Description
Book SynopsisThe past decade has seen a vast expansion of resilience pedagogies, policies, and products in public education, from the Every Student Succeeds Act to social and emotional learning to grit. Educational apps, avatars, and games as well as behaviorist techniques, meditation programs, and biometric devices claim to teach resilience to adverse social conditions while new cyber schools, education brokers, global democracy promotion companies, and dropout recovery firms promise schools resilience to disaster and disruption.
The Disaster of Resilience shows how resilience discourse is interwoven with the new digital directions of educational privatization. Saltman argues that resilience has provided the justification for new educational profiteering, creating a climate which individualizes collective responsibilities, depoliticizes and dehistoricizes knowledge and curriculum, and falsely grounds its politics in a mashup of pseudoscience and human capital theory. He argues that we must
Trade ReviewTeachers, students and parents are required to be excitedly resilient in the face of radical reforms that are destroying their relationship with each other in schools and communities. Saltman shows in detail the relationship between seemingly benign interventions about bodies and practices, and the unfolding disasters occurring as a result of the relocation of responsibility to the private world of the individual. This book is shockingly important for understanding and explaining the dismantling of public education. -- Helen M. Gunter, Professor Emerita, University of Manchester, UK
If you’re excited about promoting resilience among the youth, read this book. Educators, parents, students, and researchers all need to consider what Saltman unveils. Resilience pedagogy, no matter what its form, may just be that trojan horse for even more privatization, and even less democracy. -- Mark Garrison, Professor of Education, West Texas A&M University, USA
Table of ContentsIntroduction: The Politics of Resilience and Disaster 1. Microschools, UberEd and the Dropout Recovery Industry 2. From Venture Philanthropy to Digital Privatization: New Schools Venture Fund, Leap Innovations and the Selling of Digital Student Resilience 3. Democracy International, Inc.: Selling Resilience and Education in the Global Influence Peddling Industry 4. Trauma-Informed Pedagogy, Grit, and Biometrics: The Denial of Educational Politics and Racial Politics 5. Student Resilience, Social Emotional Learning, Testing as Teaching, and the Displacement of Intellectual Traditions Conclusion: From the Disaster of Resilience to Becoming Resilient to Resilience References Index
