The contributors to Amplified Voices, Intersecting Identities: First-Gen PhDs Navigating Institutional Power in Early Careers overcame deeply unequal educational systems to become the first in their families to finish college. Now, they are among the 3% of first-generation undergraduate students to go on to graduate school and then become faculty, in spite of structural barriers that worked against them. These scholars write of socialization to the professoriate through the complex lens of intersectional identities of race, ethnicity, gender, sexuality, ability and social class. These first-generation graduate students have crafted critical narratives of the structural obstacles within higher education that stand in the way of brilliant scholars who are poor and working-class, Black, Indigenous, Latinx, Asian, immigrant, queer, white, women, or people with disabilities. They write of agency in creating defiant networks of support, of sustaining connections to family and communities, of their activism and advocacy on campus. They refuse to perpetuate the myths of meritocracy that reproduce the inequalities of higher education. In response to a research literature and to campus programming that frames their identities around "need", they write instead of agentive and politicized intersectional identities as first-generation graduate students, committed to institutional change through their research, teaching, and service. Contributors are: Veronica R. Barrios, Candis Bond, Beth Buyserie, Noralis Rodriguez Coss, Charise Paulette DeBerry, Janette Diaz, Alfred P. Flores, Jose Garcia, Cynthia George, Shonda Goward, Luis Javier Penton Herrera, Nataria T. Joseph, Castagna Lacet, Jennifer M. Longley, Catherine Ma, Esther Diaz Martin, Nadia Yolanda Alverez Mexia, T. Mark Montoya, Miranda Mosier, Michelle Parrinello-Cason, J. Michael Ryan, Adrian Arroyo Perez, Will Porter, Jaye Sablan, Theresa Stewart-Ambo, Keisha Thompson, Ethan Trinh, Jane A. Van Galen and Wendy Champagnie Williams.

Blockchain relies on distributed databases that give an alterable and semipublic record of digital transactions. Blockchain in learning should address theoretical, practical, and technical issues, but it must also consider the philosophy behind interactive blockchain in learning. While the applications of blockchain have been the subject of serious academic research, there must be more continuous and multicultural attention paid to the impact of the latest management, communication, pedagogy, technology, and evaluation-based developments of blockchain in learning. Blockchain Technology Applications in Education is an essential scholarly publication that scrutinizes how open universities establish a blockchain network for decentralized learning. This book will explore a variety of new management models, communicational actions, pedagogical approaches, new technologies, and evaluation models. There will be new trends, patterns, and customs of blockchain in learning drawn from the distinctive improvements in learning milieus. Highlighting a range of topics such as corporate education, lifelong learning, and social media, this book is essential for academicians, curriculum designers, instructional designers, IT consultants, administrators, researchers, and students.

Educational inequalities between students begin early, as children enter kindergarten with vastly different sets of background knowledge and experiences that do (or in many cases do not) prepare them to learn successfully in school. Many children enter school with skills and prior knowledge so low that they are unable to overcome this lack during the kindergarten year, leaving them unprepared for first grade. Predictably, these deficits only widen as the children progress on to subsequent grades. Conversely, children who enter kindergarten prepared to learn, and leave kindergarten having mastered key competencies in literacy and numeracy, are more likely to succeed throughout their schooling and later in life. The recent pandemic has only exacerbated this problem of learner variability. Differences in school approaches to remote or hybrid learning and variability in family and home environments have all impacted the performance of children, many of whom are now nearly a year behind. The pandemic has forced us all to consider the ways in which traditional models of schooling have fallen short, and how we might better design programs that leverage all the inputs in a young child's life (the home, parents, school, community, technology, and more) to ensure that their learning needs are met. If we hope to solve this problem at scale, we must re-examine what we know about these formative early years and develop new ways to ensure that children enter kindergarten ready to learn and leave kindergarten with all the competencies they need succeed in later schooling and beyond. We must consider of all the factors that contribute to a child's school readiness, as well as the critical learning must take place during the kindergarten year. It requires the examination of factors that most influence children's development during the first five years, and their lasting effects on the rest of children's lives. More importantly, we must examine the ways that we, as stakeholders, can influence outcomes for young children by creating synergies between and among these various factors. With all this in mind, this book proposes to assemble the most current research and thought-leadership on the ways in which innovative education stakeholders are working together to impact what are perhaps the most critical years in a child's education - the years leading up to and including kindergarten. Ensuring that children enter kindergarten ready to learn and leave kindergarten with all the key competencies required for later success must be pursued with intensity, creativity, and purpose if we truly wish to address learner variability and its impact on achievement at scale. This book will Illuminate the problem of learner variability in early childhood education, its short and long-term effects on K-12 education and life beyond school, and the potential of technological innovations to address this problem at scale.

Is this right? Is this how it's supposed to look? Adolescent writers often ask these kinds of questions because traditional grammar instruction focuses too much on what's right or what's wrong. The fear of making a mistake hides the true power of conventions - the creation of meaning, purpose, and effect, the ultimate reading-writing connection. Join Jeff Anderson, with Travis Leech and Melinda Clark, as they explore grammar in a new way in Patterns of Power: Inviting Adolescent Writers into the Conventions of Language, Grades 6 - 8. Let's lift middle school writers by focusing on possibility and producing effective writing that will transfer to the classroom and beyond. Inside Patterns of Power, Grades 6 - 8, teachers will find a quick yet comprehensive explanation of the invitational process-the easy-to-follow, brain-based process created to invite adolescent writers to learn about and apply conventions of the English language through the celebration of author's purpose and craft. This process is the foundation on which 55 authentic, flexible, and effective lesson sets were built. Through practical guidance and ready-to-use lessons, you'll be fully equipped to teach grammar in an engaging and authentic way in just 10 minutes a day. Inside you'll find: 55 standards-aligned lesson sets that include excerpts from high-interest, authentic, and diverse young adult and middle grade mentor texts Real-life classroom examples and tips gleaned from the authors' work facilitating the Patterns-of-Power process in hundreds of classrooms Resources to use in classroom instruction or as handouts for student literacy notebooks With hundreds of teach-tomorrow visuals and implementation supports that include quick-reference guides as well as soundtrack lists to infuse the joy of music into grammar instruction, Patterns of Power, Grades 6 - 8 gives you everything you need to inspire your adolescent writers to move beyond limitation and into the endless possibilities of what they can do as writers.

The genesis for this book, and the strategy within it, is a longstanding commitment from Essex County Council to improve the life chances and life choices of disadvantaged pupils being educated in Essex. The purpose of the book is to set out a strategic, evidence-informed approach with pupils, families, teachers, leaders, system leaders and wider agencies which puts learners first. This approach is rooted in best practice. It centres on improving the day to day learning experiences of disadvantaged pupils, leading to better long term choice and opportunity. Unity Research School and Essex County Council hope it will support efforts to address the impact of socio-economic disadvantage on learning in schools and colleges nationally.

A Man Comes from Someplace is a story of a lost world, a story in history of a multi-generational Jewish family from a shtetl in Ukraine before WWI. As cultural study, the narrative draws upon the oral stories of the author's father, family letters, eyewitness accounts, immigration papers, etc., and cultural research. The narrative becomes a transformative space to re-present story as performance, a meta-narrative, and an auto-ethnography for the author to reflect upon the effects of the stories on her own life, as daughter of a survivor, and as teacher/scholar. Summerfield raises questions about immigration, survival, resilience, place and identity, how story functions as antidote to trauma, a means of making sense of the world, and as resistance, the refusal to be silenced or erased, the insistence we know the past and remember those who came before. In 2011, she found her way back to the place her family came from in Ukraine. The book is now being read by students in their ESL classes in Novokoonstantinov, Ukraine.