"Author discusses how sharing his writing has opened up his students and their writing. Ultimately, student outcomes increased from authentic writing, which also strengthened students' other writing styles"--

The purpose of this text is to elicit discussion, reflection, and action specific to pedagogy within education, especially higher education, and circles of experiential learning, community organizing, conflict resolution and youth empowerment work. Vulnerability itself is not a new term within education; however the pedagogical imperatives of vulnerability are both undertheorized in educational discourse and underexplored in practice. This work builds on that of Edward Brantmeier in Re-Envisioning Higher Education: Embodied Pathways to Wisdom and Transformation (Lin, Oxford, & Brantmeier, 2013). In his chapter, “Pedagogy of vulnerability: Definitions, assumptions, and application,” he outlines a set of assumptions about the term, clarifying for his readers the complicated, risky, reciprocal, and purposeful nature of vulnerability, particularly within educational settings. Creating spaces of risk taking, and consistent mutual, critical engagement are challenging at a moment in history where neoliberal forces impact so many realms of formal teaching and learning. Within this context, the divide between what educators, be they in a classroom or a community, imagine as possible and their ability to implement these kinds of pedagogical possibilities is an urgent conundrum worth exploring. We must consider how to address these disconnects; advocating and envisioning a more holistic, healthy, forward thinking model of teaching and learning. How do we create cultures of engaged inquiry, framed in vulnerability, where educators and students are compelled to ask questions just beyond their grasp? How can we all be better equipped to ask and answer big, beautiful, bold, even uncomfortable questions that fuel the heart of inquiry and perhaps, just maybe, lead to a more peaceful and just world? A collection of reflections, case studies, and research focused on the pedagogy of vulnerability is a starting point for this work. The book itself is meant to be an example of pedagogical vulnerability, wherein the authors work to explicate the most intimate and delicate aspects of the varied pedagogical journeys, understandings rooted in vulnerability, and those of their students, colleagues, clients, even adversaries. It is a work that “holds space.”

What is trauma and what does it mean for the literacy curriculum? In this book, elementary teachers will learn how to approach difficult experiences through the everyday instruction and interactions in their classrooms. Readers will look inside classrooms and literacies across genres to see what can unfold when teachers are committed to compassionate, critical, and relational practice. Weaving her own challenging experiences into chapters brimming with children’s writing and voices, Dutro emphasizes that issues of power and privilege matter centrally to how attention to trauma positions children. The book includes questions and prompts for discussion, reflection, and practice and describes pedagogies and strategies designed to provide opportunities for children to bring the varied experiences of life, including trauma, to their school literacies in positive, meaningful, and supported ways. “This stunning book about trauma interrogates the very notion. Dutro excels at interweaving her stories with those of teachers and students and at challenging readers to find their way into the fabric. I recommend this book to teachers so that they might accept her challenge to explore and understand the importance of both witnessing and testimony in relation to trauma in literacy curriculum and pedagogy.” —Mollie Blackburn, The Ohio State University

The practices that work—and those that don’t—to reach and teach students at risk. When schools fail to address the problems of struggling students, the consequences can be dire: course failures, absenteeism, suspensions or expulsions, dropouts. Those effects continue to ripple after school with lower rates of college attendance and graduation, underemployment and lower wages, and even incarceration. Yet many of these students can experience a very different trajectory when their learning difficulties are addressed. Whether it’s a student with ADHD who has trouble sitting still, a student just arrived from the Dominican Republic who speaks no English, or a traumatized student who dissociates in class, there are strategies that have proven effective in overcoming the hurdles they face. This guide will help teachers recognize the most common barriers to learning and apply solutions that will work in their classrooms.

This electronic version has been made available under a Creative Commons (BY-NC-ND) open access license. This book is available as an open access ebook under a CC-BY-NC-ND licence. This book investigates the new language of vulnerability that has emerged in feminist, queer and antiracist debates on media, taking a particular interest in the historical legacies and contemporary forms and effects of this language. Contributors such as Jack Halberstam and Sara Ahmed examine how vulnerability has become a battleground, how affect and vulnerability have turned into a politicised currency both for addressing and obscuring asymmetries of power, and how media activism and state policies address so-called vulnerable groups. Taking on such heated topics as trigger warnings and diversity policies, the book will be of interest to scholars and students in media and cultural studies, affect theory, gender studies, queer theory and critical race studies.

Featuring storytelling as a central theme, this book examines the role of narrative inquiry in social processes of establishing teacher knowledge and identity to provide new insights into the role of storytelling in education’s teaching and learning paradigm. Gui and Wong engage with a body of academics, creative writers, and researchers looking at the role of storytelling in Hong Kong education. The book is split into three sections of storytelling: introspective, agentive, and collaborative. Examining personal accounts of teachers using storytelling to reflect on and transform feelings, the authors reconstruct the traditional pedagogical and learner practices into new opportunities for civic participation and generative community practices. With attention to educators who make use of collaborative experiences to develop narrative approaches and foster community identities, the chapters explore existing pedagogical, creative, and scholarly literature for re-purposing narratives, teacher transformation, and learner participation. With the use of autoethnographic accounts, this book’s innovative approach to storytelling will appeal to professional educators, teachers, and researchers in the fields of literacy, narrative inquiry, and creative writing. Scholars engaging with reflexive, participatory, and collaborative modes of teaching and learning will find this an essential read.

In The Tact of Teaching bestselling author Max van Manen offers teachers at every stage an original and inspiring interpretation of the notion of pedagogy, one that searches for its roots in the experience of in loco parentis. Using dozens of anecdotes and scenes taken directly from life in classrooms, including many from the often-neglected domain of high school, The Tact of Teaching explicates the meaning of pedagogical moments, the conditions of pedagogy, the relation between pedagogy and politics, the nature of pedagogical experience, and the practical forms of pedagogical understanding. The author: -Presents experiential analysis of the relation between pedagogical reflection and action-Explores how pedagogical tact manifests itself, what tact accomplishes, and how tact does what it does-Speaks of hope and humane practice in an era of schooling often given over to mindless technocracy or fashionable despair