In Performing Loss: Rebuilding Community through Theater and Writing, author Jodi Kanter explores opportunities for creativity and growth within our collective responses to grief. Performing Loss provides teachers, students, and others interested in performance with strategies for reading, writing, and performing loss as communities—in the classroom, the theater, and the wider public sphere. From an adaptation of Jose Saramago’s novel Blindness to a reading of Suzan-Lori Parks’s The America Play, from Kanter’s own experience creating theater with terminally ill patients and federal prisoners to a visual artist’s response to September 11th, Kanter shows in practical, replicable detail how performing loss with community members can transform experiences of isolation and paralysis into experiences of solidarity and action. Drawing on academic work in performance, cultural studies, literature, sociology, and anthropology, Kanter considers a range of responses to grief in historical context and goes on to imagine newer, more collaborative, and more civically engaged responses. Performing Loss describes Kanter’s pedagogical and artistic processes in lively and vivid detail, enabling the reader to use her projects as models or to adapt the techniques to new communities, venues, and purposes. Kanter demonstrates through each example the ways in which writing and performing can create new possibilities for mourning and living together.
Democracy and Other Neoliberal Fantasies is an impassioned call for the realization of a progressive left politics in the United States. Through an assessment of the ideologies underlying contemporary political culture, Jodi Dean takes the left to task for its capitulations to conservatives and its failure to take responsibility for the extensive neoliberalization implemented during the Clinton presidency. She argues that the left’s ability to develop and defend a collective vision of equality and solidarity has been undermined by the ascendance of “communicative capitalism,” a constellation of consumerism, the privileging of the self over group interests, and the embrace of the language of victimization. As Dean explains, communicative capitalism is enabled and exacerbated by the Web and other networked communications media, which reduce political energies to the registration of opinion and the transmission of feelings. The result is a psychotic politics where certainty displaces credibility and the circulation of intense feeling trumps the exchange of reason. Dean’s critique ranges from her argument that the term democracy has become a meaningless cipher invoked by the left and right alike to an analysis of the fantasy of free trade underlying neoliberalism, and from an examination of new theories of sovereignty advanced by politicians and left academics to a look at the changing meanings of “evil” in the speeches of U.S. presidents since the mid-twentieth century. She emphasizes the futility of a politics enacted by individuals determined not to offend anyone, and she examines questions of truth, knowledge, and power in relation to 9/11 conspiracy theories. Dean insists that any reestablishment of a vital and purposeful left politics will require shedding the mantle of victimization, confronting the marriage of neoliberalism and democracy, and mobilizing different terms to represent political strategies and goals.
All too often the poorest readers learn that if they keep quiet during sustained silent reading (SSR), they're doing okay--no reading required. This is especially true in middle school where class sizes are large and instructional emphasis is on content rather than reading. In Are They Really Reading?, Jodi Crum Marshall discusses how to find out if your students are using SSR time wisely and what to do about it if they're not. Her book describes how to support middle-grade readers who need it the most, while embracing a research-proven need to increase independent, self-selected reading time for students. Jodi shares lessons and anecdotes from her classroom and from her experience as a reading specialist implementing her model schoolwide. She expands the traditional concepts of SSR to include read-alouds, writing, and accountability to scaffold struggling middle-grade students. Bolstered by these additional supports, Jodi's students dramatically increased their interest and ability in reading through a program they named Supporting Student Literacy (SSL). Classroom teachers will appreciate the clear direction on how and why to implement an SSR program. Administrators will appreciate the guidance for establishing a schoolwide literacy block that substantially improves student motivation and learning. Are They Really Reading? answers the following important questions: Why should I start an SSR program? How do I build a classroom library? Where do I get funding for books and other materials? How do I prepare the students for SSR? How do I motivate students to read? What is the role of the teacher? How do I assess SSR? If you don't currently use a sustained silent reading program, this book will help you get started on the right track. If you worry that some of your students aren't really reading during SSR or if you want to enhance your program, here is a roadmap that is instructionally sound and flexible enough to fit your students' needs.
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