Teachers, Students, and the Hero\u27s Journey

The cave you fear to enter holds the treasure you seek. -- Joseph Campbell Joseph Campbell, an American mythologist who studied myths from all over the world, created the famous Hero\u27s Journey, a monomyth that explains how each individual goes through continuous cycles of change and transformation. Nothing could be more accurate than when we apply this monomyth to educators, students, and schools, because the teaching and learning process and emotional connection are real-life cycles of continual challenges, births of new ideas, successes, and transformations

Another Person\u27s World: Ed Reform Through True Understanding

Anthropologist and humanist Ashley Montagu stated: Love is profound involvement in the well-being of others. Several weeks ago, I experienced this kind of love in West Humboldt Park, an impoverished, gang-and-violence-infested inner city Chicago neighborhood

Whatever! You Think I Care?

I was thinking this afternoon of the misunderstood language from developing children and adolescents that we often receive as educators. This is the type of language that catches us off guard as we posture for the perfect discipline-minded one-up response. Sometimes it feels frustrating -- and actually downright awful -- when we hear our reactions unintentionally mirroring those anxious or angry emotions, personalizing these conversations when, in actuality, it has nothing to do with us

Walking the Walk: An Educator\u27s Perspective From All Views

As an education professor, I recently decided it was time to walk the walk of my graduate and undergraduate students. I was ready to experience what happens when the educational neuroscience and the social and emotional disciplines meet head-on with real-life challenges and opportunities. So, while continuing with my courses at the University, I became a fifth grade co-teacher, joining an incredible group of educators from Washington Township, a large public school district in Indianapolis

Structuralist Legal Histories

This is a contribution to a symposium titled Theorizing Contemporary Legal Thought. The central theme of the piece is the relation between legal structuralism and legal historiography

Attitudes of mothers and fathers of schizophrenic patients.

Thesis (M.S.)--Boston Universit

The Key of Connection

Over the past few weeks, I have learned deeply. My students were paramount teachers as I was privileged to share a part of their interior worlds, their private logic that is a culmination of accumulated beliefs, experiences, values, thoughts and feelings. This inner world is often kept tucked away unless an environment is created that allows for feelings of safety and an untainted sense of belonging. When any child or adult enters into a space that accepts, inspires and affirms their ever-changing personhood, we have finally found the key that unlocks the door to extravagant learning! What is that key? That golden key is connection, nothing more