of Imagination In An Era Of Standardization

A Curriculum of Imagination in an Era of Standardization In A Curriculum of Imagination in an Era of Standardization: An Imaginative Dialogue with Maxine Greene and Paulo Freire, a volume in Landscapes of Education [Series Editors: William H. Schubert, University of Illinois at Chicago & Ming Fang He, Georgia Southern University], Robert Lake explores with the reader what is meant by imagination in the work of Maxine Greene and Paulo Freire and their relevance in an era of increasingly standardized and highly scripted practices in the field of education. The author explores how imagination permeates every aspect of life with the intent to develop capacity with the readers to look beyond the taken-for-granted, to question the normal, to develop various ways of knowing, seeing, feeling, and to imagine and act upon possibilities for positive social and educational change. The principal aspect of the work illustrated in this book that distinguishes it from other work is that an “imaginary” dialogue between Maxine Greene and Paulo Freire runs through the book using actual citations from their work. Each chapter starts with such a dialogue interspersed with the works of others and the author’s critical autobiographical reflections. With a brief overview of the socio-cultural evolution of imagination from pre-literate times to the present, the author explores some of the current iterations of imagination including the eugenics movement and “dark” imagination, sensing gaps and creative/critical imagination, metaphors as the language of imagination and empathy as social imagination. Reflecting upon emerging tensions, challenges, and possibilities curriculum workers face in such an era of standardization, the author calls for a curriculum of imagination. After providing a brief overview of the socio-cultural evolution of imagination from pre-literate times to the present, the author looks at some of the current iterations of imagination, including the eugenics movement and “dark” imagination, sensing gaps and creative/critical imagination, metaphors as the language of the imagination, and empathy as social imagination. All of these ideas are then incorporated in a curriculum of imagination that is envisioned through Joseph Schwab’s four commonplaces of curriculum followed by a discussion of emerging tensions, issues and possibilities for praxis and scholarship in present and future inquiry.

Scope of the Book: Personal~Passionate~Participatory Inquiry into Social Justice in Education, the first book in the series, features 14 programs of social justice oriented research on life in schools, families, and communities. This work, done by a diverse group of practitioner researchers, educators, and scholars, connects the personal with the political, the theoretical with the practical, and research with social and educational change. These inquiries demonstrate three distinct qualities. Each is personal, compelled by values and experiences researchers bring to the work. Each is passionate, grounded in a commitment to social justice concerns of people and places under consideration. Each is participatory, built on long-term, heart-felt engagement, and shared efforts. The principle aspect of the inquiries featured in the book series that distinguish it from others is that researchers are not detached observers, nor putatively objective recorders, but active participants in schools, families, and communities. Researchers have explicit research agendas that focus on equity, equality, and social justice. Rather than aiming solely at traditional educational research outcomes, positive social and educational change is the focal outcome of inquiry. The researchers are diverse and their inquiries are far ranging in terms of content, people and geographic locations studied. These studies reflect new and exciting ways of researching and representing experience of the disenfranchised, underrepresented, and invisible groups seldom discussed in the literature, and challenge stereotypical or deficit oriented perspectives on these groups. This book informs pre-service and in-service teachers, educators, educational researchers, administrators, and educational policy makers, particularly those who advocate for people who are marginalized and those who are committed to the enactment of social justice and positive educational and social change.

The SAGE Guide to Curriculum in Education integrates, summarizes, and explains, in highly accessible form, foundational knowledge and information about the field of curriculum with brief, simply written overviews for people outside of or new to the field of education. This Guide supports study, research, and instruction, with content that permits quick access to basic information, accompanied by references to more in-depth presentations in other published sources. This Guide lies between the sophistication of a handbook and the brevity of an encyclopedia. It addresses the ties between and controversies over public debate, policy making, university scholarship, and school practice. While tracing complex traditions, trajectories, and evolutions of curriculum scholarship, the Guide illuminates how curriculum ideas, issues, perspectives, and possibilities can be translated into public debate, school practice, policy making, and life of the general public focusing on the aims of education for a better human condition. 55 topical chapters are organized into four parts: Subject Matter as Curriculum, Teachers as Curriculum, Students as Curriculum, and Milieu as Curriculum based upon the conceptualization of curriculum commonplaces by Joseph J. Schwab: subject matter, teachers, learners, and milieu. The Guide highlights and explicates how the four commonplaces are interdependent and interconnected in the decision-making processes that involve local and state school boards and government agencies, educational institutions, and curriculum stakeholders at all levels that address the central curriculum questions: What is worthwhile? What is worth knowing, needing, experiencing, doing, being, becoming, overcoming, sharing, contributing, wondering, and imagining? The Guide benefits undergraduate and graduate students, curriculum professors, teachers, teacher educators, parents, educational leaders, policy makers, media writers, public intellectuals, and other educational workers. Key Features: Each chapter inspires readers to understand why the particular topic is a cutting edge curriculum topic; what are the pressing issues and contemporary concerns about the topic; what historical, social, political, economic, geographical, cultural, linguistic, ecological, etc. contexts surrounding the topic area; how the topic, relevant practical and policy ramifications, and contextual embodiment can be understood by theoretical perspectives; and how forms of inquiry and modes of representation or expression in the topic area are crucial to develop understanding for and make impact on practice, policy, context, and theory. Further readings and resources are provided for readers to explore topics in more details.

Devoted to and inspired by the late Maxine Greene, a champion of education and advocator of the arts, this book recognizes the importance of Greene’s scholarship by revisiting her oeuvre in the context of the intellectual historicity that shaped its formation. As a scholar, Greene dialogued with philosophers, social theorists, writers, musicians, and artists. These conversations reveal the ways in which the arts, just like philosophy and science, allow for the facilitation of "wide-awakeness," a term that is central to Greene’s pedagogy. Amidst contemporary trends of neoliberal, one-size-fits-all curriculum reforms in which the arts are typically squeezed out or pushed aside, Greene’s work reminds us that the social imagination is stunted without the arts. Artistic ways of knowing allow for people to see beyond their own worlds and beyond "what is" into other worlds of "what was" and "what might" be some day. This volume demonstrates Maxine Greene’s profound ability to illuminate the importance of the artistic world and the imaginary for development of the self in the world and for encouraging a "wide-awakeness" reflective of an emerging political awareness and a longing for a democratic world that "is not yet." This book was originally published as a Special Issue of The Review of Education, Pedagogy and Cultural Studies.

Erich Fromm’s body of work, written more than 50 years ago, was prophetic of the contemporary moment: Increasingly, global society is threatened by the many-headed monster of corporate greed, neo-liberalism, nihilism, extreme fundamentalist beliefs, and their resulting effects on the natural world and the lived lives of people. Fromm clearly warned us of the peril of the misuse of technology and the destructive nature of man’s perverse desire to possess, control and/or destroy. Through his theories of having vs. being, the importance of hope as active resistance, and his notion of freedom as the capacity to love self, and others, Fromm encouraged his readers to cultivate biophilic ways of being in the world that will counter and heal the impending necrophilic plunder of man’s hubris. This multi-authored volume sheds new light on Fromm’s forgotten role in the formation of contemporary thought through an engaging variety of reflexive and historical narratives from fields of sociology, clinical psychology, political science, critical theory of religion and education. Key concepts from his body of work are interpreted and expressed in ways that offer hopeful and humane alternatives to the present global conditions of despair, greed and depersonalization.

The Handbook of Critical Theoretical Research Methods in Education approaches theory as a method for doing research, rather than as a background framework. Educational research often reduces theory to a framework used only to analyze empirically collected data. In this view theories are not considered methods, and studies that apply them as such are not given credence. This misunderstanding is primarily due to an empiricist stance of educational research, one that lacks understanding of how theories operate methodologically and presumes positivism is the only valid form of research. This limited perspective has serious consequences on essential academic activities: publication, tenure and promotion, grants, and academic awards. Expanding what constitutes methods in critical theoretical educational research, this edited book details 21 educationally just theories and demonstrates how theories are applied as method to various subfields in education. From critical race hermeneutics to Bakhtin’s dialogism, each chapter explicates the ideological roots of said theory while teaching us how to apply the theory as method. This edited book is the first of its kind in educational research. To date, no other book details educationally just theories and clearly explicates how those theories can be applied as methods. With contributions from scholars in the fields of education and qualitative research worldwide, the book will appeal to researchers and graduate students.

This is the first book to explicitly link healing and wellness practices with critical pedagogy. Bringing together scholars from Brazil, Canada, Malta and the USA, the chapters combine critical pedagogy and social justice education to reorient the conversation around wellness in teaching and learning. Working against white Eurocentric narratives of wellness in schools which focus on the symptoms, not the causes, of society's sickness, the authors argues for a "soul revival" of education which tackles, head on, the causes of dis-ease in society, from institutional racism, colonialism, xenophobia and patriarchy. The contributors provide fresh perspectives that address short-term goals of wellness alongside long-term goals of healing in schools and society by attending to underlying causes of social sickness. The chapters bridge theory and practice, bringing diverse historical and contemporary philosophical discussions around wellness into contact with concrete examples of the interconnections between wellness, education, and social justice. Examples of topics covered include: Buddhist practices for healing, Black liberation theology, hip hop pedagogy, anxiety and vulnerability, art therapy and story-telling.