PRODUCTS

Many schools have failed to create a nurturing educational environment for LGBTQ students. Our Children are Your Students features a discussion about the various tactics that LGBTQ families use to work with schools that don’t anticipate the arrival of their families and children. The book features a verbatim theatre script called Out at School, which is based on interviews conducted with 37 LGBTQ families about their experiences in school. The families live in four different cities in the province of Ontario as well as in the suburbs and rural communities surrounding them. Written by Tara Goldstein, Jenny Salisbury, and Pam Baer, the play contains 22 scenes of verbatim monologues and dialogues. A set of images created by visual artist benjamin lee hicks accompanies each scene. The play also contains three original songs composed by musician Kate Reid, who draws on a number of the themes embedded in the scenes. Links to performances of the songs and to the artwork can be seen on the LGBTQ Families Speak Out project website: www.lgbtqfamiliesspeakout.ca. This is an important book for teachers and pre service teachers who are interested in creating inclusive classroom environments for all students.

Since the founding of the nation, higher education has helped female faculty and students to assert themselves to establish equality between men and women across the country (Morris, 1984). During the nineteenth century, women had limited access to many sectors of American society because of their inferior status to men. Such differences were visible in both political and academic arenas. This discrimination reflected general societal norms of the time, relegating women to the roles of mothers and homemakers. Theoretically, there are several models that address the development of women in higher education. Women & Gender in Higher Education provides a comprehensive review of the various concepts that illustrate how women understand the world around them, make meaning for themselves and their environment, and acknowledge the intersectionality of their identity. In addition, it breaks new ground in the conversation about the roles of women and gender in higher education.

Maker Education is a relatively new, transformational approach to teaching, which combines hands-on learning and project-based learning. Maker teachers encourage their students to create their own concepts, experiment, fail and experiment again until they've made something personally meaningful. Teaching Maker Education in Colleges of Education is critical to the preparation of pre-service teachers interested in instilling the principles of the approach in their specific discipline. Because the maker concept dovetails with active learning theory, it is easy for pre-service teachers to grasp the concept and start to think of their classroom as a makerspace where students create and build to learn. Infusing Maker Education into Teacher Education is the perfect textbook for use in instructing pre-service teachers in a variety of disciplines.

In a decidedly anti-intellectual moment, exemplified by such recent phenomena as denials of science, defunding of universities, and distrust of “facts,” Intra-Public Intellectualism examines the relationships among qualitative inquiry, truth telling and social activism. 

With contributions from scholars and activists around the world, the book addresses three key tensions in the field of social inquiry. The first tension concerns the proliferation of digital environments and virtual spaces, exploring how the “public” in public intellectualism might be reconsidered. The second tension concerns the ongoing critiques of truth and subjectivity, exploring how these disruptions change the work of the intellectual. The third tension concerns the growing scientific and philosophical rejection of static material worlds, exploring what becomes of social responsibility and justice when agency extends beyond human subjects. 

Intra-Public Intellectualism will be a must read for those interested in the roles of the intellectual in the academy and beyond and those keen on rethinking critical social inquiry for the twenty-first century.

Across the globe, students are speaking up, walking out, and marching for social and ecological justice. Despite deficit discourses about students, youth are using their voice and agency to call forth a better world. Will educators respond to this call to stand with students in relational solidarity as co-constructors of a new tomorrow? What is possible when teachers and students engage together in new ways? Pedagogies of With-ness: Students, Teachers, Voice and Agency offers insight into the transformative possibilities of education when enacted as the art of being with. Driven by student voices and their experiences of marginalization, this text takes a clear ethical stance. It asserts that students are both capable and competent. Taking a narrative approach, this book honors academic work that is rooted in educational practice. Expanding beyond traditional conceptions of student voice, chapters engage in meditations on three themes: identity, pedagogy, and partnership. This book is an exploration of with-ness, a way of knowing, being, and acting. By centralizing the all-too-often suppressed wisdom of youth, teachers and researchers engage in new forms of critique and possibility-making with students. Editors reflect on this central theme, exploring the dimensions of such pedagogies of with-ness. Through this book, teachers are invited to imagine pedagogy under this new framework, actively committed to students, their voice, and mutual engagement.

Navigating Media Literacy: A Pedagogical Tour of Disneyland is an education playbook applied to the vast mediated universe of Disney. Readers of all ages can critically apply media literacy principles while still conscientiously participating as consumer-citizens, media creators, and agents of change. Media literacy is defined throughout this book as an instructional method rather than a political movement.

The book counterbalances the frequently myopic critiques of cultural scholars and the critical exemption granted by those across the world who find Disney to be a source of great pleasure. Integrated theory and practical examples allow readers to investigate of themselves and draw their own conclusions based on real inquisitive, observatory, and creative experiences that constitute media literacy (access, analyze, evaluate, create, reflect and act). Each chapter is ideologically mapped to an actual physical realm of Disneyland (e.g., Main Street, USA; Adventureland; Tomorrowland; Frontierland; Fantasyland). Each site provides a pedagogical playground for experimenting with each media literacy concept (e.g., context, audience, language, ownership, representation). The reader will come away with a deeper pedagogical understanding of how to cultivate media literacy using any context or subject—not just Disney. Each chapter includes discursive excerpts from students, along with assignments, discussion prompts, and classroom exercises, making it a valuable resource as a classroom textbook.

Perfect for courses such as: Media Literacy | Communication and Media Arts | Film Studies | Media History | Transmedia Studies | Business | Marketing

John Dewey's Imaginative Vision of Teaching explores key philosophical topics in John Dewey’s work, including epistemology, ethics, and aesthetics, and relates them to teacher practice and education policy. Each chapter begins with theory and ends with practical implications. While there are numerous books on Dewey, there are relatively few that connect his philosophy of education to actual practice. By linking primary fields of philosophy with classroom teaching and education policy, Boyles suggests that the binary between theory and practice is a false chasm that can and should be bridged if teaching and learning are to change into more dynamic, reflexive, and authentic interactions.

The Improvement Science Dissertation in Practice provides a narrative and illustration about the purpose and features comprising the Dissertation in Practice and how this culminating experience is well suited to using Improvement Science as a signature methodology for preparing professional practitioners. This methodology, when combined with the Dissertation in Practice experience in EdD programs, reinforces practitioner learning about and skills for leadership and change. As a guide, the book is an extremely valuable resource that supports faculty, students, and practitioners in the application of Improvement Science to pressing educational problems in a structured, disciplined way.

It’s clear that American public education has been under assault for more than the last 30 years. So much of this current "age of accountability" has focused on blame, both of teachers and those who prepare them. Somehow, unlike in other professions, declarations were made to the effect that anyone could teach better than teachers, including business leaders and people from tony universities without teacher preparation.

The Age of Accountability scrutinizes the attack on teachers through weaponized data. While an effective corporate tool to improve bottom-line goals, its use in education became more sinister and misanthropic. International PISA scores imply the mediocre ability of American students, fueling a belief that American education needed more than an upgrade. The only answer that would placate many was a complete upheaval, a redefinition of a teacher and who should be permitted to become one. We teachers ceded authority to these business and legislative forces. Their subsequent fervor for testing overwhelmed teaching and drove the joy out of schooling for students. It is time for a recounting of what has been done to the profession and to our children. Young teachers need encouragement and veteran teachers need reminding of their valiant and effective efforts.

In what ways can performance be mobilized to resist? This is the question that the present volume explores from within the context of qualitative research. From an arts-based approach, authors suggest methods on how artistic practice resists. The volume addresses how critical performance autoethnography might retain its ethical and democratic potential without falling into dogmatism or hegemony. This vision for democracy can even be accomplished through improvised, process-centered pieces that weave together thoughts from several key scholars, all to give us a critical perspective on how performative autoethnography is paradigmatically situated. The performance texts collected here question and resist, showing how the experience of art-making can move us through political and public spaces with liberatory potential, challenging social and ideological hegemonies and to generate social movements. Imaginative arts-based practices allow us access to emotional and embodied phenomena that remain otherwise foreclosed by traditional forms of inquiry. From poetics to public performances, subversive interventions, and more, these chapters bring a radical performative discourse to the fore. In so doing, the chapters work to create a framework for just performance, showing us how we might live performance as resistance.

What can it mean to resist in these troubled times, and how can we do so through theory? This volume presents novel ideas on how to accomplish this in the context of the field of qualitative research. The authors show us how we might go beyond pre-existing, systematized research methodologies to find our way. They challenge us to go beyond facile modes of thought and slow down any mechanistic practices of research, a slowing that can be surprisingly generative regarding pedagogy and knowledge production. The articles think through theories such as ones theorizing the postcolonial for the purpose of responding to global hegemony regarding institutional experiences of academe. They engage with practices of new materialism and show the multiform ways in which theory can be a companion to us in our journey of research. Further, the articles question hold-overs from humanist and modernist thought so that we might perform an inclusive pedagogy. Rather than falling into the cynical view that the world is too troubled to change, this volume presents a sound vision that we have no option but to engage in theoretical practice, for now, there’s no time not to think.

Mistakes We Have Made: Implications for Social Justice Educators is an edited collection from eleven authors with a wealth of experience teaching in K-12 schools and utilizing culturally relevant practices. This book is current with social justice research and strategies, while connecting to the audience through personal vignettes in each chapter. The personal connection of research supported ideas to help new teachers avoid the authors' early career mistakes in the classroom is at the center of this text. The content is organized into three themes: Inclusive Classrooms, Curriculum Implementation, and Professionalism. Reflection questions are provided at the end of each chapter, which will guide the practitioners to self-reflect and plan next steps accordingly. The e-book provides links to videos, strategies, articles, and other supplemental resources to make this text a “one-stop shop.” Mistakes We Have Made speaks to several audiences, from pre-service teachers to new teachers, to any practitioner that needs a new perspective on teaching with a social justice lens. It can be used as a text in a variety of college courses, professional development workshops, or as a gift for new teachers.

Perfect for courses such as:

Social Justice for Educators | Diverse Perspectives for Educational Leaders  | Diversity and Multiculturalism | Sociocultural Foundations in Education | Issues in Education | Elementary Teacher Foundations  | Sociology of Education

For the past 35 years, Scott Mandel has been teaching students in an urban Los Angeles school district. In addition, he instructs teachers in professional development courses. In those classes, he’s known for telling stories—stories gleaned from his time spent in the classroom. Classrooms in the Real World is a collection of many of those stories, presented as a set of teachable moments—a practical how-to book for new teachers, one based on interacting with kids on a daily basis. Rather than providing educational theories about what should be, Mandel shares real-life stories of how to relate to your students, administrators and parents, along with his thoughts on how to deal with the multiple curricular and classroom challenges that all teachers face in the real world. Chapters such as "Kids Don't Care How Much You Know As Long As They Know You Care," "Take Curricular Chances," "Administrators Want You To Succeed," "Keeping My Sanity All These Years," and “What Have I Learned” will give you the reader practical ideas, philosophies and encouragement from a long-time classroom teacher, someone still in the classroom sharing the lived experience of teaching in today’s school environment.

Perfect for courses such as: Introduction to Teaching | Classroom Management | Student Teaching

The first wave of Black immigrants arrived in North America during the 1960s and 1970s, coming originally from the Caribbean. An opportunity was missed, however, in documenting their everyday experience from a social science perspective: what did it mean for a Barbadian or a Jamaican to live in Toronto or New York? Were they Jamaicans or did they go with the descriptor ‘Black’? What relationship did they have with African Canadians or African Americans? Black Immigrants in North America answers these and other questions while documenting the second wave of Black immigration to North America, which started in the early 1990s. Theoretically and empirically grounded, the book is a documentation of the process of becoming Black – a radical identity transformation where a continental African is marked by Blackness. This, in turn, leads to a deeper understanding of what it means to encounter that social imaginary of, ‘Oh, they all look like Blacks to me!’ This encounter impacts what one learns and how one learns it, where learning English as a Second Language (ESL) is sidestepped in favor of Black English as a Second Language (BESL). Learning becomes a political and a pedagogical project of cultural, linguistic and identity investment and desire.

Perfect for courses such as: Black Immigrants, Race Complexity, Critical Applied Linguistics, Ethnography, Graduate Course on Educational Foundations and Curriculum

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

2020 Outstanding Book Award Honorable Mention from Division B (Curriculum Studies) of the American Educational Research Association

Researching Resistance: Public Education After Neoliberalism serves two vital functions. First, it explores, explicates, and encourages critical qualitative research that engages the arts and born-digital scholarship. Second, it offers options for understanding neoliberalism, revealing its impact on communities, and resisting it as ideology, practice, and law. The book delves into

• strategies for engaging neoliberalism
• the Black feminist cyborg theoretical assumptions and intentions of the ethnographic web-based film project
• the research and arts-based methodology that walks the fault line between film and ethnography, and
• the relationships between the researcher, the activist organizations, and the activism.

While the book will focus on neoliberalism within the realm of public education, the implications extend to many other areas of public life.

This is an excellent text for classes in qualitative research and public policy. It is the companion text to the digital native ethnographic film project entitled Public Education|Participatory Democracy: After Neoliberalism. 

Perfect for courses such as: Qualitative Research, Curriculum Studies, Women and Gender Studies, Race and Ethnic Studies, Sociology of Education, Social Justice and Education, Democracy and Civics, Community Engagement, Policy Studies, Service Learning, Education Reform, and Youth Advocacy.

A 2020 SPE Outstanding Book Award Honorable Mention

Many people believe that “education” has a disproportionately negative effect on them and those close to them. With so much wealth, technological prowess, innovation, and economic development, why do we still have marginalization, social inequalities, conflict, mass incarceration and generational poverty?

The connection to democracy, Education for Democracy (EfD) and social justice is, for Carr and Thésée, clear, and this volume interweaves a narrative within these themes based on a Freirian theoretical backdrop. This book presents a vision for transformative education and EfD, seeking to cultivate, stimulate and support political and media literacy, critical engagement and a re-conceptualization of what education is, and, importantly, how it can address entrenched, systemic and institutional problems that plague society. Based on over a decade of empirical research in a range of contexts and jurisdictions, the authors strive to link teaching and learning with agency, solidarity, action and transformative change within the conceptual framework of a critically-engaged EfD.   

Perfect for courses in: Sociology of Education; Social Justice and Education; Democracy and Civics; Community Engagement; Education Policy; Service Learning; Education Reform; Citizenship Education; Transformative Education; Politics of Education.

This volume engages researchers with the notion of critical qualitative inquiry (CQI) as a direct practice of resistance. As female educators and researchers who have (through our politically activist sister) been referred to as “Nasty Women” in the US presidential debates, we believe that it is our responsibility to respond through our inquiry to the violent reinscription of intersecting forms of injustice and marginalization. The purposes of this volume are therefore (1) to demonstrate personal actions taken by researchers to deal with thoughts/feelings of despair as well as how to move toward survival, and (2) to explore historical, new, and rethought research and activist methodologies (frameworks) as counter measures broadly and for public education specifically. Examples of CQI as resistance in response to the particular neoliberal patriarchal, whitelash presidential election event are provided by featured authors. Additionally, resources related to activist scholarship are provided. These frameworks, resources, and perspectives are also useful for future research in reaction to neoliberalism, patriarchy, and white supremacy.

Perfect for courses such as: Qualitative Research, Curriculum Studies, Women and Gender Studies, Race and Ethnic Studies, Sociology of Education, Social Justice and Education, Democracy and Civics, Community Engagement, Policy Studies, Critical Race Theory, Intersectional Studies, Posthuman Inquiry, and Activism and Performance Inquiry.

This new release of the classic text Pragmatism is absolutely timely. James' seminal statement of pragmatism's underpinnings and its treatment of essential philosophical questions (the nature of truth; the one and the many; free will; etc.) could not come at a more appropriate time. In a “post-truth” era of fake news, alternative facts, and a belief that "truth isn't truth," James' presentation of pragmatism as a method of adjudicating truth-claims is a must-read.

Perfect for courses in: Philosophy of Education (Graduate Level), American Philosophy (Graduate and Upper-Level Undergraduate), American Studies, Special topics class on William James or Pragmatism, Sociology of Education (Graduate Level), Religious Studies.

These are certainly troubled times in which neoliberal capitalist patriarchy and the tyranny of racism and domination are continually reinscribed on the bodies and lives of so many. However, critical researchers understand the necessity for, as well as the difficulty of, using research to facilitate public transformations that lead to increased justice and equity. The authors contributing to Making Research Public in Troubled Times: Pedagogy, Activism, and Critical Obligations recognize the importance of diverse pedagogies, activism, and ethical choices regarding an environment that supports critical research in oppressive times. Diverse pedagogies that can facilitate the education of critical public researchers across disciplines are illustrated in the first set of chapters addressing questions like: What is important in teaching critical qualitative inquiry? How do students, materials, histories, and the public influence this teaching? What have we learned over years of attempting to teach critical qualitative research methods? The authors in the second section are activist local scholars sharing their projects and explaining what this work means for critical qualitative inquiry. This work includes methods used to incorporate critical qualitative inquiry into community activism. Finally, chapters in the last section focus on future steps and most important actions for the ways critical qualitative inquiry can be conceptualized to address concerns in these troubled times.

Perfect for courses such as: Qualitative Research, Curriculum Studies, Women and Gender Studies, International Studies, Social Work, Sociology, Higher Education, Community Engagement, Policy Studies, Service Learning, and Social Justice.