Now that the political correctness controversy has cooled, a time for sober reflection on the field of English has arrived. In this insightful overview of English, and of literary studies, Fleishman employs both historical perspective and pragmatic sense about choices for the future. His approach is to apply recent strategies of contextual understanding to English itself. What can a class analysis tell us about the influence on the profession of the changing American socioeconomic system? What are the likely intellectual and professional outcomes of the curricular embrace of minority literatures, neglected authors, and popular culture? Beyond stimulating self-evaluation by English educators, this study prepares readers outside the field to selectively encourage new curricular and methodological opportunities.

This year (2012) marks ten years of No Child Left Behind and the U.S. federal government's official designation of what qualifies as "scientifically based research" (SBR) in education. Combined, these two policies have resulted in a narrowing of education via standardization and high stakes testing (Au, 2007) as well as the curtailment of forms of inquiry that are deemed legitimate for examining education (Wright, 2006). While there has been much debate about the benefits and limitations of the NCLB legislation (e.g., Au, 2010) and SBR (e.g., Eisenhart & Towne, 2003), critical researchers have held strong to their position: The reductionistic narrowing of education curricula and educational research cannot solve the present and historical inequities in society and education (Shields, 2012). Contrarily, reductionism (via standardization and/or methodological prescription) exacerbates the challenges we face because it effectively erases the epistemological, ontological, and axiological diversity necessary for disrupting hegemonic social structures that lie at the root of human suffering (Kincheloe, 2004). Not only has NCLB proven incapable of overcoming inequalities, but there seems to be sufficient evidence to suggest it was never really intended to eliminate poverty and human suffering. That is, it seems NCLB, despite its lofty title and public discourse, is actually designed to advance the agenda of handing public education over to for-profit corporations to manage and privatize thereby intensifying the capitalist class' war on those who rely on a wage to survive (Malott, 2010). In the present ethos, reductionism upholds and retrenches the status quo (i.e. the basic structures of power), and it puts at risk education and educational research as means of working toward social justice (Biesta, 2007). Because social justice can be interpreted in multiple ways, we might note that we understand critical social justice as oriented toward action and social change. Thus, critical education and research may have potential to contribute to a number of social justice imperatives, such as: redistributing land from the neo-colonizing settler-state to Indigenous peoples, halting exploitative labor relations and hazardous working conditions for wage-earners, and engaging in reparations with formerly enslaved communities.

This volume examines the interface between the teachings of art and the art of teaching, and asserts the centrality of aesthetics for rethinking education. Many of the essays in this collection claim a direct connection between critical thinking, democratic dissensus, and anti-racist pedagogy with aesthetic experiences. They argue that aesthetics should be reconceptualized less as mere art appreciation or the cultivation of aesthetic judgment of taste, and more with the affective disruptions, phenomenological experiences, and the democratic politics of learning, thinking, and teaching. The first set of essays in the volume examines the unique pedagogies of the various arts including literature, poetry, film, and music. The second set addresses questions concerning the art of pedagogy and the relationship between aesthetic experience and teaching and learning. Demonstrating the flexibility and diversity of aesthetic expressions and experiences in education, the book deals with issues such as the connections between racism and affect, curatorship and teaching, aesthetic experience and the common, and studying and poetics. The book explores these topics through a variety of theoretical and philosophical lenses including contemporary post-structuralism, psychoanalysis, phenomenology, critical theory, and pragmatism.

This text examines the implications of government policy for the curriculum, the professionalism of educational practitioners, and the training and career options of young people. It argues for a new educational agenda which recognizes the importance of intellectual investment and innovation in all areas of educational provision and which addresses the profound changes taking place in the relationship between national and global citizenship. The text also includes a critique of New Right policies.

Addressing the debate around what makes a good citizen, this work proposes a new form of post-colonial citizenship education which can be applied in any cultural setting. International educational partnerships provide the opportunity for participants to live out values such as cultural empathy and thus demonstrate their right to citizenship.

This book examines the philosophical, historical, political and social contexts of research and the implications of these for the collection and analysis of data. "Researching Education" looks at the theory and practice of researching education and examines the philosophical, historical, political and social contexts of research and the implications of these for the collection and analysis of data. Scott and Usher argue that while power is ever present in the construction of research texts, this is inevitable as research imposes a closure of the world through representations and thus is always and inevitably involved with and implicated in the operation of power. The authors provide a theoretical framework against previously compiled research can be judged to stimulates further study and consider key questions: What is legitimate knowledge? What is the relationship between the collection and analysis of data? How does the researcher's presence in the field impact on their data? This new edition has been completely revised to reflect new insights into education research and educational research methodology and the impact of recent political initiatives. "Researching Education" is invaluable reading for educational and social researchers as well as postgraduate and doctoral students.

This book reinvigorates the philosophical treatment of the nature, purpose, and meaning of thought in today's universities. The wider discussion about higher education has moved from a philosophical discourse to a discourse on social welfare and service, economics, and political agendas. This book reconnects philosophy with the central academic concepts of thought, reason, and critique and their associated academic practices of thinking and reasoning. Thought in this context should not be considered as a merely mental or cognitive construction, still less a cloistered college, but a fully developed individual and social engagement of critical reflection and discussion with the current pressing disciplinary, political, and philosophical issues. The editors hold that the element of thought, and the ability to think in a deep and groundbreaking way is, still, the essence of the university. But what does it mean to think in the university today? And in what ways is thought related not only to the epistemological and ontological issues of philosophical debate, but also to the social and political dimensions of our globalised age? In many countries, the state is imposing limitations on universities, dismissing or threatening academics who speak out critically. With this volume, the editors ask questions such as: What is the value of thought? What is the university's proper relationship to thought? To give the notion of thought a thorough philosophical treatment, the book is divided into in three parts. The focus moves from an epistemological perspective in Part I, to a focus on existence and values in higher education in Part II, and then to a societal-oriented focus on the university in Part III. All three parts, in their own ways, debate the notion of thought in higher education and the university as a thinking form of being.

While it is quite clear that black and Latino students in general, and poor black and poor Latino students in particular do not do as well as white students in school, the road to real solutions to this very important and vexing problem is far from clear. Some champion vouchers and charter schools as the ideal solution, despite strong data suggesting that neither is particularly effective. Others point to smaller classes. Increasingly scholars and politicians support more accountability on the part of teachers, despite the reality that teachers do not have a great deal of control over much that influences performance. This book addresses the various "solutions", and suggests that any solution to the gap that ignores the role of families is limited at best, and misguided at worst. The book details an effort to help poor black and poor Latino families learn to do the things necessary to help their children to do better in school, and argues that this family centered approach, while complicated, should be considered along side the school centered efforts.

The fate of public education and therefore the future of our democracy is at risk. Powerful forces are eroding commitment to public schools and weakening democratic resolve. Yet even in deeply troubling times, it is possible to broaden social imagination and empower efforts toward systemic progressive reform. This book is an invitation for widespread participation in a complex process-re-envisioning education and democracy. To reenvision- to envision and then envision again-is to join with others in imagining new possibilities and bringing these into existence. Re-envisioning is a radically social process. Although distinct and varied individual contributions are required, transformative visions cannot be advanced through the agency of one charismatic person, or bound by one influential perspective. The process of re-envisioning, like all forms of democratic living and learning, draws energy and insight when connection and communion are sustained across dimensions of difference. Re-envisioning is an intensely creative and exploratory process. It is not accomplished through careful construction of "best laid plans" aimed at attaining certainty and control. Re-envisioning is instead experienced and evolved by preparing for, and then acting on, informed and strategic glimpses. These brief and fleeting impressions-multimodal and multi-sensory, incomplete and ambiguous, always in motion-offer potentials, but no definitive answers. Re-envisioning is a profoundly ethical and aesthetic process, centered in prospects for social justice, compassion, reform, and renewal. Social movements are rarely motivated by commitments to narrow objectives aimed at solving specific problems. Across time and cultures we are drawn to persons and processes, to ideas and images, that call us back to remember our highest principles, and move us forward to respond with acts of integrity and grace. Recurrent themes of beauty and power-here mirrored in chapter titles-inspire, guide, and liberate collective vision and principled action. Re-envisioning, although accessible to all, remains largely undeveloped and underutilized. Our collective ability to realize progressive aspirations for education and democracy can be significantly enhanced by integrating the process of re-envisioning with other, more familiar, educational and political reform strategies.

This comprehensive and up-to-date review of learning and educational quality in developing countries, written by 16 highly knowledgeable specialists from around the world, provides policymakers and researchers accessible perspectives with the Millennium Development Goals in mind.

In recent years there have been strong movements of reforms in teacher education. The most common are intended to adjust teacher preparation to the standardization demands of NCLB, Race to the Top, and CAEP to make teacher education more accountable. These reforms-carried out in the name of excellence, accountability, diversity, and inclusion-constitute subliminal efforts to appropriate the possibilities for real transformation in teacher education. However, in spite of the pervasive rhetoric to identify diversity and social justice with the accountability and standardization movement, there are endeavors to create transformations in teacher preparation that are authentic. These deliberate changes seek to counteract the neoliberal vision of school reform and strive to reclaim the original goals of public education represented in a vision of rigorous content knowledge, democratic schooling, and social justice. Appropriating the Discourse of Social Justice in Teacher Education is a testimony to that kind of authentic reform. It documents the transformational efforts of a teacher education program that infused the preparation of its teachers with a vision of education as a public good. This book validates the claim that the process of reproduction of social inequalities in teacher education is not a perfect, static process, but on the contrary, the real "seeds of transformation" within teacher education departments are abundant.

School connectedness is the leading protective factor against multiple at-risk behaviors for adolescents. Its far-reaching influence, however, is not widely known. Here, the author provides valuable information about school connectedness, including strategies on how to strengthen life-saving ties with students. The chapters in this book are comprised of the five factors associated with school connectedness: * Closeness * Belonging * Happiness * Fairness * Safety Many books address bullying prevention and the importance of building relationships with students. This book ties the two together and goes a step further. School connectedness is a protective barrier against a host of at-risk behaviors including early sexual experimentation, tobacco use, alcohol and drug use, truancy, delinquency, violence, and dropping out. Educators, future teachers, and parents will benefit from learning more about the power of school connectedness and the simple steps to take to increase it.

Teacher effectiveness and licensure in the United States continue to be scrutinized at the state and national levels. At present, 40 states plus the District of Columbia have adopted edTPA to inform initial teacher licensure and/or certification decisions (American Association of Colleges for Teacher Education, n.d.). edTPA is designed to measure novice teachers' readiness to teach their content area, with a focus on student learning and principles from research and theory (SCALE, 2015). Composed of planning, instruction, and assessment tasks, edTPA portfolios seek to provide evidence of teacher candidate readiness in three areas: (1) intended teaching, (2) enacted teaching, and (3) the impact of teaching on student learning. Specifically, edTPA measures teacher candidates' ability to: develop knowledge of subject matter, content standards, and subject-specific pedagogy develop and apply knowledge of varied students' needs consider research and theory about how students learn reflect on and analyze evidence of the effects of instruction on student learning (p. 1) Teacher candidates create extensive portfolios that include written commentaries explaining each task and video excerpts of a recorded teaching event. Teacher candidates must submit evidence to show their teaching prowess and pay $300, at present, to Pearson Education for their portfolio to be evaluated by external reviewers. In this volume, researchers share their experiences working with edTPA in three areas of language learning: English Language Arts, English to Speakers of Other Languages, and World Languages. The volume provides empirical research in the areas of multicultural perspectives, pedagogical practices, and edTPA (in)compatibility. Findings are of interest to multiple stakeholders such as teacher candidates, mentor teachers, teacher preparation faculty members and program coordinators, and administrators.

This book provides an analysis of race and education through the lens of the work of Judith Butler. Although Butler tends to be best known in the field of education for her work on gender and sexuality, her work more broadly encompasses the functioning of power and hegemonic norms and the formation of subjects, and thus can also be applied to analyse issues of race. Applying a Butlerian framework to race allows us to question its ontological status, while considering it a hegemonic norm and a performative notion which has a significant impact on real lives. The author considers the implications of Butler's thinking for debates; addressing diverse contemporary educational issues in which race continues to be (re)produced, such as the formation of leaner identities, the production of the good citizen, raising student aspirations, counter terrorism and surveillance in education, and qualitative research in education. This book will be of interest to students and scholars of education and race, the sociology of education and equality of opportunity.

This book examines inclusion teaching at the college and university level. It establishes the importance of the Humanities disciplines and the use of qualitative analysis as a means of understanding and encouraging democratic materials and classroom organization. The first section of the text provides two primers for those unfamiliar with pedagogical history and theory. These primers are designed to give basic information and sources for additional study. They trace pedagogical influences from foundationism, neoliberalism, conflict, and critical theories to critical race theory, Red pedagogy, and decolonization theories. The second half of the book focuses on strategies to assist those attempting classroom inclusion. These chapters are designed to assist with practical ways in which inclusion can be advanced as well as strategies to assist junior faculty in the navigation of the politics of inclusive education.

Those who work with children-teachers and home-schooling parents, continually search for print material and media resources that will "help me help my kids!" Five Skills to Learning How to Learn provides practical materials and easy to follow activities to help educators and parents nurture, guide, and facilitate learning with their children. This book has been written for the purpose of preparing children for a lifetime of learning. Durham does this with the five essential skills: Logic, Critical Thinking, Problem Solving, Investigating, and Experimenting. These skills will help children in deciphering, analyzing, assessing, and summarizing all the material they are learning.

Principal to Principal: Conversations in Servant Leadership and School Transformation takes the reader into the real world of school leadership, as a retiring elementary principal and his successor engage in a 12-month mentoring partnership. Packed with emotion and the complexities of the twenty-first century school, the story weaves in and out of the day-by-day transformation that can take place when past paradigms and traditions are challenged, and students are put first. The unleashed potential of the servant leadership model, and the critical importance of core values, vision, and strategic change are addressed with passion and intensity as the two colleagues discover together how fast a school can really change_if the human resources are all focused on the same goal: creating a great school that meets the variety of needs of every child it serves_no exceptions.

This cutting edge book considers how advances in technologies and new media have transformed our perception of education, and focuses on the impact of the privatisation of digital tools as a mean of knowledge production. Arguing that education needs to adapt to the modern learner, the book's unique approach is based on a disassociation with the deeply ingrained attitude with which people have traditionally viewed education - learning the existing symbolic systems of certain disciplines and then expressing themselves strictly within the operational modes of these systems. The ways of knowledge production - exploring, recording, representing, making meaning of and sharing human experiences - have been fundamentally transformed through the infusion of digital technologies into all aspects of human activity, allowing learners to engage with their immediate natural, social and cultural environments by capitalising on their individual abilities and interests. This book proposes a new approach to teaching and learning termed 'cinematic bricolage', which involves generating knowledge from heterogeneous resources in a 'do-it-yourself' manner while making meaning through multimodal representations. It shows how cinematic bricolage reconnects ways of knowing with ways of being, empowering the individual with a sense of personal identity and responsibility, helping to shape more aware social citizens.

In this book about communities of practice in the international, higher education sector, the authors articulate the theoretical foundations of communities of practice (CoPs), research into their application in higher education, leadership roles and how CoPs sustain and support professional learning. Research demonstrates that communities of practice build professional and personal links both within and across faculty, student services and administrative and support units. This book describes how community of practice members may be physically co-located and how social media can be used to connect members across geographically diverse locations. It positions higher education communities of practice within the broader community of practice and social learning literature, and articulates the importance of community of practice leadership roles, and the growing focus on the use of social media for community of practice implementation. The multiple perspectives provide higher education leaders, academic and professional staff with the means to establish, or reflect on existing CoPs, by sharing insights and critical reflections on their implementation strategies, practical guidelines and ideas on how community of practice's theoretical underpinnings can be tailored to the higher education context.

This challenging and provocative book reimagines the justification, substance, process, and study of education in open, pluralistic, liberal democratic societies. Hanan Alexander argues that educators need to enable students to embark on a quest for intelligent spirituality, while paying heed to a pedagogy of difference. Through close analysis of the work of such thinkers as William James, Charles Taylor, Elliot Eisner, Michael Oakeshott, Isaiah Berlin, Martin Buber, Michael Apple and Terrence McLaughlin, Reimagining Liberal Education offers an account of school curriculum and moral and religious instruction that throws new light on the possibilities of a nuanced, rounded education for citizenship. Divided into three parts - Transcendental Pragmatism in Educational Research, Pedagogy of Difference and the Other Face of Liberalism, and Intelligent Spirituality in the Curriculum, this is a thrilling work of philosophy that builds upon the author's award-winning text Reclaiming Goodness: Education and the Spiritual Quest.

In recent years there have been strong movements of reforms in teacher education. The most common are intended to adjust teacher preparation to the standardization demands of NCLB, Race to the Top, and CAEP to make teacher education more accountable. These reforms-carried out in the name of excellence, accountability, diversity, and inclusion-constitute subliminal efforts to appropriate the possibilities for real transformation in teacher education. However, in spite of the pervasive rhetoric to identify diversity and social justice with the accountability and standardization movement, there are endeavors to create transformations in teacher preparation that are authentic. These deliberate changes seek to counteract the neoliberal vision of school reform and strive to reclaim the original goals of public education represented in a vision of rigorous content knowledge, democratic schooling, and social justice. Appropriating the Discourse of Social Justice in Teacher Education is a testimony to that kind of authentic reform. It documents the transformational efforts of a teacher education program that infused the preparation of its teachers with a vision of education as a public good. This book validates the claim that the process of reproduction of social inequalities in teacher education is not a perfect, static process, but on the contrary, the real "seeds of transformation" within teacher education departments are abundant.

This book argues for a modern version of liberal arts education, exploring first principles within the divine comedy of educational logic. By reforming the three philosophies of metaphysics, nature and ethics upon which liberal arts education is based, Tubbs offers a profound transatlantic philosophical and educational challenge to the subject.

This book argues for renewed understandings of academic activism, understandings that conceive of the ideas, arguments and scholarship of the academe as embedded within the practices of what the academy does. It examines why and how a renewed notion of academic activism informs a philosophy of higher education specifically in relation to teaching and learning. The book focuses on the theories and practices of teaching and learning, in particular how such pedagogical actions are guided by social, political and cultural influences outside of the university as a higher education institution. The authors advocate for a living philosophy of higher education that is commensurate with real actions and imaginary fictions of what constitutes higher education and what remains in becoming for the discourse. With a focus on South African social justice education, the book imagines pathways for academic activism to manifest in revolutionised pedagogical actions or actions that bring into contestation what already exists with the possibility for the cultivation of renewal.

This edited volume offers empirical, evaluative, and philosophical perspectives on the question of higher education as a human right in the Asia Pacific. Throughout the region, higher education has grown rapidly in a variety of ways. Price, accessibility, mobility, and government funding are all key areas of interest, which likely shape the degree to which higher education may be viewed as a human right. Although enrollments continue to grow in many higher education systems, protests related to fees and other equity issues continue to grow. This volume will include scholarly perspectives from around the region for a more extensive understanding of higher education as a human right in the Asia Pacific.