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Below you will find our latest e-newsletter sent August 31, 2010.
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1) Planning to Change the World: A Plan Book for Social Justice Teachers (BOOK)
2) Get all 24 talks from AERO for less than $50! (RESOURCE)
3) Update on Start a School 101 & History/Theory Courses (COURSE)
4) Approach Your Local Library About Turning Points (REQUEST)
5) Become an AERO Distributor (OPPORTUNITY)
6) Less than 20 Books Still Left on Clearance! (SALE)
7) Fix Our Schools (SHARE YOUR STORY)
8) De-institutionalizing Macaulay: Reclaiming the wider meaning of education (ARTICLE)
9) The Creativity Crisis (BLOG)
Education Revolution E-Newsletter
1) Planning to Change the World: A Plan Book for Social Justice Teachers (BOOK)
Edited
by Tara Mack and Bree Picower
"...an imaginative and innovative idea in the field of
education. It is something that teachers all over the country who have social
consciences will find useful because it will give them an opportunity and a
framework for putting into practice what they believe. I hope it will be widely
adopted."
Howard Zinn, author of A People’s History of the United
States
Planning to Change the World is a plan book for educators who believe their
students can and will change the world. It is designed to help teachers
translate their vision of a just education into concrete classroom activities.
The 2010/2011 edition has all the things you would expect in a lesson plan book
plus:
* Weekly planning pages packed with important social justice
birthdays and historical events.
* References to online lesson plans and
resources related to those dates.
* Tips from social justice teachers across the country.
* Inspirational quotes to share with students.
* Thought-provoking essential questions to spark classroom
discussions on critical issues.
* Reproducible social justice awards for students. and much more.
Published by New York Collective of Radical Educators (NYCoRE)
and Education for Liberation Network.
Order online at www.educationrevolution.org/planbook.html
"Finally, a plan book that is enlightening, provocative and
fun."
Lisa Delpit, author of Other People’s Children
"In our daily work, teachers need their feet on the ground and their eyes on the
horizon. Planning to Change provides both: A practical place to record our plans
and a weekly reminder that we need keep bending the curriculum towards justice.
This book is one of the gifts I give new teachers."
Linda Christensen, author of Reading, Writing, and Rising
Up
2) Get all 24 talks from AERO for less than $50!
(RESOURCE)
It's taken a few weeks, but we finally have the DVD-Rom set
of all the AERO talks ready! These are lower resolution than regular DVDs,
but clear enough to watch on your computer (higher quality than most YouTube
videos). This is a great low-cost way to watch all the talks
from the 2010 AERO conference!
These files are compatible on PCs and Macs with a DVD drive and a video player such as iTunes, Windows Media Player, and Quicktime. These discs will play on select DVD players that have the ability to play these files. They will not play on most DVD players.
Visit
http://www.educationrevolution.org/2010dvdrom.html for more information and
to order. The price is $49.95 or $44.95 for members.
We also have one last full set of the 24 AERO conference DVDs that we can still sell at the discounted price of $6.25 a piece, a total of $150 ($135 for members). After someone orders the final set, the price will double as that is the last of our bulk order. Visit www.educationrevolution.org/2010dvds.html to order.
3) Update on Start a School 101 & History/Theory Courses (COURSE)
We now have enough serious interest in the School Starters
course, the History and Theory of Educational Alternatives course, and the
school starters in Spanish course that we can announce that all three will be
given this year. We have room for about 6 more participants in each course.
Right now we have just asking people to continue to express interest. This is
not a final commitment but it will give us an idea how many people will take
each course. The school starters class has been very effective in helping people
get from their dream of starting a school to opening their school. The daily
give and take between participants and with staff and resource people is
crucial. We have helped start over 40 new schools (http://www.educationrevolution.org/aero-start-up.html)
and alternatives in the last four years we have been offering these courses.
Also, this is the first time we will offer the course in Spanish. Ron Miller has
again agreed to offer the History and Theory class, which has always been
enthusiastically received. Let us know if you have interest in any of the
courses and which ones. Just reply to this e-newsletter or write to
jerryaero@aol.com
People have asked if they need to be clost to starting a school to join that course. Actually people come in at many stages, from just thinking about to to already started. This works well for everyone in the group.
For more information on last year's courses go to:
http://www.educationrevolution.org/onlinecourses.html
4) Approach
Your Local Library About Turning Points (REQUEST)
As the drive for the matching fund nears completion as part of the Sustain AERO
Campaign, we are turning our attention to marketing the Turning Points
book, as you will see below in the item about the creation of our distribution
network. If you are not in a position to become a distributor, everyone on this
list can help us in another, very simple way: Please contact your local library
and bookstores and ask them to order Turning Points. If only ten
percent of you on this list did that it would generate a great deal of support
for AERO, as well as get a simply amazing book about learner-centered education
into many people’s hands. Please do it today!
You can call your library and tell them they can order at EducationRevolution.org or (800) 769-4171.
Even more effective would be printing the 2-page promotional PDF (with ordering information) and handing it to your librarian and favorite bookstores. You can download it by visiting http://lib.store.yahoo.net/lib/educationrevolution/turningpointspromo.pdf or by e-mailing your request to jerryaero@aol.com
5) Become an AERO Distributor (OPPORTUNITY)
We are creating a distribution network for our new book Turning Points: 35
Visionaries in Education Tell Their Own Stories and possibly other books.
We will have a limited number of distributors, organized geographically. We
already have tentative distributors for New Hampshire, Southern Oregon, Northern
California, southern New Jersey, St. Louis, Missouri, Puerto Rico, South Africa
and Finland. We can use many more!
Each distributor will have exclusive rights in their area to buy the books at
wholesale price. Distributors must buy a minimum of 10 books at a 50% discount
and may continue to buy them in minimum lots of five. Distributors can sell
copies to individuals, and schools and organizations can sell them as
fundraisers. This works in a mutually beneficial way financially and promotes
learner-centered education. We are particularly interested in people who can
make arrangements with colleges and universities. We will send further
information to those of you who are interested.
For more information about becoming a distributor go to
http://www.educationrevolution.org/distributors.html
You may also contact me directly at
jerryAERO@aol.com or simply reply to this e-newsletter.
6) Less than 20 Books Still Left on Clearance! (SALE)
Less than 20 excellent titles remain at clearance prices! We have only a few copies available for most titles, so act now if you want them! Remember, purchasing books from AERO is yet another great way to support our work.
Authors of clearance books include: John Taylor Gatto, Deborah Meier, Chris Mercogliano, and Matt Hern!
View all clearance titles at: www.educationrevolution.org/clearance.html
View main titles at: www.educationrevolution.org/products.html
7) Fix Our Schools (SHARE YOUR STORY)
From funding and teacher shortages to alarmingly high
drop-out rates, America is facing an unprecedented crisis in education.
Fortunately, some schools are getting it right. Which ones and what’s their
recipe for success?
CNN kicks off “Fix Our Schools” week on August 30th, highlighting concrete,
unique solutions to the troubles facing the nation’s schools. And we're making
this special public appeal right now to hear directly from parents, students and
their teachers. We want you to tell us:
Why is your school the best?
Why is your teacher the best?
And parents, what would you be willing to pay to fix our schools?
What programs would you be willing to forgo in order to ‘fix’ the classroom?
Whether it's a particular teaching style or an innovative after-school program,
show us through photos and video the small things that are making a big
difference in your school today.
Share your story at http://ireport.cnn.com/ir-topic-stories.jspa?topicId=319206
8)
De-institutionalizing Macaulay:
Reclaiming the wider meaning of education
(ARTICLE)
Manish Jain
At a time when the world is calling for urgent systemic transformation, the
Right to Education (RtE) Act stands as a regressive and reductionist document
that is based on 19th century colonial assumptions of education and learning. It
institutionalizes Macaulay’s racist vision of education while devaluing the wide
range of learning assets, learning spaces, learning traditions and learning
experiments that exist in India. There is a certain irony in that the framers of
the RtE seem to have failed to learn from history, science, and many of the
other subjects which they wish to propound. One wonders whether there can be
space in the RtE for an evolutionary and pluralistic post-post colonial vision
of the 21st century which highlights the policy design principles of
flexibility, diversity and co-creation.
As the father of an 8-year old girl, I believe that the RtE is an insult to the
intelligence of children and parents all over India. It violates the Universal
Declaration of Human Rights (Article 26) which explicitly states that parents
have the prior right to choose the kind of education that shall be given to
their children. Nowhere in the RtE document is this aspect of the Universal
Declaration mentioned. The sacred role of parents and community in the child’s
learning process has been reduced to their becoming mere chowkidars of the
school, as benevolent Big Brother aka the State aka India, Inc. takes monopoly
control over the very meaning of education and development.
Thus, we as an extended family, have chosen unschooling as the best form of
holistic education for our daughter, Kanku. There are many reasons behind this
but after several years of research and experience, we have come to believe that
schooling stifles creativity, curiousity, compassion, collaboration,
self-initiative, activism, entrepreneurial spirit, wisdom, and self-discipline
in children. It fills them with fear, stress, false inferiority/superiority, and
vicious competition. Unschooling differs from homeschooling and other forms of
alternative schooling in several ways. It does not follow any prescribed
government curriculum, norms, or textbook. The topics of study come from life
itself and from the naturally unfolding questions, interests and needs of each
individual child. Exams are not limited to pieces of paper but rather come from
everyday practical challenges that emerge in the community as well as one’s own
honest self-assessment. The parents’ role is not as know-it-all teachers but as
honest co-learners who are committed to continuously unlearning and uplearning
with their children. There is a strong commitment to building healthy and
sustainable communities and accessing diverse community knowledge systems.
Rather than remaining wedded to an abstract notion of a unipolar,
hyper-competitive ‘mainstream’ (driven by the values of the global
industrial-military economy), unschooling seeks to validate the profound reality
of many streams, many dreams and many alternatives.
Read more at: http://www.teacherplus.org/debate/de-institutionalizing-macaulay-reclaiming-the-wider-meaning-of-education
9) The
Creativity Crisis (BLOG)
For the first time, research shows that American creativity is declining. What
went wrong--and how we can fix it.
Back in 1958, Ted Schwarzrock was an 8-year-old third grader when he became one
of the “Torrance kids,” a group of nearly 400 Minneapolis children who completed
a series of creativity tasks newly designed by professor E. Paul Torrance.
Schwarzrock still vividly remembers the moment when a psychologist handed him a
fire truck and asked, “How could you improve this toy to make it better and more
fun to play with?” He recalls the psychologist being excited by his answers. In
fact, the psychologist’s session notes indicate Schwarzrock rattled off 25
improvements, such as adding a removable ladder and springs to the wheels. That
wasn’t the only time he impressed the scholars, who judged Schwarzrock to have
“unusual visual perspective” and “an ability to synthesize diverse elements into
meaningful products.”
Read more at
http://www.newsweek.com/2010/07/10/the-creativity-crisis.html?obref=obinsite
Related: Watch two poignant videos from Sir. Ken Robinson titled, "Do Schools Kill Creativity" and "Bring on the Learning Revolution" at http://aeroeducation.org/2010/08/31/do-schools-kill-creativity-video/
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Ph. 516.621.2195
Fx: 516.625.3257
info@educationrevolution.org
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