Peter Smagorinsky Livres

Engage your students in critical thinking, literacy activities, and inquiry using as a springboard the personal and social issues of pressing importance to today’s students.

Focusing on Vygotsky's concept development, this volume explores the transition from biological to social examples, emphasizing the cultural construction of concepts. It delves into the interplay between societal goals and the processes that enrich concept development, including its future orientation and the role of creativity. The author complicates Vygotsky's ideas by examining the ambiguous meanings of social concepts, proposing practical concepts as fragmented yet coherent understandings shaped by diverse social, cultural, and historical contexts.

L. S. Vygotsky and English in Education and the Language Arts focuses on the hugely significant contributions of L. S. Vygotsky to research, theory and practice in English and the Language Arts, exploring the relevance of Vygotsky's works for today's teachers and researchers.

Dismantling the Disabling Environments of Education: Creating New Cultures and Contexts for Accommodating Difference challenges assumptions that view people of difference to be "abnormal," that isolate attention to their difference solely in the individual, that treat areas of difference as matters of deficiency, and that separate youth of difference from the mainstream and treat them as pathologized. As outsiders to mainstream special education, the authors of this collection take a more social and cultural perspective that views the surrounding social environment as at least as problematic as any point of difference in any individual. Most of the scholars contributing to this volume work with preservice and inservice teachers and grapple with issues of curriculum and pedagogy. One of the primary audiences we hope to reach with this book is our colleagues and practitioners who have not made special education or disability studies the focus of their careers, but who, like we, are determined to engage with the full range of people who attend schools. Dismantling the Disabling Environments of Education: Creating New Cultures and Contexts for Accommodating Difference can be a valuable text for undergraduate and graduate courses in teacher education, as it addresses key issues of inclusion, diversity, equity, and differentiated approaches to educating the full range of students.