This book raises questions around pedagogy and illness. Morris explores two large issues that run through the text. What does the ill body teach? What does the teacher do through the ill body?

In Are You Mixed?, Sonia Janis explores the spaces in-between race and place from the perspective of an educator who is multi-racial. As she reflects on her own experiences as a seventh grade student up to her eventual appointment as a school administrator, she learns of the complexity of situating oneself in predetermined demographic categories. She shares how she explores the intricacies of undefined spaces that teach her to embrace differences, contradictions, and complexities in schools, neighborhoods and communities. Exploring the in-betweenness (Anzaldua & Keating, 2002; He, 2003, 2010) of her life as a multi-race person problematizes imbedded notions of race, gender, class, and power. The power of this memoir lies in its narrative possibilities to capture the contradictions and paradoxes of lives in-between race and place, “to honor the subtleties, fluidities, and complexities of such experience, and to cultivate understanding towards individual ... experience and the multicultural/multiracial contexts that shape and are shaped by such experience” (He, 2003, p. xvii). This memoir creates new ways to think about and write about in-between experience and their relevance to multicultural and multiracial education. Janis challenges educators, teachers, administrators, and policy makers to view the educational experience of students with multiracial, multicultural, and multilingual backgrounds by shattering predetermined categories and stereotyped classifications and looking into unknown and fluid realms of the in-betweenness of their lives. This challenge helps create equitable and just opportunities and engender culturally responsive and inspiring curricular and learning environments to bring out the best potential in all diverse schools, communities, neighborhoods, tribes and societies.

The SAGE Guide to Curriculum in Education integrates, summarizes, and explains, in highly accessible form, foundational knowledge and information about the field of curriculum with brief, simply written overviews for people outside of or new to the field of education. This Guide supports study, research, and instruction, with content that permits quick access to basic information, accompanied by references to more in-depth presentations in other published sources. This Guide lies between the sophistication of a handbook and the brevity of an encyclopedia. It addresses the ties between and controversies over public debate, policy making, university scholarship, and school practice. While tracing complex traditions, trajectories, and evolutions of curriculum scholarship, the Guide illuminates how curriculum ideas, issues, perspectives, and possibilities can be translated into public debate, school practice, policy making, and life of the general public focusing on the aims of education for a better human condition. 55 topical chapters are organized into four parts: Subject Matter as Curriculum, Teachers as Curriculum, Students as Curriculum, and Milieu as Curriculum based upon the conceptualization of curriculum commonplaces by Joseph J. Schwab: subject matter, teachers, learners, and milieu. The Guide highlights and explicates how the four commonplaces are interdependent and interconnected in the decision-making processes that involve local and state school boards and government agencies, educational institutions, and curriculum stakeholders at all levels that address the central curriculum questions: What is worthwhile? What is worth knowing, needing, experiencing, doing, being, becoming, overcoming, sharing, contributing, wondering, and imagining? The Guide benefits undergraduate and graduate students, curriculum professors, teachers, teacher educators, parents, educational leaders, policy makers, media writers, public intellectuals, and other educational workers. Key Features: Each chapter inspires readers to understand why the particular topic is a cutting edge curriculum topic; what are the pressing issues and contemporary concerns about the topic; what historical, social, political, economic, geographical, cultural, linguistic, ecological, etc. contexts surrounding the topic area; how the topic, relevant practical and policy ramifications, and contextual embodiment can be understood by theoretical perspectives; and how forms of inquiry and modes of representation or expression in the topic area are crucial to develop understanding for and make impact on practice, policy, context, and theory. Further readings and resources are provided for readers to explore topics in more details.

Developed within a network of Canadian researchers and their community partners, this book is a collection of case studies that explore the learning that people do through community engagement. The crucial work here explores learning that is organized by the learners themselves, collectively, rather than as individuals. Reflecting the contributors’ political priorities, the volume covers groups that are highly marginalized in our society and moves on to examine more mainstream citizens.

The Handbook of Cultural Studies in Education brings together interdisciplinary voices to ask critical questions about the meanings of diverse forms of cultural studies and the ways in which it can enrich both education scholarship and practice. Examining multiple forms, mechanisms, and actors of resistance in cultural studies, it seeks to bridge the gap between theory and practice by examining the theme of resistance in multiple fields and contested spaces from a holistic multi-dimensional perspective converging insights from leading scholars, practitioners, and community activists. Particular focus is paid to the practical role and impact of these converging fields in challenging, rupturing, subverting, and changing the dominant socio-economic, political, and cultural forces that work to maintain injustice and inequity in various educational contexts. With contributions from international scholars, this handbook serves as a key transdisciplinary resource for scholars and students interested in how and in what forms Cultural Studies can be applied to education.

This book uses a nine-year experience of teaching world mythology to art students in order to discuss why and how such ancient stories provide significance today. Myth’s weird images and metaphors recall Wyrd (Word), the goddess of the cauldron. Students can be guided into the cauldron of mythic language to feel the stirring of new awareness of what it really means to be human. Psychologically, myth offers insights into family relations, memory, imagination, and otherness. Ecological insights from myth teach the connection among human-animal-plant relations and the organicism of all life forms. Cosmological insights from myth surprisingly echo findings in new science, with its emphasis on quantum mechanics, force fields, black holes, subatomic particles, chaos, and the possibilities of time travel. Two areas often considered completely opposite -- myth and science—actually reflect one another, since both propose theories, albeit in different ways. Myth cannot be laughed away as “mere” fabula, since, like science and psychology, it has long explored adventures into unseen, unknown worlds that yield necessary knowledge about the place of humans in the scheme of things big and small. The “more” of myth will be of interest to teachers and students of curriculum studies, to those seeking to go beyond Oedipus and Gutenberg, and to readers who know that all forms of life (including fingernails and rocks) are wondrous, diverse, alive, capable, purposive, and necessary.

This book showcases the work and thinking of environmental educators who are concerned about the residual mechanism within their field, the guiding symbol of the web of life in all its dynamism notwithstanding.

These highly personal essays from a range of academic settings explore the palpable moments of discomfort, disempowerment, and/or enlightenment that emerge when we discard the fiction that the teacher has no body. Visible and/or invisible, the body can transform both the teacher's experience and classroom dynamics. When students think the teacher's body is clearly marked by ethnicity, race, disability, size, gender, sexuality, illness, age, pregnancy, class, linguistic and geographic origins, or some combination of these, both the mode and the content of education can change. Other, less visible aspects of a teacher's body, such as depression or a history of sexual assault, can have an equally powerful impact on how we teach and learn. The collection anatomizes these moments of embodied pedagogy as unexpected teaching opportunities and examines their apparent impact on teacher-student educational dynamics of power, authority, desire, friendship, open-mindedness, and resistance.

Curriculum and the Life Erratic: The Geographic Cure lays bare the untold damage done to children who are forced to endure the toxic combination of "fermented parenting" (as author Leslie Nissen has termed it) and frequent family moves at the hands of alcoholic parents who perpetually seek the elusive Geographic Cure. While such parents deceive themselves that in the next new place, sobriety will prevail, their children know better. Alcoholics who chronically uproot their families for a fresh start usually carry along every reason to drink. For the school-age children of such cure-seeking alcoholics, the torment of life with a volatile, unpredictable and chronically intoxicated parent is intensified by the anguish of being “the new kid” who changes schools at the whim of the parent. Highly mobile children, bearing an alarmingly long list of prior schools, may be part of a group which Nissen calls Geographic Cure Children, whose chances of finding help are nearly non-existent, despite their acute need for care. The dilemma of this unique subset of Children of Alcoholics is examined via autobiographical, psychoanalytic and fictional lenses. Nissen also recounts her own urge to hit the road when diagnosed with cancer, and explores the Geographic Cure writ large, observing how the current “testing frenzy” and clamor for cures for low test scores dominate educational policy. Could teachers’ panic about accountability cause them to resent new students who appear at their classroom doors mid-year? Is education encumbered because, at the hands of policy-makers, educators are working the Life Erratic?

Discover the simple three-part self-care system that will help you stay calm in class, enjoy a good work–life balance, and keep doing the job you love. It’s a cliché but it’s true: teaching is the best job in the world. So why are more teachers leaving the profession than ever before? Thanks to staff shortages, accountability pressures, and heavy workloads, teachers are burning out fast. This raises the question: How do you stay happy and keep teaching? Michelle Auton has the answer. Drawing on both her own 20+ years in the profession and the experiences of her many teacher friends, Michelle has developed a three-part system to help you not just survive, but thrive in teaching. In What Happy Teachers Do, she takes you through these three principles: 1. Self-care: You’ll learn how to deal with the unique highs and lows of the teaching year and practice good self-care every day. 2. Mindfulness: Michelle explains the neuroscience and benefits of mindfulness, and details short mindful practices that can help you in times of stress, overwhelm, exhaustion, or judgment. 3. Tapping: Tapping is an alternative treatment for physical pain and emotional distress, and can help to restore balance to your body's energy. Use these tapping—aka Emotional Freedom Techniques (EFT)—scripts in both your personal and teaching life, such as when you’re having difficulty sleeping, preparing for a lesson observation, or worried about an awkward conversation with a parent. This book will help all teachers, whether you’re in your first or thirty-first year of teaching, to reduce stress, prioritize self-care, and feel empowered. This is what happy teachers do.