Classroom Action: Human Rights, Critical Activism, and Community-Based Education (Cultural Spaces)

Building on the concept of a “teaching community,” Heble and his contributors explore what it might mean for teachers and students to reach outside the walls of the classroom and attempt to establish meaningful connections between the ideas and theories they have learned and the broader community beyond campus. Utilizing a case study approach, the chapters in this volume are conceptually and practically useful for teachers and students involved in thinking about and implementing community-based forms of teaching and learning.

Classroom Action links teaching and research in genuinely innovative ways, and provides a range of dissemination strategies to inspire broad-based outcomes and impact among a diverse range of knowledge-users. It marks a major advance on the ways in which the relationship among pedagogy, human rights, and community-based learning has hitherto been theorized and practiced. The community-based learning at the centre of Classroom Action prompts a radically new means of thinking about what teachers do in the classroom, and how and why they do it.

Ajay Heble is a professor of English in the School of English and Theatre Studies as well as the director of the International Institute for Critical Studies in Improvisation at the University of Guelph.