Though the contemporary classroom is often described as a site of contention and resistance, this book rethinks its nature and substance and posits that the classroom can be changed from its current state as a place for conventional learning to a place for encounter, exploration, and engagement. Learning in the classroom is generally directed and plotted by the formal curriculum and organized by the constraints of the teacher and the physical space.
Block believes the classroom can be organized as a place for intellectual and emotional struggle in an environment replete with challenging material that inspires great effort but remains free from the feelings of failure. Organized in this way, the classroom may be transformed for us from a place of relative conventionality and familiarity to one of relative discomfort and possibility.
Review: This book portrays the wisdom of a journeyer; one who, with his students, has traveled the literature of great western writers, of the Bible, the Torah, and plunged into the depths of self. Learning is too superficial a word to describe this journey; it is one of appreciating the 'sacredness of study,' of reading with engagement, insight, questioning, and of experiencing Life.
This is education in all its full, rich, existential glory. - William. E. Doll, Jr., Visiting Professor, University of British Columbia, Canada Block accomplishes the complex yet crucial challenge of integrating curriculum studies and teacher education. In characteristic style and language that are elegant, poetic, poignant, and prophetic, he offers readers a glimpse into the classroom-but not the classroom we are expecting to see.
Block's greatest accomplishment is posing questions and sitting with ambiguities of what it means to be a teacher, thereby uncovering the great secret of classrooms and schools: that they themselves are places not of answers and certainty-but of questions and ambiguity. - Reta Ugena Whitlock, Associate Professor of Curriculum and Instruction and Gender and Women's Studies, Kennesaw State University, USA Block's book is both a lamentation and a love affair exposed for all to see.
As I enter the classroom yet again this year, The Classroom provides what he says we seek-some peace and refuge from the world's turmoil. But his writing does this by facing that turmoil. His great gift as a writer is to make it more bearable by not turning away. - David Jardine, Professor of Education, University of Calgary, Canada
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