New book: Education Is Translation

Posted by on December 9, 2005

Education Is Translation
A Metaphor for Change in Learning and Teaching
Alison Cook-Sather

“The depth and resonance with which the author explores the metaphor of translation and the freshness of insights about learning and teaching which the metaphor opens to the reader are truly impressive. I would literally stop in the course of my reading, with a sense of awe, pondering the diverse implications of the metaphor-which is exactly what the author invites the reader to do.”
-Frederick Erickson, University of California at Los Angeles

Education Is Translation offers a radical redefinition of the promises and possibilities of teaching and learning. Through an unusual weaving of not only disciplinary but also personal and academic, poetic, and analytical perspectives, Alison Cook-Sather argues that education can be understood as a process of translation through which every learner is both the translator and the subject of her own translation. Drawing on the fields of anthropology, literary theory, psychology, translation studies, and educational theory, she presents in-depth explorations of various educational experiences and provides the insights necessary for the development of rewarding life-long strategies for becoming a more effective teacher and a better learner. Her analysis reveals how teaching and learning are intimately linked together, how technology can transform learning, and how teachers and learners must reposition themselves in order to achieve the most transformative education.

This is not a how-to book; rather, it presents in a serious and inviting way the metaphor of translation to anyone who wants to understand more deeply and support more constructively the ways humans interact, learn, and change. Alison Cook-Sather is Associate Professor of Education and Director, Bryn Mawr/Haverford Education Program, Bryn Mawr College. She is coeditor (with Jeffrey Shultz) of/ In Our Own Words: Students’ Perspectives on School (Rowman & Littlefield, 2001) and of the International Handbook of Student Experiences in Elementary and Secondary School (with Dennis Thiessen, Springer Academic Publishers, forthcoming).