Imagining The Possibilities

Imagining the possibilities explores approaches to creative methods on how to teach various orientation and mobility (O & M) techniques to people who are blind or visually impaired, including those with multiple disabilities. This is a hands-on teaching resource for preservice and practicing O & M specialists. It offers materials, samples, and creative teaching strategies that will effectively help students. Each chapter in Imagining the possibilities provides specific examples and strategies for assessment and instruction in O & M, including Idea Boxes with teaching tips, sample lesson plans, and appendices that give sample materials.

Recent and increasing efforts to standardize young children’s academic performance have shifted the emphases of education toward normative practices and away from qualitative, substantive intentions. Connection to human experience, compassion for societal ailments, and the joys of learning are straining under the pressure of quantitative research, competition, and test scores, exemplified by federal funding competitions and policymaking. Disrupting Early Childhood Education Research critically interrogates the traditional foundations of early childhood research practices to disrupt the status quo through imaginative, cutting-edge research in diverse U.S. and international contexts. Its chapters are driven by empirical data derived from unique research projects and a variety of contemporary methodologies that include phenomenological studies, auto-ethnographic writings, action-oriented studies, arts-based methodologies, and other innovative approaches. By giving voice to marginalized social science researchers who are active in learning, school, and early education sectors, this volume explores the meanings of actionable and everyday approaches based on the experiences of young children, their families, and educators.

Imagining New Legalities reminds us that examining the right to privacy and the public/private distinction is an important way of mapping the forms and limits of power that can legitimately be exercised by collective bodies over individuals and by governments over their citizens. This book does not seek to provide a comprehensive overview of threats to privacy and rejoinders to them. Instead it considers several different conceptions of privacy and provides examples of legal inventiveness in confronting some contemporary challenges to the public/private distinction. It provides a context for that consideration by surveying the meanings of privacy in three domains—-the first, involving intimacy and intimate relations; the second, implicating criminal procedure, in particular, the 4th amendment; and the third, addressing control of information in the digital age. The first two provide examples of what are taken to be classic breaches of the public/private distinction, namely instances when government intrudes in an area claimed to be private. The third has to do with voluntary circulation of information and the question of who gets to control what happens to and with that information.

Foundations of Orientation and Mobility, the classic professional reference and textbook has been completely revised and expanded to two volumes by the most knowledgeable experts in the field. The new third edition includes both the latest research in O&M and expanded information on practice and teaching strategies. Volume 1, History and Theory, includes the bases of O&M knowledge, including perception, orientation, low vision, audition, kinesiology, psychosocial issues, and learning theories, as well as chapters on technology, dog guides, orientation aids, and environmental accessibility. A section on the profession of O&M includes its international history; administration, assessment and program planning; and a chapter on research in O&M. No O&M student or professional can afford to be without this essential resource.

Enter into the world of two young girls, each diagnosed with congenital heart disease, and witness how their unique paths translate into an instant connection between them. Their rare journeys, complete with surgeries at young ages and other complexities difficult for children to process, lends itself to forging a friendship that has given them the confidence to endure the lifelong fight against their CHDs and the emotional challenges that follow. The rainbows and storms the girl face side-by-side creates a special bond that helps carry them through challenges, yet also normalizes their childhood, including embracing their warrior zipper scar. Faith, hope, and love is instilled in the girls from their mothers and proves to be the anchor of all the uncertainty and their roadmap for learning to support each other along the way.

Through drama girls can explore their particular sexual, cultural, ethnic, and class-based identities. Gallagher's research offers pedagogical alternatives in an increasingly mechanistic and disempowering period in education.

La Clase Mágica: Imagining Optimal Possibilities in a Bilingual Community of Learners vividly captures the social and intellectual developments and the promises of an ongoing after-school project called La Clase Mágica. It is a blow-by-blow description of the early transformations of a project that began as an educational activity and slowly but deliberately turned into a social action project whose aim was to serve those with low economic and political means and little access to educational resources. This multivocal account details research in action for effectively serving Spanish-English bilingual speakers from a Mexican origin community, as well as--on a broader level--the diverse populations that increasingly characterize American society today. The focus is on the early foundational work of the project between 1989-1996, though attention is also given to the national and international recognition the project has subsequently received, the college-going patterns of its long-term participants, and the transplantation of the project to other cultural communities. The book speaks out from the "zones of contact" between the university and a language minority community about new ways to extend and intersect theory and practice in many areas of the educational enterprise. Contact is defined not only in the physical sense of face-to-face interaction but also as symbolic interaction between languages, cultures, histories, and epistemologies. Thus, Vásquez speaks of optimal possibilities situated in the middle grounds, or more technically speaking, in the borders between Spanish and English, Mexican and mainstream culture, minority and majority designations, and between school and community contexts where contact is made and new arrangements are imagined. This account uses the reflections of participants at times to take readers from the scientific to the everyday, to make real and concrete the theoretical conceptualizations that box in human behavior. In this way, it defines the theories, methods, and philosophies for linking multiple disciplines, institutions, and participant groups into a concerted effort with potential to reframe the educational opportunities of under-served populations. A close look is provided into the intricacies and the fundamental principles for building and sustaining effective learning environments and institutional relations necessary for enhancing the potential of learners of all ages. In the process, the book also suggests ways in which community members and institutional agents can play an active and integral role in creating learning opportunities that serve both constituencies. Educators and policymakers will find the systems approach for pursuing parent and community involvement in the educational enterprise useful. In sum, the book offers researchers, practitioners, and policymakers much needed guidance, insight, and perhaps inspiration for rethinking educational goals and objectives.

To every girl that needs an extra push, the girl that was told she wasn't good enough or ever felt that she couldn't or wouldn't accomplish her dreams because of what someone said or her upbringing. This book is for you! Tap into your thoughts and control them. Realize that you have a power inside of you that has authority to thrive. Never give up on whatever it is you hope for. Use your imagination and zone out. Get in your zone and use your imagination. Never stop, never stop planning, never stop talking about it, never stop wishing for it... Never! To all the young women that love themselves so hard that they refused to listen to the haters, the men that caused havoc or the family members that didn't believe in you. You don't owe anybody! This life is for YOU to live.