PRODUCTS

The rise of high-stakes testing in New York and across the nation has narrowed and simplified what is taught, while becoming central to the effort to privatize public schools. However, it and similar reform efforts have met resistance, with New York as the exemplar for how to repel standardized testing and invasive data collection, such as inBloom. In New York, the two parent/teacher organizations that have been most effective are Long Island Opt Out and New York State Allies for Public Education. Over the last four years, they and other groups have focused on having parents refuse to submit their children to the testing regime, arguing that if students don’t take the tests, the results aren’t usable. The opt-out movement has been so successful that 20% of students statewide and 50% of students on Long Island refused to take tests. In Opting Out, two parent leaders of the opt-out movement—Jeanette Deutermann and Lisa Rudley—tell why and how they became activists in the two organizations. The story of parents, students, and teachers resisting not only high-stakes testing but also privatization and other corporate reforms parallels the rise of teachers across the country going on strike to demand increases in school funding and teacher salaries. Both the success of the opt-out movement and teacher strikes reflect the rise of grassroots organizing using social media to influence policy makers at the local, state, and national levels.Perfect for courses such as:The Politics Of Education | Education Policy | Education ReformCommunity Organizing | Education Evaluation | Education Reform | Parents And Education

Cartographies of Blackness and Black Indigeneities acknowledges the saliency of Blackness in contemporary social formations, insisting that how bodies are read is extremely important. The contributors to this volume elicit or produce both tangible and intangible social, political, material, spiritual and emotional effects and consequences on Black and African bodies, globally. It is a call to celebrate Blackness in all its complexities, including race, ethnicity, class, gender, sexuality, (dis)ability, spiritualities, and geographies. Understanding Blackness is to insist on Black and African political and cultural appreciation of the phenomenon outside of Euro-colonial attempts to regulate and define how Black and African bodies are perceived. This book intersperses discussions of Blackness with Black racial identity and cultural politics and the required responsibilities for the Global Black and African populations to build viable communities utilizing our differences—knowledges, cultures, politics, identities, histories—as strengths.

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

More than 3,400 colleges and universities in the United States serve 20.5 million students. While each campus is unique, most campuses and institutions face common issues, including tenure and promotion; budgeting; competition among disciplines for space and funding; academic bullying; and issues of identity. These are just a few of the topics among the many vital areas of concern at schools across the country. In Bridges not Blockades, personal essays related to these cultural and political matters will allow faculty and administrators in higher education to see, hear, and better understand the inner workings of our institutions. Perhaps more importantly, this book demonstrates that faculty and staff at colleges and universities need to embrace our commonalities so that we can meet the challenges of higher education throughout the 21st century. Indeed, some of these essays may suggest ways in which faculty, staff, and administrators have moved from differences to commitment to shared goals to tackle new and existing challenges and opportunities.

Studies of teacher leadership have proliferated over the past fifty years. Earlier work tended to focus exclusively on the link between teacher leadership and school improvement. Now, however, cross-cultural research on the relationship between teacher leadership and power, agency and school culture has the potential to contribute to a deeper understanding of the teaching profession in diverse geographical and social contexts. A Cross-Cultural Consideration of Teacher Leaders’ Narratives of Power, Agency and School Culture presents groundbreaking work that expands discussions of teachers’ work to highlight the struggles of a profession in three different countries: England, Jamaica and the United States. This research provides examples of teacher leaders’ narratives about power, agency and school culture, presenting the voices of teacher leaders across diverse contexts. It identifies the “lessons” that transcend culture and speaks to the importance of understanding how teachers’ work (and teacher leadership) functions within complex school cultures. This work has profound implications for teaching, learning and leading in a 21st century global economy.Perfect for courses such as:Teacher Leadership | Educational Leadership and Management | Teaching and Teaching Methods | Action Research/Applied Research

Foundations, Research, and Assessment of Fraternities and Sororities is inspired by continuing conversations about the enduring challenges facing fraternities and sororities on campuses across the country. The co-editors curate contributions from scholars and noteworthy practitioners from across higher education to examine a variety of issues relating to the past and future construct of these institutions. The text begins with a historical section that provides a perspective on the origins of fraternities and sororities. Other sections look at such critical areas as values, legal issues, and research. Values are described regarding the values congruence movement and acknowledging emerging areas of the individual fraternity and sorority experience. Legal issues include freedom of speech, hazing law, and risk management. Additional profiles of large, national benchmark surveys are included, and the book concludes with a final overview of the state of fraternity/sorority scholarship. This volume will appeal to a broad readership made up of faculty, administrations and alumni/ae.

Supporting Fraternities and Sororities in the Contemporary Era is inspired by sustained and reoccurring professional conversations and scholarship that have suggested that not just change is necessary, but that there ought to be a fundamental shift towards reconceptualizing the construct of fraternities and sororities. The co-editors curate work from scholars and noteworthy practitioners from across higher education to provide an imperative text that reflects the complexity and expansiveness by addressing diversity, programming, and support approaches. This text commences with the understanding that issues will continuously exist, requiring a greater nuanced depth of appreciation to reduce their negative impact. It also summarizes national organizations from authentic, represented voices. Chapters then focus on solutions to support the fraternity and sorority experience, providing strategies and emerging explanations for the issues described in this text. Supporting Fraternities and Sororities seeks to do exactly as the title implies: to inform all stakeholders so that they can make better decisions about the future of these institutions.

Originally published in 1993, Silencing Ivan Illich fell out of print when the original publisher went out of business in 1995. The author, David Gabbard, states that the book was pivotal in the evolution of his understanding of schools. Delving into Foucault's work to forge a methodology, he wanted to understand the discursive (symbolic) forces and relations of power and knowledge responsible for the marginalization of Ivan Illich from educational discourse. In short, Illich was “silenced” for having committed the heretical act of denying the benevolence of state-enforced, compulsory schooling. In Silencing Ivan Illich Revisited, Gabbard revisits the text as a means of opening the question of what schools should be. Inspired by Slavoj Žižek's call for a Positive Universal Project, the book provides an alternative vision of what our species ought to be doing in the name of collective learning.

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

Exploring Data Production in Motion facilitates the use of feminist critical qualitative methodologies. With open-ended methods and poststructuralist theory and analysis, this book will offer tools to approach and to examine challenging and controversial topics ethically. This book will argue that to examine data of ‘individual’ experience and aspirations requires examining the process of the data production in which these were ‘produced’. It will form an understanding of a data production as a process, which in its fluidity enables us also to form an understanding of difference and change as inevitable parts of social processes.