Writing and Teaching to Change the World: Connecting with Our Most Vulnerable Students

Perfect for use in teacher preparation courses and professional learning groups, this book shows what critical pedagogy looks like and identifies the conditions needed for it to emerge in the K–12 classroom. Focusing on and documenting their experiences with one of their most disenfranchised students, six teachers analyze and rethink what they do in the classroom and why they do it. In so doing, each comes to re-imagine who they are as teachers and as individuals. This engaging collection illuminates writing as a powerful tool for thinking deeply about how and why teachers respond to students in particular ways.

Book Features:

• Prompts and suggested writing exercises at the end of each chapter to support teacher-writer groups.
• Guiding questions at the end of each chapter to support the instructional practices of K-12 teachers.
• Powerful stories of teachers' and students' experiences with standards, tracking practices, evaluation practices, and life.
• Helpful appendices, including books for further reading and an essay about the Oral Inquiry Process by Bob Fecho.

“This is an important book for all teachers to read—beginners and experienced, as it confronts all of us as teachers to pay attention to the social and political contexts within which we work and consider what we often ignore—our student’s lives outside of school.”
—From the Foreword by Ann Lieberman, Senior Scholar at Stanford University

“Kudos to Stephanie Jones and her colleagues for making moral sense of the day-to-day craft of education.”
—Carl Glickman, educator and author of The Trembling Field: Stories of Wonder, Possibilities, and Downright Craziness

Stephanie Jones is associate professor in the department of educational theory and practice at The University of Georgia, and co-director of the Red Clay Writing Project. Her books include The Reading Turn-Around: A Five-Part Framework for Differentiated Instruction.