Drawing on the results of a three-year grant funded by the Ohio Department of Education, Henderson, Castner, and Schneider develop a wonderfully original project that honors the primacy of practice in philosophical reflection in ways that enable “curriculum-teaching-leadership”to emerge as pedagogical problem solving artistry. It will reinvigorate teachers as well as students, parents, educational administrators, and other educational leaders in the larger community.

Jim Garrison, Virginia Tech and Uppsala University

A valuable resource for all educators, this book provides an abundance of ways to employ Dewey’s ideas in today’s schools. Much needed!

Nel Noddings, Lee L. Jacks professor of Education, Emerita, at Stanford University

Henderson, Castner, and Schneider’s volume is an extraordinary accomplishment. Written in a highly accessible style and combined with a wealth of practical illustrations, the volume’s emphasis on professional judgment and professional autonomy offers a breath of fresh air for educational leaders who have long been beleaguered by technical and reductionist approaches to their work. Democratic Curriculum Leadership is essential reading for all teachers and educational leaders committed to integrating democratic values and decision-making into their professional practice. Curriculum scholars will be highly interested in the book’s well-developed and comprehensive restructuring of the field’s conceptual centerpiece—the Tyler Rationale. In doing so, the authors adroitly repair longstanding divisions between the critical and the aesthetic branches of reconceptualist and post-reconceptualist thought. The authors’ “fourfold approach” is deeply informed by critical and aesthetically-oriented writers ranging from John Dewey, Nel Noddings, and Paulo Freire to Joseph Schwab, Elliot Eisner, and Maxine Greene. With this volume, Henderson, Castner, and Schneider have proven themselves to be groundbreaking educational theorists.

David J. Flinders, Professor of Curriculum Studies, Indiana University