Performance Theories in Education: Power, Pedagogy, and the Politics of Identity breaks new ground by presenting a range of approaches to understanding the role, function, impact, and presence of performance in education. It is a definitive contribution to a beginning dialogue on how performance, as a theoretical and pragmatic lens, can be used to view the processes, procedures, and politics of education. The conceptual framework of the volume is the editors' argument that performance and performativity help to locate and describe repetitive actions plotted within grids of power relationships and social norms that comprise the context of education and schooling. The book brings together performance studies and education researchers, teachers, and scholars to investigate such topics as: *the relationship between performance and performativity in pedagogical practice; *the nature and impact of performing identities in varying contexts; *cultural and community configurations that fall under the umbrella of teaching, education, and schooling; and *the hot button issues of educational policies and reform as performances. With the aim of developing a clearer understanding of the effect, affect, and role of performance in education, the volume provides a crucial starting point for discourse among theorists and teacher practitioners who are interested in understanding and acknowledging the politics of performance and the practices of performative social identities that always and already intervene in the educational endeavor.

Performance Theories in Education: Power, Pedagogy, and the Politics of Identity breaks new ground by presenting a range of approaches to understanding the role, function, impact, and presence of performance in education. It is a definitive contribution to a beginning dialogue on how performance, as a theoretical and pragmatic lens, can be used to view the processes, procedures, and politics of education. The conceptual framework of the volume is the editors' argument that performance and performativity help to locate and describe repetitive actions plotted within grids of power relationships and social norms that comprise the context of education and schooling. The book brings together performance studies and education researchers, teachers, and scholars to investigate such topics as: *the relationship between performance and performativity in pedagogical practice; *the nature and impact of performing identities in varying contexts; *cultural and community configurations that fall under the umbrella of teaching, education, and schooling; and *the hot button issues of educational policies and reform as performances. With the aim of developing a clearer understanding of the effect, affect, and role of performance in education, the volume provides a crucial starting point for discourse among theorists and teacher practitioners who are interested in understanding and acknowledging the politics of performance and the practices of performative social identities that always and already intervene in the educational endeavor.

We are living in a time of resurgent global conflicts and imperialistic tensions a time in which many children are being left behind by school systems that appear more concerned with developing accountability schemes and standardized models of testing than with defending the right of every child to have access to a good education. The efforts of countless teachers, activists, and families working and living in poor areas around the world are labeled as failures, entirely discredited on the basis of their expendability in relation to capital gains, or simply ignored. In response to these oppressive and challenging conditions, this book's contributors a group of committed educators and activists working in an ethos of solidarity across geopolitical and geographical borders have advanced arguments and strategies that link educational transformation to the larger struggle to transform oppressive social relations. In a clear attempt to move beyond both nostalgia and romanticism, Critical Theories, Radical Pedagogies, and Global Conflicts draws from a range of viewpoints-conceptual and thematic, transnational and crosscultural, First World and Third World to articulate new directions for teachers and activists working to demonstrate that another education, and indeed, another world, is possible."