ABSTRACT
Muhammad Yunus won the Nobel Prize for Economics in December 2006, five months after I met the teachers and children that are in this book. His work to help poor families and villages in remote Bangladesh involved making small low-interest loans to individuals for as little as the equivalent of twenty five US dollars. They used the money to initiate business activities that ultimately led to self-sustenance and an increased sense of dignity and quality of life. Yunus’ understanding of poverty and his use of microeconomics (small loans to tiny businesses) resonates with the emotional and cognitive poverty that teachers, children, and communities in this book are experiencing under the constant thrashing of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act (ESEA) (US Department of Education [DOE], 2001a). Consistent with Yunus’ lending model, we ‘borrowed’ small amounts of time from the official mandated curriculum to help children and teachers see themselves not as failures, but as thoughtful writers with important things to say, enhancing their sense of dignity and, perhaps, the quality of their lives. Until Yunus and others like him began their work, economic poverty was a force in motion that seemed relentless in perpetuating itself. Yunus worked to disrupt economic poverty by offering hope enacted through a real and tangible investment. This book is the story of teachers, students, and a researcher working to find hope in the punitive context of the ESEA, euphemistically subtitled No Child Left Behind (NCLB).
