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This book collects the most important essays of the late James B. Macdonald, educational theorist and cultural critic. Given the rise of importance of educational thinkers within the current move toward interdisciplinary theory dialogue. Macdonald's work stands as an important link between earlier technical discussions associated with curriculum development and contemporary moves toward viewing the central role of educational institutions and discourses in social and cultural life. Macdonald's essays - spanning from the early '60s to the early '80s - argue for the necessity of curriculum theorizing in the attempt to create a more humane schooling environment, a process that he consistently linked to larger cultural and social transformations.
About the author
The Author: James B. Macdonald was Distinguished Professor of Education at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro before his death in 1983. He received his Ph.D. in Education at the University of Wisconsin, Madison.
The Editor: Bradley J. Macdonald is an assistant professor of Political Science at Colorado State University. He received his Ph.D. in Political Science at the University of California, Los Angeles. In addition to publishing articles in professional journals on contemporary political theory, he is an editor of Strategies: A Journal of Theory Culture and Politics.
Report
«Jim Macdonald is one of the towering figures in the history of the development of critical curriculum theory. 'Theory as a Prayerful Act: The Collected Essays' brings together for the first time the best of what Jim wrote and thought about the importance of schooling, politics, and hope. This is a magnificent collection of essays and is indispensible for anyone who wants to read an educational theorist who was decades ahead of his time. The pleasure derived from this text is rarely matched in educational theory and publishing. Get this book and read it as soon as you can. The payoff will be well worth the effort and time.» (Herny A. Giroux, Waterbury Chair, Pennsylvania State University)
«This collection of writings by James Macdonald marks an historical moment when we can revisit the thinking of one of the great scholars in the field of curriculum. In revisting the work of Macdonald we are doing more than engaging in an intellectual exercise of theory-building, more than pondering the ineffable; rather, we are invited once again to make Macdonald's inspirational ideas an affirmative feature of our own struggle for freedom in the 1990s; to make necessary and important appeals to a tangible future of social justice, a future that Macdonald always held out as a possibility as long as men and women engaged the present critically and passionately.» (Peter McLaren, UCLA Graduate School of Education)
