Envisioning Process as Content or Latin America

Envisioning Process as Content: Toward a Renaissance Curriculum

Author: Arthur L L Costa

"How will the traditional skillset of the industrial era have to be expanded for successful workers and citizens in the knowledge era? How must the traditional education process be transformed? Two cornerstones to the new system of education will be elevating the learning process to comparable standing with the content of what is learned, and making high-level thinking and learning skills, like systems thinking and collaborative learning, as important as traditional skills of reductionistic thinking and individual problem solving. These could indeed be two elements of a 'thought revolution in education."
From the Foreword by Peter M. Senge, Center for Organizational Learning
Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Envisioning Process as Content proposes a radical revision of curriculum, the heart and soul of teaching, too often an overlooked component of school reform and restructuring. The chapter authors of this comprehensive study, all leaders in their respective fields, establish a new framework for our learning communities that fosters a desire to see life as an intellectual and personal quest for knowledge and meaning. Teaching specific disciplines, such as language arts, math, or social studies, reinforces the all-important teaching of processes and skills such as critical thinking, problem solving, information processing, and lifelong learning. The authors explore in detail the dynamics of shifting the primary focus so that the content becomes the vehicle for teaching the process, resulting in a greater mastery of the discipline.

This volume will help you:

• Reconsider specific disciplines as vehicles forteaching processes

• Link processes and content

• Enhance student learning through process-centered teaching

• Create outcomes that ensure all students have learned to think

Envisioning Process as Content is the first volume of a trilogy addressing the curriculum needs for the 21st century. Written for school administrators, teachers, staff developers, curriculum specialists, and students and faculty of teacher education, the series provides new insight about the role of restructuring the curriculum in the school.

Table of Contents:

	Foreword
	Preface to the Trilogy
	Preface to Envisioning Process as Content
	Acknowledgments
	About the Authors
1	Toward Renaissance Curriculum: An Idea Whose Time Has Come	1
2	Difficulties With the Disciplines	21
3	Shifting Paradigms From Either/Or to Both/And	32
4	Curriculum: A Decision-Making Process	41
5	How Process Is Connected With the Human Spirit	50
6	Process as Content	63
7	Reading as a Thinking Process	76
8	Mathematics Is Process Education	95
9	Teaching the Process of Aesthetic Knowing and Representation	107
10	Science as Inquiry: Transforming Science Education	120
11	Paper Thinking: The Process of Writing	140
12	Learning Creative Process: A Basic Life Skill	163
13	Historical Inquiry	185
14	Above the Word: When Process Is Content in Foreign Language Teaching	199
15	Humor as Process	211
	The Essence: Process as Content	230
	Index	235

Book review: Terrorism As Crime or The Rights of Man

Latin America (Making of the Contemporary World Series): Development and conflict Since 1945

Author: John Ward

Latin America provides an introduction to the volatile economic and political history of the region in the last half century. Beginning with a brief history of Latin America since 1492, John Ward discusses the interactions between economic, political and social issues. The discussions includes:

* the long-term background to the 1980s debt crisis
* the effects of neo-liberal free market reforms
* relations with the United States and the wider world
* welfare provision in relation to wider economic issues
* social trends as reflected by changes in the status of women
* environmental debates
* comparisons with the more dynamic East Asian economies.

This expanded edition brings the story up to date. John Ward updates the book throughout to take into account recent historiography, and considers the current situation in Latin America in relation to the wider world, especially the US. Also included are biographies of the leading figures of the period, among them Peron, Castroand Pinochet.