William Ayers

Examines public and private writings of low-income, urban, pre-adolescent girls, illuminating ways that girls' voices are often silenced in schools and society. She Say, He Say reveals the development of fifth-grade urban girls' voices through their own writing in the classroom. This book underscores the importance of including all of the girls' voices into the curriculum where their voices can be nurtured, cultured, and responded to in potentially productive ways. Through an exploration of two major writing contexts, the public and the private, Brett Elizabeth Blake chronicles how the girls learned through their writing not only how to name issues salient to them, such as domesticity and racism, but also how to resist the underlying notions of such important issues. The girls' stories are based on nearly three years of study, and the traditional notion of a process approach to writing is challenged by addressing how such an approach must become a site for significant tension and struggle over issues like ownership and voice. Blake suggests several curricular strategies, such as reader response techniques and a violence-prevention unit, as additional approaches that support girls' voices. This book explores and challenges us to look more closely at how the intersection of gender, race, and class is crucial for understanding not only how and what girls write about, but also why they write so deliberately and poignantly about their lives.

To Become a Teacher, edited by William Ayers, is filled with practical, concrete advice for new teachers (and experienced teachers who are rethinking their practices). Ayers has gathered an impressive array of educators, teachers, reformers, and philosophers, including Nancy Balaban, Lisa Delpit, Hubert Dyasi, Helen Featherstone and colleagues, Joseph Featherstone, Maxine Greene, Mary Anne Raywid, Rita Tenorio, and Lillian Weber, among others, to write about teaching as a profession, the state of our schools, and their visions of the future. Part I, “Becoming a Teacher,” offers insight into teaching as a calling, as an intellectual challenge, and as a profoundly human enterprise. Part II, “Thinking and Teaching,” draws our attention to the power of teaching, its responsibility, and the kind of consciousness demanded and expected. Part III, “Reinventing Schools,” locates teaching in the real world. This is a book for those who want to stop swimming uncomfortably in a sea of habit and routine, of behaviorism and instrumentalism, who want to create something better. The volume will be an important primary text in undergraduate and graduate courses on foundations of education, teacher education, curriculum, and methods and a course reading in American studies, comparative education, and philosophy of education, as well as watershed reading for classroom teachers.

Of Borders and Dreams: A Mexican-American Experience of Urban Education is the story of Alejandro Juarez, Jr., a Mexican-American youth, his family, and their experiences in a bureaucratic and frustrating public school system. Located in Chicago's west-side neighborhood, replete with crime, violence, and gangs, we first come to know Alejandro as a shy, good-natured fifth grader, the oldest child in a close-knit Mexican family. We follow Chris Carger, the author and Alejandro's ESL teacher, as she sets forth with his mother on a journey to provide him with the education he needs and deserves. Of Borders and Dreams is an intelligent, probing portrayal of the problems that face bilingual and bicultural children. Through Alejandro's story, we are moved and enraged by the failure of the American school system to offer better opportunities for all children regardless of race, sex, or class. This book is of enormous importance to teachers and educators on all levels, and anyone interested in the future of education in America.