Layers of Learning: Lessons from a Life in Education

In this book, an intellectual, professional, and personal memoir, Katherine Jelly examines a lifetime in education to argue for changes needed to sustain, strengthen, and renew our battered public schools. Mining her theoretical inquiry and her experience, she derives abiding ideas for critical, creative, and effectual teaching and learning, and proposes changes to K-12 schools, to teacher education, and to schools’ relationships to broader efforts at social change. Interweaving her studies and stories, grappling with the conundra, contradictions, and questions arising, Jelly frames the means and the actual potential for effecting meaningful, constructive change to public education in America.

Katherine Jelly, Director (retired) of the Center for Mentoring and Learning at Empire State College (now Empire State University) of SUNY, has published papers and chapters on teaching, reflective practice, and professional development. She also co-edited, with Alan Mandell, Principles, Practices, and Creative Tensions in Progressive Higher Education (Sense Publishers, 2017).