Brian Charest – författare

This practical book provides teachers, teacher educators, and school leaders with concrete strategies for doing community-based work. By reframing the act of teaching to include working for social change, the author pushes readers to see school and community revitalization as reciprocal, not separate, projects. Drawing on the strategies and tactics of community organizers and activists, Charest describes an approach to schooling that addresses the social and economic concerns that students and families in under-resourced communities confront in their daily lives. He uses a decolonial framework to examine how schools can decenter Whiteness and reimagine curriculum and teaching. He also shows teacher educators how they can better prepare the next generation of civic-minded teachers to create a more just and democratic society. This model of intentional community engagement, when initiated by teachers and school leadership, is designed to re-position schools to take up questions of equity, racism, and the long-term health and well-being of individuals and communities. Book Features:Outlines useful strategies for teachers, teacher educators, and school leaders who want to enact community engagement.Explores how educators can center the voices and experiences of people of color to revitalize teaching and learning.Explains how to build curriculum around local history to address everyday concerns in communities. Provides community engagement strategies for middle and high school educators.

This practical book provides teachers, teacher educators, and school leaders with concrete strategies for doing community-based work.By reframing the act of teaching to include working for social change, the author pushes readers to see school and community revitalization as reciprocal, not separate, projects. Drawing on the strategies and tactics of community organizers and activists, Charest describes an approach to schooling that addresses the social and economic concerns that students and families in under-resourced communities confront in their daily lives. He uses a decolonial framework to examine how schools can de-center Whiteness and reimagine curriculum and teaching. He also shows teacher educators how they can better prepare the next generation of civic-minded teachers to create a more just and democratic society.This model of intentional community engagement, when initiated by teachers and school leadership, is designed to re-position schools to take up questions of equity, racism, and the long-term health and well-being of individuals and communities.Book Features:Outlines useful strategies for teachers, teacher educators, and school leaders who want to enact community engagement.Explores how educators can center the voices and experiences of people of color to revitalize teaching and learning.Explains how to build curriculum around local history to address everyday concerns in communities. Provides community engagement strategies for middle and high school educators.

Unsettling Education: Searching for Ethical Footing in a Time of Reform offers a counter-narrative to the prevailing orthodoxies of schooling and school reform that conflate education and learning with that which can be measured on state-mandated examinations. Despite the push to "settle" the purposes of teaching and schooling in ways that see education as the teaching of a discrete set of skills that align with standardized exams, there are teachers and students who continue to resist standardization and whose stories suggest there are many ways to organize schools, design curriculum, and understand the purposes of education. Unsettling Education shares stories of how teachers have resisted state and local mandates to teach to the test in dehumanizing ways, how such teachers have sought to de-commodify educational spaces, how they have enacted their ethical commitments to students and communities, and how they have theorized such practices, sometimes even reconsidering their roles as teachers and the very purposes of schooling. Volume contributors offer concrete ways in which teachers might challenge the structures of schooling to reveal the full humanity and potential of students through different forms of resistance pedagogy, institutional critiques, and critical self-reflection. Featuring a wide range of voices and contexts, the collections’ chapters blend story and theory, resulting in a volume both accessible and thought-provoking to varied audiences—from undergraduate students of education and concerned citizens to veteran educators, teacher educators, administrators, and policymakers.