PRODUCTS

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.CPED Initiative Fireside Chat with Jill Perry: https://vimeo.com/508666806To learn more about Improvement Science and see our full list of books in this area, please click through to the Myers Education Press Improvement Science website. Perfect for courses such as: Educational Leadership, Research Methods, The Dissertation Process, Dissertation Writing and Research, and Thesis and Dissertation

Remixed and Reimagined: Innovations in Religion, Spirituality, and (Inter)faith in Higher Education is a new edited book that invites readers to rethink and re-examine the traditional paradigms in which religion, spirituality, and interfaith (RSI) have been studied within higher education and student affairs settings. This volume introduces new theoretical frameworks that enrich and enliven the study of RSI, making it more dynamic, inclusive, and, most importantly, innovative. It is framed by a commitment to social justice and intersectionality, while centering the narratives of the religiously marginalized. The text is divided into two units. The first unit explores new and emergent frameworks for analyzing and interpreting RSI in higher education and student affairs. The second unit puts various theoretical frameworks into practice, while highlighting the often-marginalized voices of the religiously minoritized. The book concludes with a call for researchers to begin exploring the new proposed horizons within the study of RSI in higher education and student affairs. This text is perfect for graduate level seminars in higher education and student affairs programs. It is also an invaluable resource for researchers and scholars.Perfect for courses such as:Religion in Popular Culture | Religion and Spirituality in Higher Education | Introduction to the Study of Religion | Introduction to Interfaith (Multifaith studies) | Interfaith Dialogue on Campus | Introduction to Queer Studies | Contemporary Issues in LGBTQ Studies | Introduction to Diversity | Masters of Education (Graduate Level) | Politics of Difference | Diversity and Identity | Diverse Issues in Higher Education | Student Affairs

2021 SPE Outstanding Book Award Honorable Mention The Activist Academic serves as a guide for merging activism into academia. Following the journey of two academics, the book offers stories, frameworks and methods for how scholars can marry their academic selves, involved in scholarship, teaching and service, with their activist commitments to justice, while navigating the lived realities of raising families and navigating office politics. This volume invites academics across disciplines to enter into a dialogue about how to take knowledge to the streets. Click HERE to listen to the New Books Network podcast with the authors, hosted by Jane Richards. Click HERE to see a video of the book launch. Additional author interviews and podcasts can be found on this book's product detail page.

A 2021 SPE Outstanding Book Award Winner 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.

Novice and early career researchers often have difficulty with understanding how theory, data analysis and interpretation of findings “hang together” in a well-designed and theorized qualitative research investigation and with learning how to draw on such understanding to conduct rigorous data analysis and interpretation of their analytic results. Data Analysis, Interpretation, and Theory in Literacy Studies Research demonstrates how to design, conduct and analyze a well put together qualitative research project. Using their own successful studies, chapter authors spell out a problem area, research question, and theoretical framing, carefully explaining their choices and decisions. They then show in detail how they analyzed their data, and why they took this approach. Finally, they demonstrate how they interpreted the results of their analysis, to make them meaningful in research terms. Approaches include interactional sociolinguistics, microethnographic discourse analysis, multimodal analysis, iterative coding, conversation analysis, and multimediated discourse analysis, among others. This book will appeal to beginning researchers and to literacy researchers responsible for teaching qualitative literacy studies research design at undergraduate and graduate levels.

A 2021 AERA Qualitative Research SIG Outstanding Book Award winnerFocus Groups: Culturally Responsive Approaches for Qualitative Inquiry and Program Evaluation takes an in-depth look at how culturally-responsive focus groups are developed and implemented within the context of qualitative inquiry broadly, and program evaluation more specifically. The book showcases various forms of focus groups and how they can be responsive to specific communities across different disciplines. This book provides: an historical perspective on focus groupsa theoretical foundation helpful for supporting focus groups with marginalized groups, vulnerable populations (older adults, children), and participants within non-Western settingsbasic procedures for conducting focus groupsguidelines for cultural responsiveness andcase examples of alternative approaches to focus groups that target specific communities and those in different contexts. It also considers ethical issues around the use of culturally responsive focus groups, while providing guidance on analyzing and interpreting your data and establishing the credibility of your study. Focus Groups is an information rich resource for qualitative researchers and program evaluators at various levels who want to learn about or enhance their knowledge on designing and conducting culturally responsive focus groups.Perfect for courses such as:Foundations of Culturally Responsive Focus Groups | Culturally Responsive Approaches to Program Evaluation Practicing Qualitative Program Evaluation | Qualitative Research: Culturally Responsive Methods | Focus Groups in Research | Introduction to Qualitative Methods | Methods in Educational Research | Program Evaluation Practice | Designing Qualitative Research

This volume on arts-based research explores the transformative power of arts for qualitative inquiry and beyond. The chapters address multiple approaches from within arts-based research and suggest that art can be mobilized to reorient the political, especially when we find the political aim straying from its proper target of truth and justice. Artistic representation is never an end in itself, for the goal is to change the way we think about people and their lives. Arts-based research makes the world visible in new and different ways, in ways ordinary scholarly writing does not allow. The Arts develops a utopian idea of belonging, illustrating how moments of history, biography, culture, politics and lived experience come together in the aesthetic. Ultimately, the content of the book examines how artistic insights resonate in arts-based research, something that not only gives us criteria for assessing the quality of ethical engagement in arts-based research practice, but also provides a conceptual framework for living more just lives through art.

The chapters in this volume collect together perspectives on Indigenous epistemologies. These Indigenous ways of knowing pay particular attention to the relational aspects of language, culture, and place. They are not identified as specific themes, but as integrated parts of a philosophy, for Indigenous epistemologies think within a relational framework, so that all aspects are best understood from this perspective. Indigenous ways of knowing have resisted colonization and oppression, and as such, Indigenous research perspectives exemplify a commitment to social justice, one that recovers knowledges that have been silenced or subjugated. When such knowledge is shared, we can see how to challenge oppressive regimes. We can see how to seek truth in a relational way that’s attendant to being together. Indigenous Research takes up issues of social justice in a way that is informed by Indigenous epistemologies, an important practice in contemporary research, particularly qualitative inquiry.