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Friday, February 26, 2010

Alternatives to Textbooks

An excerpt of an article about Elizabeth Birr Moje:

Alternatives to Textbooks

Moje's solution: Put the textbook on the back burner. Textbooks, she believes, are a primary culprit in what Theodore Sizer has described as the "pedagogy of telling," providing content area teachers with a vehicle for covering vast amounts of information in short periods of time at the expense of the understanding that makes for true engagement.

Moje would replace dependence on a single text with the tools that workers in a scholarly field actually use. Students of history, for instance, would have at their disposal a variety of source documents that would help them construct their own narrative and understandings.

(Note: Click on the link at the end of the excerpt to read Art Peterson's article in its entirety)

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