Books by "Brian D. Smedley"
3 books found
Transforming Teaching and Learning with Active and Dramatic Approaches
by Brian Edmiston
2013 · Routledge
A CHOICE Outstanding Academic Title 2014! How can teachers transform classroom teaching and learning by making pedagogy more socially and culturally responsive, more relevant to students’ lives, and more collaborative? How can they engage disaffected students in learning and at the same time promote deep understanding though high-quality teaching that goes beyond test preparation? This text for prospective and practicing teachers introduces engaging, innovative pedagogy for putting active and dramatic approaches to learning and teaching into action. Written in an accessible, conversational, and refreshingly honest style by a teacher and professor with over 30 years' experience, it features real examples of preschool, elementary, middle, and high school teachers working in actual classrooms in diverse settings. Their tales explore not only how, but also why, they have changed the way they teach. Photographs and stories of their classroom practice, along with summarizing charts of principles and strategies, both illuminate the critical, cross-curricular, and inquiry-based conceptual framework Edmiston develops and provide rich examples and straightforward guidelines that can support readers as they experiment with using active and dramatic approaches to dialogue, inquiry, building community, planning for exploration, and authentic assessment in their own classrooms.
An artistic discussion on the critical potential of African American expressive culture In a major reassessment of African American culture, Phillip Brian Harper intervenes in the ongoing debate about the “proper” depiction of black people. He advocates for African American aesthetic abstractionism—a representational mode whereby an artwork, rather than striving for realist verisimilitude, vigorously asserts its essentially artificial character. Maintaining that realist representation reaffirms the very social facts that it might have been understood to challenge, Harper contends that abstractionism shows up the actual constructedness of those facts, thereby subjecting them to critical scrutiny and making them amenable to transformation. Arguing against the need for “positive” representations, Abstractionist Aesthetics displaces realism as the primary mode of African American representational aesthetics, re-centers literature as a principal site of African American cultural politics, and elevates experimental prose within the domain of African American literature. Drawing on examples across a variety of artistic production, including the visual work of Fred Wilson and Kara Walker, the music of Billie Holiday and Cecil Taylor, and the prose and verse writings of Ntozake Shange, Alice Walker, and John Keene, this book poses urgent questions about how racial blackness is made to assume certain social meanings. In the process, African American aesthetics are upended, rendering abstractionism as the most powerful modality for Black representation.
Provides a history of the disease called syphilis, how it is transmitted, affects the body, and is treated.