Congratulations to Our Published Authors!
We're so proud that several members of our TCS community authored chapters in recent academic or educational publications.
Ms. Gloria Mitchell, eighth grade teacher and high school transition coordinator at TCS, published an article titled "Thinking Through Failure" in School Studies in Education, Volume 16, Issue 1 by University of Chicago Press.
"Any activity that involves making choices entails the risk of failure, and the more personally meaningful the choices are, the more deeply felt the failure will be," explains Ms. Mitchell. "Drawing on my experiences in supervising the self-chosen, long-term projects of my eighth-grade students, I argue that it is neither possible nor desirable to prevent young people from experiencing failure in a school context."
TCS parent Miranda Johnson, co-authored the chapter "Supporting Policy and Practice to Address Implicit Bias in Discipline" for the book Implicit Bias in Schools published by Routledge. Ms. Johnson is a faculty member at Loyola University Chicago School of Law and co-authored the chapter with a professor in Loyola's School of Education. "We provided an overview of materials we helped develop to support schools to reduce the use of suspensions and expulsions and racial disparities in their administration," she explains. "We described efforts taken by a collaborative of individuals and organizations who came together to offer training and technical assistance to schools following the passage of discipline reform in Illinois. The chapter summarizes our progress as well as our challenges and lessons learned through this work and linked it to the broader challenges of implementing alternatives to exclusionary discipline practices."
Also, our faculty members Mr. Will Hudson and Ms. Angela Whitacre de Resendiz authored a chapter titled, "Calculating Justice? Using Mathematical Mindsets for Teaching from a Social Justice Perspective."
"The chapter addresses building 'mindsets' -- a recent and successful shift in mathematics teaching -- as a guide for teachers to build a social justice mindset curriculum. Rather than relying on specific content units, students and teachers can engage in a more process-oriented approach to learning history," explains Ms. Whitacre de Resendiz. "Much like in math, we can give students tools and space to make meaning of inequity and not simply give prescriptive lessons. Shifting the goal of teaching history or explaining 'isms' from having answers to learning to see, think about, and question historical and current inequities by seeing the continuity, finding patterns in history and social behaviors, recognizing relationships between events, behaviors, policies, representations, etc. so that 'social justice' in the classroom becomes a way of constantly seeing and analyzing the world and not an isolated curricular topic."
The chapter appears in the book, Unsettling Education: Searching for Ethical Footing in a Time of Reform. The book is edited by Brian Charest and our own Kate Sjostrom, TCS Board President.
"In putting this collection together, my co-editor and I sought to highlight those who honor the humanity of students and teachers in the face of standardization and data-centric reforms," says Ms. Sjostrom. "In the process, we worked with some amazing educators from across the country, but it was especially exciting to learn more about the amazing work done right here at TCS."
*Update 4.5.2021 - "Unsettling Education: Searching for Ethical Footing in a Time of Reform" won an Outstanding Book Award from the Society of Professors of Education.
