Empowering Students For Just Societies

What happens when teachers share power with students? In this profound book, Ira Shor—the inventor of critical pedagogy in the United States—relates the story of an experiment that nearly went out of control. Shor provides the reader with a reenactment of one semester that shows what really can happen when one applies the theory and democratizes the classroom. This is the story of one class in which Shor tried to fully share with his students control of the curriculum and of the classroom. After twenty years of practicing critical teaching, he unexpectedly found himself faced with a student uprising that threatened the very possibility of learning. How Shor resolves these problems, while remaining true to his commitment to power-sharing and radical pedagogy, is the crux of the book. Unconventional in both form and substance, this deeply personal work weaves together student voices and thick descriptions of classroom experience with pedagogical theory to illuminate the power relations that must be negotiated if true learning is to take place.

All children deserve the opportunity to practice freedom of thought, voice, and movement in school. Giving students the opportunity to practice freedom--to teach them how to be autonomous, responsible, cooperative and critically literate--should be done in communities and schools across the country, and this book shows how. The key ability of the human brain that cannot be digitized or mechanized is its ability to interpret—that is, to cope with the intentions of another, to understand what was said and what was meant. Humans have the ability to work together as a team toward a common goal (i.e. cooperate), to be altruistic and make sacrifices to help others, to build trust, and to feel empathy or sympathy—and robots do not. Developing and using these interpretive and cooperative skills is essential to having a nation of thoughtful citizens who are capable of seeing themselves as solutions to the problems and issues we face. Empowered Students: Educating Flexible Minds for a Flexible Future is a theory-to-practice story of how students at a segregated and failing New York City high school were released from years of oppressive schooling practices and learned how to practice freedom, told through the voices and the people who built it: the school leaders, teachers and students.

Empowering Students Through Multilingual and Content Discourse is a peer-reviewed research book that challenges the traditional monolingual classroom approach, where the teacher's voice dominates and only the dominant culture's language is considered the path to success. The book aims to empower students by creating classroom spaces where all voices are heard, valued, and empowered. It draws on research from scholars who study discourse and offers insights into how discourse can be used to promote language and literacy development, honor all students' voices, and empower them. This book also provides guidance on culturally and linguistically sustaining discourse practices and encourages educators to incorporate students' home languages and discourse practices in classroom instruction. It challenges educators to move away from centering White English and represent language more responsibly within the classroom. This research is a valuable resource for academic scholars and a useful tool for teachers looking to cultivate student-centered classroom practices. By encouraging discourse among students, educators can create a space where human life holds meaning, and students feel empowered to act and use their voices.

Conceived through collaboration by activist academics from Israel and Northern Ireland, this book draws from experience to offer practical and theoretical insights and programs for promoting activist pedagogy for shared learning and shared life in divided societies.

Established in the aftermath of World War II, UNESCO succinctly states its peace mission as well as its peaceful resolution to peace in its Constitution—constructing the “defenses of peace” in the minds of peoples on the “intellectual and moral” grounds. For more than seven decades, UNESCO has been consistently positioning peace as its unwavering core and ultimate goal through promoting international understanding and cooperation in and across its five major sectors of competence in education, natural sciences, culture, communication and information, and social and human sciences. Historical Dictionary of the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO), Second Edition contains a chronology, an introduction, and an extensive bibliography. The dictionary section has more than 700 cross-referenced entries on UNESCO’s initiatives, programs, projects, normative instruments, and partners over the past 76 years. This book is an excellent resource for students, researchers, and anyone wanting to know more about UNESCO.