A Novel Way to Promote Change

As an added note on the post "What Are the Parameters of Your Sandbox?" I was recently notified that the education director of DesignShare had read my novel, Angel Park, and wanted to feature it in the first newsletter for the creative design site.   Wow!  Fast company, I thought, and gladly provided the needed information.  So, here is my novel about school reform and cultural change in the inaugural edition of this prestigious international newsletter:

A Novel Way to Promote Change Agency



In ANGEL PARK, a novel about school reform that centers on the mystery surrounding the death of a school official, the characters’ lives and attitudes are shaped by the buildings that contain them. Despite its attempt at modernity, the school district reveals its real story at the ringing of each bell when “the pressure of all the classroom doors shutting simultaneously” allows students to be “vacuum-sealed into each tiny micro-climate.” Thus, the educational spaces embody and perpetuate the sense of isolation and disconnection that still permeates the traditional school system, despite a century of human progress in the outside world.

The author, Patricia Kokinos, a veteran teacher and school and district administrator in both California and New York, saw these buildings and the fictionalized but true events of the story as a microcosm of the issues of school reform. She offers the unique perspective of fiction to give readers an emotional sense of the forces, both human and societal, that stifle change and the deep beliefs we may have to uproot to make some changes that count. ANGEL PARK is available on Amazon (http://tiny.cc/AngelParkAmz), and more about its awards and reviews can be found on the author’s school reform website, http://changetheschools.com/.

--from the inaugural newsletter for DesignShare, a global forum for innovative school design, http://designshare.com/   See the entire newsletter for October 2011.