Empowering our Students for the Future: Encouraging Self-Direction and Life-Long Learning

Educators of every kind such as school superintendents, principals, teachers, higher education practitioners, community organizers and even students will gain essential skills, resources and examples to encourage and support individual as well as collective empowerment from early childhood education through college in both traditional classrooms and in the broader community. Working toward the goal of empowering young people as active citizens, this collection of chapters presents voices from across the broad community of educators who share their successful individual work of methods and practices that empower young people to engage in their own agency. By using student centered practices in and out of the classroom, their stories demonstrate multiple ways to successfully achieve these ends. The book clearly and effectively presents these concepts: How to encourage self-directed learning; methods and examples of participatory practices and inquiry methods; strategies designing and supporting Problem Based Learning; models for civic engagement; organizing strategies; and practices related to Critical Race Theory. This collection can provide practitioners with strategies and skills that will encourage and develop self-confidence and self-direction in many arenas working together to create change in a democratic landscape as youth learn to use their power.

Table of Contents:
Preface Introduction Chapter 1- Empowering Students to Take Control Through Project-Based Learning Scott Wurdinger Chapter 2- The Promise of Action Civics in Closing the Civic Engagement Gap Arielle Jennings Chapter 3- Engagement of Stakeholders in a Learning Community: Avalon SchoolWalter Enloe and David Blake WillisChapter 4- Finding a Direction, Creating Student Driven Learning Culture Paul Tweed Chapter 5- Have I Ever Stopped You… Fred Chapel Chapter 6- Beyond Revolution: Transforming Whole Schools to Foster Student Power Adam Fletcher Chapter 7- Empowering the Self-Perceived Powerless: Reflections of a first-year, high school science teacher Kimberly Kim Takagi Chapter 8- Empowering Students through Curriculum Development in the College Classroom Kiel Harell and Sara Lam Chapter 9- Preparing New Teachers to Radically Change Predictable and Unequal Outcomes for P-12: A Critical Race Theory Approach Timothy Berry Chapter 10- Engaging and Deschooling Students: Promoting the Grande Passion through Failure and Mastery with Self Determination Theory Pete Allison Chapter 11- (Re)Design to Empower Students In the Classroom and at Scale Jeff Galle Chapter 12- Creating a Foxfire-like project in Teacher Education Carlin Bell, Malaika Boyer, Fred Chapel, Jillian Eissler, Ryan Johnson, Muniza Khan, Diana Lesso, Jose Lovo, J. Cynthia McDermott, Zoe Morris, and Ian Stuart About the Editors About the Contributors

About the Author :
Scott Wurdinger is a professor of experiential learning and leadership studies at Minnesota State University, Mankato. His most recent book published with Rowman and Littlefield is titled Changing the Status Quo: Courage to Challenge the Education System. Cynthia McDermott is a faculty member in education at Antioch University Los Angeles. Her academic interest is in encouraging opportunities for young people to have power and to stand against oppression. Kiel Harell is an assistant professor of education at the University of Minnesota, Morris. His research focuses on increasing opportunities for democratic deliberation in teacher education. Hilton Smith, starting in 1965, taught secondary social studies in a variety of demographic situations – rural, suburban, urban – including an alternative high school in Atlantic Public Schools which he cofounded. He served as Coordinator of Education for the Foxfire Foundation until joining the School of Education at Piedmont College, Georgia, until his retirement in June 2017 to assume a part-time status.

Review :
Empowering Our Students for the Future is a visionary book that gives us real world examples of just how powerful it is when children make decisions about their own learning. In doing so, this collection also shows us how to challenge the teacher and test centered education being promoted by corporate education reformers. Creating the conditions for student voice and participation is critically essential to the social and political formation of young people. In this book, the editors bring together an excellent set of essays that provide educators with useful and empowering strategies to support the democratic formation of their students as engaged citizens for a just and democratic society. Empowering our Students for the Future is an excellent resource for educators interested in helping all students take responsibility for their own learning. The book provides exceptional examples that demonstrate the importance of creating learning experiences, which raise engagement and critical skills for success through relevant projects and increased opportunities to increase student agency. If we’re ever going to be able to use schools as tools to help people of all ages find their ways to lives worth living and work worth doing, we will have to question the assumptions supporting the schooling status quo. Empowering Our Students for the Future is full of the kinds of questions we need and some possible answers as well.