Before I knew a god there was a river —a muddled, polite thing that mislaid its oar.I drifted to its rhythm like a man to free coffee;the lark tried a solo and hit the wrong note spectacularly. Before I knew a god there was a star,a glittering gossip in the sky’s dressing room.I leaned close, squinting, thinking: bargain bin beauty —

Abstract Critical theory and critical pedagogy offer conceptual tools that, when translated into operational practices, can materially improve Special Educational Needs and Disabilities (SEND) provision. This article synthesizes scholarly and practitioner literatures on Universal Design for Learning (UDL), co-teaching, student participation in Individualized Education Program (IEP) processes, Goal Attainment Scaling (GAS), anti-ableism professional development, and intersectionality to produce a coherent, implementable framework for SEND reform.

Anthony Quinn’s Ceramic Design Course presents itself less as a conventional how-to manual and more as a practiced teacher’s syllabus made beautifully portable. Its ambition—bridging the tactile minutiae of clay work with the larger problems of form, function and aesthetic intention—makes it an especially welcome book for the contemporary ceramicist who wants technique to serve design rather than the other way around.

Before I knew a god there was a river —not singing but pulling, a black lung drawing me down.I followed that current like a confession;the lark answered like something that remembers falling. Before I knew a god there was a star,a frost-scribed page in the throat of night.I read the margin until the ink bled colour,

Angelica Pozo’s Ceramics for Beginners: Surfaces, Glazes & Firing reads at first like a craftsman’s primer and, on closer inspection, performs the subtler work of a modest modus operandi. It is both a handbook and a primer in temper — practical, kindly, and quietly persuasive. Where many how-to volumes insist on mastery as a destination, this insists upon practice as a mode of attention: a way of seeing clay, heat, and surface as a text to be read and revised.

Before I knew a god there was a river,its pulse a promise. I moved toward that cadence;the lark took the promise in its throatand gave me a first, clear song.Before I knew a god there was a star,spilling small iron-lit pages across the dark.I read until the night turned colour —no hand stopped me from keeping the last line.

Angelica Pozo’s Making and Installing Handmade Tiles sits at an interesting crossroads: part technical manual, part artist’s manifesto, and part visual essay. The book announces itself as a practical companion for the person at the wheel or the trowel, but its most enduring achievement is how it insists that technique and meaning are inseparable. The book does not present tilework as merely surface decoration, but frames it as a dialogue between hand, material, and place—an argument that will resonate with craftspeople and readers drawn to the material turn in contemporary art and design.

I knew a God… Some river before me —I followed its slow rhythm,as if to tell me it might happen:the lark sang its first song. Some star before me —I leaned into the glitter;no one stopped me from seeingthe last, most colourful page. Some rose before me —I turned toward the aroma,with only fate left to pluckthe first drop of morning dew. Some thorn before me —I met my private pain.As if the migraine could welcomethe final, quiet proof of life.

Critical theory — here understood as a set of tools for noticing power, asking who benefits from a given idea, and imagining fairer alternatives — can be translated into developmentally appropriate practice in primary schools. When paired with teacher supports, intentional assessment, and community engagement, it cultivates children who are observant, empathetic, and ready to act for justice. This essay explains what that translation looks like in classrooms (K–5), what schools must do to sustain it, and how to measure whether it is working.

Irene Poulton’s Fired Up with Raku: Over 300 Raku Recipes reads, at first glance, like a practical compendium; read closely, it reveals itself as a meditation on the paradox at the heart of raku work — the persistent human desire to name, measure, and reproduce a process whose aesthetic power depends on chance. She gives the ceramicist a vast repertory of formulas and technical permutations, but she also stages, between lists of ingredients and firing notes, a quiet argument about what mastery in the ceramic arts actually comprises.

Beatrix Potter’s The Tale of Peter Rabbit (1902) is a pocket-sized fable whose deceptive simplicity disguises a finely tuned moral and aesthetic practice. Written for children yet animated by the author’s keen observational eye, the tale endures because it compresses a complex set of cultural anxieties — discipline and transgression, class and rural economics, the boundary between human order and animal instinct — into a narrative no longer than a long letter and as vividly drawn as a naturalist’s sketch.

Edgar Allan Poe’s The Fall of the House of Usher reads like a concentrated experiment in atmosphere: a short story that refuses to be small, folding psychological pathology, architectural metaphor, and sonic lyricism into a single, inexorable collapse. Poe does not so much tell a tale as stage an experience — one in which language, sound, and structure conspire to make the reader inhabit dread.

The town still speaks his gentle name,a man of coin and quiet care.He kept a pouch of folded things,and sent them out like softened prayer. They called him Scrooge when snow was thick,not for a sting, but for his lists.He tallied ribbons, numbered bows,and waited for his chosen wrists. That once his pockets had been bare,

Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Raven” reads like a virtuoso exercise in controlled obsession. In a compact, theatrical narrative of no more than a few hundred lines, Poe engineers an atmosphere so resonant that the poem’s central motifs—loss, memory, and the unanswering voice of doom—saturate the reader long after the final refrain. It is less a plot than a single dramatic motion: an intellect undone by grief, attempting to reason with an emblem of fixed answer.

Copernicus Wiffledown was much admired—a well-to-do gentleman with a bulging pouchlike a squirrel’s briefcase, stuffed with oddments:a clock that ran backwards for sentimental people,a rubber chicken for emergencies, a mitten with a pocket,and tins of biscuits stamped “For Immediate Surprise.” They called him the Christmas-Day Scrooge—not for stinginess but for his solemn inventory:he kept a ledger (inked in peppermint), tallied each ribbon,

Critical theory equips teacher education with a principled, practice-oriented framework for preparing educators who can recognize and disrupt inequitable power structures in schools and society. When paired with culturally relevant pedagogy and sustained, practice-based professional learning, critical theory does more than motivate ethical teaching: it produces measurable shifts in instructional practice, curriculum design, and teacher agency. Programs that embed critical theory should therefore move beyond single courses or token readings and instead design longitudinal experiences—course sequences, mentored practicum, and year-long professional learning—that develop teachers’ critical consciousness, culturally responsive instruction, and capacity for collective action.

Edgar Allan Poe’s The Tell-Tale Heart is a study in compression: a few pages of prose that map, with surgical precision, the anatomy of guilt. Unlike long Gothic romances that luxuriate in setting and backstory, Poe offers a single, claustrophobic motion — the narrator’s descent from confident rationalization into seizure-like confession — and trusts that motion to carry the reader through the whole moral landscape.

Copernicus Wiffledown was much admired—a well-to-do gentleman who kept a pouchof wrapped surprises beneath his coat:a mitten for a red-nosed passerby,a loaf slipped through a shuttered window,a bright tin soldier for a child who’d lost one. They called him the Christmas-Day Scrooge—not because he grudged, but because he counted:each gift catalogued, each ribbon given a number,

Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Cask of Amontillado” is often taught as the archetype of the short, perfectly executed revenge tale; read closely, it is also a miniature philosophical probe into pride, performative identity, and the moral elasticity permitted by first-person confession. In under 3,000 words Poe stages a slow, elegant murder that doubles as a theatrical demonstration of narrative control: the story is not merely about how Montresor kills Fortunato, but about how he asks to be believed.

www.ted.com/talks/natsai_audrey_chieza_fashion_has_a_pollution_problem_can_biology_fix_it

Copernicus Wiffledown was much admired— a well-to-do gentleman who kept a pouch of wrapped surprises beneath his coat: a mitten when the north wind came, a loaf for someone’s sudden hunger. They called him Scrooge on Christmas Day— not for keeping, but because he counted gifts and hoarded them until the town could breathe.

Plato’s The Republic remains one of those rare books that functions simultaneously as a founding text of political thought, a work of moral psychology, and a sustained exercise in dramatic philosophy. Written as a dialogue with Socrates at its center, it pursues a single, seemingly straightforward question — “What is justice?” — and from that launchpad builds an entire architecture of ideas about the soul, knowledge, art, education, and the constitution of a good city.

I’m down — I keep them close:my favorite pessimists, bedside friends,Kurt’s sharp laugh, Rod’s exposed heart.I study their habits to learn how not to break. love of others,love of self:I admit I confuse the two,give away my warmth and keep the ache,each misdirected like a misaddressed letter. I’m up sometimes,not by bravado but by accident,lifted only to the wishof clouds — thin, honest, undecided.

Critical theory offers powerful tools for interrogating how knowledge, power, and identity operate within educational systems. Its emphasis on social justice, historical inequities, and the dismantling of dominant paradigms makes it a productive—though not sufficient—framework for supporting the integration of Indigenous pedagogies in contemporary education (Apple, 2013; Freire, 1970). When combined with de-colonial commitments and Indigenous self-determination, critical theory can help shift schooling from mere inclusion toward structural transformation.

Daniel H. Pink’s Drive reads at first like a corrective essay to a long domestic argument: for decades, the dominant picture of human motivation has been the carrot-and-stick economy of rewards and punishments; Pink insists we have the wrong map. The book’s central—and elegantly simple—claim is that for tasks requiring creativity, judgement, and sustained engagement, traditional extrinsic incentives not only fall short but actively distort performance.