Personal Passionate Participatory Inquiry Into Social Justice in Education (PB)

322 Pages·2008·1.299 MB·English

by  Ming Fang He, JoAnn Phillion

Personal~Passionate~ Participatory Inquiry Into
Social Justice in Education
A volume in
Research for Social Justice:
Personal~Passionate~Participatory Inquiry
Series Editors:
Ming Fang He, Georgia Southern University
JoAnn Phillion, Purdue University
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Research for Social Justice: Personal~Passionate~
Participatory Inquiry
Ming Fang He and JoAnn Phillion, Series Editors
Personal~Passionate~Participatory Inquiry Into
Social Justice in Education (2008)
edited by Ming Fang He and JoAnn Phillion
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Personal ~ Passionate ~ Participatory
Inquiry into Social Justice in Education
4
Ming Fang He
JoAnn Phillion
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Personal, passionate, participatory inquiry into social justice in education / edited by Ming Fang He and
JoAnn Phillion.
p. cm. -- (Research for social justice: personal, passionate, participatory inquiry)
Includes bibliographical references.
9781607529309
I. He, Ming Fang. II. Phillion, JoAnn.
LC191.4.P47 2008
303.3’ 72--dc
2008027250
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Copyright © 2008 IAP–Information Age Publishing, Inc.
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted
in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, or by photocopying, microfilming, recording, or
otherwise without written permission from the publisher.
Printed in the United States of America
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Table of Contents
Personal~Passionate~ Participatory Inquiry Into Social Justice in Education
Research for Social Justice: Personal~Passionate~ Participatory Inquiry
Title Page
Copyright Page
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
FOREWORD
CHAPTER 1 - PERSONAL~PASSIONATE~ PARTICIPATORY INQUIRY
CHAPTER 2 - STITCHED FROM THE SOUL
CHAPTER 3 - TEEN MOM
CHAPTER 4 - RESILIENT LIVES
CHAPTER 5 - SELF, OTHERS, AND JUMP ROPE COMMUNITY
CHAPTER 6 - USING MULTICULTURAL LITERATURE TO DEVELOP EMPATHY AND
COMPASSION IN PRESERVICE TEACHERS
CHAPTER 7 - A CURRICULUM OF IMAGINATION IN AN ERA OF STANDARDIZATION
CHAPTER 8 - A QUIET AWAKENING
CHAPTER 9 - AFRICAN AMERICAN STUDENTS WITH READING DISABILITIES
CHAPTER 10 - LANGUAGE, CULTURE, AND IDENTITY
CHAPTER 11 - READING THROUGH BROWN EYES
CHAPTER 12 - DALTON’S SUICIDE
CHAPTER 13 - FOSTERING JUSTICE IN AN UNJUST WORLD
CHAPTER 14 - IT STARTS AT HOME
CHAPTER 15 - BECOMING AN AGENT OF SOCIAL CHANGE
CHAPTER 16 - CONCLUSION: PERSONAL~PASSIONATE~ PARTICIPATORY INQUIRY
EPILOGUE - A Love Letter to the Personal~ Passionate~Participatory Research Group
ABOUT THE AUTHORS
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ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Personal~Passionate~Participatory Inquiry Into Social Justice in Education, the first book in the series,
Research for Social Justice: Personal~Passionate~Participatory Inquiry, is dedicated to all the people who have
engaged in personal~passionate~participatory inquiry with us over the years—students, parents, teachers,
educators, administrators, and community workers in various contexts. We deeply appreciate the experience
and knowledge of the researchers featured in the book and their participants; their concerns for people who
are marginalized and disfranchised; their long-term and heart-felt engagement in schools, families, and
communities; their shared efforts driven by commitment to social justice; and their unfaltering stance on
equity, equality, social justice, freedom, and human possibility.
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FOREWORD
William Ayers
History charges forward—gyrating, wobbling, crashing, careening, drifting, stampeding, advancing. There is
no stopping it—history is always on the move, always on the make.
People are on the move and on the make as well—we slouch toward the next point on our journey, we
arrive and just as quickly we stumble or dash from there to the next. We are, each of us, unfinished,
incomplete, works-in-progress.
“The streets are narrow and so are the minds,” Galileo announced as he prepared to overthrow the dogma
of an orthodox church and state. His discovery that the planets and the stars were not—as had been thought
—fixed to a crystal vault, but rather that they were spinning through space without visible support—like us,
who are also on an immense journey, also free and without support—brought him into direct and fatal conflict
with authority. Forced to denounce his discovery and betray his principles, Galileo’s last words nonetheless
stood up for truth: “Still, it moves,” he said.
Even the most casual glance backward offers a big-letter lesson: all that is solid melts into air; the center
cannot hold; the way things are is not, can never be, the way things will always be. The dance of the dialectic
is underway and ongoing.
History moves. We are led to believe—by authority, by common sense, by existential experience—that we
are living somehow at a point of arrival, the end-point of history: all that has occurred until now brings us
inevitably to this time, this place. And pretty much this is simply the way it is, the way it must be. We retract
into passivity, cynicism: What can I do about it? we ask with a resigned shrug. Whatever, we sigh.
But it’s a choice. We can note that the current moment is neither inevitable nor stable, that its
imperfections—the unnecessary suffering, the undeserved pain—might be cause for alarm. Our situations are
neither fixed nor entirely determined, and history has not stood still for us—another world is both possible
and inevitable: Get up, get up, get moving. We can choose to resist passivity and cynicism, to plant the seeds
of a world in-the-making. We can learn to create—right here, right now—a bit of the world we want to
inhabit.
Ming Fang He and JoAnn Phillion with this book provide a map into a new territory of inquiry:
personal~passionate~participatory. The rhythm is intentional, for they intend to break old barriers and break
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