Democratic Practices As Learning Opportunities

This book presents the findings of eleven teacher educators as they examine the meaning of democracy and its application to classroom practice. It will stimulate interest, understanding, and competence in the development of democratic practices at all levels of schooling.

The future of public education and democracy is at risk. Powerful forces are eroding commitment to public schools and weakening democratic resolve. Yet even in deeply troubling times, it is possible to broaden social imagination and empower effective advocacy for systemic progressive reform. Re-envisioning Education and Democracy explores challenges and opportunities for restructuring public education to establish and sustain more broadly inclusive, deeply democratic, and effectively transforming approaches to social inquiry and civic participation. Re-envisioning Education and Democracy adopts a non-traditional format to extend social awareness and imagination. Within each chapter, one episode of an evolving strategic narrative traces the life cycle of a systemic reform initiative. This is followed by an exploratory essay that draws from theory, research, criticism, and practice to prompt consideration of focal issues. Woven through each chapter is a poetically framed meditative stream informed by varied historical and cultural conceptions of oracles. A developmental sequence of social learning strategies (exploratory democratic practices), accompanied by thematic bibliographic references, are included to model democratic teaching and learning applicable in classroom and community settings.

Nautilus Gold Award Winner (Books for a Better World) in Social Sciences & Education Create inclusive, democratic classrooms that prepare knowledgeable, compassionate, and engaged global citizens. Today’s global challenges—climate change, food and water insecurity, social and economic inequality, and a global pandemic—demand that educators prepare students to become compassionate, critical thinkers who can explore alternative futures. Their own, others’, and the planet’s well-being depend on it. Worldwise Learning presents a "Pedagogy for People, Planet, and Prosperity" that supports K-8 educators in nurturing "Worldwise Learners": students who both deeply understand and purposefully act when learning about global challenges. Coupling theory with practice, this book builds educators’ understanding of how curriculum and meaningful interdisciplinary learning can be organized around local, global, and intercultural issues, and provides a detailed framework for making those issues come alive in the classroom. Richly illustrated, each innovative chapter asserts a transformational approach to teaching and learning following an original three-part inquiry cycle, and includes: Practical classroom strategies to implement Worldwise Learning at the lesson level, along with tips for scaffolding students’ thinking. Images of student work and vignettes of learning experiences that help educators visualize authentic Worldwise Learning moments. Stories that spotlight Worldwise Learning in action from diverse student, teacher, and organization perspectives. An exemplar unit plan that illustrates how the planning process links to and can support teaching and learning about global challenges. QR codes that link to additional lesson and unit plans, educational resources, videos of strategies, and interviews with educators and thought leaders on a companion website, where teachers can discuss topics and share ideas with each other. Worldwise Learning turns students into local and global citizens who feel genuine concern for the world around them, living their learning with intention and purpose. The time is now.

This book outlines the notion of ‘lived democracy in education’, bringing together interdisciplinary educational research on young citizens’ democratic practices in kindergartens, schools, and teacher education. Presenting both theoretical and empirical studies, and drawing on a variety of approaches, the book investigates participatory education practices where young learners are given the opportunity to influence a course of action or a discussion through expressing arguments, information and critique. Lived democracy in education is understood as opportunities for young learners to influence a decision or line of thought through enacting the values of freedom of speech and equality, and the book shows how such opportunities can be positioned in educational practices. Chapters also investigate what kind of pedagogical situations promote lived democracy and what qualities are present in these situations. The book will be of interest to academics, researchers, graduate students and post-graduate students in the fields of educational theory, educational philosophy and democracy in education concerning several school subjects.

As the title of this book suggests, how we understand, perceive and experience democracy may have a significant effect on how we actually engage in, and with, democracy. Within the educational context, this is a key concern, and forms the basis of the research presented in this volume within a critical, comparative analysis. The Global Doing Democracy Research Project (GDDRP), which currently has some 70 scholars in over 20 countries examining how educators do democracy, provides the framework in which diverse scholars explore a host of concerns related to democracy and democratic education, including the impact of neoliberalism, political literacy, critical engagement, teaching and learning for and about democracy, social justice, and the meaning of power/power relations within the educational context. Ultimately, the contributors of this book collectively ask: can there be democracy without a critically engaged education, and, importantly, what role do educators play in this context and process? Why many educators in diverse contexts believe that they are unable, dissuaded and/or prevented from doing thick democratic education is problematized in this book but the authors also seek to illustrate that, despite the challenges, barriers and concerns about doing democracy in education, something can, and should, be done to develop, cultivate and ingratiate schools and society with more meaningful democratic practices and processes. This book breaks new ground by using a similar empirical methodology within a number of international contexts to gage the democratic sentiments and actions of educators, which raises a host of questions about epistemology, teacher education, policy development, pedagogy, institutional cultures, conscientization, and the potential for transformational change in education.

How does â oedemocracyâ work in the United States? How are candidates selected to appear on the ballot? How are issues framed for presentation to the electorate? What processes, conversations, institutions, and laws interact to determine how democracy â oeworksâ ? How do new politicians learn to deal with all of this?There is a large and growing literature about these issues, some of which is reviewed in Chapter Two. This book examines selected facts of these issues through the lens of learning theory. It turns out that viewing political parties as â oecommunities of practiceâ is a very useful organizing principle. Within this point of view, and research presented in this book is examined how â oepartisansâ (people who got involved beyond voting and letter-writing) learn how to function within these communities of practice. While this is formally interesting from a learning theory point of view, it turns out that the by-products of this inquiry say a lot about what is happening to â oedemocracyâ in the United States and how it got that way. The core of the book is a set of interviews with partisans. This book examines the factors that operate in political parties as communities of practice to maintain or discourage partisanship. The theories of adult learning involved in this research are from the field of learning from experience. Political socialization is the process by which the individual develops a politicalidentity. In a large research study in Europe, the political socialization processfor adults to learn active citizenship there was studied. This study is a partialreplica of this European study, by John Holford and Ruud van der Veen, et al.[Lifelong Learning, Governance and Active Citizenship in Europe (2003). FinalReport of the ETGACE Research Project: Education and Training for Governance and Active Citizenship in Europe: Analysis of Adult Learning and Design of Formal, Non-Formal and Informal Educational Intervention Strategies.Guildford: University of Surrey Department of Educational Studies.] In thework presented here, the activist in a political party is referred to as a â oepartisanâ . For purposes of this research, â oepartisansâ are those who have joined a politicalparty by taking part in membership activities, or as candidates.

Educating for Democracy reports the results of the Political Engagement Project, a study of educational practices at the college level that prepare students for responsible democratic participation. In this book, coauthors Anne Colby, Elizabeth Beaumont, Thomas Ehrlich, and Josh Corngold show that education for political development can increase students’ political understanding, skill, motivation, and involvement while contributing to many aspects of general academic learning.