An Appetizer to Munch On Regarding our Emerging Book titled Mending Education
Ed Wang and I were recently privileged, thanks to Professor Marybeth Gasman and her team at Rutgers GSE, to conduct a webinar on our forthcoming book titled Mending Education. The book is being published by Teachers College Press and is set to release in Sept. 2024. This book forms the third book in a trilogy that includes Breakaway Learners (2017) and Trauma Doesn’t Stop at the School Door (2020), both published by Teachers College Press. Together, these books showcase how to help all of our students in times of trauma and declines in mental wellness.
In a nutshell, the book address the positives that occurred in education during the Pandemic….yes, there were positives. We certainly do not deny the many negatives that the Pandemic engendered within and outside the field of education. But, the positives are remarkable and well worth our attention. Indeed, if we can capture these positives and replicate and scale them, then we can make them game changers that can improve education writ large. And surely we know that education needs improvement.
Here is a link to the YouTube of the just referenced webinar. We are calling it an “appetizer,” as it touches on the new book’s central themes and showcases some of the positives we identified and explicated. (There is a PowerPoint within the webinar that is evident.) We hope the webinar engages you and encourages you to delve deeper into the Pandemic experience within education. And, as pre-publication reviewers have noted, the idea of Pandemic Positives is not unique to education and the lessons from Mending Education can be expanded into other fields and disciplines.
https://m.youtube.com/watch?feature=shared&v=vO9rih-FmbE
We hope the webinar will serve as an initial step to counter the largely negative narrative surrounding the Pandemic and education. Indeed, given our generalized focus on the negative (call it our “negativity bias”), positives may not be so easy to acknowledge. We have identified positives through a myriad of avenues including but not limited to our own work with educators and students during the Pandemic, the voices of educators who participated in our Virtual Teachers Lounge and shared their perspectives in real time and the results of a survey of educators we conducted specifically for this book.
What this means is that the positives we have seen are grounded in theory and practice; they are not hypotheticals. They are supported by in-the-trenches experiences of educators across our nation. For some readers, these positives will “name” what they experienced and give voice to what they experienced. We are sure readers can come up with other positives, particularly if they are willing to search for them and name them.
We hope too that you will visit the Teachers College website; a description and five pre-publication reviews of the new book appear there. We hope that between the YouTube and the website, you will be intrigued by the presence of Pandemic Positives arising in education and beyond. (There is meaning to the cover image shown below which will become evident in the last chapter of the book.)
One added thought. The book is filled with art created by the co-authors. There is a reason for this, actually many reasons. Creativity was a positive generated by the Pandemic and art is but one expression (certainly not the only one) of this creativity. The artwork that follows is similar to that contained in the book.And, if you listen to the webinar, the pre-order discount code is referenced; so we leave it to you to order soon using this code.
Between now and the book’s publication, we will be writing and speaking about the book and its launch. We hope you will follow along with us, sharing strategies for enabling our students, all of our students, to succeed. We’d welcome your insights.
