Search results for Kenneth Jones

African American males are confronted with formidable barriers in their pursuit of quality education, resulting in stark disparities in academic performance, economic opportunities, and social outcomes. Despite numerous educational initiatives striving for parity, African American males persistently bear the brunt of the highest rates of suspensions, expulsions, and dropout rates, surpassing all other demographic groups.

Educational environments often fail to acknowledge and integrate the cultural and social needs of Black males, viewing them as "problems" rather than recognizing their immense potential for academic and leadership success. The prevalence of negative stereotypes in media, particularly in video games, exacerbates societal biases, portraying African American males as inherently violent and criminal. These representations contribute to implicit biases that affect perceptions and treatment in real-life scenarios. The systemic issues within the education system, coupled with socioeconomic factors, result in African American males being underrepresented in advanced placement and gifted education programs. This underrepresentation limits their opportunities for higher education and professional advancement.

Confronting these challenges necessitates a comprehensive approach that encompasses the creation of inclusive educational environments, the eradication of systemic racism, and the promotion of positive representations of African American males in media. By acknowledging and fostering the potential of Black males, society can strive to reduce disparities and cultivate a more equitable and just education system that recognizes and celebrates their academic and professional achievements.

African American Males and Video Games explores the perspectives of four African American male college students aged 18 to 21 on the impact of video games on their academic growth and development. The participants, all maintaining a GPA of 3.0 or higher, shared their experiences with teachers, video games, and coping mechanisms. This qualitative approach allowed for a rich understanding of the participant's experiences and the role of video games in their academic and mental well-being.

Video games emerged as a significant coping tool for the participants, providing a mental escape from academic and social pressures. The games allowed them to engage in competitive and creative activities, fostering a sense of accomplishment and reducing stress. For example, games like NBA 2K21 and Forza Horizon 4 enabled them to explore alter egos and interests in a virtual space, offering entertainment and a sense of community.

African American Males and Video Games is a critical text for exploring alternatives in providing a quality education experience for young African American males. It is vital reading for educators in all areas of higher education, and a valuable teaching tool in Colleges of Education.

Professor Rudolf Inderst interviewed Kenneth Jones for a New Books Network podcast. Listen at: https://newbooksnetwork.com/african-american-males-and-video-games

Perfect for courses such as: Educational Psychology; Sociology of Education; African American Studies; Media Studies; Game Design; Youth Development; Digital Literacy; Cultural Studies; Educational Technology; Social Psychology; Gender Studies

What is a fandom, and why do fandoms matter for school?

Fandoms are passionate communities dedicated to appreciating and engaging with texts of interest (movies, TV shows, books, bands, brands, sports teams, etc.) via personally and communally meaningful literacy practices. It is increasingly obvious that scripted literacy curricula and standardized tests fall short of meeting meaningful literacy goals and create culturally destructive learning spaces. Fandoms in the Classroom provides an alternative for educators looking to center passion in their classrooms, individualizing their literacy curricula by building from youth’s interests. The book describes how educators in a wide range of secondary learning contexts can build curricula around students’ already-present fandom interests to support literacy growth. This text supports educators in a range of learning contexts with step-by-step processes for building learning spaces that support navigation of fandom and disciplinary literacies, with a particular focus on common obstacles and roadblocks that teachers have shared with us. It addresses how classrooms doing critical fandom work can address social justice issues across both fandom and disciplinary communities.

This book covers relevant topics such as:

• Why Fandoms? We introduce readers to the concept of fandoms and how engaging students’ experiences in fandoms is not an extra or add-on but instead crucial to flipping the script on literacy learning.
• Bring Your Fandom to Class: Critically Putting Communities in Conversation. The book discusses how to shift ideas of literacy learning contexts from teacher-centric instruction to a community learning model.
• Fostering Engagement & Choosing Texts Together: Teachers are often nervous about teaching what they don’t know. The text provides strategies for making learning ecologies and having kids fill it with their own interests, describing specific step-by-step discussion routines that can support youth’s engagement with critical tools on texts of their choice.
• Building Culturally Responsive Assessments Engaging Youth-Centric Audiences: the book describes how educators can design more expansive literacy assessments with examples of culturally responsive objectives and tasks. The authors include a range of fandom genres and audiences that they have seen in their own work.
• Transforming Your Current Curriculum in Conversation with Fandoms: Supporting educators interested in expanding literature units in conversation with fandom texts, the text describes how to design units that put various discourse communities in conversation without deadening or co-opting youth interests.
• Interdisciplinary Applications: there is a discussion about specific examples of how educators the authors have supported in various contexts have applied this kind of work. It includes a focus on cross-disciplinary literacy, with cases highlighting applications for math, science, social studies and music disciplinary learning.

This collection consists of theoretical discussions, personal reflections, research reports, and policy suggestions sourced in the experiences of our most vulnerable students with an eye to making schools places all students might love rather than hate. The essays take up these issues from the perspectives of poverty, gender, race, ethnicity, ability, language, and religion among others.

These essays also provide practical advice for teachers and administrators—both practicing and pre-service—for making classrooms and schools spaces that would encourage our students to say, “I love school.”  

Perfect for courses in: Introduction to Education, General Methods, Social Foundations of Education, Diversity, Management/Assessment, Philosophy of Education, Sociology of Education, Educational Research, Educational Administration/Leadership, Teacher Leadership, Curriculum Theory, and Curriculum Development.

2025 SPE Outstanding Book Award Honorable Mention

In schools, a Code Red alert indicates a potential or immediate threat within a building or on a campus and is the signal for a full-scale lockdown of all classrooms. This book, Code Red: Conversations and Solutions for an Educational System in Crisis, presents a variety of voices from teachers, administrators, teacher preparation faculty, college supervisors, and pre-service teacher candidates. These voices are crying “Code Red” because they want a broken system repaired. For them, the system is bleeding, cancerous, and in turmoil, with the expectation that they work under arduous and often dangerous conditions; teachers are underpaid, devalued, exhausted, voiceless, and abused. They face an environment in which politics has replaced learning, students are failing and, in extreme circumstances, walking away from schools or even committing suicide. The political discourse is wrestling control from teachers in certain states. Neurodivergent students are being pushed aside. The altruistic profession of teaching is being reduced to factory work, in which teachers—especially those in their first five years of service—are leaving the profession at staggering rates. The profession itself is at risk of becoming obsolete.

The contributors to Code Red believe that the American educational system has entered a moment of crisis. Their voices need to be heard, and their stories and lived experiences should be recognized. The adage is true: the answer to any problem resides with those who own the problem. We cannot create solutions without owning that these issues exist, and all of America owns the education of our children. Therefore, this book provides a dialogic space where everyone involved in the American educational system can reimagine the possibilities of our system and, through this process, begin creating positive and sustainable changes to bring our system out of crisis. In addition to providing a vivid picture of the current state of public schools, the book offers real solutions that can be used to produce healthier, more successful classrooms. It is an invaluable tool for instructors, pre-service teachers, and Colleges of Education administrators.

Perfect for courses such as: Introductory Education; Undergraduate Social and Cultural Foundations of Education; Introductory Educational Leadership; Introductory Undergraduate Teacher Preparation; Graduate Foundations of Education; and Introductory MAT Graduate

Some students enter classrooms with an “I dare you try to teach me” look on their faces, and others bounce into class excited to learn and anxious to please the teacher. We know we can’t automatically blame teachers or schools when students don’t want to learn. But we also know that sometimes teachers and schools don’t always set students up for success, and they don’t always help them love what they’re learning.

Why Kids Love (and Hate) School: Reflections on Practice investigates some of the school and classroom practices that help students love school—and some that send students in the opposite direction. Intended for classroom teachers, teacher education students, and school administrators, chapters in the book investigate a variety of topics: how schools can build effective school cultures, the “struggle” students encounter in learning, practices of other countries that help students love school, testing practices that cause students to hate school—and much more.  

Perfect for courses in: Introduction to Education, General Methods, Management/Assessment, Educational Research, Educational Administration/Leadership, Teacher Leadership, Curriculum Theory, Curriculum Development.

2025 SPE Outstanding Book Award Honorable Mention

In recent years, the field of education has been fraught with a variety of different challenges. A multi-year pandemic, book banning, and legislative efforts seeking to ban Critical Race Theory and LGBTQ positive curriculum have had negative effects on K-12 education, leaving many educators feeling the progress made in several states and communities before and during the 2018 teacher walkouts and strikes was now gone. Teacher morale is sitting at a historic low point, with teachers leaving the profession in droves. Education as an institution is at a crucial tipping point, and changes focused on equity and reducing the neoliberal hold on reform need to be implemented in order to keep schools as democratic spaces. The way this vision can be realized is through activism and existing social movement organizations that use both traditional and netroots practices. The purpose of Activists, Advocates, and Agitators is to provide readers with a history and analysis of 21st century teacher activism in K-12 schools to better understand the effectiveness of organizing and activism. Additionally, the text will introduce readers to present-day activist groups whose work is positively changing education and schools and the ways in which some teachers are working within their communities to assist in their specific needs.

Activists, Advocates, and Agitators is the perfect book to instruct preservice teachers about the conditions that they will face in their classrooms, arming them with valuable strategies to help them to achieve their academic goals.

Perfect for courses such as: Social Foundations of Education; Foundations of Education; Education Policy; Educational Leadership; Teacher Leadership; Sociology of Education; Politics of Education; and Democratic Education

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.

Advancing Special Education Through Improvement Science: A Practical Guide offers a comprehensive and accessible resource for educators, administrators, and policymakers committed to enhancing equity and effectiveness in special education. It bridges the gap between theory and practice by providing a structured approach to applying improvement science within the unique context of special education services. Grounded in the principles of continuous improvement, the book introduces a methodical process for identifying, testing, and refining practices to achieve better outcomes for students with disabilities. It emphasizes the importance of understanding educational systems' complexities and using data-driven strategies to foster lasting change.

A key strength of this guide is its focus on the role of data in driving improvement. Readers are guided through practical methods for collecting, analyzing, and using data to inform decisions, along with solutions to common challenges in the process. By centering evidence-based decision-making, the book empowers educators to make meaningful changes that positively impact student outcomes. Collaboration is another major theme. The text highlights the importance of engaging teachers, administrators, families, and students in improvement efforts. Strategies for building strong teams, fostering trust, and ensuring inclusive stakeholder participation are woven throughout, reinforcing the idea that sustainable improvement depends on shared responsibility.

Real-world case studies illustrate successful applications of improvement science in diverse school settings. These examples provide readers with insights into implementation challenges and successes, offering practical takeaways that can be adapted for their own contexts. To support day-to-day implementation, the book includes a variety of tools and resources such as data collection templates, PDSA (Plan-Do-Study-Act) cycle checklists, and facilitation guides for collaborative meetings. These practical assets make it easier for educators to incorporate improvement science into their routines.

Finally, the guide addresses the critical need for sustainability and scalability. It offers strategies for embedding improvement practices into school and district operations so that gains can be maintained and expanded over time. By focusing on long-term change, the book helps ensure that students with disabilities benefit from ongoing, systemic improvements.

Whether you're a classroom teacher, school leader, or policymaker, this guide provides the knowledge and tools needed to drive meaningful progress in special education through improvement science.

Perfect for courses such as: Introduction to Special Education; Exceptional Children; Foundations of Special Education; Special Education Leadership; School Improvement and Reform