PRODUCTS

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

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.

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.

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.

Professional and educational associations, such as the Carnegie Project for the Education Doctorate (CPED), create and offer awards that recognize the accomplishments of individuals, programs, and institutions. In this edited book, W. Kyle Ingle and Harriette Thurber Rasmussen focus on CPED’s Program of the Year (POY) Award, examining its history, purpose, submission requirements, its committee structure, activities, and outcomes. Faculty members from CPED’s award-winning institutions have been invited to discuss their innovative programs, how these innovations were developed, how they pursue social justice, and how these innovations have been sustained since winning the award. Furthermore, the award’s role in facilitating the diffusion of innovative and effective practices among CPED member institutions is examined. The book and its chapters are framed through the lens of innovation diffusion theory. Popularized by communication theorist Everett Rogers (1967, 2003), innovation diffusion theory has spread widely across the social sciences. In his seminal work, Diffusion of Innovations, Rogers defines an innovation as “an idea, practice, or object that is perceived as new by an individual or other unit of adoption” (2003, p. 12). Innovation diffusion is the process by which an innovation spreads among the members of a social system, in this case the internal and external communities of Ed.D.-granting institutions.

The book includes dual components: (1) innovative programs that drive social justice and (2) how these institutional innovations were developed and sustained. The latter component will shed light on three self-study processes related to these award willing programs:

1. The process of creating the featured innovative program;
2. The process of applying for the program of the year award; and
3. The process of writing the journey and considering the impact of the program of the year award on their institution, including any reinvention/adaptations. 

Reclaiming the Education Doctorate: A Guidebook for (re)Designing EdD Programs 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

Radical Roots: How One Professor Changed a University's Legacy tells the story of Joel Torstenson, a sociology professor at Augsburg University in Minneapolis, Minnesota. In the 1960s, Torstenson challenged his university to embrace its urban setting and to design its curricular, co-curricular, and community engagement programs to advance its mission of “Education for service.” The compelling story of Torstenson’s legacy at Augsburg over the past 60 years offers lessons for colleges and universities across the country committed to democratic engagement in their work at the intersections of mission and place.

Augsburg University's saga as an urban settlement has not always been embraced by the university. Though location and place are central to the university’s identity, it is not sufficient to explain the integrative power of the university’s character. For that purpose, it is critical that place be understood through the lens of Augsburg’s academic mission and work. This integrated view of place and mission required a new way of imagining the university’s core work of educating students.

The purpose of this book is two-fold. The first is to document and celebrate the legacy of Professor Joel Torstenson, and to understand the impact of this legacy’s inception, evolution, and current manifestations and impact at Augsburg and in the wider world. Professor Torstenson cared deeply about the public purpose of higher education, and Torstenson’s model for what this public purpose might look like prompted massive transformation in Augsburg University’s trajectory. The resulting experiments in education and commitment to the city flowered into a legacy that has spurred Augsburg University to create an innovative model for 21st Century education. This model has impacted everything from student learning and community life, to teaching and curricular structure, to the public mission of the institution and its presence in the city and world. Torstenson’s creative—and even radical—work in the 1960s and '70s has been carried through the decades by continued innovation in teaching and learning based in experiential education, and a commitment to place and community building. This legacy has simultaneously advanced the public purpose and mission of the University.

Secondly, this book shares what are some of the lessons learned from fifty years of innovation following Torstenson’s vision, with the hope that these lessons might serve the broader community of colleges, universities, faculty, staff, and students engaged in similar pursuits. Augsburg’s innovative experiential education, place-based community engagement, and public and anchor institution work has been and will continue to be a model for other institutions. We believe that Torstenson’s legacy, and the lessons learned through the years of its evolution, has lessons to teach and models to follow for our sibling institutions across the United States.

The volume includes discussion prompts and questions after each section. There is also a companion website (www.augsburg.edu/radicalroots) that includes additional resources related to the volume's themes.

Perfect for course such as: Higher Education and Democracy in the United States; Principles of Experiential Education; Place Matters: Higher Education and Community Engagement; Universities as Anchor Institutions in their Communities; Introduction to Citizen Professionalism: Leading in the 21st Century; Public Work, Social Responsibility, and Vocation in a World of Extremes; Accompaniment: Developing Democratic Skills and Fostering Healing with Communities; Curricular Innovations in Higher Education; and Principles of Higher Education Pedagogy

Transforming Identities is the story of one doctoral program that was developed to transform the individuals who participated in the program personally and professionally, leading to improved ways of working within their professional practice. The book details the components of the program believed to have contributed to students' transformed personal and professional identities. The description of the program serves as a frame for 14 individual, compelling stories of transformation. These stories include identities experienced during the program, programmatic components that were mechanisms for change, and the impact of these alums' transformation on their professional organizations. In the final chapter, the editors look across the alums' stories of transformation to inform those who are developing/redeveloping doctor of education programs. Mechanisms of change highlighted by these former students include courses, communities of practice, advisers, and comprehensive examination. The book also synthesizes alums' descriptions of the phases of their transformation, what it means to be a scholar-practitioner, and what meaningful contributions “look like” within their professional contexts.

The Johns Hopkins University (JHU) Doctor of Education (EdD) program was created with the expressed programmatic outcome of developing leaders who possess the knowledge, skills, and dispositions to rigorously examine educational problems of practice with stakeholders within their context of professional practice. Transforming Identities frames this discussion of identity transformation from an improvement science perspective as depicted by Bryk et al. (2015) (see also Author et al., 2022). Using this framework for the Applied Dissertation, the program supported its scholar-practitioners to partner with their colleagues in educational institutions and to independently take on the challenges and opportunities they encountered in their work within their context of professional practice. The initial chapters in the book provide an overview of the EdD program, to frame the remaining chapters in which graduates from the program describe their inspirational stories of transformation. They describe the ways in which the program components, including their dissertation, transformed their identity as well as their work within their context of professional practice. These stories present the ways in which these change agents within their organizations have served as insiders who, with greater knowledge and access to knowledge, were able to become the bridge between research and practice, and practice and research and thereby change their organizations from the inside. These stories of transformation highlight how their skills and insights accurately identify the variability in the contexts in which their problem of practice is situated, the variability in the successes of interventions within similar contexts, and the most appropriate way to move the organization forward toward improved outcomes. Each chapter tells the author’s story of transformation from practitioner to scholar-practitioner through the dissertation study and beyond.

It's Not Rocket Science - A Guide to the School Improvement Cycle: With Examples From New Zealand and Australian Schools presents an easy-to-read, practical guide to effectively leading school improvement. It walks leaders through each step of ‘The School Improvement Cycle’ developed by Bendikson and Meyer, providing case studies, examples, and helpful tools from primary and secondary schools for the implementation of each step. The book will support school leaders in implementing improvement cycles without making the classic mistakes of failing to develop measures of improvement and test change actions before scaling up. Schools and system leaders will benefit greatly from this practical guide, in which Bendikson and Meyer demonstrate that implementing improvement cycles is not a difficult process. While the book uses examples from Australian and New Zealand schools, the lessons that the book teaches can be applied to school leaders everywhere.

The authors show how to make the complex work of improving student learning and outcomes at least somewhat simpler. They do this by describing and illustrating improvement steps that they have found to work in practice, providing examples from their work in schools to show the application of these ideas. If implemented properly, the cycles become “self-propelling,” thus reducing the cognitive load involved in planning how to improve. A range of evidence from international research and the authors’ own research and development work in schools explains the cycle and illustrate it.

The book is entitled It’s Not Rocket Science because this is the common reaction from leaders once they understand the improvement cycle process. The book is perfect for a variety of courses in Education Leadership, Professional Development, and any other curriculum devoted to improving schools and student performance.

Perfect for courses such as: Educational Leadership, Professional Development