Effective or Wise?

In our work as educators, we all aspire to be effective. We also aspire to be wise. If teachers are to represent and advocate for education, we must become the stewards of a discourse that nurtures education’s possibilities. This book explores how teacher dispositions are defined, developed, cultivated, and assessed. The authors in the volume consider the various and interconnected ways in which educators’ values, beliefs, attitudes, and behaviors are performed and how these performances affect experiences and practices of learning. This text investigates complex questions, such as: How should teachers be? and Who should decide how teachers should be? In different ways, all the chapters in this book invite us into the work of reinvigorating educational discourse. The contributors contradict the idea that wisdom is the province of the lone genius who possesses knowledge that is obscure to the majority. Instead, they ask us all to participate in the necessarily collaborative endeavor of discourse stewardship in – as grand as it may sound – the pursuit of wisdom.

Julie A. Gorlewski (PhD, the State University of New York at Buffalo) is Assistant Professor of Secondary Education at the State University of New York at New Paltz. Her books include Power, Resistance, and Literacy: Writing for Social Justice and, with David A. Gorlewski, Making it Real: Case Stories for Secondary Teachers. She is coeditor of English Journal. David A. Gorlewski (EdD, the State University of New York at Buffalo) is Assistant Professor of Educational Administration at the State University of New York at New Paltz. David is coeditor of English Journal and has published numerous articles and chapters on school reform and school leadership. Jed Hopkins (PhD, the University of Minnesota) is Associate Professor of Education at Edgewood College in Madison, WI. His teaching and research interests straddle literacy, teacher education, drama-in-education, and philosophy of education. Brad J. Porfilio (PhD, the State University of New York at Buffalo) is an associate professor in the Educational Leadership for Teaching and Learning Doctoral Program at Lewis University. His research interests and expertise include: urban education, gender and technology, cultural studies, neoliberalism and schooling, and transformative education.