PRODUCTS

Light a Fire and Watch It Burn: Disruptive Qualitative Methods in Education Research revolutionizes how qualitative research is conceptualized, taught, and practiced. Edited by Michael L. Boucher, Jr., Ph.D., this groundbreaking collection of essays by emerging and established scholars introduces equity-centered, justice-oriented methodologies designed to challenge entrenched systems of power and privilege. With a focus on amplifying marginalized voices and fostering transformative social action, this book serves as an inspiring, accessible resource for educators, researchers, and graduate students.

Traditional qualitative research texts provide invaluable foundations for understanding methods such as participant observation, coding, and analysis. Yet, they often fail to address innovative approaches that challenge oppressive norms and center lived experiences of marginalized communities. Light a Fire and Watch It Burn fills this critical gap, presenting 15 concise, practice-oriented chapters on disruptive methods, including photovoice, duoethnography, feminist critical discourse analysis, and arts-based research like ethnodrama. These approaches reimagine qualitative inquiry as a vehicle for equity, inclusion, and justice, equipping readers with tools to create meaningful change.

Each chapter follows a consistent structure, making the book an ideal classroom text for qualitative research courses. Readers will find clear explanations of the methodologies, their theoretical foundations, and how they disrupt systems of oppression while empowering participants. Practical examples, discussion questions, and curated lists of further readings encourage deep reflection and active engagement. This structure ensures seamless integration into weekly lessons for master’s and doctoral students, while also serving as a reference for scholars seeking to expand their methodological repertoire.

From exploring anticolonial ethics to embracing culturally responsive frameworks like ʻŌiwi methodologies and Pláticas, the book highlights the potential of qualitative research to humanize and transform. Contributors share personal narratives and research experiences that illuminate how these methodologies foster trust, amplify silenced voices, and dismantle academic hierarchies. The metaphor of “lighting a fire” reflects the catalytic potential of these methods to spark curiosity, disrupt traditional paradigms, and ignite transformative social action, while “watching it burn” underscores the boldness and urgency of these practices in reimagining education research.

Accessible, inspiring, and deeply rooted in critical theory, Light a Fire and Watch It Burn is an essential companion for students and educators who dare to confront power and reimagine research as a tool for justice. It challenges readers to move beyond the safe confines of traditional methods and embrace innovative practices that center humanity, equity, and resilience. Whether you are a graduate student beginning your journey, a scholar seeking to disrupt academic norms, or an educator looking for practical tools to inspire your students, this book provides the guidance and vision needed to reshape qualitative research—and, ultimately, the world it seeks to understand. Light a Fire and Watch It Burn is not just a book; it is a call to action for those ready to create a more inclusive, equitable future through research.

Perfect for courses such as: Introduction to Qualitative Research Methods; Critical Theory in Education; Advanced Qualitative Research Design; Participatory Research in Education; Feminist Research in Social Sciences; Decolonizing Research Practices; Arts and Humanities-Based Inquiry; Social Justice in Education; Education Policy and Practice; Research Ethics and Methodologies

Photovoice research is a participatory qualitative research method where participants photograph themselves, then analyzing them to document and reflect upon their experiences and perspectives on a specific topic, often with the goal of raising awareness and advocating for change. It empowers participants by giving them control over the research process and their own narratives.

Photovoice: Using Words and Images in Qualitative Research is a collection of essays from the field that focuses on educators’ implementation of photovoice in a myriad of settings. This methodology crosses disciplines and offers a powerful way to combine visual methods with social research, making it adaptable to many areas where understanding and representing marginalized voices are important.

Photovoice is the perfect text for use in a variety of classrooms and courses, including:

• Introduction to Qualitative Research Methods
• Community Studies (understanding how visual methods like photovoice can help researchers gain insight into the lived experiences of people within a community)
• Public Health (photovoice is a valuable method for understanding health disparities, the impact of the environment on health)
• Education (when studying participatory learning, student engagement, or community-based education. It would also be useful in teacher training programs focusing on inclusive and culturally responsive teaching.)
• Anthropology (courses on qualitative research or ethnography, photovoice allows for a deeper understanding of cultural and social dynamics through the visual representation of people's lived experiences)
• Selected topics in Educational Research
• Place-Based Education

In the challenging world of doctoral studies, where less than 5% of the U.S. population holds a doctorate degree, support and guidance are crucial for success. From ABD to PhD and EdD: Navigating the Final Stretch of Your Doctoral Journey offers a unique and powerful approach to completing your doctoral degree through the often-overlooked strategy of peer mentoring/coaching groups.

Drawing from years of experience mentoring doctoral students at prestigious institutions, Dr. Vickie E. Lake presents a comprehensive guide for both faculty and students. This book addresses the critical gap in support that many doctoral candidates face after completing their coursework, a period when guidance is most needed but often least available. From ABD to PhD and EdD is divided into three essential chapters:

1. Doctoral Group Mentoring/Coaching: Learn the fundamentals of establishing and maintaining effective peer support groups. Understand the difference between mentoring and coaching, and how to leverage both for maximum benefit.
2. Strategies for Success: Discover proven techniques for tackling each milestone of your doctoral journey, from comprehensive exams to the dissertation defense. This chapter offers practical advice on pre-writing strategies, time management, and overcoming common obstacles.
3. Resources for Completion: Navigate the often-confusing world of university resources. Learn how to effectively utilize writing centers, librarians, graduate colleges, and professional organizations to support your research and writing process.

Implementation Science: A Playbook for Instructional Leaders offers a practical approach to driving sustainable, impactful change in educational settings. Grounded in research-to-practice methodology, this essential guide is designed for district and school instructional leaders committed to elevating student outcomes through strategic, evidence-informed decisions. Dr. Carlson draws on decades of experience in teaching, leadership, curriculum development, and literacy research to deliver a step-by-step framework that empowers leaders to effectively plan, implement, monitor, and assess initiatives.

In clear, accessible language, Implementation Science demystifies the core principles of implementation and bridges concepts to turnaround. It offers actionable strategies and tools for tackling complex challenges in today’s educational landscape. From curriculum selection to fostering an engaged, capable team, this playbook navigates the nuances of change management, helping leaders make data-driven decisions that stick. Each chapter culminates with key takeaways and questions for reflection, supporting instructional leaders in aligning their work with broader district goals.

Perfect for superintendents, principals, curriculum directors, and aspiring leaders, Implementation Science is more than a guide—it’s a hands-on resource for building a sustainable, student-centered culture of continuous improvement. The book can also be adopted for a variety of courses such as Educational Leadership and Administration; Curriculum and Instructional Design; Data-Driven Decision Making in Education; Change Management in Education; and many more.

Fat on Campus: The Voices and Images of Fat College Students and the Impacts of Fatphobia amplifies the voices of 11 fat college students across the United States. Defined as “a pathological fear of fatness often manifested as negative attitudes and stereotypes about fat people” (Robinson et al., 1993, p. 468), fatphobia, like other forms of oppression, impacts our students and our campuses. Unlike other cultural phenomena, fatness is one of the last socially acceptable forms of bias.

This text sheds light on fat students, increasing their visibility in higher education, explaining why it is important to recognize and address this critical issue on campuses across America. Using rich stories from students who self-identify as fat, this text honors their experiences and highlights how they have created welcoming spaces for themselves in often unwelcoming collegiate environments. The book shares findings from a national photovoice research study, including narratives and photographs. A methodological technique combining storytelling and photography, photovoice is often used to inspire social change. Aligned with the idea of transforming the future of higher education, this book serves as both a call to action for educators and a love letter to fat students on campus.

The book is designed to engage educators and amplify the voices of fat students in an accessible way. While it may be tempting for readers to flip to the section corresponding with their functional area of interest, readers are invited to read the whole book and ask themselves, “How can I extend this research to my own place of work?”

Perfect for courses such as: College Environments; Diversity in Higher Education; Understanding College Students; Arts-Based Research and Methodologies; Qualitative Research

Scaffolding the Language of Power: An Apprenticeship in Doctoral Level Writing offers an accessible, practical, hands-on guide to developing the skills needed to successfully write a doctoral dissertation or thesis. This textbook-workbook hybrid can be used both as a program/course text and as a supplement for individual doctoral students in education and related social science and humanities fields.

The book is built on three main ideas. First, writing is fundamentally connected to issues of social justice. Doctoral-level writing is part of the “language of power” in academia, which builds on the linguistic patterns of the dominant culture and serves as a gatekeeping mechanism. Second, writing is genre-based. This means that doctoral level writing is a particular way of using language, or a specific genre, with distinct rules and structures that can be taught. And third, writing can be scaffolded. Approaching writing as a pedagogical act that supports readers’ understanding through purposeful scaffolding is not just a way to successfully complete a doctoral dissertation—it is a way to make academic writing more accessible in general.

In its first chapter, Scaffolding the Language of Power provides a general framework for the rules of the doctoral “language of power.” Chapter two offers an in-depth look at organization and scaffolding as key features of academic writing at the doctoral level, with discussions and activities to practice drafting supportive headings, chunking text, creating road maps and topic sentences, and strategically linking sections, paragraphs, and sentences through transitions and connector phrases. Chapter three provides lessons and exercises to develop argumentation, evidence use, synthesis skills, and academic voice. The remaining six chapters address each major task of the dissertation, including the problem statement, literature review, theoretical framework, methodology, findings, and discussion. Each of these chapters explicitly teaches the purposes and elements of its specific dissertation task, guiding students through warm-ups, annotated examples with elaborated explanations of writing moves, and carefully sequenced activities. Ultimately, these pedagogical features support students to build out the pieces of their doctoral dissertations or theses, chapter by chapter.

This book is appropriate for any course on academic writing in EdD or PhD programs. It is also useful for courses that teach how to write a problem statement, literature review, and/or theoretical framework. Additional courses include: Qualitative Research; Qualitative Practicum/pilot study courses; and Dissertation seminar and support courses.

CPED Webinar Series--Scaffolding the Language of Power: https://vimeo.com/1029693697

Letters to the Field: Curriculum Scholars’ Stories for Future Generations encapsulates a generation of scholars who revitalized the field of Curriculum Studies across North America in the mid-1970s, as well as the generations of scholars who immediately followed, all of whom are now themselves senior scholars. Rather than another edited work of reprints or new monographs, this volume seeks to do something special by providing an opportunity for this group of scholars to speak to their field about understandings they believe to be of significance.

The strength of this book generally resides in two overarching factors. First, there is the depth and strength of this well-rounded, highly regarded group of scholars whose work speaks to the heart of the interdisciplinary nature of curriculum studies and curriculum theorizing. Second, as you might imagine, this is a significant moment in the United States when the very foundation of curriculum theory–critical inquiry and often an engagement with questions of race, queerness, disability, and the like–continues to be under attack in K-12 schools and universities across the United States. Contributors speak to the foundations of the field and the contemporary challenges that the field and schools of education more broadly must survive.

Contributions to this important work are five to seven handwritten or, in the case of scholars who are unable to write, typed pages. There are also chapters that have accompanying photos and drawings. The reproduction of actual letters in the book lend authenticity and will appeal to readers by giving an intimate view into the thoughts and wishes of these scholars. We also understand that, similar to the challenge folks might face when handwriting a document, some writing might not be legible to all readers. Therefore, stable QR codes and/or hyperlinks to typed versions of handwritten chapters are included so that readers can easily look at typed versions alongside the handwritten work online.

Letters to the Field makes an invaluable contribution to Curriculum Studies. By providing a history of the rationale used to revitalize the field, it will prove a valuable addition to the libraries of educators in a variety of disciplines.

Perfect for courses such as: Introduction to Curriculum Theory; Introduction to College Teaching; Social Foundations of Education; History of American Higher Education; Traditions of Inquiry; and Introduction to Scholarship

Researchers working to clearly identify a research topic and theme have difficulty deciding how to focus their work. Using a potential-based learning focus, detailed in this text, readers are challenged to consider their role as researcher, scholar, and leader to guide their reflective work. Transformative Potential Based Research: A Guide to Successfully Finding One's Place in Research provides both the theoretical support and the guiding activities to help readers decide on an area of potential-based research. The result will prove to be transformational.

To guide this work, Karen Moroz and Trish Harvey have developed a suitable framework. They invite readers to review the mountain metaphor shared within the framework and to keep the visual present at all times as they progress through the book. It is addressed often and readers will be invited to use, extend, and discuss it numerous times throughout their journey.

Transformative Potential Based Research supports instructors and students through all stages of research, including:

• identifying and embracing relevant and essential topics,
• crafting research questions that accurately and concisely convey the purpose(s),
• exploring one’s own connection to the issue,
• developing and employing individual processes that lead to success, and
• determining a potential-based frame that motivates the writer and frames the work

2025 SPE Outstanding Book Award Honorable Mention

The IMPACT of the Scholarly Practitioner Doctorate: Developing Socially-Just Leaders to Make Equitable Change is a collection of shared counternarratives between EdD alums and their supervising professor mentors, detailing their dissertation in practice (DiP) journeys as scholarly practitioners and the impact of the scholarly practitioner doctorate on their paths from doctoral students to socially-just leaders in a wide range of educational fields. The IMPACT of the Scholarly Practitioner Doctorate posits these relationships as the catalyst in bringing theory learned in course work to scholarly research that is positioned within practice, focused on contributing to equity-centered work. The book serves as an exemplar learning companion to a wide audience and diverse EdD programs looking to modify, develop, or redesign their programs to align with The Carnegie Project on the Education Doctorate (CPED) concepts including signature pedagogy, laboratories of practice, inquiry as practice and mentoring and advising. The IMPACT of the Scholarly Practitioner Doctorate demonstrates how change in education, community, and organizations have been impacted in efficacious ways. EdD students and their supervising professors, faculty, and administrators will be able to use this book’s content as their own catalyst for building socially-just leadership knowledge, skills, and dispositions while preparing their EdD students to exhibit equitable change in the professional practice areas they are in.

Perfect for courses such as: Introduction to Educational Research; Social Justice Education Foundations; Leadership for Equity and Social Change; Transformative Leadership; Foundations of Inquiry for Social Justice; Qualitative Inquiry for Social Justice; Critical Perspectives for Equity in Education; Engaging in Critical Social Theories for Designing Research for Equity and Social Justice; Reform and Change for Social Justice; Educational Leadership Development