Critical Issues in Democratic Schooling
Curriculum, Teaching, and Socio-Political Realities

Focusing on a wide range of critical issues, this book provides a comprehensive analysis of the linkage of different educational ideas, policies, and practices to a commitment for democratic schooling. Informed by significant, interdisciplinary research, as well as by his own extensive professional experiences as a teacher, professor, department chair, and dean, Teitelbaum examines contemporary concerns related to three broad areas: 1) teaching and teacher education; 2) curriculum studies; and 3) multiculturalism and social justice. His approach is to integrate the current and the historical, the practical and the theoretical, the technical and the socio-political, and the personal and the structural. With this volume, Teitelbaum considers how schools should be organized and funded, what they should teach and to whom, the role that teachers, students, and parents should play in school life, and the need and prospects for schools and teacher education programs that foster meaningful learning, critical reflection, and social justice.

1: Teaching Has Its Own Rewards; 2: Despite What Some Think, Teaching Isn’t Easy; 3: Reasons to be A Teacher; 4: "Work with What You’ve Got"; 5: Lessons from Alternative (Progressive) Schooling; 6: Understanding Teacher Education and Teaching; 7: Globalization, Neoliberalism, and Teacher Education; 8: The Work of Education Deans Amidst Recent State Policy Changes; 9: The Nature and Value of Curriculum Theorizing; 10: Curriculum Debates; 11: Critical Civic Literacy in Schools; 12: Curriculum and Socialism in the United States, 1900-1920; 13: Everyone a Writer; 14: What About the Arts?; 15: The Value of Recreation and Play; 16: Multicultural Education: A Rationale; 17: Tensions and Dilemmas in Multicultural Teaching; 18: Context and Black Academic Attainment; 19: Poverty, Children, and Schooling; 20: Class in America: What do Schools Have to do With It?; 21: The "Gaze" of Teachers and Issues of Academic and Communicative Competence;

Kenneth Teitelbaum is a former education dean at Southern Illinois University Carbondale, University of North Carolina Wilmington, and Kutztown University of Pennsylvania. He was also a department chair at Kent State University and a faculty member and graduate program coordinator at Binghamton University and Syracuse University. He is a recipient of the Distinguished Alumni Achievement Award from the School of Education at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.