Holistic Approach for School Based Culture Change: Character Education for Ages 13-15 uses stories to engage students on a variety of issues such a stereotyping that can lead to bullying. The stories include questions for students to consider along with suggestions for teachers on how they can stimulate further discussion and inquiry. I believe teachers will find this book very helpful in engaging students to discuss and reflect on important issues in their lives.
- John P. Miller, professor, The Ontario Institute for Studies in Education, University of Toronto <I>From the Foreword<I>,
Marc Levitt has created a useful resource for any educator who works with newly-minted teenagers in A Holistic Approach for Cultural Change: Character Education for Ages 13-15. With an increased focus on diversity, historical complexity, and contextualization in our school system and beyond, Levitt offers specific examples, strategies, and questions for teachers and students that will help start and continue challenging conversations.
- Hilary Levey Friedman, author of Playing to Win: Raising Children in a Competitive Culture,
Restorative Justice in Education is grounded in the notion that we are all valued and interconnected. Eschewing the notion of rugged individualism that plagues our world, Marc uses his creative energy to design a resource for middle school educators who are wanting to build a more interconnected and restorative world. I see this resource as a great way to begin conversations about how we do that. May we all work to help the next generation do this better.
- Katherine Evans, teacher, educator, and author of The Little Book of Restorative Justice in Education,
Marc Levitt offers a powerful new perspective on the complex pedagogical and curricular issues surrounding character education. With courage, clarity and conviction, Levitt pleads with us to understand that it is only in authentic concern for the wellbeing of others that one rises to one’s full stature as a rich and authentic individual. This, he concludes, is the foundation upon which character education must be built if the schools are to play a vital role in helping us not only navigate the multiplicity of ethical visions and cultural constructs that now contentiously abound in the 21st century, but in turning that diversity into an opportunity for each to be edified and nurtured by each in a grand synthesis that, in Tennyson’s words, will empower us, individually and collectively, “to seek a newer world.
- Clifford Mayes Ph.D, Psy.D, Retired Professor of Educational Psychology, BYU and author,