{"product_id":"beyond-the-script","title":"Beyond the Script","description":"\u003cp\u003e\u003cspan\u003eThis powerful and timely memoir takes readers inside the often unseen realities of teaching special education in an urban school district, where daily classroom challenges collide with systemic failures. Through vivid, deeply human stories of students too often dismissed as “unreachable,” it reveals how trust, creativity, and compassion can transform learning even amid chaos. Both a critique of policies that value compliance over connection and a tribute to the resilience of career teachers who stay and care, the book bridges personal experience with systemic insight. Spanning perspectives from open veranda schools in the Caribbean to security-locked classrooms in America, it offers a rare, cross-cultural view of how context shapes education. Ultimately, it is a call to humanize special education—to see students not as data points but as individuals full of potential—and to honor the teachers who persist in helping them reach it.\u003c\/span\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e\u003cstrong\u003eAbout the Author\u003c\/strong\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp class=\"p1\"\u003e\u003cspan class=\"s1\"\u003eJemma Shillingford, PhD has devoted her life to teaching and advocating for students whose voices are too often unheard. She earned a doctorate in Special Education to deepen her understanding of learners with disabilities and to help create educational spaces grounded in dignity, and possibility.\u003c\/span\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp class=\"p1\"\u003e\u003cspan class=\"s1\"\u003eBorn on a small Caribbean island, Jemma began her teaching journey there before carrying that work beyond its shores. Though her path has taken her elsewhere, the island remains central to her sense of self. She maintains close ties, regularly collecting and donating books to schools across the island—a quiet testament to her belief in access, literacy, and belonging.\u003c\/span\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp class=\"p1\"\u003e\u003cspan class=\"s1\"\u003eHer writing emerges from a life shaped by movement—between places, classrooms, and identities. When she is not teaching or writing, Jemma finds joy in nature, gardening, travel, and learning from different cultures. She lives with the steady support of her husband, her two adult children, and a circle of devoted friends and colleagues.\u003c\/span\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"Dorrance Bookstore","offers":[{"title":"Paperback","offer_id":52096921731360,"sku":"9798899782763","price":15.0,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":true},{"title":"eBook","offer_id":52096921764128,"sku":null,"price":10.0,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0857\/3983\/1584\/files\/ShillingfordFC.jpg?v=1785764118","url":"https:\/\/bookstore.dorrancepublishing.com\/products\/beyond-the-script","provider":"Dorrance Bookstore","version":"1.0","type":"link"}