Editors
"...Unsettling Education offers both hope and guidance. The dazzling educators gathered together by Brian Charest and Kate Sjostrom are animated by an urgent spirit of resistance to the status quo which they recognize as representing a kind of state of emergency for the oppressed, the exploited, and the disadvantaged...."
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--William Ayers, Distinguished Professor of Education and Senior  University Scholar at the University of Illinois at Chicago (retired)
Synopsis
Unsettling Education: Searching for Ethical Footing in a Time of Reform produces a counter-narrative to the prevailing orthodoxies of schooling and school reform that conflate education and learning with that which can be measured on state-mandated examinations. The central argument of the book is that despite the push to “settle” the purposes of teaching and schooling in ways that see education as the teaching of a discrete set of skills that align with standardized exams, there are teachers and students who continue to resist standardization and whose stories suggest there are many ways to organize schools, design curriculum, and understand the purposes of education. Unsettling Education shares stories of how teachers have resisted state and local mandates to teach to the test in dehumanizing ways, how such teachers have sought to de-commodify educational spaces, how they have enacted their ethical commitments to students and communities, and how they have theorized such practices, sometimes even reconsidering their role as teachers and the very purposes of schooling. Volume contributors offer concrete ways in which teachers might challenge the structures of schooling to reveal the full humanity and potential of students through different forms of resistance pedagogy, institutional critiques, and critical self-reflection. Featuring a wide range of voices and contexts, the collections’ chapters blend story and theory, resulting in a volume both accessible and thought-provoking to varied audiences—from undergraduate students of education and concerned citizens to veteran educators, teacher educators, administrators and policy makers.