Thursday, August 1, 2013

New Book Out! Planet in Peril: Young People to the Rescue

I am very pleased to announce the publication of my new book, Planet in Peril: Young People to the Rescue you can find it on Amazon Kindle among many other venues.Why did I write this book? First because the news headlines concerning the future can make young people especially if not the rest of us feel gloomy and even despondent about the future.

Young people in particular find it harder to separate off their own futures from the general gloom. While a gifted environmental science or social science teacher can give them a perspective on topics like global warming and the many calamities to come, too often the discussion is framed far too abstractly. I wrote this book because students need and want to comprehend their own role and place in this unfolding drama. Without understanding their own sense of agency students can all too often feel depressed and tune
out. But how do students gain this sense of agency? In my view it is through understanding people like themselves acting in the world and working to realize their own goals and following their own core values. My second reason for writing is that for a while now I have been frustrated by the gap between the rhetoric applied to various school reform initiatives and the reality. The rhetoric of why we must change our traditional teacher and text book centered classrooms and embrace more global realities has been in place at least since the cold war ended in the 1980s if not before. Yet despite the introduction of computers that can link any classroom to anywhere around the world, we have been relatively slow in using technology to exploring our global identities, preferring the safety and security of our still quite insular textbooks and the traditional approaches to the curriculum that they so often favor. The latest effort of our still quite insular textbooks and the traditional approaches to the curriculum that they so often favor.  A third and final reason for writing this book is my deep conviction that if we are truly to survive as a species we will need to be able to exhibit a new ethic of cooperation and collaboration that can surmount race and nationality. Young people I have met instinctively understand this and yet in their classrooms they are not shown enough people who may not look like them or sound like them who also want to make a difference on behalf of our common humanity. As the world gets smaller and we all get connected on Facebook and other social networks, we need to do more to show our young people the ways they can make a difference by using their voices to affect positive change in the world.

You can find the book at the following E-Reader Sites--

On Amazon


On Nook

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