How Students (mis-) Understand Science and Mathematics

Book excerpt: In this long-awaited book, Timothy J. Lensmire examines the problems and promise of progressive literacy education. He does this by developing a series of striking metaphors in which, for example, he imagines the writing workshop as a carnival or popular festival and the teacher as a novelist who writes her student-characters into more and less desirable classroom stories. Grounded in Lensmire's own and others' work in schools, Powerful Writing, Responsible Teaching makes powerful use of Bakhtin's theories of language and writing and Dewey's vision of schooling and democracy. Lensmire's book is, at once, a defense, a criticism, and a reconstruction of progressive and critical literacy approaches.