Ian Munday – författare

Students, parents, teachers, leaders, and policy-makers generate and take responsibility for their efforts, often without understanding the nature of the responsibility they hold. Barbara S. Stengel argues that every educational interaction is a call to and opportunity for responsibility for all involved. In short, responsibility represents the goal for students, the guiding vision for educators’ practice, and a useful design principal for leaders and policy makers. Using a critical pragmatist framing of the concept of responsibility, Stengel shows how greater attention to responsibility allows for a deeper understanding of diversity and equity as well as individual and common goods. It enables a deeper understanding of the moral dimensions of teaching and learning prospectively in growth rather than retrospectively in blame. The philosophical discussion of responsibility is coupled with discussion of the lived experiences of students, teachers, aides, and administrators and draws evidence from a case study of a middle school turnaround in Nashville, USA. The Bailey Middle School community developed a reading of responsibility that matched educators’ intuitions and experiences of their work, while enhancing students’ understanding of their place in the world. The book represents a call for educators to be, and become, responsible for their and their students’ lives-in-common and the individual well-being of all in the community.

Collaboration is widely celebrated as an ability schools should teach children to practice. Yet collaboration has a darker side, as its use to refer to those complicit with Nazi occupiers and with colonial oppressors of many kinds suggests. In effect, “collaboration” is a contranym, a word that can mean something or its opposite. To collaborate can mean to work with one’s friends and colleagues for the common good. It can also mean to sell out one’s friends and colleagues for the sake of personal gain. What can schools do to encourage the first and discourage the second? The loyalty and commitment to shared ends that collaboration implies may seem a positive good only insofar as those loyalties and ends are also good – but how to judge?This book asks: to whom should one be loyal and what are the limits of loyalty? What responsibility do collaborators bear for the outcomes of their joint projects? Should I make those friends and those responsibilities my own? These are questions children learn to answer in schools, through the formal and informal education that happens there. Amy Shuffelton explores those questions in the context of children’s lives in schools, including examples from films, literature, and children’s own accounts of moral dilemmas they face around questions of friendship, authority, and their own developing agency. She argues that rather than collaboration being a simple, good practice, considerable care is needed to ensure it serves individuals and their communities well.

Schools and other forms of education have significant impacts on people’s views about emotions and emotional experiences. This book helps students and educators to better understand emotions and their significance in social life and in education. It shows how we often take it for granted that certain emotions, such as happiness, are ‘positive’, while others are ‘negative’ and how personal characteristics such as gender, ethnicity, and race, can make an unfair difference when it comes to what emotions are expected or accepted. It also focuses on how emotions are understood as functional and as moral by different theoretical traditions, from psychology to philosophy. Written in an accessible format, the book encourages broad reflection on what emotions are and why they matter, in relation to the aims of education, what it means to be a good person, and equality and social justice.The ebook editions of this book are available open access under a CC BYNC-ND 4.0 licence on bloomsburycollections.com. Open access was funded by the Karen Lo Eugene Chuang Professorship in Diversity and Equity at the University of Hong Kong.

Sammy has been sick with a virus that has all but destroyed society as we know it. He awakes one morning to discover he is an orphan. His only living relative, his grandfather, lives two hundred miles away in Wales. With no trains, buses or cars running how is he to get there?He packs essentials and, in a highly traumatised state, sets out on his bicycle, having to sleep in woods and fields and eat whatever food nature is able to provide. But soon that journey has to be made on foot. Meeting various characters on the way, he discovers that other people, far from offering him help, need help themselves. Young or old, everyone has their own needs and agendas which they try to embroil him in. Every chapter of the journey presents him with a hurdle he must overcome. Will one of those hurdles prove just too much? Will he reach his grandfather in Wales or will he fail?