SARAH M. STITZLEIN
Democracy is struggling in an age of populism and post-truth. In a world swirling with competing political groups stating conflicting facts, citizens are left unsure whom to trust and which facts are true. The role of honesty in civic life is in jeopardy. When we lose sight of the importance of honesty, it hampers our ability to solve pressing problems. Teaching Honesty in a Populist Era asserts that to better enable young citizens to successfully engage in civic inquiry, the role of honesty must be foregrounded within education. The book posits that honesty is a key component of a well-functioning democracy.
Building upon this foundation, author, Sarah Stitzlein, defines what honesty is, how it is connected to truth, and why both are important to and at risk in democracies today. Furthermore, the chapters offer guidance on how honesty and truth should be taught in schools. Situated within the philosophical perspective of pragmatism, the book examines the relationships between honesty, truth, trust, and healthy democratic living and provides recommendations for improving citizenship education and our ability to engage in civic reasoning.
Teaching Honesty in a Populist Era offers an improved path forward within our schools by detailing how to cultivate habits of truth-seeking and truth-telling. Such honesty will better enable citizens to navigate our difficult political moment and increase the likelihood that citizens can craft long-term solutions for democratic life together.
Winner of the John Dewey Society Outstanding Achievement Award.
**Available for FREE via Open Access on OUP website**
Democracy is struggling in America. Citizens increasingly feel cynical about an intractable political system, while hyper-partisanship has dramatically shrank common ground and intensified the extremes. Out of this deepening sense of political despair, this book seeks to revive democracy by teaching citizens how to hope. Offering an informed call to citizen engagement, it directly addresses presidential campaigns, including how to select candidates who support citizens in enacting and sustaining hope. Drawing on examples from American history and pragmatist philosophy, this book explains how hope can be cultivated in schools and sustained through action in our communities -- it describes what hope is, why it matters to democracy, and how to teach it.
Winner of the Society of Professors of Education Outstanding Book Award. The project was supported by the Templeton Foundation, the Spencer Foundation, the Society for the Advancement of American Philosophy, and the Center for Ethics & Education. The book has been the topic of the Bode Lecture at Ohio State University, the Wolfe Lecture in American Politics at Boston College, the Life of the Mind Lecture at the University of Cincinnati, a keynote address to the Association of Teacher Educators, a speech at the Carsey Center of Public Policy, The Merritt Award in Philosophy of Education, and an invited talk at Goethe University in Germany.
Oxford University Press, 2020.
**Available for FREE via Open Access on WorldCat**
This book helps readers to understand how schools work, how they can have an influential role in shaping them, and what their responsibilities are to supporting public schools as a key institution of democracy.
Now, more than ever, citizens increasingly do not feel as though public schools are our schools, forgetting that we have influence over their outcomes and are responsible for their success. In effect, accountability becomes more and more about finding failure and casting blame on our school administrators and teachers, rather than taking responsibility as citizens for shaping our expectations of the classroom, determining the criteria we use to measure its success, and supporting our public schools as they nurture our children for the future.
Moving from philosophical critique of these changes to practical suggestions for action, it provides readers with the tools, habits, practices, and knowledge necessary to support public education.
Oxford University Press, 2017.
Winner of the American Educational Studies Association Critics' Choice Award.
This book argues that political dissent is essential to a healthy democracy and explains how we should teach for it in our schools.
Teaching for Dissent looks at the implications of new forms of dissent for educational practice. The reappearance of dissent in political meetings and street protests opens new possibilities for improved democratic life and citizen participation. This book argues that this possibility will not be fulfilled if schools do not cultivate the skills necessary for our citizens to engage in political dissent. It looks at how practices in schools, such as the testing regime and the 'hidden curriculum', suppress students' ability to voice ideas that stand in opposition to the status quo. Teaching for Dissent calls for a realignment of the curriculum and the practices of schooling with a guiding vision of democratic participation.
Routledge, 2014.
Winner of the American Educational Studies Association Critics' Choice Award.
This book explains how children learn to enact and respond to race and gender in schools and how schools can work to transform racism and sexism.
Every day teachers encounter moments of racial and gender tension in their classrooms. In the most drastic cases, these situations erupt into overt conflict or violence, while in other instances they go largely unnoted. Such incidents reveal that despite equality legislation and the good intentions of many teachers, racial and gender problems persist. How can teachers more effectively handle these moments? How can they prevent them in the future? This book offers both theoretical and concrete suggestions for dealing with actual classroom race and gender related events. This book argues that within schools, children learn how to enact and respond to race and gender through the cultivation of habits, including dispositions, bodily comportment, and ways of interacting. In a spirit of social transformation, this book argues that when students learn to inhabit their races and genders more flexibly, many classroom problems can be prevented and current social structures of identity-based oppression can be alleviated.
Rowman & Littlefield, 2008.
