Talking Back and Looking Forward
An Educational Revolution in Poetry and Prose
Edited by Paul C. Gorski, Rosanna M. Salcedo, Julie Landsman
Publication date:
08 March 2016Length of book:
226 pagesPublisher
Rowman & Littlefield PublishersISBN-13: 9781475824896
As schools grow more and more vulnerable to the whims of profiteers and, as a result, become less and less a sacred public space of learning and justice, the voices of everyday educators and students are increasingly marginalized. This is the tyranny of neoliberal school reform: silence the people who know education, the people committed to equity and justice, and elevate the voices and desires of the privileged few whose knowledge of education is peripheral and profit-driven. Talking Back and Moving Forward: An Education Revolution in Poetry and Prose is a collective response to this tyranny, a collecting rallying cry for reclaiming our schools. It is a chorus of voices from teachers, educators, and educational justice advocates who refuse to be silenced—who are standing up and responding to the imposition of damaging school reform initiatives. Unconfined by the conventions of the traditional scholarly voice, the contributors use poetry, memoir, short stories, and photography, choosing the expressions that most effectively capture their experiences and their demands for educational and social justice.
Talking Back and Looking Forward is a brilliant counter to lists of best practices that race to the top. This wonderful book evokes the transformational power of the arts to reclaim the identities, experiences, and injuries that standardization-policed-by-testing tries to erase from schools.