November 2020 Bookshelf
Books 12 November 2020
Difference Making at the Heart of Learning: Students, Schools, and Communities Alive With Possibility
Tom Vander Ark and Emily Liebtag
Difference Making at the Heart of Learning, by Tom Vander Ark and Emily Liebtag, serves as inspiration and as a practical guide for educators (both formal and informal) who are driven to cultivate the talents and interests of young people, and lean into their innate desire to help build a better world. The book includes new learning priorities centered around making a difference; a framework based on the 25 most important issues of our time; and examples and case studies from a diverse range of projects, people, and places.
Change by Design: How Design Thinking Transforms Organizations and Inspires Innovation
Tim Brown
Dreaming up and bringing to life transformative ideas that lead to a new, learner-centered future for education requires tapping into your capacity to do “rigorous,” need-focused problem solving. As Tim Brown talks about in his book, Change by Design, this skill is not unique to individuals in the “creative” industry. For leaders in education, embracing this truth and exploring the design thinking processes Brown so cogently presents, you might find yourself emboldened to infuse design thinking into your transformational strategy. And, see yourself as a creative.
Future Driven: Will Your Students Thrive in an Unpredictable World?
David Geurin Ed.D.
How do you prepare young people to navigate an increasingly unpredictable world? How about designing learning communities to be future-oriented organizations? In Future Driven, David Geurin argues that through this lens, educators will be empowered to look beyond the status quo to create more opportunities for young learners to have “creative and adaptable learning” experiences. This is a great resource for anyone in the education space looking to take an “evolutionary” leap in how they help young people harness their depth of knowledge and apply it within robust, real-world contexts.
Photographic: The Life of Graciela Iturbide
Isabel Quintero (Author) and Zeke Peña (Illustrator)
Experiencing trauma is a natural part of life. And, out of that pain, we have the capacity to create space for great beauty to emerge. This beauty is creatively captured by Isabel Quintero and Zeke Peña in their inventive biography (which integrates the elements of photo essay, memoir, and graphic novel), Photographic. Their book traces the life of iconic Mexican photographer, Graciela Iturbide, who, beset by tragedy as a young mother, “turned to photography for solace and understanding.” This biography is a great tool for guiding young people, even in the midst of trauma, to hold fast to the things that bring them the most joy and provoke their imagination.
Another Kind of Public Education: Race, Schools, The Media, and Democratic Possibilities
Patricia Hill Collins
One of the key obstacles preventing the invention of an American education system that equally honors all young people is the systemic racism that permeates every segment of society. Sociologist Patricia Hills Collins, in Another Kind of Public Education, identifies this phenomenon as “racism as a system of power” that operates in four distinct domains: structural, disciplinary, cultural, and interpersonal. Collins exposes the levers that enable the manifestation and proliferation of racial inequality and dispels the myth that our children are living in a post-racial world. The resolution she offers is using public education to resist and upend this system by arming young people with the language and tools to confront these systems head on.
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