Teaching To Change The World

Author Jeannie Oakes was the founding director of UCLA’s Center X--the institutional home of the university’s teacher education program--a program based on the research and principles that Teaching To Change The World represents. Oakes draws from her distinguished research career as a sociologist of education to integrate the components of educational foundations into a thematic and ideological whole. The result is a sustainable theory of education that positions new teachers to be highly competent in the classroom, lifelong education reformers, and education leaders and partners with students and families. Co-author Martin Lipton brings to this book 31 years of classroom experience and a parallel career as education writer and consultant. His photographs of the book’s featured teachers and their students reveal that social justice classrooms are both ordinary and inspired.

If you want to teach with traditional, back-to-basics methods, then read this book to at least see the other side. Use it to develop your own disagreement. If you want to teach in a way that encourages students to create knowledge and think critically, read this book to understand how this is even possible, but also go find another book which takes the opposite perspective so you can fully develop your own understanding of teaching.

Its true, you have to take much of this book with a grain of salt. But the fact is that there is no "center" to the politics of teaching, and there is no fair and balanced way to present any political agenda. The choice to teach in a traditional manner is a political choice as well.

What this book lacks is a deeper description of traditionalist/conservative motives in the educational arena. Too often it glosses over the desires of traditionalist motivation and insituates consipiracy theory about the true goal of such groups' agendas.

However, if you keep all this in mind as you read it, you'll learn some rather fascinating things.


interesting   May 21, 2002
9 out of 12 found this review helpful

This book is very upfront with its goals. It advocates the examination of every aspect of schooling in an attempt to overhaul the system to maximize the effectiveness of learning.
Such an examination has at its core three questions. As they were expressed by the professor of the course for which I read this book, they are "What knowledge?, Why that knowledge?, And who benefits from passing on that knowledge?" It is obvious, even from the title, that the authors don't believe that the benefits of traditional education practices are widespread. Indeed, they advocate a progressivist philosophy with a particular emphasis on multicultural education.
I'm not sure how this really affects my opinion of the book. While I do tend to believe in a fairly student-centered approach to teaching, and I do appreciate the need for greater cultural awareness in this increasingly globalized world, the tone of the book seems a little too forceful for my tastes, neglecting the fact that many Americans work from a basis of the western culture they grew up in, and insulting that culture, which this book borders on doing at times, is not a good way to convert people to your side.
What I did like about this book is the completeness of its history, as it details events that are both notable and not so notable that have had impact on the development of educational theory and educational politics, even if the impact isn't so obvious. And even if the tone does bother me at times, I must admit that the numerous examples of young teachers trying to implement the favored philosophies are quite convincing, maybe even more so than the rest of the text.
So, in short, I find the book a strange mixed bag of philosophies I largely agree with presented in a way that inconsistently works to advance the adoption of them.