ELIZABETH STRINGER KEEFE
BOOKS
LEVEL UP!
Forthcoming from Rowman & Littlefield, 2023
This book is for teachers -- a counternarrative about the teaching profession. It unpacks some of the challenges we faces as a profession - lack of respect, lack of professional jurisdiction, and low public opinion, and how these affects our work - and offers insights for reclaiming professional boundaries.
BEYOND RHETORIC
Forthcoming from Rowman & Littlefield, 2023
Beyond Rhetoric makes a case for a new approach to equity and inclusivity in teacher education – beyond rhetoric alone. The pressures of external accountability demands –including federal and state regulations of teacher preparation, accreditors and education reform critics – make it challenging for teacher educators and teacher preparation programs to prioritize and sustain internal accountability efforts, such as conceptual and philosophical ideologies that encompass equity, inclusivity, and diversity. Yet these are critically important lenses for teachers to have as they enter the field. This books addresses practical ways to address to balance practical skills in the context of inclusivity.
2018
Teacher accountability has been a major strategy for “fixing” education for the last 2 decades. In this book, we argue that it is time for teacher educators to reclaim accountability by adopting a new approach that features intelligent professional responsibility, challenges the structures and processes that reproduce inequity, and sustains multi-layered collaboration with diverse communities. We analyze and critique major accountability initiatives, including USDOE initiatives, CAEP, NCTQ, and edTPA, and expose the lack of evidence behind these policies, as well as the negative impact they are having on teacher education. However, the book does not conclude that accountability is the wrong direction for the next generation of teacher education. Instead, we offer a vision of accountability for teacher education based on a commitment to equity and democracy.
2018
Remixing the Curriculum offers educators a way to rethink traditional curricular approaches through a “curricular remix,” a concept in which a curriculum becomes different from its original form, retaining its basic foundational elements, but experiencing a metamorphosis to create a new version. Remixing the Curriculum suggests that the way to develop curriculum to maximize student access and engagement is to employ essential elements of traditional pedagogy, but infuse it with technology to create new features through the X Framework (XFW). XFW capitalizes on four essential features of educators’ practice and learning: Technology Fitness, in which a teacher self-evaluates their comfort level using technology; Proactive Teaching, which front-loads the planning and preparation for instruction to prior to implementation; Universal Design for Learning (UDL), a set of principles which guide the conditions for learning, including flexible learning environments to accommodate individual learning differences; and Assistive Technology, technology to improve the capabilities of students with disabilities. At the intersection of these four quadrants is X, which serves as a fulcrum for access to the curriculum.
