This book contrasts authentic approaches to education with classroom practices based primarily on standards external to the individuals who are supposed to learn. While other books tend to promote either a desperate scramble for meeting standards or determined resistance to neoliberal reforms, this book fills that gap in ways that will inspire practitioners, prospective teachers, and teacher educators. Mandates pay only lip service to constructivist and social constructivist principles while thwarting the value of both students and teachers actively creating understandings. Authors in this book assert the central importance of a range of constructivist approaches to teaching, learning, and thinking, inviting careful reflection on the goals and values of education. 

Table of Contents:

Section I: Introduction.- 1. Teaching as if children matter.- 2. The place for Dewey’s constructivism of intelligent action in the American meritocracy of Thorndike.- 3. The Confucian concept of learning.- Section II: Engaged Learning for Understanding: STEM Education.- 4. Pedagogic doublethink: Scientific enquiry and the construction of personal knowledge under the English National Curriculum for science.- 5. The practice turn in learning theory and in science education.- 6. How constructivism can boost success in STEM fields for women and minorities.- Section III: Other Literacies.- 7. Reconceptualizing accountability:  The ethical importance of expanding understandings of literacy and assessment for 21st century learners.- 8. Where DAP is due:  Constructing community across difference with the Dialogue Arts Project.- 9. A constructing perspective on games in Education.- Section IV: Social Studies and Social Life.- 10. Social studies, Common Core, and the threat to constructivist education.- 11. Toward a resolution for teacher-student conflict: Crafting spaces of rigorous freedom with classroom debate.- 12. Activity settings as context for motivation:  Reframing classroom motivation as dilemmas within and between activities.- 13. Expeditionary learning, constructivism, and the emotional risks of open-ended inquiry.- Section V: Implications for the future of public education.- 14. Learning, teaching, and social justice:  Eleanor Duckworth’s perspective.- 15. How documentation of practice contributes to construction and reconstruction of an understanding of learning and teaching.- 16. Reimagining research and practice in education.- 17. School learning as compliance or creation.