PRODUCTS

Attaining a Just Future: Disability Studies Examines Curriculum and Transition for Students Labeled with Intellectual Disability is a critical volume in the area of Disability Studies in Education that investigates current trends in curricular access for 14- to 21-year-old students with intellectual disabilities (ID), offering revelatory insights into how students with ID are understood and taught in U.S. schools. By analyzing the state of curricular access for students with ID through a myriad of perspectives, this book reveals that ideological barriers, educational policies, and neoliberal priorities substantially contribute to ongoing segregation and unequal outcomes for people with ID in U.S. schools and society. It examines how commonly used school curricular practices play a role in sustaining segregation and negative outcomes experienced by people with ID labels. The book centers the experiences of six young adults with ID labels, who, along with their families, were qualitatively interviewed with the goal of understanding the complexities of curriculum access and future planning from a first-person perspective. In addition, professionals who work with young adults with ID labels were also interviewed, including transition program directors, teachers, child study team members, administrators, a curriculum specialist, a transition advocate and a state-level employee. A mixed-methods survey was disseminated, which received 77 responses from teachers, administrators, and transition specialists regarding their usage and understanding of curriculum for their students. Finally, an analysis of publicly available documents from the websites of five commonly used published curricula targeted to students with significant disabilities was conducted. The first chapter in the book offers the readers information about the six students centered in this project and then provides contextual policy frameworks, a review of literature, and an overview of the intersectional theoretical approach that guides the analysis throughout the book. Chapter two considers the role that the Least Restrictive Environment policy plays in concretizing tracking in alignment to curricular opportunities for students with ID. Chapter three digs into the kinds of content curricular publishing companies target to high school and transition-aged students with ID, professional beliefs about curriculum for students with ID, and the learning goals students and families have for themselves. Chapter four unpacks the concept of “independence” within special education and how it becomes a justification for funneling students away from academic learning. Chapter five evaluates both segregative and inclusive practices found in 18-21 transition program planning, curricula and programming. Finally, chapter six highlights best-practices, advocacy tactics, and teaching approaches that can lead to improved outcomes for young adults with ID labels. This book reveals that the curricular choices made on behalf of many young adults with ID are often not aligned with their desires and are often based upon ideologies about intellectual functioning itself, rather than being based on the individual interests, cultural backgrounds, potential, skills, or ambitions of the young person. Ultimately, the book offers educators, administrators, advocates, disabled people, and families tools and ways of thinking that can lead to more just and inclusive futures for transition-aged students with ID labels.Perfect for courses such as: Foundations of Inclusive Education; Foundations in Curriculum Studies; Special Education and Educational Leadership; Inclusion and Educational Leadership; Special Education Law and Policy; Pedagogy in Secondary Inclusive Education; Disability Studies in Education; Foundations and Philosophies in Inclusive Education; Issues, Policies, and Trends in Inclusive Education; Inclusive Methods for Middle and Secondary Schools

We STILL be lovin’ Black children.Not sometimes.Not conditionally.Not when it is convenient.We loved them in the past.We love them now.We will love them in the future. In this expanded second edition, We Still Be Lovin’ Black Children: African Diaspora Literacy, A Divine Ancestral Charge, leading scholars, educators, and community leaders deepen the call to center African Diaspora Literacy as a foundation for healing, identity, and collective thriving. Across classrooms, homes, and communities in the United States, Africa, and the Caribbean, contributors offer practical strategies, critical questions, cultural frameworks, and affirming activities that protect Black children’s spirits while nurturing their brilliance. At a time when Black histories are distorted, erased, or politicized, this book insists on truth-telling rooted in love. Grounded in African Indigenous Knowledge, Adinkra principles, intergenerational wisdom, and Pro-Black educational practices, authors demonstrate how literacy about the African diaspora is essential.This edition includes new chapters, updated chapters, expanded global perspectives, new resources for families and educators, and timely guidance for confronting anti-Blackness in schools, media, and public discourse.To love Black children is to teach them who they are.To teach them who they are is to protect their souls and spirits.To protect their souls and spirits is to secure our collective future.This is a love book.This is a liberation book.This is an urgent book.Perfect for courses such as: Foundations of Education; Black Education; African Studies; African American Studies; Introduction to Early Childhood Education;

Decoloniality and African Education is a vibrant and vital collection of essays that addresses the challenges, possibilities, and responsibilities for the future of de- and anti-colonial African education as it is taught in universities in the U.S. and Canada, particularly in Colleges of Education. It looks at the ways in which African education is taught in these countries, and how the curriculum for the topic is influenced by colonialization, thus restricting or removing altogether the essence of Africanness from the content of classes.The themes of this book go beyond the mere rhetoric of decolonialization by creating specific approaches to dismantling colonial educational systems in North American universities as well as in Africa itself, creating a new environment for African education duly informed by local cultural resource knowing, known from grounded everyday practices of authentic African educators. In other words, it is a revision of educational practices informed by what educators know and are doing for the lessons in envisioning schooling and education in North America and Africa. African educators are urged to think through solutions specific to the problems and challenges in schools today, and to meet the call of our times to provide education to young learners that not only empowers them, but also provides them with background knowledge, cultural grounding, and specific lessons that will enable them to craft their own futures. So how do we “do” decolonial education from the standpoint of African educators and learners everyday schooling practice and knowledge? Decoloniality and African Education argues that a careful embrace of African Indigenous and cultural knowings determine the successful response to this question. It engages both the “decolonial” and the “anti-colonial,” with a reading that the “decolonial” (as many have pointed out, see Parry, 1994) is a process and a path toward an end, which is the goal of the “anti-colonial” (see Dei, 2022).Decoloniality and African Education is essential reading for students and scholars committed to the improvement of educational outcomes for African American students. It’s a book that empowers educators and raises awareness about African-based teaching environments. It can be used in a variety of courses, including African Studies, African Development, Anti-Colonial Thought and Indigenous Knowledge, and the Pedagogical Implications of Decolonization.

Muslim families raising children with autism navigate complex intersections of faith, culture, and disability services that remain largely unexamined in special education literature. In a first for that academic literature, Faith, Family, and Neurodiversity: Islamic Approaches to Understanding Autism addresses this critical gap by centering the voices and expertise of Muslim families who have developed sophisticated strategies for supporting their children while maintaining religious identity and cultural values within American educational systems. Drawing on extensive community engagement and research, Dr. Sadia Warsi and Ms. Sophia Memon document how Islamic principles provide conceptual frameworks for understanding autism that align with contemporary special education values while offering additional resources for family resilience. Through composite narratives that protect participant confidentiality, this volume examines how families successfully integrate Islamic wisdom with evidence-based interventions to create comprehensive support programs. The analysis reveals systematic gaps in how educational institutions serve culturally diverse families, while each chapter integrates young adult literature featuring characters with exceptionalities, including autism, as pedagogical tools for building cultural competence. This volume challenges prevailing assumptions about cultural values and evidence-based practice, offering a strengths-based perspective on cultural diversity in special education. Faith, Family, and Neurodiversity provides essential content for special educators, school psychologists, administrators, teacher preparation faculty, and educational researchers committed to creating truly inclusive educational systems. The goal of the book is to become a foundational document in the study of this unique but important phenomenon. It can be adopted in a variety of neurodiversity or cultural studies classes, and it is essential reading for special education teachers, especially those dealing with issues of health in diverse cultures.Perfect for courses such as: Introduction to Special Education; Culturally Responsive Teaching in Special Education; Family Engagement in Special Education; Foundations of Inclusive Education; Autism Spectrum Disorders: Theory and Practice; Multicultural Education; Diversity in Early Childhood Special Education; Critical Perspectives in Disability Studies; Educational Equity and Social Justice; Collaboration with Families and Communities

Why is the sense of taste so conspicuously absent from contemporary educational research and so severely rationed in the ways it is lived in universities and schools? After all, in the world, taste is a perceptual and epistemological powerhouse in the complicated process of staying alive as well as living a life. Taste is also a process of world making. It’s a way of reading, naming, mapping, imagining, remembering, and making worlds and connecting to the worlds of others--therefore it is curricular. In attending to how taste matters and matters of taste, chapters in Tasting Education: Viewing Curriculum, Pedagogy, Learning, and Educational Research Through the Sense of Taste invite participants to think about taste as a sense, and/or the sense of taste, as it plays out in the thinking and doing of education and its inquiry. This book takes up taste as an embodied set of meanings that are sensuous, pragmatic, and political: as a key part of the sensorium, and as engagement with the sensuosity of the olfactory, the nose, the mouth, the tongue as a way of making meaning of food, but also ways for making meaning from the food for thought and action that theory can provide. It also asks us to take into account the culture of food as it relates to education; whose palates are catered to and whose remain marginalized, deliberately destroyed, or are left-unfed? Taste, then, also becomes a way of resisting, challenging, and reimagining such modes as they play themselves out in curriculum and pedagogy and reveal collective commitments that include shared pleasure alongside political and social action (Siniscalchi, 2018). This book offers a space for deeper conversations around taste in curriculum and elsewhere, and how taste is being used to dismantle oppression in these spaces. The slow-food movement argues that “taste and pleasure” must return to the table (Siniscalchi, 2018). Tasting Education invites the mixed pleasures and problematics of taste to the table of educational research as well. Tasting Education will appeal to faculty and students in graduate-level courses related to curriculum, instruction, social foundations and leadership studies, as well as those involved with food studies courses.

Walking the Doctoral Trail: A Fully Relatable (and Occasionally Humorous) Guide for Successful Completion and Beyond is not a how-to manual—and that is exactly the point. For many prospective and current doctoral students, beginning a doctorate is one of the most meaningful, and most underestimated, undertakings of their lives. This book meets doctoral sojourners where they are: curious, hopeful, anxious, determined, sometimes discouraged, and often more alone than expected. Rather than offering a prescriptive formula for “how to finish,” it invites readers into honest reflection, grounded conversation, and realistic preparation and action for the doctoral journey as it is truly lived. Co-authored by three doctoral completers, the book reflects decades of experience walking alongside doctoral students as educators, advisors, and practitioner-scholars who understand the academic and personal demands of doctoral life. Together, the authors offer diverse perspectives without promoting a single theoretical, methodological, or disciplinary stance. Using the metaphor of a hiking trail, Walking the Doctoral Trail supports doctoral students across disciplines and program structures and acknowledges that journeys differ in terrain and pacing, yet share common challenges and turning points. Organized into seven chapters representing stages of the doctoral journey, each topic includes reflection, guidance, warnings, trail tales, and space for readers’ own notes. Humor—through original cartoons—is woven throughout, reminding readers they are not alone and that completing the hike is achievable. Ideal for doctoral orientation courses and mentoring conversations, this book offers companionship, perspective, wisdom, and steady encouragement for those committed to walking the doctoral trail to the end. It will be a meaningful gift for someone considering—or beginning—a doctorate program as well! Walking the Doctoral Trail is an invaluable tool for every doctoral student, regardless of the stage that they find themselves in in their program.Perfect for courses such as: Introduction to Doctoral Education; Doctoral Research Seminar; Dissertation/Thesis Proposal Writing; Doctoral Dissertation Seminar; Foundations of Social Science Research; Foundations of Behavioral Science Research; Foundations of Organizational and Leadership Research; Introduction to Educational Research; Doctoral Mentoring and Advising; Inquiry as Practice

Let's face it: studying Special Education Law is difficult and can be quite tedious. If it were not a part of the requirements for most advanced administrative degrees in education, many students would prefer to skip the course. However, skipping the study of Special Education Law would be quite detrimental to the anticipated and actual experience not only of principals, but also of many other central office administrators, and especially Superintendents. Mistakes in Special Education Law not only lead to shortchanging students and failing to meet their needs, but the same mistakes can be quite costly to school districts in lawsuits, sanctions, and personnel issues. Case Studies for Special Education Law: One Foot in the Real World, the Other Grounded in the Law gives actual case studies that discuss the issues in special education today. It is a great resource and textbook addition for university courses, and would be outstanding for school district personnel to use for professional development. For each case study, the book follows the Issue, Rule, Application, and Conclusion (IRAC) format: Clearly identify the ISSUE associated with the case. What did the school do? What are the parents alleging? What are the parents asking for? Determine the relevant RULE: what part of special education law most impacts this case? Who else is involved in the case? Is it clear cut for either side? ANALYSIS or APPLICATION: as an outside observer, what did the school do right? Do the parents have an actionable case? Did it go to hearing? Was due process involved? Were advocates involved? CONCLUSION: was a settlement arrived at through mediation? If not, what was the next step? Did the parents hire an attorney? What lessons were learned? How can this be applied to administrative practice? Case Studies for Special Education Law is an essential book for two audiences: graduate-level special education law courses to use as discussions as they cover particular aspects of special education law, so that they can see how the law plays out in real life, and school district special education administrators to use in training their special education teachers and other administrators in professional development every year.Perfect for courses such as: Special Education Law; School Law; Introduction to Special Education; Introduction to Emotional and Behavioral Disorders; Introduction to Students with Intense Intervention Needs; Special Education Administration; Theory and Practice in Early Childhood Special Education; Advanced Studies in Emotional and Behavioral Disorders

Curriculum and pedagogy are the heartbeat of our schools. They encompass what we do and do not teach–what content and approaches we either choose or are mandated to choose, or leave out or are mandated to leave out. Curriculum entails the overall educational experience of schooling, while pedagogy is the art and craft of teaching–or the translation of curriculum into student knowledge and growth. Hence, curriculum and pedagogy are sociocultural phenomena that impact and are impacted by context (e.g., students, community, colleagues, geography, etc.). Once upon a time, curriculum and pedagogy were the spaces in which educators could exercise creativity and exploration, reflecting the individual needs of their students and communities. However, as political structures shifted and the standards movement took hold in the late 20th century, freedoms around curriculum and pedagogy began to fade with increased oversight over and standardization of “best practices” with greater emphasis placed on performance and efficiency. Pedagogical practices were soon framed around producing results (test scores, graduation rates, measurable learning objectives derived from prescribed state standards), while curriculum became a prescribed structure formatted to reflect state standards with an eye toward test performance. Curriculum and pedagogy were further impeded by hegemonic forces calling for censorship of teaching and curriculum, such as the ban on Ethnic Studies in Tucson, Arizona, and continued attacks on Critical Race Theory nationwide. Further, curriculum became a tool for concealing and/or silencing the experiences and voices of our diverse students, educators, and communities. The results of these phenomena are teachers feeling uninspired and deprofessionalized and students feeling devalued and unheard–especially marginalized students. Since curriculum and pedagogy directly impact the experiences of teachers and students, they must be transformed. However, how do we do that within today’s tenuous PreK-12 environment? How do we transform curriculum and pedagogy so that they reflect, liberate, and ensure justice for students and educators in preschools, elementary schools, middle schools, high schools and the content areas taught within them? Moving from Traditional to Transformative Curriculum and Pedagogy addresses these challenges by providing clear and direct guidance for current and aspiring educators committed to transforming the status quo in their classrooms and schools. Innovative and creative methodologies and practices that aspiring and practicing educators can use right away are the primary focus of this book. Because the editors and contributors are former or current PreK-12 practitioners and/or education scholars, this book is written for a broad educational audience. The editors and contributors provide preservice and practicing teachers entry points for transforming the educational landscape in favor of liberatory, transformative practices in PreK-12 schools across grade levels, content areas, school types, and geographic regions. Additionally, this book is ideal for teacher preparation programs as well as PreK-12 professional development, as this book guides readers through theoretical and empirical discussions, supported by hands-on applications that enable real-time application, and concludes with interactive features, like case studies, extension activities, and discussion prompts.

Writing as Artistry: EdD Students Learning to Write as Scholarly Practitioners is a timely guidebook that supports EdD students’ scholarly writing development while honoring and amplifying their rich practitioner knowledge and wisdom. EdD students are educational leaders and working professionals transitioning from expert-practitioners to scholarly practitioners who aim to positively transform the lives of students and communities. This resource addresses the significant need for mastering scholarly writing skills required for EdD students’ successful degree completion and real-life impact.The book’s conceptual approach frames scholarly writing as artistry. This perspective recognizes the work of practitioners as a deeply human and experiential process of solving problems of practice by drawing on prior knowledge and exploring new methods to improve practice. This view champions the idea that practitioners’ professional knowledge and rich prior experience are essential assets and that their insider knowledge is a necessary and key condition for rigorous practitioner inquiry. The authors adopt a critical stance that rejects the dominant notion of technical rationality, which historically views researchers as scholars and practitioners as mere “doers,” arguing instead that building successful experiences for EdD students requires and respects practitioners’ professional knowledge.The guidebook offers a scaffolded, practical approach to scholarly writing, aiming to guide the reader toward a practice-focused lens, provides practical tools for fostering scholarly writing, and builds students’ confidence as writers. It is centrally focused on developing practice-centered dissertations and culminating projects that align with professional-practice degrees.To support students throughout the process, the book provides a robust repertoire of writing approaches and strategies. It offers guidance on prewriting techniques for capturing initial ideas and helps students in effectively connecting their ideas with others. Critical to this artistic approach is the development of a unique writer’s voice and positionality, often through the use of reflexivity. The book includes comprehensive practical tools for navigating the often-challenging mechanics of scholarly work, detailing writing feedback and revision strategies, and including a range of templates and clear examples of student work. Furthermore, the guide provides essential advice for leveraging support structures, such as engaging with multiple mentors and critical friends. The guide also prepares students for diverse project types, including individual, collaborative, and alternative dissertation projects.Ultimately, mastering these skills is a critical way to support students in their work beyond graduation. The ability to write clear, scholarly reports is essential, as the skills learned must transfer from the Dissertation-in-Practice experience to the student's world of practice, thus ensuring real-world impact by enhancing leaders’ capacity to implement evidence-based solutions to complex problems.

This new and innovative book, Improving Your College Courses: A Guide for Engaging in Digital Learning, provides instructors from any discipline with a guide for improving course quality and engaging learners in digital learning environments. It inspires professional development and learning (PDL) by making available an indispensable resource for higher education faculty seeking to enhance their teaching practices, propel meaningful experiences, and improve student outcomes. Instructors and administrators will want to read this research-informed, practical book authored by faculty with expertise in digital learning environments. All of them have published on this topic, some earning digital certifications and online teaching awards. Faculty and administrators attracted to a blend of theoretical insights and practical applications will welcome a solid resource for instructors engaged in continuous course improvement and PDL. At the same time, administrators overseeing faculty development as well as mentoring coordinators who sponsor PDL around instructional effectiveness and ethics will benefit from the use of the volume. Professors will find strategies that can be immediately implemented in their courses, making them a valuable tool for PDL. It will be a “must have” for new instructors and faculty who are adapting their teaching for a digital world. The book covers essential topics including course introduction; content and materials; engagement activities; accessibility and usability; and support strategies; as well as practical methods such as case studies, glossary, and appendix and supplementary materials with web content. Improving Your College Courses features pictures, figures, drawings, charts, and graphs designed to clearly illustrate the steps and concepts narrated. This book is designed to be an indispensable resource for educators seeking to enhance their teaching practices and improve student outcomes.Carol A. Mullen is the recipient of the 2026 Excellence in Research Award, AERA Division A: Administration, Organization, and Leadership. Watch a clip of her acceptance speech at: https://youtu.be/W5Ao9bGZrF0