The Educator And The Ordinary

This book creates a unique discursive environment to consider how initial teacher education can support student teachers in practical and personal senses, in what they can do and who they are. What is it to care? To develop our voice? To educate in beautifully risky ways? Engaging with the philosophy of Stanley Cavell, Gert Biesta and Nel Noddings, central capabilities of the educator are suggested: Acknowledgement, Autobiography, Imagination, Interruption, Attention and Uncertainty, culminating in the essential, unifying capability of The Ordinary, underpinned by Complexity and Hope. This book will appeal to those interested and engaged in initial teacher education, professional development and support from early years to higher education and practicing educators. It aims to enrich theoretical as well as practical discussion, to influence how we live, how we think, and how we treat each other.

A plain-English guide to teaching phonics. Every parent can teach reading—no experts need apply! Too many parents watch their children struggle with early reading skills—and don't know how to help. Phonics programs are too often complicated, overpriced, gimmicky, and filled with obscure educationalese. The Ordinary Parent's Guide to Teaching Reading cuts through the confusion, giving parents a simple, direct, scripted guide to teaching reading—from short vowels through supercalifragilisticexpialidocious. This one book supplies parents with all the tools they need. Over the years of her teaching career, Jessie Wise has seen good reading instruction fall prey to trendy philosophies and political infighting. Now she has teamed with dynamic coauthor Sara Buffington to supply parents with a clear, direct phonics program—a program that gives them the know-how and confidence to take matters into their own hands.

This is a two-volume set. The first volume explores the theory as to how special schools could respond to the many changes with which they are currently faced. The second volume carries forward this theme by presenting case studies of real schools, real developments, not theory, that might be replicated or serve as a model in other setttings.

Randall and Kenyon examine the concept of wisdom. What wisdom is exactly has vexed thinkers throughout the history of thought. Indeed, for much of modern times, the topic has been taboo, given the intellectual climate created by such movements as analytic philosophy, behaviorist psychology, and cognitive science. This study adds to a growing movement that is reclaiming wisdom as a meaningful concept by viewing human development in terms of metaphors that enrich models like mind-as-computer, which proposes mental activity is reducible to processing information. Randall and Kenyon's metaphors are life-as-story and life-as-journey and their conceptual extension, life-as-adventure: ordinary metaphors with extraordinary implications. Through the lenses of these intertwining, time-honored tropes, the authors see wisdom not as an unattainable ideal nor as the sole province of experts or educators, geniuses, therapists, or saints. Rather, it is potentially within the reach of everyone, not as a commodity but as a quality of life; as a matter of being, not of having. Insofar as everyone is on a journey and has--or is--a story, everyone has access to an ordinary wisdom, which it behooves people to explore and express. This book will be of particular interest to scholars, students, and researchers involved with psychology, gerontology, theology, philosophy, and education.