Teaching for a Living Democracy: Project-Based Learning in the English and History Classroom

by Joshua Block

Overview

This classroom narrative explores how teachers can build and sustain an intellectually and emotionally fulfilling teaching practice while changing the way students experience school. Written by an English and history teacher in a Philadelphia public high school, this book presents a framework of teaching for a living democracy”supporting learners to produce intellectually rigorous and creative work by designing instruction that intersects with students' lives and interests. The text offers project-based units of study and classroom practices that allow students to reconfigure understandings of themselves, their capabilities, and their roles in the world. Packed with student voices and the work of youth, this book provides a rich window into classroom practices that challenge authoritarian tendencies while cultivating dignity and agency.

Book Features:

• Shares a vision of project-based inquiry learning that is rooted in systemic understandings of social change.
• Provides a pragmatic framework and tools to help teachers develop their practice in creative and sustainable ways.
• Shows how to support diverse learners, with a special focus on the experiences of students who struggle.
• Includes many classroom scenes and examples of curriculum design strategies.
• Offers the realistic perspective of a teacher working in an urban public high school.

“The author’s argument for a ‘living democracy’ is both timely and compelling, illuminated with a richly detailed and accessible account of what it has meant to co-create a curriculum and pedagogy with his diverse group of urban students. A pedagogical tour de force, this book is a must-read for all those who seek new images of what it means to strive for and embrace a truly transformational view of schools and schooling.”
—Susan L. Lytle, Professor Emerita of Education, University of Pennsylvania

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780807778708
Publisher:	Teachers College Press
Publication date:	04/17/2020
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
File size:	767 KB

About the Author

Joshua Block teaches public high school students English and history in Philadelphia. He is a teacher educator, a national board certified teacher, and recipient of a Fulbright Distinguished Award in Teaching.

Table of Contents

Foreword Carla Shalaby ix

Acknowledgments xiii

1 Reframing School Learning 1

Teaching for a Living Democracy 3

Changing the Grammar of Schooling 6

My Teaching Context and Background 7

Agency and Possibility 8

2 Designing Curriculum for Deeper Learning 11

Immigration Oral History Projects 12

Advanced Essay Process 20

Modern-Day de Tocquevilles 28

Coda 33

3 Elevating Student Voices and Truths 35

Acknowledging and Honoring Students' Realities 38

Building Cohesive Classroom Communities 45

Making Learning Complex and Real 50

Prioritizing Student Voices, Decentralizing the Classroom 54

Coda 63

4 Envisioning New Roles for Teachers 65

Reframing Teacher Voice 66

Teachers as Facilitators 67

Teachers as Lead Collaborators 71

Teachers as Consultants and Scholars 73

Coda 76

5 Decolonizing School 78

Insights from Aotearoa, New Zealand 79

Biculturalism and Creating Space in Schools 80

The Re-PLACE-ing Project 81

Our Philadelphia, Our America 88

Coda 94

6 Engaging Multiple Realities of Teaching for a Living Democracy 96

Learning in Action: Art in the Open 97

The Messy Process of Creation 99

Navigating Intolerance 101

Engaging Issues of the World 104

Coda 106

Epilogue: For Teachers 108

Appendix: Additional Classroom Resources 111

References 119

Index 123

About the Author 129

What People are Saying About This

From the Publisher

“Simultaneously inspirational and useful, this book is a visionary, hopeful invitation to dream and a practical, generous resource for translating our dreams into concrete new realities of teaching and learning. What a rare combination in a single text, and a gift that only a practicing teacher working and speaking from direct, daily experience is positioned to offer. We need books like this.”
—From the Foreword by Carla Shalaby, author of Troublemakers: Lessons in Freedom from Young Children at School

“The author’s argument for a ‘living democracy’ is both timely and compelling, illuminated with a richly detailed and accessible account of what it has meant—over 20 years in the classroom—to co-create a curriculum and pedagogy with his diverse group of urban students. Not only does this make his classroom an unusually engaged and lively space for learning that builds from his students’ interests, questions, lived experiences, and collaborative relationships, but together Block and his students have also found agentive ways to extend and deepen their inquiry by forging unique connections with people, places, and spaces in the wider community. A pedagogical tour de force, this book is a must-read for all those who seek new images of what it means to strive for and embrace a truly transformational view of schools and schooling.”
—Susan L. Lytle, Professor Emerita of Education, University of Pennsylvania

Editorial Reviews

Teaching for a Living Democracy: Project-Based Learning in the English and History Classroom offers both a method for civic engagement and a message of faith in the power of young people to serve as agents for change within their own communities right now.”

—Teachers College Record

“Using his own teaching practice as the foundation, Block illustrates effective, context-based principles that have allowed him to teach in ways that encourage democratic thought and civic engagement. He does not prescribe best practices, but rather invites the reader into his classroom to experience his projects, showing rather than telling what works. In his descriptions of classwork, Block presents a raw picture not only of classroom successes, but of challenges, pivots, and necessary adaptations that accurately depict the often messy space of learning.”

— Choice

“In a time when standardized tests are increasingly critiqued by teachers, students, families, and communities, Block’s work offers an important alternative to such emaciated yardsticks of ‘learning.’ Indeed, by showing us what is possible in a classroom, he provides us with more than a model: He gives us hope, an animating force in any democracy.”

—Democracy & Education

From the Publisher