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Thinking with Maps: Understanding the World through Spatialization

Spatial reasoning, which promises connection across wide areas, is itself ironically often not connected to other areas of knowledge. Thinking with Maps: Understanding the World through Spatialization addresses this problem, developing its argument through historical analysis and cross-disciplinary examples involving maps. The idea of maps here includes traditional cartographic representations of physical environments, but more broadly encompasses the wide variety of ways that visualizations are used across all disciplines to enable understanding, to generate new knowledge, and to effect change.

The idea of thinking with maps is also used broadly. Maps become, not simply one among many items to learn about, but indispensable tools for thinking across every field of inquiry, in a way similar to that of textual and mathematical language. Effective use of maps becomes a way to make knowledge, much as writing or mathematical exploration not only displays ideas, but also creates them. The book shows that maps for thinking are not just a means to improve geographic knowledge, as valuable as that may be. Instead, they provide mechanisms for rejuvenating our engagement with the world, helping us to become more capable of facing our global challenges.

This book has a broader aim: It is fundamentally about general principles of how we learn and know. It calls for a renewed focus on democratic education in which both the means and ends are democratic. Education, just as the political realm, should follow Dewey’s dictum that “democratic ends need democratic methods for their realization.” Maps and mapping are invaluable in that endeavor.

Available from Rowman & Littlefield (as well as Amazon, etc.), April 1, 2020

978-1-4758-5928-7 • Hardback

978-1-4758-5929-4 • Paperback

978-1-4758-5930-0 • eBook

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Education’s Ecosystems: Learning through Life

EE coverThis book offers a new perspective on learning that is integrated and connected to lived experience. It presents a model for salient characteristics of both biological and pedagogical ecosystems, involving diversity, interaction, emergence, construction, and interpretation.

Examples from around the world show how learning can be made more whole and relevant. The book should be valuable to educators, parents, policy makers, and anyone interested in democratic education.

Foreword by John Pecore, University of West Florida

Available from Rowman & Littlefield (as well as Amazon, etc.), April 1, 2020

ISBN-13: 978-1475851199

ISBN-10: 1475851197
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Démocratie et éthique sociale

Jane Addams’s Democracy and Social Ethics is a fascinating book. Although it was written in 1902, it has a surprising relevance for today.

A major contribution to philosophy, the book develops a theory of social ethics, which extends classical theories oriented toward individual virtues and actions. For social policy it offers ways to think about issues such as racism, immigration, economic injustice, democracy, and social improvement. The abstract ideas are linked to Addams’s own concrete work with Hull-House in Chicago.

Unfortunately, her work is not nearly as well known within the US as it should be. Speakers of languages other than English rarely encounter her work.

Bernard Jung and Céline Jung have gone a long way to remedy that situation, with a translation of Democracy and Social Ethics into French. It has just been issued by Editions Raison et Passions (Dijon, France) as Démocratie et éthique sociale. Céline and I added an introduction discussing the relevance of the book to France and French readers today.

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Progressive Education In Nepal: The Community Is the Curriculum

Nepal is a country with daunting needs in terms of basic education and other social services. At the same time, its cultural and moral wealth provide a strong basis for meaningful life and learning. In particular, it offers fertile ground for progressive education, in which learning grows out of experiences in the community. Thus, despite material poverty, the country holds the possibility of significant advances, even international leadership, in the area of progressive education. This book reports on recent educational innovations. There are 118 color photos.

 

Available in paper and ebook formats: http://www.lulu.com/spotlight/chipbruce

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International Handbook of Progressive Education

International Handbook of Progressive Education cover I returned from Newfoundland to a pleasant surprise. There were three large boxes containing contributor copies of our new International Handbook of Progressive Education (Peter Lang, 2015). The book represents a project involving over 60 authors and editors from countries around the world.

Mustafa Yunus Eryaman and I are editors, aided immeasurably by Section editors John Pecore, Brian Drayton, Maureen Hogan, Jeanne Connell, Alistair Ross, and Martina Riedler.

The International Handbook of Progressive Education engages contemporary debates about the purpose of education, presenting diverse ideas developed within a broadly conceived progressive education movement.

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Youth community inquiry: New media for community and personal growth

Youth community inquiry: New media for community and personal growthBertram C. Bruce, Ann Peterson Bishop, Nama R. Budhathoki (eds.)

Youth Community Inquiry offers a detailed look at how young people use new media to help their communities thrive. Chapters address questions about learning, digital technology, and community engagement through the theory of community inquiry. The settings range from a small farming town, to a mostly immigrant community, to inner-city Chicago, and include youth from ages eight to 20. Going beyond works on social media in a narrow sense, the projects in these settings involve the use of varied technologies, such as GPS/GIS mapping tools, video production, use of archives and databases, podcasts, and Internet radio. The development of inquiry-based activities serves as a record of the diverse experiences and a guide to future projects. The book concludes with an overview of a curriculum that readers may adapt for their own settings.
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Libraries: Changing information space and practice

librairiesThis volume examines the social, cultural, and political implications of the shift from traditional forms of print-based libraries to the delivery of online information in educational contexts. Despite the central role of libraries in literacy and learning, research of them has, in the main, remained isolated within the disciplinary boundaries of information and library science. By contrast, this book problematizes and thereby mainstreams the field. It brings together scholars from a wide range of academic fields to explore the dislodging of library discourse from its longstanding apolitical, modernist paradigm.

Collectively, the authors interrogate the presuppositions of current library practice and examine how library as place and library as space blend together in ways that may be both complementary and contradictory. Seeking a suitable term to designate this rapidly evolving and much contested development, the editors devised the word “libr@ry,” and use the term arobase to signify the conditions of formation of new libraries within contexts of space, knowledge, and capital.

Kaptizke, Cushla, & Bruce, Bertram C. (Eds.) (2006). Libr@ries: Changing information space and practice. Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum. [ISBN 0-8058-5481-9]

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Literacy in the information age: Inquiries into meaning making with new technologies

liabookEducators today want to go beyond how-to manuals and publications that merely celebrate the many exciting new technologies as they appear in schools. Students are immersed in an evolving world of new technology development in which they are not passive recipients of these technologies but active interpreters of them. How do you help learners interpret these technologies as we all become immersed in the new information age? Continue reading →

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Discoveries

Discoveries (1995) was a series of four interactive CD-ROM programs for Grades 3-6 (ages 8-12). It included hypertext, panoramic images, and immersive technology in a pre-web ecology.

Awards

The series won the National Educational Media Award (1996), the New England Book Show Award (1996), the Bookbuilder’s Award (1995), and was selected for the Gallery at the Fifth Annual Macromedia Conference (1994). 

Titles in the series

img_3975Into the Forest (Great Smoky Mountains National Park) [ISBN 0-669-36168-2]

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Teacher to teacher

t2tAlvermann, D. E., Arrington, H. J., Bridge, C. A., Bruce, B. C., Fountas, I. C., Garcia, E., Paris, S. G., Ruiz, N. T., Schmidt, B. A., Searfoss, L. W., & Winograd, P. (1995). Teacher to teacher: A professional’s handbook for the primary classroom. Lexington, MA: D. C. Heath. [218 pp.; ISBN 0-669-35984-X]

Also, Alvermann, D. E., Arrington, H. J., Bridge, C. A., Bruce, B. C., Fountas, I. C., Garcia, E., Paris, S. G., Ruiz, N. T., Schmidt, B. A., Searfoss, L. W., & Winograd, P. (1995). Teacher to teacher: A professional’s handbook for the intermediate classroom. Lexington, MA: D. C. Heath. [216 pp.; ISBN 0-669-35985-8]