Teaching, Learning, and Other Miracles: Foreword by William Ayers(5 Transgressions: Cultural Studies and Education)

This book, by award-winning author Grace Feuerverger, explores teaching and learning in schools as a sacred life journey, a quest toward liberation. Written for teacher/educators who wish to make a real difference in the lives of their students, this book speaks to everyone who finds themselves, as she did, on winding and often treacherous paths, longing to discover the meaning and potential in their professional lives at school. This book also honours the struggle of every child who seeks to be rescued, to be heard, and to speak the truth about his or her lived experience. Many such students fall by the wayside, too weary from experiences of violence, war, poverty or other oppressions to continue on their journey towards the life force. A child of Holocaust survivors, Feuerverger wrote this book to tell how School can be a magical place where miracles happen. She shares narratives about her school teaching years, about her university teaching and about her research work. Unifying these is a story of how language, culture and school serendipitously all came together in her childhood to offer her a way to survive --- a path towards repair and restoration. In an era of narrow agendas of 'efficiency' and 'control' in schools, this book dares to suggest that education is and always will be about uplifting of the human spirit. It advocates for the priceless opportunity that good public education can give to students of all backgrounds. Every chapter of this book offers both inspiration and direction, discussing in a multiplicity of ways the act of creating and of being in classrooms as sites of cultural encounters and spaces for possibility and community and knowledge. Each classroom calls out for a witness. Each student is an angel in disguise. Each lesson is a work-in-progress. Each teacher is both an artist and a muse. This book underscores the mystery and the majesty of the teaching-learning experience as an act of courage, love and hope. Teaching is not solely about technique but also about presence, about awareness of both the frailties and potentials of humankind, about helping to create a world more joyful, more creative, more articulate, more compassionate, and more peaceful than it is now. It is first and foremost about sharing dreams of a better future with our students, about saving lives. Nothing more or less really matters.

Review :
“It is in the spirit of resistance and hope that Feuerverger goes in search of a more fully humanistic pedagogy… A book of inspiration and practical guidance…Here, indeed, is a book about miracles—written by a miracle-maker for the miracle-workers teachers might yet become.” -From the Foreword by William Ayers
“A beautifully written quest for meaning through teaching, this narrative imparts a glow and significance to the relation between teachers and learners that can only arise in an awareness of a darkness ordinarily denied. A fine and unusual book, authentic and wise.” -Maxine Greene, Professor of Education (emerita), Teachers College, Columbia University
“A splendid meditation on education. Feuerverger reminds us of the deepest consulation of the Classroom” - Richard Rodriguez, author of Hunger of Memory: The Education of Richard Rodriguez