Learning, Teaching, and Community

This volume brings together established and new scholarly voices to explore how participatory and situated approaches to learning can contribute to educational innovation. The contributors' critical examinations of educational programming and engagements provide insights into how educators, youth, families, and community members understand and enact their commitments to diversity and equitable access. Collectively, these essays complicate notions of community, alerting readers to ways in which community can be constructed other than in geographical and ethnoracial terms--as alliances and collaborations of individuals joining together to accomplish or negotiate shared agendas. The focus on agency combined with social context, a dialectic to which all of the authors speak, enlarges and invigorates our sense of what is pedagogically possible in societies characterized by diversity and flux. *Part I, "Linking Pedagogy to Communities," focuses on dynamic initiatives where practitioners collaborate with community members and other professionals as they acknowledge and build on the cultural, linguistic, and intellectual resources of ethnic-minority students and their communities. *Part II, "Professional Learning for Diversity," centers on the authors' experiences in facilitating opportunities for working with prospective and practicing teachers to develop situated pedagogies, highlighting both the challenges that emerge and the transformations that occur. *Part III, "Learning in Community (and Community in Learning), illustrates how educational innovation can extend beyond the realm of schools and classrooms by elucidating ways in which individuals construct learning venues in out-of-school settings. Learning, Teaching, and Community: Contributions of Situated and Participatory Approaches to Educational Innovation is a compelling and timely text ideally suited for courses focused on teacher education and development, informal learning, equity and education, multilingual and multicultural education, language and culture, educational foundations, and school reform/educational restructuring, and will be equally of interest to faculty, researchers, and professionals in these areas.

Lucinda Pease-Alvarez (University of California, Santa Cruz) (Author), Sandra R. Schecter (Edited by)

Content: C. Sleeter, Foreword. Preface. Part I: Linking Pedagogy to Communities.K.A. Davis, S. Bazzi, H-s. Cho, M. Ishida, J. Soria, "It's Our Kuleana": A Critical Participatory Approach to Language-Minority Education. C. Ballenger, "I Would Sing Every Day": Skepticism and the Imagination. M.A. Gibson, It's All About Relationships: Growing a Community of College-Oriented Migrant Youth. A. Henry, Writing in the Margins of Classroom Life: A Teacher/Researcher Partnership Using Dialogue Journals. C. Haig-Brown, Toward a Pedagogy of the Land: The Indigenous Knowledge Instructors' Program. Part II: Professional Learning for Diversity.S.W. Freedman, Teacher Research, Professional Growth, and School Reform. L. Pease-Alvarez, C. Angelillo, P. Chavajay, Working Through Dilemmas About Homework in an After-School Program: Integrating Theory, Research, and Practice. P. Chavajay, C. Angelillo, L. Pease-Alvarez, Teachers, Mentors, Friends?: Undergraduates' Engagements With Latino Children in an After-School Program. R.P. Solomon, R.K. Manoukian, J. Clarke, From an Ethnic of Altruism to Possibilities of Transformation in Teacher Candidates' Community Involvement. J. Willet, C. Rosenberger, Critical Dialogue: Transforming the Discourses of Educational Reform. Part III: Learning in Community (and Community in Learning).C.E. James, Constructing Aspirations: The Significance of Community in the Schooling Lives of Children of Immigrants. K.P. Jiménez, Lengua Latina: Latina Canadians (Re)constructing Identity Through a Community of Practice. R.C. Henze, Veronica's Story: Reflections on the Limitations of "Support Systems." S. Roy, Who's Got the Norm?: Community and the New Work Order.