Books by "William F. Pinar"

6 books found

Curriculum as Institution and Practice

Curriculum as Institution and Practice

by William A. Reid

2012 · Routledge

This volume brings together a collection of essays by William A. Reid that present and elaborate the deliberative tradition of curriculum theory, and examine the implications of a deliberative perspective for approaches to policy making and school systems. The essays illustrate the development of Reid's understanding of the deliberative tradition and his efforts to extend it from a focus on practice to one that embraces conceptions of schooling as an institution. Institution and practice are the key concepts which guide and illuminate the central thesis of the book: To be effective, a theory of curriculum must be able to talk not only about questions of desirable practice, but also about questions of how practice may be aided or constrained by the nature of the institution within which it takes place. This significant new contribution to the literature of curriculum studies: *represents a unique attempt to synthesize what have often been treated as quite separate issues: questions of the philosophical basis for curriculum decision making, questions of processes of decision making, and questions of the nature of schools and classrooms; *presents its material in an evolutionary way, focusing on the continuing development of ideas, rather than on a "rhetoric of conclusions"; and *offers a summing up of thought and achievement in the deliberative tradition that is not otherwise available.

The Worldliness of a Cosmopolitan Education

The Worldliness of a Cosmopolitan Education

by William F. Pinar

2009 · Routledge

Pinar positions himself against three pressing problems of the profession: the crime of collectivism that identity politics commits, the devaluation of academic knowledge by the programmatic preoccupations of teacher education, and the effacement of educational experience by standardized testing. A cosmopolitan curriculum, Pinar argues, juxtaposes the abstract and the concrete, the collective and the individual: history and biography, politics and art, public service and private passion. Such a curriculum provides passages between the subjective and the social, and in so doing, engenders that worldliness a cosmopolitan education invites. Such worldliness is vividly discernible in the lives of three heroic individuals: Jane Addams (1860-1935), Laura Bragg (1881-1978), and Pier Paolo Pasolini (1922-1975). What these disparate individuals demonstrate is the centrality of subjectivity in the cultivation of cosmopolitanism. Subjectivity takes form in the world, and the world is itself reconstructed by subjectivity’s engagement with it. In this intriguing, thought-provoking, and nuanced work, Pinar outlines a cosmopolitan curriculum focused on passionate lives in public service, providing one set of answers to how the field accepts and attends to the inextricably interwoven relations among intellectual rigor, scholarly erudition, and intense but variegated engagement with the world.

The Good Preschool Teacher

The Good Preschool Teacher

by William Ayers

1989 · Teachers College Press

This important book is the result of an in-depth inquiry into the lives and work of six outstanding preschool teachers. Through a creative, original combination of interviews, letters, vignettes, interpretive analysis, and reflections, the author describes and links together the events, people, and experiences that have made these women the excellent teachers they are.Ayers’ method of using autobiographical reflection to understand teaching practice will be excellent for use in pre-service teacher education classes and inservice teacher renewal efforts. Well-written and highly readable, this book is essential for early childhood practitioners—both women and men—at all levels and within all types of services, and will appeal to researchers and parents, as well.“If teachers are to continue to grow, they must at some point begin to study themselves.” —From the Foreword by Vivian Gussin Paley

In this volume, Pinar enacts his theory of curriculum, detailing the relations among knowledge, history, and alterity. The introduction is Pinar’s intellectual life history, naming the contributions he has made to understanding educational experience. Study is the center of educational experience, as he demonstrates in the opening chapter. The alterity of educational experience is evident in his conceptions of disciplinarity and internationalization, interrelated projects of historicization, dialogical encounter, and recontextualization. By reactivating the past, not by instrumentalizing the present, we can find the future, explicated in his studies of the Eight-Year Study, the Tyler Rationale, and the gendering and racialization of U.S. school reform. The interrelation of race and gender is emphasized in the chapters on Ida B. Wells and Jane Addams. The technologization of education is critiqued through analysis of the achievements of George Grant and Pier Paolo Pasolini. The educational project of subjective and social reconstruction is explored through study of Musil’s essayism, a genre that corrects the problems accompanying ethnography and created by identity politics.

Curriculum in Abundance

Curriculum in Abundance

by David William Jardine, Sharon Friesen, Patricia Anne Clifford

2006 · Psychology Press

Addresses curriculum and teaching topics, such as mathematics, science, environmental education, social studies, language arts, and the arts curriculum. This book also sheds light on the issues that arise from inviting student-teachers and practicing teachers into the idea of curriculum of abundance.

Pragmatism, Postmodernism, and Complexity Theory

Pragmatism, Postmodernism, and Complexity Theory

by William E. Doll

2012 · Routledge

The first collection of the key works of the major curriculum studies scholar William E. Doll, Jr., this volume provides an overview of his scholarship over his fifty-year career and documents the theoretical and practical contribution he has made to the field . The book is organized in five thematic sections: Personal Reflections; Dewey, Piaget, Bruner, Whitehead: Process And Transformation; Modern/Post-Modern: Structures, Forms and Organization; Complexity Thinking; and Reflections on Teaching . The complicated intellectual trajectory through pragmatism, postmodernism and complexity theory not only testifies to Doll's individual lifetime works but is also intimately related to the landscape of education to which he has made an important contribution. Of interest to curriculum scholars around the world, the book will hold special significance for graduate students and junior scholars who came of the age in the field Doll helped create: one crafted by postmodernism and, more recently, complexity theory.