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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

forest visitors' centerDiscoveries (1995) was a series of four interactive CD-ROM programs for Grades 3-6 (ages 8-12), with accompanying teacher’s guides. Each CD-ROM takes you on a virtual field trip where you can discover a new environment by scrolling through a 360-degree panorama filled with images, motion video, animation, voices, and music. Students write in an e-journal and “photograph” images on the CD.

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). It was originally published by D. C. Heath, then Houghton Mifflin, later Sunburst.  The technology appears primitive now, but was state-of-the-art in 1995.

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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]

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Electronic Quills: A situated evaluation of using computers for writing in classrooms

Quill bookQuill was a suite of software tools designed to foster an environment for literacy in classrooms. We wrote it in Pascal for the Apple II computer. The software, teacher’s guide, and workshops were used widely, including in village schools in Alaska, which I visited three times during the project in 1983-84. Carol Barnhardt played a major role in setting up that Alaska project and in helping us understand the history and context of schooling in Alaska.

Andee Rubin and I later wrote the book, Electronic Quills, which looks in detail at the stories of early users. 1982-84. The book centers on the words and experiences of teachers and students who used QUILL—a software package developed by the authors to aid in the teaching and learning of writing. It looks in detail at the stories of these early users and considers questions relevant for other teachers, students, researchers, and developers of educational innovations.

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