In The Stigma of Genius: Einstein, Consciousness and Critical Education, we muse over ways in which to be, to become and to recognize uniqueness and different paths to genius. Understanding there is no prescribed procedure, we determine multiple actions, means and measures with which we recognize and teach to genius, we look at Einstein's life and knowledges to connect our pedagogies and students. Today's schools often exemplify an inability to stimulate and encourage students to find passion, goals and reasons to be educated. Many public school students do not succeed, they are disengaged, discouraged, and failing. Teachers are exhausted and overworked and lack respect and administrative support in districts controlled by local and national politics. Using Einstein as an example, but also a metaphor for educators, The Stigma of Genius is straight talk about the needs for schools/teachers/administrators/students to become critically and contextually aware. We argue for an education which is conscious of students' needs and the nuances within each school and each classroom. Discussing cognition, classes, urban education and diversity, we have attempted to circle back to Einstein and understand ways to support and encourage today's geniuses.

America is a corporatized society defined by a culture of consumerism, and the youth market is one of the groups that corporations target most. By marketing directly to children, through television, movies, radio, video games, toys, books, and fast food, advertisers have produced a 'kinderculture'. In this eye-opening book, editor Shirley R. Steinberg reveals the profound impact that our purchasing-obsessed culture has on our children and argues that the experience of childhood has been reshaped into something that is prefabricated.Analyzing the pervasive influence of these corporate productions, top experts in the fields of education, sociology, communications, and cultural studies contribute incisive essays that students, parents, educators, and general readers will find insightful and entertaining. Including seven new chapters, this third edition is thoroughly updated with examinations of the icons that shape the values and consciousness of today's children, including Twilight, True Blood, and vampires, hip hop, Hannah Montana, Disney, and others.

Curriculum: Decanonizing the Field is a fresh and innovative collection that is concerned with the totalitarian Western Eurocentric cult that has dominated the field of curriculum studies. Contributors to this volume challenge dominant and counter-dominant curriculum positions of the Western Eurocentric epistemic platform. At a time when the field laudably claims internationalization as a must, arguments presented in this volume prove that this "internationalization" is nothing more than the new Western expansionism, one that dominates all other cultures, economies and knowledges. Curriculum: Decanonizing the Field is a clarion call against curriculum epistemicides, proposing the use of Itinerant Curriculum Theory (ICT), which opens up the canon of knowledge; challenges and destroys the coloniality of power, knowledge and being; and transforms the very idea and practice of power. The volume is essential reading for anyone involved in one of the most important battles for curriculum relevance - the fact that there is no social justice without cognitive justice.

First Published in 1999. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

This book won the 2014 AESA (American Educational Studies Association) Critics Choice Award. This reader begins a conversation about the many aspects of critical youth studies. Chapters in this volume consider essential issues such as class, gender, sexuality, race, ethnicity, cultural capital, and schooling in creating a dialogue about and a conversation with youth. In a society that continues to devalue, demonize, and pathologize young women and men, leading names in the academy and youth communities argue that traditional studies of youth do not consider young people themselves. Engaging with today's young adults in formal and informal pedagogical settings as an act of respect, social justice, and transgression creates a critical pedagogical path in which to establish a meaningful twenty-first century critical youth studies.

The Miseducation of the West examines the ways in which educational institutions such as media and schools have shaped Western views of Islam. The nature of these messages tells readers as much, if not more, about Western self-images as they do about Islam and Islamic peoples. Quickly emerging is a Western perspective on the "other." Westerners found easy justification for the colonial conquest of many Islamic lands. In the 18th, 19th, and early 20th centuries England, France, and to a lesser extent Russia colonized much of the Mulsim world with the United States entering the picture after World War II. Economic colonialization, the oil business, interference with various governments, and the way these events and people are represented in the formal curriculum of schools and the informal curriculum of the media are central dimensions of this work. The contemporary expression of these stories involve the Bush administration's and its conservative allies' efforts to teach the nation about the true meaning of 9/11 and Islamic terrorism. In various reports, conservative organizations with close ties to the Bush White House, present forceful views of what historical concepts should be taught in U.S. schools. As Joe L. Kincheloe states in his thoughtful introduction, these efforts "represent a return to a 1954 view of America as the bearer of the democratic torch to the anti-democratic forces of the world. A critical education must counter such tendencies and work to conceptualize 9/11 in a variety of contexts." The essayists in this book write with different voices from diverse viewpoints, contributing to a discussion that will not end for years to come.

The second edition of 19 Urban Questions: Teaching in the City adds new questions to those in the original volume. Continuing the developing conversation in urban education, the book is provocative in style and rich in detail. Emphasizing the complexity of urban education, Shirley R. Steinberg and the authors ask direct questions about what urban teachers need to know. Their answers are guaranteed to generate both classroom discussion and discourse in the field for years to come. The book not only addresses questions pertaining directly to today's urban schools, but poses new ones for discussion, teacher education, and urban school research. Steinberg has gathered an impressive cadre of teacher/scholars who are engaged in a socially just urban pedagogy.

In these vivid, thought-provoking essays, leading scholars draw from their own life experiences to explore the ways in which socio-economic class has shaped their lives and educational practices. Some experienced the sting of poverty as students, while others tell stories of a privileged upbringing and moments of epiphany when they recognized the far-reaching effects of class privilege. Many in this volume tell stories of their successful (and not-so-successful) teaching experiences with students from various social classes, providing valuable insights for teachers and other education professionals.

Media Literacy: A Reader produces a critical understanding of media culture designed to help students develop the ability to interpret media as well as understand the ways they themselves consume and affectively (emotionally) invest in media. Such an appreciation encourages both critical thinking and self-analysis, as students begin to realize that everyday decisions are not necessarily made freely and rationally. While we strongly believe that humans exercise agency, we understand that there are social, cultural, and political forces that affect agency. In this context our conception of media literacy analyzes the ways our everyday decisions are encoded and inscribed by emotional and bodily commitments relating to the production of desire and mood, all of which leads, in Noam Chomsky's famous phrase, to the « manufacture of consent. These complex pedagogical and ideological issues demand rigorous skills including questioning, analyzing, interpreting, and meaning-making. Media Literacy: A Reader is a comprehensive collection of essays that is sorely needed, as most of the academic work in the area is written not for an introductory audience, but for scholars in the field. It will shape the agenda in media literacy for years to come.

In Rethinking Language Arts: Passion and Practice, Second Edition, author Nina Zaragoza uses the form of letters to her students to engage pre-service teachers in reevaluating teaching practices, thus bringing to life a vision of an alternative classroom environment in which the teacher is the prime mover and creative leader. Zaragoza discusses and explains the need for teachers to be decision makers, reflective thinkers, political beings, and agents of social change in order to create a positive and inclusive classroom setting. This book is both a critical text that deconstructs the way language arts are traditionally taught in our schools as well as a visionary text with clear, no-nonsense directions on how to provide much needed change in our schools.

Series Information:
Teaching and Thinking

The evil prosthesis of Captain Hook, the comical speech of Porky Pig, and the bumbling antics of Mr. Magoo are all examples of images in our culture which can become the basis of negative attitudes and subliminal prejudice towards persons with disabilities. These attitudes influence and underlie discriminatory acts, resulting in negative treatment and segregation. A teacher's ability to recognize and counter such images may well determine the success of inclusion and mainstreaming programs in our schools and society. Well-researched and well-written, this book offers practical guidance as grounded in solid research to schools that are wrestling with how to mainstream children with disabilities.

Thinking Queer takes up the challenges of queer theorizing for education by interrogating the effects of representation through voice and visibility, the interplay of social and academic knowledges and ignorances, and the performative aspects of queer identities and practices. Engaging ethnography, philosophical policy, and social analysis, cultural and media studies, and theoretical stances from psychoanalysis to complexity theory, the essays in this volume challenge readers to move beyond the logic of identity politics in order to consider the limitations and possibilities of cultural and institutional policies and practices in K-12 and higher educational contexts. This volume offers analyses of queer subjects that frame possibilities for new forms of inquiry into queer politics and practices and suggests tactics for educational change.

Series Information:
Critical Education Practice

The evil prosthesis of Captain Hook, the comical speech of Porky Pig, and the bumbling antics of Mr Magoo are all examples of images in our culture which can become the basis of negative attitudes and subliminal prejudice towards persons with disabilities. These attitudes influence and underlie discriminatory acts, resulting in negative treatment and segregation. A teacher's ability to recognise and counter such images may well determine the success of inclusion and mainstreaming programs in our schools and society. Well-researched and well-written, this book offers practical guidance as grounded in solid research to schools that are wrestling with how to mainstream children with disabilities.

Focusing on the causes for the continuing marginalization of minority children, this book examines inner-city education, its teaching practices, curricular rationales, perspectives of teachers and students, and the institutions themselves.

Focusing on the causes for the continuing marginalization of minority children, this book examines inner-city education, its teaching practices, curricular rationales, perspectives of teachers and students, and the institutions themselves.

Offers an introduction to teen life in Europe by examining 12 countries of the region There are many similarities between the experiences of teenagers across Europe, but there is also a great deal of diversity in teen life in different European countries, reflecting differences of economics, geography, and politics. This book explores teenage life in twelve different European countries. Each chapter is written by a native of that country, and covers the following areas: a typical day; family; traditional and non-traditional food dishes; school; social life, entertainment, and recreation; and religious practices and cultural ceremonies. Each chapter concludes with a resource guide providing print and electronic sources for additional research.

This reader demands that we understand diversity and multiculturalism by identifying the ways in which curriculum has been written and taught, and by redefining the field with an equitable lens, freeing it from the dominant cultural curriculum. The book problematizes the issue of whiteness, for instance, as not being the opposite of blackness or «person-of-colorness, but rather a meta-description for our dominant culture. Issues are also addressed that are usually left out of the discussion about diversity and multiculturalism: this reader includes essays on physical diversity, geographic diversity, and difference in sexualities. This is the quintessential collection of work by critical scholars committed to redefining the conversation on multiculturalism and diversity.

The late Dennis Carlson uses the alternative nature of the Burlington, Vermont-bred band, Phish, and the larger impact of rock n' roll to look at youth and revolutionary music culture. A History of Progressive Music and Youth Culture is designed for those who work with or teach young people to understand the nature and origin of musical commitment and devotion. For academics, the book traces a cultural study of rock which is unlike any other discussion of music or musicology published.

Multi/Intercultural Conversations brings together voices from all over the world in the examination of critical pedagogy and the politics of identity in regard to viewing education as a global endeavor. The authors are teachers, parents, professors, and writers engaged in projects of social justice and education with the desire to open a conversation between both students and teachers about education in the new millennium.

America is a corporatized society defined by a culture of consumerism, and the youth market is one of the groups that corporations target most. By marketing directly to children, through television, movies, radio, video games, toys, books, and fast food, advertisers have produced a "kinderculture." In this eye-opening book, editor Shirley R. Steinberg reveals the profound impact that our purchasing-obsessed culture has on our children and argues that the experience of childhood has been reshaped into something that is prefabricated.
Analyzing the pervasive influence of these corporate productions, top experts in the fields of education, sociology, communications, and cultural studies contribute incisive essays that students, parents, educators, and general readers will find insightful and entertaining. Including seven new chapters, this third edition is thoroughly updated with examinations of the icons that shape the values and consciousness of today's children, including "Twilight, True Blood, " and vampires, hip hop, "Hannah Montana, " Disney, and others.

Classroom Teaching is an introductory text that challenges the antiquated ways that teaching and curriculum have been presented. By adding chapters to Joe L. Kincheloe's original volume, this second edition gives a fresh, politicized viewpoint of power and politics in an era of corporatized education. The authors set the scene to introduce cutting-edge notions of teaching, knowledge-making, and ways of seeing the world. The essays included in this second edition of Classroom Teaching present a critical pedagogical approach to a socially-just praxis of schooling and being in schools. This edition also includes essential essays on diversity, sexuality, and media which are contemporaneous with today's concerns in society. Pre-service teachers, interns, and teacher educators in North America will find Classroom Teaching engaging and unique as they commit to an informed vision of educating our children and youth.

For more than two thousand years Christian expansion and proselytizing was couched in terms of "defending the faith." Until recently in the United States, much of that defense came in the form of reactions against the "liberal" influences channeled through big-corporate media such as popular music, Hollywood movies, and network and cable television. But the election of Ronald Reagan as a Hollywood President introduced Christian America to the tools of advertising and multimedia appeals to children and youth to win new believers to God's armies. "Christotainment" examines how Christian fundamentalism has realigned its armies to combat threats against it by employing the forces it once considered its chief enemies: the entertainment media, including movies, television, music, cartoons, theme parks, video games, and books. Invited contributors discuss the critical theoretical frameworks of top-selling devices within Christian pop culture and the appeal to masses of American souls through the blessed marriage of corporatism and the quest for pleasure.

Sista Talk: The Personal and the Pedagogical is an inquiry into the questions of how Black women define their existence in a society which devalues, dehumnizes, and silences their beliefs. Placing herself inside of the research, Rochelle Brock invites the reader on a journey of self-exploration, as she and seven of her Black female students investigate their collective journey toward self-awareness in the attempt to liberate their minds and souls from ideological domination. Throughout, Sista Talk attempts to understand the ways in which this self-exploration informs her pedagogy. Combining Black feminist and Afrocentric Theory with critical pedagogy, this book frames the parameters for an Afrowomanist pedagogy of wholeness for teaching Black students.