Curriculum

Thanks to Literacy Pedagogy with Whole-Earth Consciousness, teachers of young and older novice readers alike no longer have to separate structured reading instruction from meaningful, engaging, age-appropriate content. In clear language and with multiple examples drawn directly from practice – including case studies, vignettes, discourse analyses, text sets, samples of curriculum, and more – this book shows how literacy pedagogy can be merged with science-based concepts, understandings, and practices relating to caring for ourselves, caring for others, and caring for the earth as a whole. With environmental challenges pressing ever more closely on everyday life – including effects of extreme heat, flooding, tornadoes, hurricanes, and wildfire, among others – Literacy Pedagogy with Whole-Earth Consciousness offers a hopeful path forward for literacy educators, science educators, elementary educators, tutors, university faculty and students, homeschooling families, and childcare providers. Readers will draw inspiration from seeing how earth-conscious literacy pedagogy unfolds in multiple educational contexts: an afterschool program, a virtual literacy tutorial, a 3-week school enrichment program, and a graduate-level literacy course. Rogers and Schaenen showcase how place-based approaches to literacy instruction can empower students and teachers alike as readers while also dramatically deepening their relationships with the environment. Uniquely, Literacy Pedagogy with Whole-Earth Consciousness merges together teacher action research, discourse analysis, literacy teacher education, and eco-justice pedagogies. What results is a timely, conceptually rich guide to an experiential and evidence-based approach to literacy teaching and learning. Experiential approaches to literacy learning can help enrich the understanding young people have about themselves, other people, and their sense of belonging on planet Earth. Literacy Pedagogy with Whole-Earth Consciousness can be a central adopted text in undergraduate and graduate classrooms: with student reading scores seemingly stuck or worsening, what’s urgently needed are innovative, thoughtful, authentic approaches to teaching literacy comprehensively at the earliest and intermediate stages, especially in classes preparing teachers for service or extending the repertoires of in-service teachers at the graduate level. It will also be a useful adopted text in graduate classes that explore discourse analysis and teacher action research. Because the book will include examples of critically oriented discourse analysis within an action research framework, Literacy Pedagogy with Whole-Earth Consciousness will appeal to fellow critical literacy researchers, as well as scholars and practitioners of discourse analysis. The book will extend approaches to critical discourse studies in educational 4 settings by engaging eco-linguistics as a pedagogical and research tool. For this reason, literacy clinic directors and their affiliated faculty will also be interested readers. As a guide to cutting-edge curriculum and instruction with regard to literacy and the environment, college, university, and public libraries will want to include this book in their collections. The authors write with clarity for the ever-growing number of homeschooling families, microschools, and indeed any caregivers of young children who are interested in merging research-based developmental literacy with environmental content in age-appropriate ways. Literacy Pedagogy with Whole-Earth Consciousness is accessible and useful to all participants in an ever-growing and collaborative community of learners. The authors made the decision to jump into the kind of work that would foreground relationships, seek continuities, embrace non-linear patterns of change, and adhere to a basic ecological principle of favoring diversity over monoculture. Through a two-year inquiry across multiple contexts, they have worked to envision and construct a conceptual and practical trellis that will support the fruits of comprehensive literacy development – phonics, comprehension, fluency, writing, spelling, curiosity, and joy – while remaining grounded in place-based content and care. Along the way, they have engaged in reflexive research, documenting, analyzing, synthesizing, and reflecting on their practice across multiple learning ecologies.Perfect for courses such as: Eco-Literacy; Action Research/Teacher Research; Foundations of Teaching Literacy; Teaching Reading and Writing in School and Community Settings; Education and Society Through Service Learning; Climate Change Narratives; Literacy and Social Justice; Discourse Analysis; Theory and Practice of Literacy Tutoring; Teaching and Learning in Environmental Education; Science Communications; Science Literacy

Transdisciplinary Feedback in Higher Education: Feedback Practices to Promote Student Success Across the Disciplines in Higher Education covers a group of faculty at a small, public, comprehensive, Hispanic-serving university in west Texas who made a commitment to study effective feedback strategies and implement them in their courses across fourteen different disciplines. The faculty joined a learning community to discuss and implement high impact practices using ten feedback tools and strategies outlined by Riordan (2021). Twenty-two faculty share their unique experiences using effective feedback methodologies in over forty case studies with students in programs spanning across developmental education, biology, English, nursing, psychology, criminal justice, accounting, communication, history, political science, natural resource management, STEM, teacher education, and counseling. These case studies illustrate how each of the Riordan feedback strategies is effectively implemented, showcasing the resulting two-way exchange between the instructors and students in undergraduate and graduate courses. Drawing on their in-depth experiences, through these real world examples of feedback in higher education courses that have had a positive impact on students, authors Dr. Jeanne Qvarnstrom and Dr. Alicia M. Trotman provide insights into how meaningful feedback is framed and implemented in each discipline, using a customized approach to feedback to help readers identify the key feedback skills that are unique to each subject. Transdisciplinary Feedback in Higher Education: Feedback Practices to Promote Student Success Across the Disciplines in Higher Education is written primarily for faculty who know that feedback is important, but who also recognize that some types of feedback will be disregarded by the student. The purpose is to provide real world examples of feedback in higher education courses that have had a positive impact on students. Organized into three sections, in Part I of Transdisciplinary Feedback in Higher Education: Feedback Practices to Promote Student Success Across the Disciplines in Higher Education the authors explore instructor orientation to feedback, Part II highlights student orientation to feedback, and Part III illustrates the authors teaching the disciplinary tools as aligned with feedback strategies. While the tools and practices remain consistent, the implementation methods vary contextually to best meet the needs of the students in mastering the concepts of the disciplines. The reader gains a greater understanding of the ten feedback tools and practices from a transdisciplinary perspective. Each chapter ends with reflective questions for the reader and a reference list for future study. Effective feedback in higher education is a popular topic, but in Transdisciplinary Feedback in Higher Education: Feedback Practices to Promote Student Success Across the Disciplines in Higher Education, addresses a gap in research and offers examples from higher education. Transdisciplinary Feedback in Higher Education: Feedback Practices to Promote Student Success Across the Disciplines in Higher Education is dedicated to college and university instructors in various disciplines who recognize the power of feedback and want to learn more about effective forms of it. The book is well suited for faculty professional development initiatives, professional learning communities, and graduate programs in higher education and teacher education, making it an appropriate resource for both individual instructors and course adoption.

Food, and the context surrounding it, frames much of our lives. Our culinary experiences are imbued with our physical, social, spiritual, and cultural identities. However, for many, food practices are alienating because certain culinary practices are privileged, while others are marginalized, especially in higher education spaces. Simply having access to safe and affirming food, drink, and dining spaces on campus and at off-campus events is a right that every student and faculty member should be able to enjoy. A Culinary Approach to Inclusion and Belonging in Higher Education is a new and innovative book that is unique in that it examines food as a social justice and inclusion issue. For some, religious traditions guide the consumption of only certain foods, accompanied by various periods of fasting and other important contexts around eating. Examples include the Jewish kashrut, a mandate on preparing and eating kosher food, and the Muslim halal and Ramadan, with daytime fasting. This extends off campus as well, to events and conferences that feature alcohol, which excludes those who choose or need to abstain. For those with medical conditions such as celiac disease (gluten-free), the absence of specific ingredients and foods is a medical necessity. For autistic students, or for queer and transgender people, the physical layout and social expectations of dining cause stress and isolation. International students lack a sense of belonging when the culinary decisions on a campus exclude familiar foods or settings, rendering a sense of invisibility for the students. Finally, we can look at Food Philosophy, how we think and what we believe about food, as similar to the field of Ethnic Studies, with an examination of who is included, excluded, and the need for transformation of the culinary system. Through its nine chapters, this book is designed to weave together explanatory material on various culinary needs with stories of challenges and successes in meeting the needs of those who live on, work on, or visit campuses. It highlights the need for identity-affirming culinary experiences that create a sense of inclusion and belonging. A Culinary Approach to Inclusion and Belonging in Higher Education is a great resource for researchers in cultural studies. In addition, it is an effective teaching tool for a variety of curriculum studies classes.Perfect for courses such as: Educational Leadership; Food Studies; Foundations of Education; Higher Education; Multicultural Education; Student Affairs

Translating Words, Creating Worlds: Poetry Inside Out as Critical Literacy and Translanguaging Pedagogy in K-12 Classrooms is a timely and inspiring guide to bringing critical literacy, translanguaging, and student voice into today’s classrooms. Grounded in the innovative Poetry Inside Out (PIO) program developed at the Center for the Art of Translation, this volume demonstrates how poetry translation can transform language learning into a powerful act of collaboration, creativity, and cultural exploration. Across diverse K–12 settings, students engage with poems from around the world—written in languages such as Vietnamese, Spanish, and Albanian—and work together to translate them into English. Specifically, they first work in pairs to create a “Phrase-by-Phrase” translation, akin to a rough draft. Then, in groups of four, students meld and refine their drafts, developing a “Make it Flow” translation that the entire group agrees to. Through discussion, interpretation, performance, and revision, students do far more than learn vocabulary or grammar: they analyze meaning, wrestle with complex social and political themes, and develop sophisticated literacy practices rooted in authentic communication. Written by classroom teachers, school leaders, and literacy practitioners, Translating Words, Creating Worlds offers vivid, real-world examples of PIO in action across elementary, middle, and high school classrooms. The book provides practical, accessible strategies for educators seeking to create culturally sustaining, language-rich learning environments that honor and leverage students’ linguistic and cultural assets. At a moment when educators are searching for meaningful ways to support multilingual learners and foster inclusive classrooms, this volume delivers both inspiration and actionable pedagogy. Readers will discover how collaborative poetry translation can deepen students’ engagement with language, strengthen critical thinking, and cultivate empathy, dialogue, and intellectual curiosity. An essential resource for teachers, teacher educators, and TESOL/ESL professionals, Translating Words, Creating Worlds is ideal for courses in second language acquisition, literacy, multilingual education, and culturally responsive teaching.Perfect for courses such as: Literacy Education; Methods in ELA/Humanities; Educating Multilingual Children and Youth; Foundations of Bilingual Education; Bilingual Education Theory and Practices; Curriculum and Lesson Planning (Middle/Secondary and/or Elementary); Culture, Language, and Education

Recipes of Motherhood: Families, Communities, and the Power of Food Narratives delves into the powerful connections between food, culture, and motherhood within the demanding context of higher education. This thought-provoking volume, edited by Mila Zhu and Sarah Morrison, brings together diverse voices of academic mothers who share how food practices shape, sustain, and empower their lives as they navigate the complex terrain of career, family, and cultural identity. Drawing from personal narratives, case studies, and interdisciplinary research, Recipes of Motherhood illuminates the ways in which food serves as more than sustenance; it becomes a source of resilience, a tool for community-building, and a means of preserving cultural heritage. The academic mothers in this volume reveal how food acts as a metaphor and medium for navigating life’s challenges, allowing them to bridge their personal and professional identities. From adapting family recipes to sharing meals that create community, each story uncovers the unique strategies academic mothers use to sustain themselves and those around them in an environment that can often feel isolating. Grounded in feminist theory, food studies, and cultural memory, this book highlights how food stories are deeply intertwined with questions of gender, tradition, and self-identity. Chapters explore themes such as the symbolic role of food in cultural heritage, food as a form of resistance to institutional expectations, and culinary traditions as a way to build solidarity among women in academia. Through these narratives, Recipes of Motherhood provides a nuanced understanding of how food can act as both a grounding force and a form of empowerment in academic mothers’ lives. With its interdisciplinary approach, the book appeals not only to scholars in cultural studies, food studies, and gender studies but also to students, educators, and anyone interested in the transformative power of food. Readers will find in these pages a rich tapestry of stories that inspire, educate, and challenge traditional ideas about motherhood and academia. Perfect for academic courses and personal reading alike, the volume offers insight into how food serves as a vital element in the journey of academic mothers, helping them navigate the intersections of personal identity, professional resilience, and cultural expression. This volume invites readers to savor the complexities of academic motherhood through the lens of food and to consider how everyday acts of cooking and sharing meals can hold deep significance in our lives and our communities. Whether you are a mother, an educator, or simply someone interested in the stories that food can tell, Recipes of Motherhood is a captivating exploration of how culinary practices shape our relationships, our work, and our sense of self. Join us in celebrating the resilience, creativity, and heritage of academic mothers whose food stories nourish not only their families but also the broader academic community.Perfect for courses such as: Gender Studies / Women’s Studies – Motherhood and Identity; Food Studies – Cultural Narratives in Food Practices; Education Studies – Women in Academia: Challenges and Resilience; Sociology – Family and Society: Gender Roles and Cultural Heritage; Anthropology – Food, Culture, and Identity; Cultural Studies – Folklore, Tradition, and Modern Identities; Parenting and Family Studies – Motherhood and Work-Life Balance; Interdisciplinary Studies – Food as Narrative and Social Practice; Feminist Theory – Intersectionality of Motherhood, Career, and Culture; Psychology of Women – Resilience and Identity in Motherhood

What if the syllabus were a menu? What if learning began with a bite? Edible Tales: Folklore, Myths, and Food Narratives in Higher Learning invites readers to the table, literally and intellectually, to explore how food stories shape knowledge, identity, ethics, and pedagogy. Structured as a twelve-course banquet, the book moves from forbidden fruits and mythic punishments to kitchen-table dialogues, classroom rituals, and contemporary visual art. Across chapters, contributors examine how food functions as law and transgression, nourishment and discipline, inheritance and invention. Eve’s bite, Persephone’s seeds, and Gretel’s breadcrumbs are reread as moments where appetite becomes agency. Thanksgiving disasters become narrative laboratories. Off-calendar feasts and midnight breakfasts reveal how everyday rituals sustain resilience in academic and communal life. Olive oil tastings, medieval banquets, pupusa-making, and jollof debates demonstrate how foodways encode histories of gender, class, colonialism, migration, and belonging. Methodologically, Edible Tales blends scholarly analysis with creative forms: scripts, recipes, stage directions, audio guides, almanacs, and lesson “potions.” The volume models how folklore and food narratives can be mobilized in higher education classrooms as rigorous, embodied ways of knowing. Contributors show how storytelling, shared snacks, sensory memory, and digital food archives can foster trust, critical reflection, and ethical engagement, particularly in interdisciplinary, humanities-based, and social justice-oriented pedagogy. Designed for scholars and educators in education, folklore, cultural studies, food studies, and the humanities, Edible Tales is also an invitation to instructors seeking innovative pedagogy, to students hungry for meaning, and to readers who believe that stories travel best when passed hand to hand. Come hungry. Leave with stories. Pack the leftovers as questions, and carry them into tomorrow.Perfect for courses such as: Food Studies; Folklore and Mythology; Cultural Studies; Narrative Inquiry / Qualitative Research Methods; Curriculum Studies; Interdisciplinary Humanities; Anthropology of Food; Education and Social Justice; Gender, Culture, and Society; Teaching and Learning in Higher Education

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.

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

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.