PRODUCTS

From Getting Started to Graduation: A Student Guide to the EdD, a volume in The Coming of Age of the Education Doctorate Series book series, pulls back the curtain on the hidden curriculum of the EdD experience for students, fully supporting their journeys by making what is too often anxious and abstract more clear and concrete. Drawing from years of experience from designing and directing an EdD program, the authors provide an end-to-end playbook for students to draw from as they navigate their own EdD program of choice.

Part I focuses on getting started. The book begins with an establishment of the why behind getting an EdD and how this is a distinct and unique experience unlike other graduate degrees. It pushes readers to think beyond the title, encouraging them to drill down into their core motivation for pursuing not just a degree but a transformative experience. Readers will then learn about finding the match quality between their goals and aspirations and the myriad program choices available to them. Once students have winnowed down their choices and found their fit, they will be coached on how to build survival systems that will help them thrive from the onset to the finish line. This includes learning how to pace themselves, how to lean on friends and family, how to create contingency plans, and how to create helpful constraints that make room for work-life balance. The book closes Part I with helpful tips for time and resource management, as well as how to build routines and habits that allow them to be kind of their future selves.

Part II explicitly explores how to navigate this years-long quest and stay the course. Readers will learn how to get curious and keep that door open across coursework in order to allow for innovative and creative ideas to flourish and eventually lead to fusion—the key to creative thinking. With the door opened to ideas and exploration, the book sets the stage for how to become a scholar-practitioner through key habits of mind such as the what-if and maybe mindset and tackling the tough task of synthesis. Part II ends with the call to team up and to take this winding road together. The EdD experience can be lonely if students go it alone, and the volume explains how and why teaming up is not just nice but necessary to persevere as the way to reach the finish line.

Finally, Part III pivots to helping students survive the intensive thinking, researching, and writing demands of the dissertation. Readers will tap into years of tips and tricks on how to break this mystifying and monstrous project into sizable and achievable small steps that fuel motivation for the long haul so that students avoid burnout during the final push as they near defending their projects and crushing their comps. When finished, EdD students will be able to leverage what is too often hidden from students and draw from the concrete examples, strategies, stories, and templates therein in order to start strong and finish strong.

Perfect for courses such as: Introduction to Research; Research Methodology; Introduction to the EdD; The Scholar-Practitioner; Exploring Problems of Practice; Becoming a Change Agent

Curriculum and pedagogy are the heartbeat of our schools. They encompass what we do and do not teach–what content and approaches we either choose or are mandated to choose, or leave out or are mandated to leave out. Curriculum entails the overall educational experience of schooling, while pedagogy is the art and craft of teaching–or the translation of curriculum into student knowledge and growth. Hence, curriculum and pedagogy are sociocultural phenomena that impact and are impacted by context (e.g., students, community, colleagues, geography, etc.).

Once upon a time, curriculum and pedagogy were the spaces in which educators could exercise creativity and exploration, reflecting the individual needs of their students and communities. However, as political structures shifted and the standards movement took hold in the late 20th century, freedoms around curriculum and pedagogy began to fade with increased oversight over and standardization of “best practices” with greater emphasis placed on performance and efficiency. Pedagogical practices were soon framed around producing results (test scores, graduation rates, measurable learning objectives derived from prescribed state standards), while curriculum became a prescribed structure formatted to reflect state standards with an eye toward test performance. Curriculum and pedagogy were further impeded by hegemonic forces calling for censorship of teaching and curriculum, such as the ban on Ethnic Studies in Tucson, Arizona, and continued attacks on Critical Race Theory nationwide. Further, curriculum became a tool for concealing and/or silencing the experiences and voices of our diverse students, educators, and communities. The results of these phenomena are teachers feeling uninspired and deprofessionalized and students feeling devalued and unheard–especially marginalized students.

Since curriculum and pedagogy directly impact the experiences of teachers and students, they must be transformed. However, how do we do that within today’s tenuous PreK-12 environment? How do we transform curriculum and pedagogy so that they reflect, liberate, and ensure justice for students and educators in preschools, elementary schools, middle schools, high schools and the content areas taught within them? Moving from Traditional to Transformative Curriculum and Pedagogy addresses these challenges by providing clear and direct guidance for current and aspiring educators committed to transforming the status quo in their classrooms and schools.

Innovative and creative methodologies and practices that aspiring and practicing educators can use right away are the primary focus of this book. Because the editors and contributors are former or current PreK-12 practitioners and/or education scholars, this book is written for a broad educational audience. The editors and contributors provide preservice and practicing teachers entry points for transforming the educational landscape in favor of liberatory, transformative practices in PreK-12 schools across grade levels, content areas, school types, and geographic regions. Additionally, this book is ideal for teacher preparation programs as well as PreK-12 professional development, as this book guides readers through theoretical and empirical discussions, supported by hands-on applications that enable real-time application, and concludes with interactive features, like case studies, extension activities, and discussion prompts.

Writing as Artistry: EdD Students Learning to Write as Scholarly Practitioners is a timely guidebook that supports EdD students’ scholarly writing development while honoring and amplifying their rich practitioner knowledge and wisdom. EdD students are educational leaders and working professionals transitioning from expert-practitioners to scholarly practitioners who aim to positively transform the lives of students and communities. This resource addresses the significant need for mastering scholarly writing skills required for EdD students’ successful degree completion and real-life impact.

The book’s conceptual approach frames scholarly writing as artistry. This perspective recognizes the work of practitioners as a deeply human and experiential process of solving problems of practice by drawing on prior knowledge and exploring new methods to improve practice. This view champions the idea that practitioners’ professional knowledge and rich prior experience are essential assets and that their insider knowledge is a necessary and key condition for rigorous practitioner inquiry. The authors adopt a critical stance that rejects the dominant notion of technical rationality, which historically views researchers as scholars and practitioners as mere “doers,” arguing instead that building successful experiences for EdD students requires and respects practitioners’ professional knowledge.

The guidebook offers a scaffolded, practical approach to scholarly writing, aiming to guide the reader toward a practice-focused lens, provides practical tools for fostering scholarly writing, and builds students’ confidence as writers. It is centrally focused on developing practice-centered dissertations and culminating projects that align with professional-practice degrees.

To support students throughout the process, the book provides a robust repertoire of writing approaches and strategies. It offers guidance on prewriting techniques for capturing initial ideas and helps students in effectively connecting their ideas with others. Critical to this artistic approach is the development of a unique writer’s voice and positionality, often through the use of reflexivity. The book includes comprehensive practical tools for navigating the often-challenging mechanics of scholarly work, detailing writing feedback and revision strategies, and including a range of templates and clear examples of student work. Furthermore, the guide provides essential advice for leveraging support structures, such as engaging with multiple mentors and critical friends. The guide also prepares students for diverse project types, including individual, collaborative, and alternative dissertation projects.

Ultimately, mastering these skills is a critical way to support students in their work beyond graduation. The ability to write clear, scholarly reports is essential, as the skills learned must transfer from the Dissertation-in-Practice experience to the student's world of practice, thus ensuring real-world impact by enhancing leaders’ capacity to implement evidence-based solutions to complex problems.

The Little Shelter That Could: Literacy Resilience of Mothers and Children Facing Homelessness tells the story of homelessness, life in a shelter, and the impact of these factors on children’s lives and education. It is also a story of hope. Dr. Sadia Warsi discovered something remarkable during her research at Joseph's Shelter. Instead of educational disruption, she found literacy resilience. Families created sophisticated learning environments that challenged assumptions about capabilities during crisis. The Little Shelter That Could reveals extraordinary educational leadership, where children became teachers in hallway spaces and mothers transformed dormitories into literacy-rich environments. Through anonymized, reconstructed narrative case studies based on her research, this book documents how education served as both anchor during crisis and pathway to future possibilities. Rather than focusing on deficits, this work illuminates sophisticated educational knowledge families possess during vulnerable moments. Readers encounter stories of mothers who strategically selected books to accelerate their children's reading while in emergency housing, families who created "learning corners" that became the shelter's educational heart, and parents whose daily bus journeys maintained their children's school enrollment. Written for early childhood educators and teacher candidates, this book provides frameworks for recognizing family educational assets invisible to traditional assessments. Dr. Warsi challenges deficit-based approaches, offering asset-based strategies that build on what families already know. Drawing from extensive experience in special education and multicultural competency, Warsi provides trauma-informed approaches that honor family expertise while supporting growth. Twenty-five years after the initial study, these lessons remain urgently relevant, as housing instability affects an increasing number of families. The Little Shelter That Could offers hope, practical strategies, and a transformative vision for early childhood education that honors every family's educational assets.

Perfect for courses such as: Foundations of Early Childhood Education; Family and Community Engagement in Education; Culturally Responsive Teaching; Early Childhood Literacy Development; Trauma-Informed Educational Practices; Introduction to Special Education; Assessment in Early Childhood Education; Supporting Diverse Families; Child Development and Learning; and Educational Equity and Social Justice

In a higher education landscape that seems to be increasingly focused on accreditation and accountability, administrators, faculty, and staff in higher education institutions expend considerable resources engaging in assessment activities in response to the demands of compliance-oriented external forces. Beyond Accreditation: Designing and Implementing Meaningful Quality Assurance and Continuous Improvement Systems presents an alternative paradigm for consideration: the primary purpose of assessment systems should be to provide program improvement, with the resulting data serving as supporting evidence for compliance-oriented requests.

The book is intended to provide a foundation of background knowledge to empower programs, regardless of size or disciplinary context, to engage in the processes associated with assessment in pursuit of continuous improvement. It supplies data and other information in three distinct ways throughout the book. In some chapters, candid dialogues between the authors are presented in a conversational tone. In others, a more philosophical and sometimes historical perspective provides background knowledge informing why certain things are done and the purposes those activities serve. The remaining chapters present a practical approach to engaging in assessment, from identifying signature assessments to analyzing and reporting on data, all within the overarching context of designing an assessment system that serves continuous improvement efforts.

The accountability mindset that has taken hold in education, and in higher education in particular, has fostered a view of assessment as a complicated, challenging, and burdensome enterprise that is done to us in pursuit of compliance. Throughout the book, assessment is presented as something to be done in pursuit of continuous improvement. The authors hope that its contents prove useful to anyone in search of assistance in these efforts.

Perfect for courses such as: Educational Program Evaluation; Teacher Education; Education Policy; Teacher Education Policy; and Human Resources in Education.

Books and stories can inspire, create empathy, and be cathartic outlets. They expand our understanding of the lived experience as one of the most important conduits for how we spread knowledge and participate in shared humanity. Building on the work of Rudine Sims Bishop, Battle of the Bans: Narratives of Reading and Engaging with Banned Books explores how challenged and banned books act as windows, mirrors, and sliding doors. In the United States and globally, the twenty-first century is seeing renewed efforts at banning books in a variety of forms, including parental controls, book burning, curricular erasure and epistemicide, and social media banning. These efforts have the potential of silencing particular stories, histories, and perspectives. Book banning targets and has deleterious impacts on particular communities, including but not restricted to people of color, LGBTQ+, religious and cultural minorities, and people with different abilities. This edited collection counteracts the narrative that books are dangerous, centering a celebration of how stories shape lives. Educators, families, and individuals present a range of perspectives on how particular banned books have changed their lived experience and view of the world. Contributors discuss children’s literature, young adult literature, fiction, and nonfiction texts. The book is comprised of three parts. In the Context section, contributors explore lessons and/or situations for how banned books have, can, or should be used. In the Introspection section, contributors provide narratives about how banned books shaped a sense of self. In the Action section, contributors detail steps taken in response to book bans, providing strategies for countering censorship and erasure in classrooms, schools, and libraries. Battle of the Bans creates hope and conversation in an era of political divisiveness. It inspires readers to reflect on their own experiences with books, creates dialogue, and provides pathways to challenge book banning, ensuring access to stories, histories, and perspectives.

The book will appeal to a wide range of audiences, including academics, librarians, classroom teachers, parents, and readers who understand the value of books and literature.

Perfect for courses such as: Multicultural Literature; Honors Seminar/Special Topics: Book Banning; Curriculum Theory in Education; History of Reading; Contemporary Social Issues; Introduction to American Studies; Introduction to Policy Studies; Qualitative Research Methods; Narrative Research Methods; and Essay Writing

In these times, decisions large and small can have important consequences for educators. Everything from daily curricular choices and interpersonal encounters to long-term educational aims and approaches to educator-client relations is up for careful decision-making. While not every professional decision requires careful preparation and defense, more than ever, in our increasingly polarized, distrustful, and argumentative world, many more than we might anticipate do. How should educators prepare to make careful, defensible public decisions affecting their students and themselves? An important part of that preparation involves training in a range of logical and interpersonal abilities that come before and help to make good educational decisions. A Preface to Educational Decision-Making is aimed at describing those abilities, illustrating their professional uses, and providing a starting point for increasing educators’ practical skills in applying them.

What are these abilities? For the most part, they involve common-sense attention to the ways that educators can become clearer about the nature of actual decisions they are asked to make, and aware of what must be done to make those decisions ones that all concerned can recognize as reasonable and as logically presented, even if not universally agreeable. In short, these are factors that provide, for decision-makers and their audiences, a preface to decisions that matter to those who make them and to those affected by them. A most important, though widely ignored set of those abilities center on making the nature of particular decisions clear to all concerned. Those abilities involve becoming sensitive to the ways such decisions can become or can be made to be unclear. In the give and take of public educational decision-making processes, bad decisions are often, even usually begin with confusion over what is to be decided and over what is proposed as the decision to make. The ability to get clarification, and the habit of clarifying before committing are crucial to good decision-making. A second set of preparatory abilities involve recognizing what must be done to actually decide what is true and/or advisable, as part of a decision at hand. Making what is recognized as a reasonable and well-reasoned decision depends in large part on applying those abilities clearly and often publicly.

These two large sets of abilities are crucially connected. Making clear to oneself and to others what is to be decided is part and parcel of becoming aware of how to decide an issue at hand. This book works to explain the connections and to describe the order of their application. While most of these abilities have been described in other texts on what is usually called “informal logic,” A Preface to Educational Decision-Making is especially concerned with the sorts of decision that educators are called on to make in their professional lives. Moreover, this book widens the range of abilities to clarify and support professional decisions beyond what is usually discussed. The sections on educational speech acts and on deciding what to call true or advisable provide useful additions to educators’ repertoire of decision-making abilities. Finally, the discussion of interpersonal factors in public decision-making offers useful guides to reaching decisions with other educators and with clients.

Perfect for courses such as: Foundations of Education; Philosophy; Social Foundations, Methods Courses in Education; Pre-student Teaching; and most Graduate courses in Educational Theory, Curriculum, Social Issues

Privilege Through the Looking-Glass, Third Edition is a revised and expanded collection of essays that explore privilege and status characteristics in daily life.

This collection seeks to make visible that which is often invisible. It seeks to sensitize us to things we have been taught not to see. Privilege, power, oppression, and domination operate in complex and insidious ways, impacting groups and individuals. And yet, these forces that affect our lives so deeply seem to at once operate in plain sight and lurk in the shadows, making them difficult to discern. Like water to a fish, environments are nearly impossible to perceive when we are immersed in them. This book attempts to expose our environments.

With engaging and powerful writing, the contributors share their personal stories as a means of connecting the personal and the public. This volume applies an intersectional perspective to explore how race, class, gender, sexuality, education, and ableness converge, creating the basis for privilege and oppression. Privilege Through the Looking-Glass encourages readers to engage in self and social reflection and can be used in a range of courses in sociology, social work, communication, education, gender studies, and Black studies. Each chapter includes discussion questions and/or activities for further engagement, making it a perfect classroom text.

Transition planning for students with disabilities is often treated as a procedural task rather than an opportunity to address systemic inequities. Beyond Graduation: Navigating Postsecondary Success for Students with Disabilities reframes postsecondary transition through a justice-centered framework that prioritizes equity, inclusion, and culturally responsive practices. The book examines the current state of transition planning, highlighting disparities in access, employment, and community integration for disabled students, particularly those from marginalized backgrounds. It advocates for early intervention, comprehensive assessments, and individualized goals aligned with each student’s strengths and aspirations.

The book explores how race, disability, and socioeconomic status intersect to shape postsecondary experiences, emphasizing the need for equity-centered transition practices that address systemic biases in special education. It critiques traditional definitions of college readiness and advocates for inclusive curriculum design and equitable access to advanced coursework.

Strategies for fostering independence, financial literacy, and self-advocacy are outlined, along with practical recommendations for navigating postsecondary systems and digital spaces. The concluding chapter underscores the importance of accountability, systemic change, and justice-oriented planning that prepares all students to thrive beyond graduation. Designed for educators, practitioners, students, families, educators, and policymakers, this research bridges the gap between policy and practice, offering actionable solutions to empower students with disabilities to achieve success beyond the classroom and into adulthood.

Perfect for courses such as: Foundations of Postsecondary Transition Planning for Students with Disabilities; Equity and Inclusion in College Readiness Programs; Principles of Independent Living and Life Skills Development; Addressing Ableism and Systemic Barriers in Higher Education; Intersectionality and Disability: Navigating Race, Class, and Access; Technology and Access in Postsecondary Education; Advocacy and Self-Determination for Students with Disabilities; Introduction to Special Education; and Exceptional Children

Decoloniality and African Education: Contested Issues and Challenges is a vibrant and vital collection of essays that addresses the challenges, possibilities, and responsibilities for the future of de- and anti-colonial African education. Decolonization has become a buzz word of late, so the term is used in this context with a certain trepidation. But the themes of this book go beyond mere rhetoric by creating specific approaches to dismantling colonial educational systems in African and to create a new environment for African education duly informed by local cultural resource knowing, known from grounded everyday practices of authentic African educators. In other words, a revision of educational practices informed by what educators know and are doing for the lessons in envisioning schooling and education in Africa. In this endeavor, while we seek lessons and partnerships with others, African educators are urged to think through solutions specific to the problems and challenges in schools today, and meet the call of our times to provide education to young learners that not only empowers them, but also provides them with background knowledge, cultural grounding, and specific lessons that will enable them to craft their own futures. So how do we “do” decolonial education from the standpoint of African educators and learners everyday schooling practice and knowledge? Decoloniality and African Education argues that a careful embrace of African Indigenous and cultural knowings determine the successful response to this question. It engages both the “decolonial” and the “anti-colonial,” with a reading that the “decolonial” (as many have pointed out, see Parry, 1994) is a process and a path toward an end, which is the goal of the “anti-colonial” (see Dei, 2022).

Decoloniality and African Education is essential reading for students and scholars committed to the improvement of educational outcomes for African American students. It’s a book that empowers educators and raises awareness about African-based teaching environments. It can be used in a variety of courses, including African Studies, African Development, Anti-Colonial Thought and Indigenous Knowledge, and the Pedagogical Implications of Decolonization.