Democratic Discord in Schools: Cases and Commentaries in Educational Ethics

Teaching in a democracy is challenging and filled with dilemmas that have no easy answers. For example, how do educators meet their responsibilities of teaching civic norms and dispositions while remaining nonpartisan? Democratic Discord in Schools features eight normative cases of complex dilemmas drawn from real events designed to help educators practice the type of collaborative problem solving and civil discourse needed to meet these challenges of democratic education. Each of the cases also features a set of six commentaries written by a diverse array of scholars, educators, policy makers, students, and activists with a range of political views to spark reflection and conversation.

Drawing on research and methods developed in the Justice in Schools project at the Harvard Graduate School of Education (HGSE), Democratic Discord in Schools provides the tools that allow educators and others to practice the deliberative skills they need in order to find reasonable solutions to common ethical dilemmas in politically fraught times.

Author: Meira Levinson
Publisher: Harvard Education PR
Published: 04/30/2019
Pages: 360
Binding Type: Paperback
Weight: 1.00lbs
Size: 9.00h x 6.10w x 0.70d
ISBN: 9781682533024

About the Author
Meira Levinson is professor of education at Harvard, where she also serves as graduate fellowship program codirector in the Edmond J. Safra Center for Ethics and as co-convener of Harvard Graduate School of Education's Civic and Moral Education Initiative. A normative political philosopher and former middle school teacher, Levinson writes about civic education, multiculturalism, youth empowerment, and educational ethics. Her work has been supported by the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study, the Spencer Foundation, the National Academy of Education, and a Guggenheim Fellowship. Her books include The Demands of Liberal Education (Oxford University Press, 1999), Making Civics Count, coedited with David E. Campbell and Fredrick M. Hess (Harvard Education Press, 2012); No Citizen Left Behind (Harvard University Press, 2012), and Dilemmas of Educational Ethics: Cases and Commentaries, coedited with Jacob Fay (Harvard Education Press, 2016). She is currently working to develop a field of educational ethics, modeled after bioethics, that is theoretically rigorous and policy- and practice-relevant.

Jacob Fay is a visiting assistant professor of education at Bowdoin College. His research synthesizes philosophical theories of injustice with insights from developmental psychology to propose a novel approach to theorizing about injustice. He was co-chair of the Harvard Educational Review, a member of the 2013-14 Spencer Foundation Philosophy of Education Institute, a 2016-17 Edmond J. Safra Center for Ethics Graduate Fellow, and a 2017-18 Edmond J. Safra Center Ethics Pedagogy Fellow. He is coeditor with Meira Levinson of Dilemmas of Educational Ethics: Cases and Commentaries (Harvard Education Press, 2016). Previously, Fay taught eighth-grade history at the Dwight-Englewood School in Englewood, New Jersey.


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