This book explores the role of the university in upholding democratic values for societal change. The chapters advocate for the moral virtue of democratic patriotism: the editors and contributors argue that universities, as institutions of higher learning, can encourage the creation of critical and patriotic citizens. The book suggests that non-violence, tolerance, and peaceful co-existence ought to manifest through pedagogical university actions on the basis of educators' desire to cultivate reflectiveness, criticality, and deliberative inquiry in and through their academic programmes. In a way, universities can respond more positively to the violence on our campuses and in society if public and controversial issues were to be addressed through an education for democratic citizenship and human rights.

Transcendental Learning discusses the work of five figures associated with transcendentalism concerning their views on education. Alcott, Emerson, Fuller, Peabody and Thoreau all taught at one time and held definite views about education. The book explores these conceptions with chapters on each of the five individuals and then focuses the main features of transcendental learning and its legacy today. A central thesis of the book is that transcendental learning is essentially holistic in nature and provides rich educational vision that is in many ways a tonic to today's factory like approach to schooling. In contrast to the narrow vision of education that is promoted by governments and the media, the Transcendentalists offer a redemptive vision of education that includes: -educating the whole child-body, mind, and soul, -happiness as a goal of education. -educating students so they see the interconnectedness of nature, -recognizing the inner wisdom of the child as something to be honored and nurtured, - a blueprint for environmental education through the work of Thoreau, - an inspiring vision for educating women of all ages through the work of Margaret Fuller, - an experimental approach to pedagogy that continually seeks for more effective ways of educating children, - a recognition of the importance of the presence of teacher and encouraging teachers to be aware and conscious of their own behavior. -a vision of multicultural and bilingual education through the work of Elizabeth Peabody The Transcendentalists, particularly Emerson and Thoreau, sewed the seeds for the environmental movement and for non-violent change. Their work eventually influenced Gandhi and Martin Luther King Jr. and it continues to resonate today in the thinking of Aung Sang Suu Kyi and the Dalai Lama. The Transcendentalists' vision of education is worth examining as well given the dissatisfaction with the current educational scene.

This book is a collection of auto, duo and multi-ethnographies written by frontline language teachers and teacher educators in different parts of the world, including Asia, Africa, Latin America, and North America. These ethnographic accounts report how the authors mobilized different forms of action research to resist against neoliberal educational models and the profit-oriented principles by which they are run. The teachers involved in these projects write about a variety of ways in which they engaged with activist and critical research projects that highlight current socio-political movements, invite marginalized students' communities into the process of teaching and learning, use language education as a means of identity negotiation, fight back institutional restrictions, and show how we can teach language for peace and happiness. The writers also explain how they have created an inquiry community to meet and support each other and used auto, duo or multi-ethnography as insiders to bring attention to their embodied knowledge of the challenges involved in contemporary neoliberal educational settings.

Educational robotics provides students with a learning environment that has the potential to successfully integrate concepts within science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) into K12 learning environments in class, after school, or for robotics competitions. Robots in K-12 Education: A New Technology for Learning explores the theory and practice of educational robotics in the K-12 formal and informal educational settings, providing empirical research supporting the use of robotics for STEM learning. An essential resource for STEM educators, the book explores processes and strategies for developing and implementing robotics-based programs and documents the impact of educational robotics on youth learning by presenting research-based descriptions of robotics technologies and programs, as well as illustrative examples of learning activities, lessons, and assessments.

Educational Leadership: Perspectives on Preparation and Practice identifies core knowledge and skills that educational leaders should be exposed to during pre-service preparation and throughout in-service professional development. The contributors discuss established pedagogical and experiential learning models as well as provocative new paradigms of their own to help prepare leaders and reinforce leadership effectiveness. Implicit throughout the book are five key leadership themes: sensitivity to student development and learning; continual professional development; responsiveness to developmental, socio-cultural, and learning contexts; accepting accountability; and advancing the field. The contributors draw upon many collective years of experience as educators and supervisors of educational leaders to offer perspectives on the application and integration of core leadership principles in leadership preparation and practice.

The Secure Child: Timeless Lessons In Parenting and Childhood Education was designed to contribute meaning to the adage 'what was old is new again'. Just as ideas in child psychology shifted in the 1960s from a focus on behavior to cognitive stages, we are currently seeing a shift away from stages of development toward an emphasis on the interplay between children and the world around them. Specifically, the book offers practical insights into how children can be helped to cope with their changing worlds. These insights emerged in the 1930s, a time of social and economic upheaval much like today. This collection of original papers by former students and colleagues of William E. Blatz, the renowned psychologist and pediatrician known as the 'Dr. Spock of Canada', makes a vital contribution by bringing forward and examining his work in the context of contemporary ideas about human development, parenting, and education. The collection forms a prologue to an included guide written by Blatz and colleagues, ""The Expanding World of the Child"". The previously unpublished work articulates a comprehensive functional approach to parenting and childhood education. The unique format of this book will make it useful for courses in parenting, childhood education as well scholarship in child psychology, personality theory, and socialization.

This book is a collection of auto, duo and multi-ethnographies written by frontline language teachers and teacher educators in different parts of the world, including Asia, Africa, Latin America, and North America. These ethnographic accounts report how the authors mobilized different forms of action research to resist against neoliberal educational models and the profit-oriented principles by which they are run. The teachers involved in these projects write about a variety of ways in which they engaged with activist and critical research projects that highlight current socio-political movements, invite marginalized students' communities into the process of teaching and learning, use language education as a means of identity negotiation, fight back institutional restrictions, and show how we can teach language for peace and happiness. The writers also explain how they have created an inquiry community to meet and support each other and used auto, duo or multi-ethnography as insiders to bring attention to their embodied knowledge of the challenges involved in contemporary neoliberal educational settings.

Teaching is not merely a technical process- it is one that requires creative and inspirational thinking, not only on the part of students but for teachers themselves as artful, reflective beings. The purpose of this book is to provide educators with creative experiences which unlock their imaginative potential so they can re-envision their curriculum to promote active learning, culturally relevant pedagogy, and differentiated instruction. This book guides the reader through a series of experiences intended to tap into the right side of the brain, and provide educators opportunities to re-imagine their existing curriculum in new ways. Through this re-imaging (or re-envisioning) of the creative potential within themselves, teachers can redesign their curricula in ways that best meet the needs of their learners, schools, and communities. This book emphasizes creativity in teaching as a collaborative effort. The experiences and ideas presented in this book are intended to inspire small groups or whole communities (including schools) to work together and support each other in their creative efforts. Creativity does not just exist for individuals in isolated contemplation but resides instead in the relational work that community members create together toward a shared vision. In order to encourage imaginative students who will have the capacities to see the world, not merely as it is, but as it could be, we need to encourage teachers to tap into their creative imaginative capacities to teach as well. Such work cannot be performed in isolation. Creative social change requires that we imagine together that which we cannot do alone.

Education is widely recognized as a fundamental human right, yet the nature of the right remains unclear. Is it an entitlement to go to school, to acquire particular forms of knowledge or develop particular skills or attributes? And why exactly is education so important that we might defend all people's right to it? This book provides a much-needed exploration of this key contemporary issue. Highlighting limitations in the approaches of both the Education for All initiative and existing international law, the book presents a radical new vision of how the right can be understood. As well as basic education, there are discussions of higher and lifelong education, of human rights education, and of the intersection of rights-based approaches with others such Amartya Sen's 'capabilities'. The work serves as a stirring defense of the universal right to education against instrumental conceptions of learning, the inactivity of national governments and the abrogation of responsibility of the international community.

This book examines the role of compassion in refiguring the university. Plotting a reimagining of the university through care, other-regard, and a commitment to act in response to the suffering of others, the author draws on various humanities disciplines to illuminate the potential of compassion in the campus. The book asks how the sector can reclaim the university from the tides of neoliberalism, inequalities and increased workloads, and which moral principles and competencies would need to be championed and instilled to build inclusive citizenship and positive connection with others. A value that is too scarcely taught, experienced, or advocated in contexts of higher education, compassion is reframed as an essential pillar of the university and a means to an epistemically just campus and curricula.

Ongoing ideological or political conflicts in the modern world have led to appalling human rights violations against North Korean defectors who attempt to escape from their repressive country and seek freedom. Although some North Korean defectors have survived the life-threatening escape journey and arrived in free countries, their overwhelming challenges have not yet ended, as they now face a range of issues and challenges in resettlement, adjustment, and learning process in new and competitive societies. North Korean Defectors in a New and Competitive Society articulates several hurdles that North Korean defectors encounter, from their long journey of escape to assimilation in their new homes. This book seeks to raise international awareness of human rights violations against North Koreans, and to emphasize the importance of helping them overcome the substantial cultural gaps between North Korea and their new homes.

This book asks what it means to live in a higher educational world continuously tempered by catastrophe. Many of the resources for response and resistance to catastrophe have long been identified by thinkers ranging from Ralph Waldo Emerson and William James to H. G. Wells and Emanuel Haldeman-Julius. Di Leo posits that hope and resistance are possible if we are willing to resist a form of pessimism that already appears to be drawing us into its arms. Catastrophe and Higher Education argues that the future of the humanities is tied to the fate of theory as a form of resistance to neoliberalism in higher education. It also offers that the fate of the academy may very well be in the hands of humanities scholars who are tasked with either rejecting theory and philosophy in times of catastrophe-or embracing it.

The "Boy Crisis" is cited often in educational and news reports due to the consistent reading achievement gap for boys and the statistics paint a dismal picture of boys in school. Politicians and researchers often focus on boys' low scores on reading achievement tests and compare these scores to the girls' scores with little consideration for the actual reading lives of boys. As a result, adolescent boys' vernacular reading is most often misunderstood. This book documents my journey as a mother of three boys and teacher of adolescents, as I attempt to articulate both the in-school and out-of-school experiences of boys. The book describes my attempts at creating a more complete picture of the reading lives and experiences of adolescent boys by describing three boys and their reading experiences in their natural contexts. It provides a rich description, revealing disconnects between school literacy practices and boys' vernacular literacy practices. In this book, parents, administrators, and teachers will find discover the complexity of boys as readers, challenging educators to pursue effective practice and curricular decisions which go beyond the quick fixes for "the boy problem" so often seen in response to low test scores. This book provides parents, administrators, and teachers with an in-depth description of three boy readers. What emerges is a description of the complexity of boys as readers, challenging educators to pursue effective practice and curricular decisions which go beyond the quick fixes for "the boy problem" so often seen in response to low test scores. Teachers interested in mentoring boy readers will find this book helpful. This book can also be used with pre-service and in-service teachers, in undergraduate and graduate courses, and in professional development.

This study re-examines John Dewey's philosophy of education, and asks how well it stands up today in view of developments in Continental European philosophy. Do Martin Heidegger's statements on the nature of thinking compel a re-examination of Dewey's view? Does Hans-Georg Gadamer's philosophy of experience advance beyond Dewey's experimental model? How does a Deweyan view of moral or political education look in light of Hannah Arendt's theory of judgment, or Paulo Freires's theory of dialogical education? Part One of this study looks at Dewey's conceptions of experience and thinking in connection with two of the most important figures in twentieth-century phenomenology and hermeneutics: Heidegger and Gadamer. It also returns to an old distinction in the philosophy of education between progressivism and conservatism, in order to situate and clarify Dewey's position and to frame the argument of this book. Part Two applies this principled framework to the teaching of several disciplines of the human sciences: philosophy, religion, ethics, politics, history, and literature. These are discussed with reference to the writings of Friedrich Nietzsche, John Caputo, Hannah Arendt, Paulo Freire, Michel Foucault, and Paul Ricoeur.

This provocative book's starting point is a deep and profound concern about the commodification of knowledge within the contemporary university. Acts of Knowing aims to provide readers with a means of understanding the issues from the perspective of Critical Pedagogy; an educational philosophy which believes that 'knowing' must be freed from the constraints of the financial and managerialist logics which dominate the contemporary university. Critical Pedagogy is important for three key reasons: it conceptualises pedagogy as a process of engagement between the teacher and taught; secondly that that engagement is based on an underlying humanistic view about human worth and value; and thirdly that the 'knowing' which can come out of this engagement needs to be understood essentially as exchange between people, rather than a financial exchange. Cowden and Singh argue that the conception of education as simply a means for securing economic returns for the individual and for the society's positioning in a global marketplace, represents a fundamentally impoverished conception of education, which impoverishes not just individuals, but society as a whole.

A volume in Research in Social Education Series Editor Merry Merryfield, The Ohio State University The primary purpose of this book is to invite educators to (re)think what it means to critically conceptualize knowledge about the world. In other words, imagining curriculum in a critical way means decolonizing mainstream knowledge about global societies. Such an approach re-evaluates how we have come to know the world and asks us to consider the socio-political context in which we have come to understand what constitutes an ethical global imagination. A critical reading of the world calls for the need to examine alternative ways of knowing and teaching about the world: a pedagogy that recognizes how diverse subjects have come to view the world. A critical question this book raises is: What are the radical ways of re-conceptualizing curriculum knowledge about global societies so that we can become accountable to the different ways people have come to experience the world? Another question the book raises is: how do we engage with complexities surrounding social differences such as gender, race, ethnicity, religion, etc., in the global contexts? Analyzing global issues and events through the prism of social difference opens up spaces to advocate a transformative framework for a global education curriculum. Transformative in the sense that such a curriculum asks students to challenge stereotypes and engages students in advocating changes within local/global contexts. A critical global perspective advocates the value of going beyond the nation-state centered approach to teaching about topics such as history, politics, culture, etc. It calls for the need to develop curriculum that accounts for transnational formations: an intervention that asks us to go beyond issues that are confined within national borders. Such a practice recognizes the complicated ways the local is connected to the global and vice versa and cautions against creating a hierarchy between national and global issues. It also suggests the need to critically examine the pitfalls of forming dichotomies between the local (or the national) and the global or the center and the periphery.