ReStorying Education in the United States

Introduction

Over the past century and a half, there have been many textbooks used to provide pre-service educators a foundation on the import of education, curriculum, and educational policy. This serves as a starting point for their future careers as teachers and teacher leaders. This textbook intends to comport these goals for students beginning to study education, content, and pedagogy. However, unlike many of this book’s predecessors and contemporaries, our intention in writing this book is to apply critical perspectives on systemic political and economic structures undergirding public education in the United States. For this project, we take a critical approach to how teachers, students, places, and even languages have been emplaced within this larger educational system that continues to replicate inequalities and, at times, oppression.

Literacy scholar and teacher, Paulo Friere saw pedagogy and the teaching of reading and writing in particular as a means for liberation. This type of pedagogy requires teachers to place themselves amidst and in solidarity with their students in resisting and reforming the systemic injustices brought on to the people with little or no economic, social, or political capital. This book, while still providing the foundational concepts for beginning pre-service educators, intends to position pre-service teachers and teacher educators to critique what Friere (2018) named as the banking model of education that has pervaded our educational system since its formal inception in the 19th century. In order to evaluate and critically examine the banking model, we employ the process of restorying as the primary pedagogical approach for this textbook.

Restorying, as a pedagogical approach, emerges from the social constructivist paradigm that embed learning in situ with real and relevant contexts, utilizes social negotiation and discussion as an essential part of learning, emphasizes multiple perspectives and modes of representation, encourages self-ownership of learning, and invites self-reflection on how one constructs knowledge (Slabon, Richards, & Dennen, 2014). Restorying involves iterations of writing, rewriting, and discussing “personal, student-generated, domain-relevant stories to promote conceptual application, critical thinking, and ill-structured problem solving skills” (p. 505). For each chapter of this textbook, Each chapter’s authors apply restorying to rewrite the underlying narratives, concepts, and ill-structured problems that form our understandings of public education from the past to the present. Each chapter includes a pre-reading activity to help readers activate background knowledge from their own lived experiences, critical essential questions to help sustain inquiry on the topics and concepts throughout the reading process, during reading activities to help guide comprehension, and an end of chapter activity, to consolidate understanding. All the activities in each chapter employ restorying as the primary pedagogical approach to encourage students to rewrite their own internalized narratives, beliefs, and attitudes on teaching, learning, and the purposes of public education.

In addition to applying restorying as the primary method to represent the foundations of public education, The editors have organized this book thematically into two sections. The first section, Teaching and Learning, focuses on our conceptual understandings of teachers and students, the curriculum that guides teaching and learning, the purposes of assessment of student learning, and the political, social, and economic educational policies. The second section, Multiple Perspectives in Education, offers disparate perspectives on education that involve alternate perspectives on linguistic diversity within communities and schools; racial and ethnic disparities that create a school to prison pipeline;  teachers as agents and activists for reform; and global perspectives of education outside the United States that may offer teachers a guide to future possibilities in how we shape education in the United States. While some of these topics and chapters may appear to be outliers from traditional textbooks on education, these chapters restory pedagogy, educational theory, curriculum, and educational policy within these nuanced topics to situate and apply readers’ conceptual understandings embedded within real and lived world of teachers, students, caregivers, and communities. This textbook is unique in being an Open Educational Resource (OER)  available– and affordable– for all who wish to use some or all of these chapters in their education programs.

Lastly, I invite all of us–teacher educators and future educators–to forge solidarity with one another and become active in creating democratic schools where the principal stakeholders become the primary decision makers in schools in regard to curriculum and hiring educational leaders. We need to advocate for democratic practices in schools–elementary, middle school, high school, undergraduate and graduate teacher education programs–as opposed to the corporate for-profit models. Currently, most of the critical decisions involving education policy and curriculum are done behind closed doors decided by the few who hold positions of power. If we are truly to shift education for a sustainable future, we must challenge undemocratic decisions and push for more democratic processes that value the professionalism of educators who are on the frontlines with students working to solve the myriad problems of the world on fire.

Let this book be a way forward in restorying public education that is equitable, sustainable, socially and economically just.

References

Fiere, P. (2018). Pedagogy of the oppressed: 50th anniversary edition. Bloomsbury Academic.

Slabon, W.A., Richards, R.L., and Dennen, V.P. (2014). Learning by restorying. Instructional Science, 505-521. DOI 10.1007/s11251-014-9311-z