Bruce Novak is currently Director of Educational Projects for the Foundation for Ethics and Meaning, undertaking research and arranging gatherings promoting educational life that will support full-bodied democracy: education with meaning for a politics of meaning. From 1998–2008 he was instrumental in the leadership of the NCTE Assembly for Expanded Perspectives on Learning, and he has staged five of its national conferences. His twenty-year teaching career has given him a wide range of experiences: teaching English and Social Studies, grades 6–12, in diverse settings in and around Chicago; assisting the English Education program at the University of Chicago; and teaching Psychoanalysis and Education for DePaul University and the Chicago Institute for Psychoanalysis, Humanities and Social Science Core courses at the University of Chicago, Writing at the University of Chicago and Truman College, and Philosophy and Foundations of Education at the University of Chicago and Northern Illinois University. Among his many scholarly publications, his “Humanizing Democracy” was the lead article in the Fall 2002 edition of the American Educational Research Journal, and has been broadly acclaimed. Currently, he is seeking to help lead a program for English Education that will embody the ideas of that article and this book. He can be contacted at brucenovak@mac.com.