PRODUCTS

Social studies education over its hundred-year history has focused predominantly on white and male narratives. This has not only been detrimental to the increasingly diverse population of the U.S., but it has also meant that social studies as a field of scholarship has systematically excluded and marginalized the voices, teaching, and research of women, scholars of color, queer scholars, and scholars whose politics challenge the dominant traditions of history, geography, economics, and civics education.

This is increasingly no longer the case. Teachers and scholars have the power -- through pedagogy, curriculum, and community activism – and use it to actively resist injustice while also working towards a more radically just world. It is of great importance to the discipline—and to the children who are being educated now and will be in the future—that the work of these pioneers be collected and shared.

Insurgent Social Studies disrupts the current state of social education by highlighting those whose work has often been deemed “too radical.” The contributions cover voices marginalized by race, ethnicity, sexual orientation, religion, political and socio-economic status. They honor the different viewpoints while building solidarity via a shared call to change.

Theoretically grounded and abounding in examples of practice, this book is essential reading to all researchers and practitioners in social studies, and is perfect as an adopted text in the social studies curriculum at Colleges of Education.

Those who are younger continue to be objects of injustice and inequity; those who are younger, people of color, females, and human beings living in poverty have never been included in equitable performances of justice, care, respect, and fairness.

The authors in this international volume use existing social values and institutions--and the strengths of these varied perspectives--to address justice in ways that have not previously been considered. The aim is to create more just worlds for those who are young--as well as for the rest of us.

The first set of chapters, Bodies, Beings, and Relations in More Just Worlds, place at the forefront the lives of those who are younger who are commonly situated in positions of invisibility, disqualification, and even erasure. In the second section, Performances of Care and Education for More Just Worlds, the authors acknowledge that needed (re)conceptualizations of those who are younger, along with appreciation for human diversity and entanglements between the so-called human and nonhuman worlds, are the foundations for more just care and education environments. From the critique of neoliberal reform discourses to reconceptualizing human relations with nonhuman animal and material worlds, care and learning environments are rethought. The set of chapters in the final section, Stir of Echoes: 20th Century Childhoods in the 21st, take-up the 20th century critical concerns with constructions of “child” that have dominated and continue to govern perspectives imposed on those who are younger. Suggestions for becoming-with those who are younger through resources like reconceptualist scholarship, Black and Indigenous Studies, and various posthuman perspectives are provided throughout.

Whatever the emphasis or focus of a section or chapter, throughout the volume is the recognition that dominant discourses (e.g. neoliberal capitalism, conservativism, progressivism, human exceptionalism) and the policies they create (and that facilitate them), influence possibilities for, and limitations to, more just childhood worlds. Therefore, each section includes chapters that address these complex discourses and policy issues. The reader is invited to engage with these complexities, to become-with the various texts, and to generate unthought possibilities for childhoods in more just worlds.

Connecting cultures to educational settings is an essential component of critical pedagogy. This book addresses many of the key issues and challenges in decolonizing the African school curriculum. It highlights important philosophical arguments on the challenges and possibilities of achieving these goals in a meaningful manner. Topics covered in the book include:

• operationalizing the key terms of “inclusion” and “curriculum”
• strategies for Africanizing the school curriculum, and
• the implications of local knowledge for schooling reform

• how do we frame an inclusive anti-colonial African future and what is the nature of the work required to collectively arrive at that future?
• what education are learners of today going to receive and how will they apply it to their schooling and work lives?
• how do we re-fashion our work as African educators and learners to create more relevant understandings of what it means to be human?
• how do we challenge colonizing and imperializing relations of the academy? What are the possibilities and limits of counter-visions of education?
• how do we make school curricula inclusive through teaching, research and graduate training in questions of Indigeneity and multi-centric ways of knowing?

Using details from California’s unique, diverse social and political history makes the potentially dry foundations course into a very personal and dynamic topic for students to wrap their minds around. 

The book is a critical analysis of the evolution of educational policies that frame teachers’ and students’ roles and responsibilities in the historical and contemporary context of public education and thoroughly covers topics such as school segregation; the political structure of the state; bilingual education, school funding, NCLB, school choice, how policies arise and how they are legislated.

This text provides a unique collection of case studies across a wide range of organizations (higher education, K-12 education, military, state and local government administration, non-profit institutions, and agency management, etc.). These cases examine ethical decision-making and organizational and leadership behavioral concepts that are practiced in these organizations. The cases cover topics facing our workforce today and ask the reader to solve the dilemma. Through a discussion of these cases, students apply decision making and organizational and leadership strategies to analyze each case and therefore gain a better understanding of how to effectively lead and manage within their organizations. This text challenges students to think critically and analytically. Students are encouraged to reflect on options a practitioner could use to solve the problem. All of the cases end with an open scenario and a set of questions, allowing students to offer a wide range of opinions and participate in reflective and robust discussions.

Perfect for courses such as:
Introduction to Ethics | Introduction to Ethical Decision-Making | Principles of Ethical Leadership
Ethical Organizations: Principles and Application | Introduction to Organizational Change

This extensive overview first surveys the history of general education in the United States. It discusses how the recommendations of stakeholder groups have shaped general education in recent decades. Subsequent chapters detail best practices and findings in the assessment of student learning as it relates to the general education curriculum across institutional types. The discussion then turns to the larger impact of general education on culture and society as students navigate life beyond the undergraduate experience. The final chapters will provide insight into how various institutions are innovating through the general education curriculum, as well as a discussion on the keys to maintaining the relevancy of this curriculum throughout the 21st century and beyond.

Perfect for courses such as:
Assessment of Student Learning | Higher Education Administration
Academic Issues in Higher Education | Introduction to/Foundations of Higher Education

From Myers Education Press—the publisher who brought you such titles as A School with a View, Childhoods, and Student Activism in the Academy—comes a story or rather…a series of stories that are as out of this world as its protagonist. Long before he became a renowned Critical Studies professor at Chapman University, Peter McLaren was just another Toronto native trying to survive in a conservative working-class family. His father fought in WWII while his mother put food on the table, but—like his father—Peter was caught in his own battles dodging abusive teachers and navigating through an academic roller-coaster. Sure, his home life may be ripped from a '50s sitcom on the surface; but his background and the rest of his life from that point on was far from one…or maybe it was. This book chronicles Peter’s cross-country climb up the educational ladder as a teacher steeped in the school system, his encounters with various key players in history—from the Black Panthers to Timothy Leary, and everything else in between.

Perfect for courses such as: History of Education, Race and Ethnic Studies, Sociology of Education, Social Justice and Education, Democracy and Civics, Community Engagement, Policy Studies, and Critical Race Theory.

The New Henry Giroux Reader presents Henry Giroux’s evolving body of work. The book articulates a crucial shift in his analyses after the September 11th, 2001 terrorist attack, when his writing took on more expansive articulations of power, politics, and pedagogy that addressed education and culture in forms that could no longer be contained via isolated reviews of media, schooling, or pedagogical practice. Instead, Giroux locates these discourses as a constellation of neoliberal influences on cultural practices, with education as the engine of their reproduction and their cessation.

The New Henry Giroux Reader also takes up Giroux’s proclivity for using metaphors articulating death as the inevitable effect of neoliberalism and its invasion of cultural policy. Zombies, entropy, and violence permeate his work, coalescing around the central notion that market ideologies are anathema to human life. His early pieces signal an unnatural state of affairs seeping through the fabric of social life, and his work in cultural studies and public pedagogy signals the escalation of this unease across educative spaces. The next sections take up the fallout of 9/11 as an eruption of these horrific practices into all facets of human life, within traditional understandings of education and culture’s broader pedagogical imperatives. The book concludes with Giroux’s writings on education's vitalist capacity, demonstrating an unerring capacity for hope in the face of abject horror.

Perfect for courses such as: History and Philosophy of Education, Political and Social Foundations of Education, Policy Issues in American Education, African American Education, Social Justice Research in Education, Marginality and the Politics of Resistance, Equity and Anti-Oppression, Cultural Studies and Public Pedagogy.

W. E. B. Du Bois’s seminal work, The Souls of Black Folk, not only captures the experience of African Americans in the years following the Civil War but also speaks to contemporary conditions. At a time when American public schools are increasingly re-segregating, are increasingly underfunded, and are perhaps nearly as separate and unequal as they were in earlier decades, this classic can help readers grasp links between a slavery past and a dismal present for too many young people of color. Disagreeing with Booker T. Washington, Du Bois analyzes the restrictiveness of education as a simple tool to prepare for work in pursuit of wealth (a trend still very much alive and well, especially in schools serving economically disadvantaged students). He also, however, demonstrates the challenges racism presents to individuals who embrace education as a tool for liberation. Du Bois’s accounts of how racism affected specific individuals allow readers to see philosophical issues in human terms. It can also help them think deeply about what kind of moral, social, educational and economic changes are necessary to provide all of America’s young people the equal opportunity promised to them inside and outside of schools.

Perfect for courses in: Social Foundations of Education, Political and Social Foundations of Education, Foundations of American Education, Foundations of Education, Introduction to Education Theory and Policy, Philosophy and Education, History of American Education, and African American Education. 

Some hundred years after John Dewey worked to illuminate what it means to educate and how public education serves as the bedrock of democracy, his seminal Democracy and Education speaks urgently not only to critical contemporary educational issues but to contemporary political issues as well. As mania for testing forces a steadily narrowing curriculum, Dewey explains why democracy cannot “flourish” if “the chief influences in selecting subject matter of instruction are utilitarian ends narrowly conceived for the masses.” As such utilitarian subject matter is increasingly placed online, isolating individual students and their electronic screens, he insists that education happens not through direct instruction but “indirectly by means of the environment” where members of a community engage in meaningful tasks. As the American population appears increasingly subject to rhetorical manipulation and ideological extremism, Dewey imagines the possibility of education cultivating “habits of mind which secure social changes without introducing disorder.” Insightful and inspiring, Dewey’s classic reintroduces readers to educational and political possibilities hard to remember as political and corporate forces to work reshape American public schools in the service of global profit rather than democratic life.

Myers Education Press’s Timely Classics in Education offer readers the opportunity to return to the original works of giants whose influence on education have persisted through the years. Critical introductions to each work offer information on the context of the original work as well as insights into current relevance. For readers unfamiliar with each text, the introductions provide entrée to the work; for experienced readers, the series offers an opportunity to return to original works untainted by the distortions of decades of interpretation. Unlike poorly produced facsimile editions, Timely Classics are high-quality products. They can be adopted for use in many types of education classes.

Perfect for courses in: Social Foundations of Education, Political and Social Foundations of Education, Foundations of American Education, Foundations of Education, Introduction to Education Theory and Policy, Philosophy and Education, History of American Education, and The Philosophy of John Dewey.