The Dream And The Reality Of Teaching

The dream of teaching is that it's fascinating, meaningful, inspiring, and rewarding. The reality of teaching is that it can be exhausting, frustrating, heart-breaking, and disappointing. This book guides prospective teachers through an analysis of the profession they are considering and of their match with that profession and leads current teachers through an analysis of their career achievements, progress, challenges, and goals.

The dream of teaching is that it's fascinating, meaningful, inspiring, and rewarding. The reality of teaching is that it can be exhausting, frustrating, heart-breaking, and disappointing. This book guides prospective teachers through an analysis of the profession they are considering and of their match with that profession and leads current teachers through an analysis of their career achievements, progress, challenges, and goals.

Intended for parents, general and special education teachers, Inclusion: The Dream and the Reality in Special Education is a book about laws and practices that impact the inclusion of students with disabilities in public schools. Each chapter illustrates a child who presents a challenging problem. The book presents inclusion issues through compelling stories. People rarely change their attitude based on facts. Stories can change the way we think and feel about issues. Written by a college professor, teacher candidates find these experiences hilarious or tragic, but always illuminating. As new teachers they must be prepared to confront the important challenge in our schools- reaching every single student, black, white, indifferent or frightened. This is the secret strength and wonder of the American educational system.

The author draws on her own experiences as a teenage mother to offer tips on setting and accomplishing goals, providing information on relationships, finances, college, paternity issues, job training, and travel.

This qualitative journey explores how literature informs and challenges my under¬standing of teaching and learning. Insights, questions, and conflicts are revealed through a series of essays in which my evolving teacher identity is illuminated through literature and imagination. Hopefully reading this portrayal of literature, which has been a source of educational insight and imagination for me, will be of use to other educators as they reflect on their own teaching. The primary works of literature used to facilitate this journey are: The Red Badge of Courage (1895), Les Miserables (1862), and American Idiot (2004); Light in August (1932), Seinfeld scripts (1991-98), and Frankenstein (1818); and The Odyssey, Night (1960), and The Souls of Black Folk (1903). By delving beneath my exterior ‘teacher mask,’ a collage of images, anecdotes, reflections, aspirations, and fears is exposed. As a resource for pre-service teachers or a reflective exercise for veteran teachers, this study aims to benefit educators by providing a new pathway through which to better understand their intrinsic identities as teachers. Each chapter concludes with “Recommendations for Reflection” that readers are encouraged to consider individu¬ally and/or collectively. The spirit of daydreams allows me to integrate literature, autobiography, and imagi¬nation through inventive and inspired discourses with literary figures, using au¬thentic quotations as content for original commentaries that further examine the intrinsic nature of teacher identity. My hope is that this journey will inspire other educators to further reflect on realities and possibilities of what it means to be a teacher.

A New York Times Best Seller "Essential reading for all adults who work with black and brown young people...Filled with exceptional intellectual sophistication and necessary wisdom for the future of education."—Imani Perry, National Book Award Winner author of South To America An award-winning educator offers a much-needed antidote to traditional top-down pedagogy and promises to radically reframe the landscape of urban education for the better Drawing on his own experience of feeling undervalued and invisible in classrooms as a young man of color, Dr. Christopher Emdin has merged his experiences with more than a decade of teaching and researching in urban America. He takes to task the perception of urban youth of color as unteachable, and he challenges educators to embrace and respect each student’s culture and to reimagine the classroom as a site where roles are reversed and students become the experts in their own learning. Putting forth his theory of Reality Pedagogy, Emdin provides practical tools to unleash the brilliance and eagerness of youth and educators alike—both of whom have been typecast and stymied by outdated modes of thinking about urban education. With this fresh and engaging new pedagogical vision, Emdin demonstrates the importance of creating a family structure and building communities within the classroom, using culturally relevant strategies like hip-hop music and call-and-response, and connecting the experiences of urban youth to indigenous populations globally. Merging real stories with theory, research, and practice, Emdin demonstrates how by implementing the “Seven Cs” of reality pedagogy in their own classrooms, urban youth of color benefit from truly transformative education.

This book is a theoretical and practical guide to implementing an inquiry-based approach to teaching which centers creative responses to works of art in curriculum. Guided by Maxine Greene’s philosophy of Aesthetic Education, the authors discuss the social justice implications of marginalized students having access to the arts and opportunities to find their voices through creative expression. They aim to demystify the process of inquiry-based learning through the arts for teachers and teacher educators by offering examples of lessons taught in high school classrooms and graduate level teaching methods courses. Examples of student writing and art work show how creative interactions with the arts can help learners of all ages deepen their skills as readers, writers, and thinkers.