PRODUCTS

Improvement Science Across the Disciplines: Driving Improvement in Healthcare, Business, and Social Services examines the way improvement science is employed outside of the traditional field of business. This book provides a multidisciplinary examination from the fields of education, nursing, social work, and criminal justice—and explores the universality of improvement methodologies in fields of service. Contributing authors will use an improvement lens to describe addressing problems of practice in their respective disciplines.

To learn more about Improvement Science and see our full list of books in this area, please click through to the Myers Education Press Improvement Science website.

Improving Together: Case Studies of Networked Improvement Science Communities examines a range of network improvement communities who are using improvement science to examine problems of practice. Operating in varying contexts, NICs provide a platform for communication and other forms of data sharing in order to create meta-findings on a particular phenomenon. The text focus on not only the use of IS in each context/node, but also processes of building and launching networks and considers how particular media and infrastructure are used to share knowledge within the network.

To learn more about Improvement Science and see our full list of books in this area, please click through to the Myers Education Press Improvement Science website.

Reclaiming the Education Doctorate: A Guidebook for Preparing Scholarly Practitioners is a practical guide for those seeking to (re)design a professional practice doctorate program in education that prepares Scholarly Practitioners. To tackle the comprehensive change process necessary for (re)designing the EdD, this book will guide the reader with an improvement lens that looks at the roots of the confusion of the EdD, the system that created it, and the framework that helped to reclaim it.

Readers will be guided through a backward mapping (re)design process that begins with defining graduate outcomes, maps through the milestones and courses, ends with rethinking the admissions process. Along the way, readers will learn how to design and integrate a dissertation in practice into the curriculum, consider best practices for their program (re)design, and view examples of successful programs. Additionally, to support readers in their (re)design efforts, each chapter will offer exercises, tools, and resources that will guide the process. The book will prove to be an invaluable resource for anyone developing or revising their EdD program.

After the opening chapter that explains the mission statement of Reclaiming the Education Doctorate, Jill Perry structures chapters to deal with the full range of issues that impact EdD programs, including:

• Roots of the EdD Problem
• Aim: The Professional Practice Doctorate Driving Change
• Backward mapping: beginning with the end
• The heart of the program: Curriculum
• The beginning: Admitting Candidates
• Measuring Impact
• Leading Change

Improvement Science: Methods for Researchers and Program Evaluators moves beyond traditional research methods textbooks by responding to people working in improvement science and program evaluation. This book is tailored to the need for specific improvement research methodologies and frameworks collected and presented in an edited volume written by research faculty associated with or teaching in leadership programs.

To learn more about Improvement Science and see our full list of books in this area, please click through to the Myers Education Press Improvement Science website.

Responding to the increasing interest in what has become known as the “archival turn,” Quests for Questioners: Inventive Approaches to Qualitative Interviews is a research volume written by many of today’s leading practitioners. Offering qualitative researchers an entrée into the world of working with archival repositories and special collections, it also serves as a primer for students and researchers who might not be familiar with these sorts of collections. It is especially helpful to novice researchers seeking a general introduction into how special collections are created and how they can be used. Quests for Questioners offers useful, clear guidance on a variety of topics, including:

• using different types of archives
• developing topics for research within the archives
• assessing materials available
• advising on how to work with archivists and curators
• documenting the research process,
• and writing up an archival study

Power Tools: 30 Critical Disciplinary Literacy Strategies for 6-12 Classroom is a unique textbook that offers readers an assortment of short, easy-to-implement disciplinary literacy strategies (which guide virtually all national standards) from critical literacy lenses. Recently emerging scholarship around critical disciplinary literacy (CDL) suggests that disciplinary literacy is, by itself, an incomplete and potentially problematic approach to secondary (grades 6-12) literacy instruction. A more equitable approach—one that understands disciplines as unique communities with their own unique (and often exclusionary) skills, norms, and discourses (Moje, 2015)—would be more responsive to the ways in which power works differently based on the disciplines at hand (Dyches, 2018/2022). For example, examining systems of power and oppression involved in vaccine distributions requires a different skill set and strategy approach than looking at representations of masculinity in Romeo and Juliet. Our work provides multidisciplinary ideas for how to implement CDL in secondary classrooms. Moreover, given the current and ongoing attacks on justice-centered teaching, we think this text serves a critical need as well: showing teachers how they can teach to name and disrupt oppression in ways that are also standards/discipline-based.

The book offers 30 strategies, with 1-2 pages for each strategy. As an organizing feature in the beginning of the text, there is a vertical list of strategies in alphabetical order, with horizontal columns to the right: one for "Critical Literacy Skill" and another for "Disciplinary Literacy Skill." This feature allows readers to quickly discern which tasks most immediately meet their instructional goals. Each brief chapter will follow the following format:

1. A brief overview of each strategy, situated in research of best practices and critique;
2. Two to three disciplinary examples for each CDL strategy (an example of a critical disciplinary literacy-oriented think aloud in seventh grade math and tenth grade ELA classroom, etc.). Strategy examples may include examples of student work, discussion prompts, dialogue between teacher and students, and reprintables;
3. Ideas for addressing push back. We think this piece will be powerful for teachers concerned about fallout from opening up CDL oriented conversations. In offering these suggestions, we hope to offer them ideas for how to articulate professionally the purposes of their work.

An Introduction to Critical Autoethnography and Education: The Vulnerable Researcher examines the practice of critical autoethnography, which combines critical pedagogy, autoethnography, and often, critical ethnography, as a research methodology for conducting research in vulnerable communities without establishing hierarchical systems. Researchers who work collaboratively with participants in these communities can provide a means for often-unheard voices to reach wider audiences.

Researchers function as collaborators/participants in the research, asking themselves the same questions they ask the other participants in the research. This methodology requires reflection and introspection, as researchers examine the Self and the complexities of their cultural perspectives, whether visible or invisible, hidden beneath layers of socially constructed beliefs and behaviors. This interrogation and problematization of words and actions surpasses chronological and supposedly objective recounting of autobiography, leading to a deep understanding of the sociocultural, socioeconomic, political, and historical beliefs that created their ways of understanding and navigating the world. Traditional research situates researchers as experts. Pushing against existing norms, critical autoethnography negates hierarchical thinking, believing all collaborators co-construct equally valuable knowledge and meaning.

Accessible to diverse audiences, this book would be appropriate in graduate qualitative methods or foundations courses, at introductory or advanced levels. It would also be a good addition to any undergraduate courses preparing students to conduct research in vulnerable communities.

Perfect for courses such as: Qualitative Research Methods I | Qualitative Research Methods II | Advanced Qualitative Research Methods | Social Justice in Education Research | Case Study | Ethnographic Research in Education | Anthropology in Education | Critical Qualitative Inquiry | Multicultural Research Methods

Qualitative Research in the Time of COVID: Lessons Learned and Opportunities Presented During a Pandemic focuses broadly upon educational issues during the COVID-19 pandemic. The chapters make note of how contextual understandings are important for the future of researchers, especially when those contexts involve inequality made more acute since the pandemic. The chapters illustrate the importance of creating a climate of care based upon the principles of care ethics, and also examine projects that could be taken in the context of necessary self-care during challenging times. Chapters address the climate of caring in both in-person and online educational spaces and what it means to support students in an expanded conception of classroom space. In discussions ranging from exemplars of arts-based, personal narrative to completing a dissertations during a pandemic, chapters share both the immensity of the challenges and the rewards of productive and meaningful work both domestically and internationally. In the context of the living taking place after the pandemic’s coming into being as an event, this volume humbly offers writings as documents of remembrance of our historical present, offering with the hope that the historical may continue to move forward with an ethics of care ever in the foreground.

Qualitative Research in the Time of COVID is perfect for such courses as Qualitative Research, Qualitative Inquiry, Ethnography, Teacher Education, Action Research, and Educational Research.

Perfect for courses such as:  Black Education from Slavery to Freedom │ Foundations of American Education │ Introduction to Africana Studies │ Introduction to Foundations of Education │ Schools & Society │ Race and Education │ African American Education │ African American Philosophy │ Education in African American Culture

An Introduction to Complexity Pedagogy: Using Critical Theory, Critical Pedagogy and Complexity in Performance and Literature offers readers an introduction to the basic concepts of complexity science and how they might be applied in the teaching of composition, creative writing, performance, and literature.

The book builds on Critical Theory (defined as Frankfurt Theory) and border theory, serving as a critique of neoliberalism in higher education and the teaching of critical thinking as a set of skills. Individual chapters are devoted to the following artists and writers:

• the Choctaw people
• author LeAnne Howe
• Chicana lesbian author Gloria Anzaldua
• performance artist Karen Finley
• the performance duo Bob Flanagan and Sheree Rose

The strength of this book is that it concentrates on the teaching of interrelated topics: borders (including the border between the able/disabled), complexity, mixed ancestry, ability/disability, texts, and performance, using the Mexico-U.S. border as the working example of a complexity system.

The work of the five aforementioned artists and authors are used to focus on political resistance within the context of decolonialism, but there are also references to mixed ancestry populations (including Redbones) and disability issues.

This complexity frame of reference allows the reader to see and understand both the artists’ narratives and viewpoints in the dynamic relations of shorter and longer time frames. No prior knowledge of complexity science is required and ample examples of complexity-related topics-- from coral reefs to zebra stripes--are provided. The focus is on students in state universities and community college transfer students, especially first generation students and students of color, with policy implications pointing to a critique of both elite small liberal arts colleges (SLACs) and research institutions.

An Introduction to Complexity Pedagogy: Using Critical Theory, Critical Pedagogy and Complexity in Performance and Literature is the perfect text for assignment in a variety of classrooms, including courses in Complexity Science, Composition and Rhetoric, Performance Arts, Cultural Studies, Critical Theory, Ethnic Studies, and many others.

Perfect for courses such as: Introduction to Creative Writing | Advanced Composition | Introduction to Border Art | Introduction to Complexity in the Arts and the Humanities | Introduction to Multicultural Literature | Introduction to Chicanx and Native American Literature | Introduction to Performance Art and Social Justice | Special Topics: Complexity, the Environment, Literature and the Arts | Special Topics: Disability Studies and Performance | Special Topics: Critical Family Histories, Mixed Ancestry and Pedagogy