Kenneth J. Saltman Boeken

"Saltman wrestles with the contradiction between the demand for radical empiricism ("data driven" everything) in contemporary education, and the flight from evidence in the enactment of policy and politics"-- Provided by publisher

The collection features 11 significant writings by Saltman, each accompanied by fresh contextual insights. Through a new introduction and conclusion, the author revisits the breadth of his work, reflects on the evolution of the field, and highlights future directions for research and exploration. This volume offers a comprehensive look at Saltman's contributions and the ongoing relevance of his ideas.

The past decade has seen a vast expansion of resilience pedagogies, policies, and products in public education, from the Every Student Succeeds Act to social and emotional learning to grit. Educational apps, avatars, and games as well as behaviorist techniques, meditation programs, and biometric devices claim to teach resilience to adverse social conditions while new cyber schools, education brokers, global democracy promotion companies, and dropout recovery firms promise schools resilience to disaster and disruption. The Disaster of Resilience shows how resilience discourse is interwoven with the new digital directions of educational privatization. Saltman argues that resilience has provided the justification for new educational profiteering, creating a climate which individualizes collective responsibilities, depoliticizes and dehistoricizes knowledge and curriculum, and falsely grounds its politics in a mashup of pseudo-science and human capital theory. He argues that we must replace resilience discourse with pedagogies and curriculum that allow students not only to endure the intolerable conditions they find themselves in, but to see beyond those conditions and to act collectively on the social, economic, and racial injustices that created them. The book includes a preface by Neil Selwyn (Monash University, Australia).