General Interest

Learning to See the University: Power, Practice, and Improvement in Academic Systems is a sharp and reflective exploration of power, policy, and survival in modern higher education. Written in the spirit of Niccolò Machiavelli’s The Prince, the book translates political realism into the everyday governance of universities, where authority operates through committees, budgets, rankings, accreditation, and carefully managed narratives rather than formal command. Neither parody nor exposé, Learning to See the University offers a clear-eyed account of how universities function beneath the language of shared governance and collegiality. Drawing on systems thinking and Improvement Science, it explains why reforms stall, why innovation must often appear as continuity, and why leadership in higher education is shaped more by timing, incentives, and legitimacy than by vision alone. Structured as a modern adaptation of Machiavelli, each chapter reimagines concepts such as virtù, fortuna, fear, reputation, and loyalty within the academic ecosystem. Departments emerge as semi-sovereign fiefdoms, committees as instruments of stability, rankings as tools of perception, and crises as catalysts for change. The tone is accessible, wry, and reflective. Humor provides distance without cynicism, allowing readers to recognize familiar institutional patterns while gaining clarity rather than frustration. New administrators will find a survival guide; experienced leaders will recognize a mirror. Intended for provosts, deans, department chairs, and graduate students in higher education leadership, Learning to See the University is suited for doctoral programs, leadership seminars, and administrative retreats. Ultimately, it is not a guide to manipulation, but an argument for realism with conscience—and for leading universities with wisdom, restraint, and integrity.Perfect for courses such as: Higher Education Leadership; College and University Administration; Higher Education Policy and Politics; Institutional Research and Effectiveness; Strategic Planning in Higher Education; Change and Innovation in Higher Education; Finance and Budgeting in Higher Education; Higher Education Law and Ethics; Leadership Theory in Education; Organizational Theory in Education; Systems Thinking and Improvement in Higher Education

As educational systems worldwide grapple with complex challenges requiring sustained, evidence-informed solutions, collaborative continuous improvement in education (CCIE) has emerged as a transformative approach to systemic change. Yet a critical gap remains: how do we effectively teach and learn these powerful improvement methods across the diverse landscape of educational institutions and professionals who work in them? This groundbreaking book addresses this vital question with practical wisdom and research-backed strategies. Teaching and Learning for Collaborative Continuous Improvement in Education: Challenges and Possibilities Across the Educational System tackles the pressing need to build CCIE capacity among higher education faculty, professional developers, state education department associates, and the broader network of professionals driving educational improvement initiatives. As policymakers increasingly turn to CCIE to inform system-wide reforms, this book provides the roadmap for spreading and deepening expertise across organizational boundaries and professional contexts. The authors examine three fundamental challenges facing the field: bridging knowledge gaps across diverse professional roles and organizations; balancing scholarly and practical applications of CCIE learning; and navigating the spectrum of delivery modalities from fully asynchronous to synchronous, and in-person to remote formats. Through real-world examples, chapter authors reveal both challenges and promising practices that transcend traditional silos and create meaningful learning communities. What sets this book apart is its collaborative approach to knowledge sharing. Rather than prescribing one-size-fits-all solutions, the editors and authors position themselves as colleagues and peers, sharing hard-won lessons from their own improvement journeys. Each chapter follows a systematic structure that includes contextual background, theoretical foundations, learning objectives and approaches, documented results, and honest reflections on lingering questions. The book's organization reflects its commitment to addressing real-world complexity. Following an introductory chapter that maps the current terrain of CCIE teaching and learning, subsequent sections dive deep into specific challenges: designing CCIE learning experiences for different audiences, adapting approaches for varying purposes, and leveraging different modalities effectively. Rich case studies and illustrative examples demonstrate how theory translates into practice across diverse educational contexts. Higher education faculty will find research-based approaches to curriculum design and pedagogy. Professional developers will discover strategies for building organizational capacity using theoretically-grounded and tested approaches. State education leaders will gain insights into system-wide implementation approaches. Most importantly, all readers will find concrete tools for learning with and from each other―breaking down the isolation that too often hampers improvement efforts. The book concludes with a look to the future―highlighting emerging trends and future opportunities in CCIE teaching and learning, while supplementary materials provide readers with immediately usable resources. It represents an essential contribution to the growing field of improvement science in education―and a vital resource for the professionals working to make that science accessible, applicable, and impactful across the entire educational ecosystem.Perfect for courses such as: Continuous Quality Improvement in Education and Human Services; Networked Improvement Communities; Improvement Science Capstone; Leadership for Continuous Improvement; Leadership Experiences, Application and Development; Leadership for Equity for Equity and Improvement; Instructional Leadership; Doctoral Seminar: Dynamics of Improving Schools and Districts; and Supervision of Instruction

Learning to See School Systems: Power, Practice, and Improvement in Public Education is a volume dedicated to the goal of improving school systems. In 1513, Niccolò Machiavelli wrote The Prince to help rulers understand the realities of power. Five hundred years later, Dr. Michael R. L. Odell — educator, researcher, and amused observer of Texas school systems — offers a modern reflection for those who lead the nation’s classrooms and districts. Learning to See School Systems is both satire and system map: a handbook for anyone attempting to lead improvement in institutions designed to resist it gracefully. Across twelve chapters, it reveals how public education mirrors the politics of Florence—ambition, reform, accountability, and fortune disguised as data. Each chapter blends humor with hard truth: board relations as diplomacy, improvement plans as rituals, dashboards as illusion, crises as curriculum. Beneath the wit lies a serious purpose—to help educators see their districts as living systems, governed by patterns that Improvement Science now names but Machiavelli already understood. For teachers, principals, superintendents, and school board members alike, Learning to See School Systems is a mirror of modern schooling—ironic, affectionate, and uncomfortably accurate. Read it for laughter. Keep it for survival. Share it with anyone about to lead their first staff meeting. “He who governs schools must learn to rule hearts that believe themselves ungoverned.” — from Learning to See School SystemsPerfect for courses such as: School Improvement and Reform; School Policy; Organizational Leadership and Change

Books and stories can inspire, create empathy, and be cathartic outlets. They expand our understanding of the lived experience as one of the most important conduits for how we spread knowledge and participate in shared humanity. Building on the work of Rudine Sims Bishop, Battle of the Bans: Narratives of Reading and Engaging with Banned Books explores how challenged and banned books act as windows, mirrors, and sliding doors. In the United States and globally, the twenty-first century is seeing renewed efforts at banning books in a variety of forms, including parental controls, book burning, curricular erasure and epistemicide, and social media banning. These efforts have the potential of silencing particular stories, histories, and perspectives. Book banning targets and has deleterious impacts on particular communities, including but not restricted to people of color, LGBTQ+, religious and cultural minorities, and people with different abilities. This edited collection counteracts the narrative that books are dangerous, centering a celebration of how stories shape lives. Educators, families, and individuals present a range of perspectives on how particular banned books have changed their lived experience and view of the world. Contributors discuss children’s literature, young adult literature, fiction, and nonfiction texts. The book is comprised of three parts. In the Context section, contributors explore lessons and/or situations for how banned books have, can, or should be used. In the Introspection section, contributors provide narratives about how banned books shaped a sense of self. In the Action section, contributors detail steps taken in response to book bans, providing strategies for countering censorship and erasure in classrooms, schools, and libraries. Battle of the Bans creates hope and conversation in an era of political divisiveness. It inspires readers to reflect on their own experiences with books, creates dialogue, and provides pathways to challenge book banning, ensuring access to stories, histories, and perspectives.The book will appeal to a wide range of audiences, including academics, librarians, classroom teachers, parents, and readers who understand the value of books and literature.Perfect for courses such as: Multicultural Literature; Honors Seminar/Special Topics: Book Banning; Curriculum Theory in Education; History of Reading; Contemporary Social Issues; Introduction to American Studies; Introduction to Policy Studies; Qualitative Research Methods; Narrative Research Methods; and Essay Writing

The Little Shelter That Could: Literacy Resilience of Mothers and Children Facing Homelessness tells the story of homelessness, life in a shelter, and the impact of these factors on children’s lives and education. It is also a story of hope. Dr. Sadia Warsi discovered something remarkable during her research at Joseph's Shelter. Instead of educational disruption, she found literacy resilience. Families created sophisticated learning environments that challenged assumptions about capabilities during crisis. The Little Shelter That Could reveals extraordinary educational leadership, where children became teachers in hallway spaces and mothers transformed dormitories into literacy-rich environments. Through anonymized, reconstructed narrative case studies based on her research, this book documents how education served as both anchor during crisis and pathway to future possibilities. Rather than focusing on deficits, this work illuminates sophisticated educational knowledge families possess during vulnerable moments. Readers encounter stories of mothers who strategically selected books to accelerate their children's reading while in emergency housing, families who created "learning corners" that became the shelter's educational heart, and parents whose daily bus journeys maintained their children's school enrollment. Written for early childhood educators and teacher candidates, this book provides frameworks for recognizing family educational assets invisible to traditional assessments. Dr. Warsi challenges deficit-based approaches, offering asset-based strategies that build on what families already know. Drawing from extensive experience in special education and multicultural competency, Warsi provides trauma-informed approaches that honor family expertise while supporting growth. Twenty-five years after the initial study, these lessons remain urgently relevant, as housing instability affects an increasing number of families. The Little Shelter That Could offers hope, practical strategies, and a transformative vision for early childhood education that honors every family's educational assets.Perfect for courses such as: Foundations of Early Childhood Education; Family and Community Engagement in Education; Culturally Responsive Teaching; Early Childhood Literacy Development; Trauma-Informed Educational Practices; Introduction to Special Education; Assessment in Early Childhood Education; Supporting Diverse Families; Child Development and Learning; and Educational Equity and Social Justice

In these times, decisions large and small can have important consequences for educators. Everything from daily curricular choices and interpersonal encounters to long-term educational aims and approaches to educator-client relations is up for careful decision-making. While not every professional decision requires careful preparation and defense, more than ever, in our increasingly polarized, distrustful, and argumentative world, many more than we might anticipate do. How should educators prepare to make careful, defensible public decisions affecting their students and themselves? An important part of that preparation involves training in a range of logical and interpersonal abilities that come before and help to make good educational decisions. A Preface to Educational Decision-Making is aimed at describing those abilities, illustrating their professional uses, and providing a starting point for increasing educators’ practical skills in applying them. What are these abilities? For the most part, they involve common-sense attention to the ways that educators can become clearer about the nature of actual decisions they are asked to make, and aware of what must be done to make those decisions ones that all concerned can recognize as reasonable and as logically presented, even if not universally agreeable. In short, these are factors that provide, for decision-makers and their audiences, a preface to decisions that matter to those who make them and to those affected by them. A most important, though widely ignored set of those abilities center on making the nature of particular decisions clear to all concerned. Those abilities involve becoming sensitive to the ways such decisions can become or can be made to be unclear. In the give and take of public educational decision-making processes, bad decisions are often, even usually begin with confusion over what is to be decided and over what is proposed as the decision to make. The ability to get clarification, and the habit of clarifying before committing are crucial to good decision-making. A second set of preparatory abilities involve recognizing what must be done to actually decide what is true and/or advisable, as part of a decision at hand. Making what is recognized as a reasonable and well-reasoned decision depends in large part on applying those abilities clearly and often publicly. These two large sets of abilities are crucially connected. Making clear to oneself and to others what is to be decided is part and parcel of becoming aware of how to decide an issue at hand. This book works to explain the connections and to describe the order of their application. While most of these abilities have been described in other texts on what is usually called “informal logic,” A Preface to Educational Decision-Making is especially concerned with the sorts of decision that educators are called on to make in their professional lives. Moreover, this book widens the range of abilities to clarify and support professional decisions beyond what is usually discussed. The sections on educational speech acts and on deciding what to call true or advisable provide useful additions to educators’ repertoire of decision-making abilities. Finally, the discussion of interpersonal factors in public decision-making offers useful guides to reaching decisions with other educators and with clients.Perfect for courses such as: Foundations of Education; Philosophy; Social Foundations, Methods Courses in Education; Pre-student Teaching; and most Graduate courses in Educational Theory, Curriculum, Social Issues

Privilege Through the Looking-Glass, Third Edition is a revised and expanded collection of essays that explore privilege and status characteristics in daily life. This collection seeks to make visible that which is often invisible. It seeks to sensitize us to things we have been taught not to see. Privilege, power, oppression, and domination operate in complex and insidious ways, impacting groups and individuals. And yet, these forces that affect our lives so deeply seem to at once operate in plain sight and lurk in the shadows, making them difficult to discern. Like water to a fish, environments are nearly impossible to perceive when we are immersed in them. This book attempts to expose our environments.With engaging and powerful writing, the contributors share their personal stories as a means of connecting the personal and the public. This volume applies an intersectional perspective to explore how race, class, gender, sexuality, education, and ableness converge, creating the basis for privilege and oppression. Privilege Through the Looking-Glass encourages readers to engage in self and social reflection and can be used in a range of courses in sociology, social work, communication, education, gender studies, and Black studies. Each chapter includes discussion questions and/or activities for further engagement, making it a perfect classroom text.

Hauntings, Remembering, and Aesthetics offers an intimate, artful exploration of what is lost—and what remains—when schools are closed. Grounded in the stories of two shuttered public schools in Chicago, it weaves together research, narrative, memory, and visual art to honor the communities shaped by these institutions and reckon with the systemic forces that led to their closure. Drawing from archival research, local records, personal memories, and conversations with former students, educators, and community members, the author—who has a personal connection to each school—reconstructs the histories left behind by braiding their voices with collages and photographs. The book makes visible the deep ties between school communities and the neighborhoods they served. This powerful storytelling serves as a prompt for reflection and reconsideration of school closures.The portraits that emerge tell of schools that operated under immense financial strain but built strong, nurturing environments through resourcefulness and relationships. Participants recall staff who shaped their lives, naming teachers and leaders as transformative figures in their youth. They speak openly about the racism, classism, and broken promises surrounding public education in gentrifying neighborhoods—where public housing was demolished and communities were displaced. In their words, school closures were not isolated policy decisions but outcomes of a broader inequality and disinvestment. Far from passive witnesses, these community members critically examine the past, theorizing their experiences and naming the systemic failures that framed them. They express a desire to pause, reflect, and remember—to reclaim the memory of their schools as spaces of resilience, joy, and collective resistance. As one participant shared, “There’s so much history in us.” That history, the book argues, is too often erased in mainstream narratives about school closures. By presenting these stories through both visual and literary forms, the book creates a new kind of archive—one grounded in lived experiences and presented through aesthetics. It invites educators, parents, policymakers, journalists, and anyone invested in public education to listen differently: to hear what was lost when the schools closed, and to recognize what still echoes in the voices of those who remember.This is not just a story of the past—it is a call to action in the present through stories that have always been here. These acts of remembering resist the dominant, data-driven narratives that often justify school closures. It reveals the human cost of policies disconnected from community realities and asks us to imagine more just futures for public education in our cities. This book asks us to see and hear stories anew, through the haunting beauty of memory, artwork, and collective reflection.Perfect for courses such as: Social Foundations of Education; Educational Policy Studies; History of Urban Education; Sociology of Education; Teacher Education in Urban Education; Historical and Cultural Contexts of Urban Education; Qualitative Research Methods; Arts-based Research Methods; Visual Research Methods

Photovoice research is a participatory qualitative research method where participants photograph themselves, then analyzing them to document and reflect upon their experiences and perspectives on a specific topic, often with the goal of raising awareness and advocating for change. It empowers participants by giving them control over the research process and their own narratives.Photovoice: Using Words and Images in Qualitative Research is a collection of essays from the field that focuses on educators’ implementation of photovoice in a myriad of settings. This methodology crosses disciplines and offers a powerful way to combine visual methods with social research, making it adaptable to many areas where understanding and representing marginalized voices are important.Photovoice is the perfect text for use in a variety of classrooms and courses, including:Introduction to Qualitative Research MethodsCommunity Studies (understanding how visual methods like photovoice can help researchers gain insight into the lived experiences of people within a community)Public Health (photovoice is a valuable method for understanding health disparities, the impact of the environment on health)Education (when studying participatory learning, student engagement, or community-based education. It would also be useful in teacher training programs focusing on inclusive and culturally responsive teaching.)Anthropology (courses on qualitative research or ethnography, photovoice allows for a deeper understanding of cultural and social dynamics through the visual representation of people's lived experiences)Selected topics in Educational ResearchPlace-Based Education

Methodology and Praxis: Thinking with Patti Lather examines the work of Patti Lather and its importance at the intersections of curriculum theory, cultural studies, and critical qualitative research. The book explores the impact of Lather's work on the field both broadly and specifically and engages with her ideas and methods in innovative ways. From 1988-2014, Patti Lather was a faculty member at Ohio State University’s School of Educational Policy and Leadership, where she taught qualitative research, feminist methodology, and courses on gender and education. She has authored four influential books: Getting Smart: Feminist Research and Pedagogy With/in the Postmodern (1991 Critics Choice Award); Troubling the Angels: Women Living with HIV/AIDS (co-written with Chris Smithies, 1998 CHOICE Outstanding Academic Title); Getting Lost: Feminist Efforts Toward a Double(d) Science (2008 Critic’s Choice Award); and Engaging (Social) Science: Policy from the Side of the Messy (awarded the Critic’s Choice Award in 2010 and 2011). Dr. Lather has delivered lectures extensively both nationally and internationally, and has held several distinguished visiting lectureships. Her research explores (post)critical, feminist, and poststructural theories, with her recent work focusing on how the demand for scientifically-based research in education affects qualitative inquiry. She has served in visiting roles at institutions such as the University of British Columbia, Goteborg University, York University, and the Danish Pedagogy Institute, and in 1995 she undertook a sabbatical at the Humanities Research Institute at the University of California, Irvine, where she participated in a seminar on feminist research methodology. Her accolades include a 1989 Fulbright to New Zealand and induction as an AERA Fellow in 2009. Lather is a prominent and prolific scholar whose work has been influential in shaping multiple fields, challenging conventional understandings of research and knowledge, and advocating for social justice and equity in education. This collection represents a diverse group of scholars that build on these contributions and showcase the diverse ways in which research improves teaching and learning. Contributors in this volume include scholars in educational theory, social science, research methodology, feminist social theory, and curriculum theorizing. Perfect for courses such as: Cultural Studies of Education; Qualitative Research Methodology; Contemporary Curriculum Theory; Advanced Qualitative Inquiry; Feminist Theory and Methodology; Education Policy Studies; Research In Education