If all humor does indeed come from pain, then American educational policymaking has been a petri dish brimming with hilarity. Even before Betsy DeVos ascended to her perch atop the U.S. Department of Education, her predecessors had offered up an excruciating decade of fodder for satire. Ably assisted by a bevy of billionaires, foundations, and advocacy think tanks, these policymakers unleashed a torrent of rhetorical gibberish and evidence-free "innovations" on the nation's children and their schools. Potential Grizzlies: Making the Nonsense Bearable is one researcher's attempt to laugh instead of cry. The book will bring back memories of policymakers from more innocent times, from Michelle Rhee to Arne Duncan to Chris Christie. Sit back and relax with fond thoughts of your favorite policies, from testing to school choice to "parent trigger." Or maybe just smile and imagine a day when policymakers turn to research evidence and knowledgeable educators to build a sound future for our children.

In a reporting tour de force, award-winning journalist Steven Brill takes an uncompromising look at the adults who are fighting over America's failure to educate its children--and points the way to reversing that failure.
Brill not only takes us inside their roller-coaster battles, he also concludes with a surprising prescription for what it will take from both sides to put the American dream back in America's schools.

This open access book, originally published in Portuguese in 1988 and now available in English for the first time, describes the Brazilian educator, Antonio Leal's, experiences teaching so-called "unteachable" children in Rio de Janeiro's favelas. A Voice for Maria Favela tells the story of how Leal considers what the children bring to the class, gradually engaging them in developing a narrative about Maria Favela, a single mother and housemaid. Leal uses the sounds within the story to draw out the students' abilities to see enunciation and articulation as a process of becoming literatized. A contemporary and admirer of Paulo Freire, Leal nevertheless recognised that his students' needs could not be theorized along Freirean lines of oppressor/oppressed. He devised an emancipatory approach that is more focussed on the individual child and their capacity for self-expression than those often found in critical pedagogy. The book puts forward a unique type of radical pedagogy and philosophy of education, developed through direct classroom observation. The book includes a substantial introduction written by the translator Alexis Gibbs (University of Winchester, UK) and preface by Inny Accioly (Fluminense Federal University, Brazil). The eBook editions of this book are available open access under a CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 licence on bloomsburycollections.com.

In the United States, community colleges are some of the most racially diverse institutions of higher education. And, as such, as argued in Minding the Obligation Gap in Community Colleges and Beyond (Sims et al., 2020), they are uniquely positioned to function as disruptive technologies, that is, spaces that disrupt institutionalized educational inequity. Pedagogy and curriculum must be liberatory if we hope to engender educational equity precisely because Nationwide, the majority of community college students are students of color and the majority of African American and Latinx college students start their journeys at a community college. The community college professorate is the inverse, as three-quarters of all college professors are white. These demographics create a cultural schism that is preventing students of color and other minoritzed groups from reaching their full intellectual and creative potential. This book fills a gap in the academic literature on how community college educators can more effectively serve their diverse students, from interrogating their own white racial identity, to overhauling their curricula and pedagogy, and later by committing to radical love as praxis. While this book's title explicitly calls on white educators, ultimately, it is for any educator who seeks to dismantle classroom power structures and who strives to create nurturing, justice-advancing curricula. "Given the disproportionate number of white faculty in the community system in comparison to the student population, this book is essential in providing the necessary guidance and tools that will allow white teachers to effectively teach students of color. Moreover, this text recognizes that if the community system is going to improve outcomes for students of color that white faculty have obligation to be equipped to have greater understanding of race and racism that would impact what and how they teach."-Edward Bush, President, Cosumnes River College "Improving outcomes for community college students begins with improving one's understanding of race and racism. The first-person perspective of engaging in anti-racist work in this book calls to our core values as community college educators. This book provides guidance, evokes critical self-reflection, and highlights practical tools to effectively educate historically minoritized students, especially for an educational system whose teaching faculty is predominantly white."-Angelica Garcia, President, Berkeley City College

In the United States, community colleges are some of the most racially diverse institutions of higher education. And, as such, as argued in Minding the Obligation Gap in Community Colleges and Beyond (Sims et al., 2020), they are uniquely positioned to function as disruptive technologies, that is, spaces that disrupt institutionalized educational inequity. Pedagogy and curriculum must be liberatory if we hope to engender educational equity precisely because Nationwide, the majority of community college students are students of color and the majority of African American and Latinx college students start their journeys at a community college. The community college professorate is the inverse, as three-quarters of all college professors are white. These demographics create a cultural schism that is preventing students of color and other minoritzed groups from reaching their full intellectual and creative potential. This book fills a gap in the academic literature on how community college educators can more effectively serve their diverse students, from interrogating their own white racial identity, to overhauling their curricula and pedagogy, and later by committing to radical love as praxis. While this book's title explicitly calls on white educators, ultimately, it is for any educator who seeks to dismantle classroom power structures and who strives to create nurturing, justice-advancing curricula. "Given the disproportionate number of white faculty in the community system in comparison to the student population, this book is essential in providing the necessary guidance and tools that will allow white teachers to effectively teach students of color. Moreover, this text recognizes that if the community system is going to improve outcomes for students of color that white faculty have obligation to be equipped to have greater understanding of race and racism that would impact what and how they teach."-Edward Bush, President, Cosumnes River College "Improving outcomes for community college students begins with improving one's understanding of race and racism. The first-person perspective of engaging in anti-racist work in this book calls to our core values as community college educators. This book provides guidance, evokes critical self-reflection, and highlights practical tools to effectively educate historically minoritized students, especially for an educational system whose teaching faculty is predominantly white."-Angelica Garcia, President, Berkeley City College

Written by scholars and educators based in Canada and the USA, this book articulates and implements a new cutting-edge theoretical framework entitled the disruptive learning narrative (DLN). The contributing authors analyze their experiences with international service learning students using DLN to uncover important lessons about race relations, power and privilege. They offer fresh insight on how DLN is useful in understanding and unpacking controversial teaching moments abroad and provide further reflections on how others can adapt the DLN framework to meet the contextual needs of their international educational experience. The chapters offer case studies and learning from international service learning and study abroad programs in Canada, China, Columbia, Cuba, Kenya, Tanzania, and the USA. The book provides essential knowledge and insights for educators who wish to address the inherent messiness and complexity of international experiences. It will help educators and researchers to better understand the controversial and sensitive issues of race relations, power and privilege dynamics.