A CHOICE Outstanding Academic Title 2012! Critical Curriculum Studies offers a novel framework for thinking about how curriculum relates to students' understanding of the world around them. Wayne Au brings together curriculum theory, critical educational studies, and feminist standpoint theory with practical examples of teaching for social justice to argue for a transformative curriculum that challenges existing inequity in social, educational, and economic relations. Making use of the work of important scholars such as Freire, Vygotsky, Hartsock, Harding, and others, Critical Curriculum Studies, argues that we must understand the relationship between the curriculum and the types of consciousness we carry out into the world.

This new edition of Unequal By Design: High-Stakes Testing and the Standardization of Inequality critically examines the deep and enduring problems within systems of education in the U.S., in order to illuminate what is really at stake for students, teachers, and communities negatively affected by such testing. Updates to the new edition include new chapters that focus on: the role of schools and standardized testing in reproducing social, cultural, and economic inequalities; the way high-stakes testing is used to advance neoliberal, market-based educational schemes that ultimately concentrate wealth and power among elites; how standardized testing became the dominant tool within our educational systems; the numerous technical and ideological problems with using standardized tests to evaluate students, teachers, and schools; the role that high-stakes testing plays in the maintenance of white supremacy; and how school communities have resisted high-stakes testing and used better assessments of student learning. Parents, teachers, university students, and scholars will find Unequal By Design useful for gaining a broad, critical understanding of the issues surrounding our over-reliance on high-stakes, standardized testing in the U.S. through up-to-date research on testing, historical and contemporary examples of the struggles over such tests, and information about how testing has fostered the privatization of public education in the U.S.

This new edition of Unequal By Design: High-Stakes Testing and the Standardization of Inequality critically examines the deep and enduring problems within systems of education in the U.S., in order to illuminate what is really at stake for students, teachers, and communities negatively affected by such testing. Updates to the new edition include new chapters that focus on: the role of schools and standardized testing in reproducing social, cultural, and economic inequalities; the way high-stakes testing is used to advance neoliberal, market-based educational schemes that ultimately concentrate wealth and power among elites; how standardized testing became the dominant tool within our educational systems; the numerous technical and ideological problems with using standardized tests to evaluate students, teachers, and schools; the role that high-stakes testing plays in the maintenance of white supremacy; and how school communities have resisted high-stakes testing and used better assessments of student learning. Parents, teachers, university students, and scholars will find Unequal By Design useful for gaining a broad, critical understanding of the issues surrounding our over-reliance on high-stakes, standardized testing in the U.S. through up-to-date research on testing, historical and contemporary examples of the struggles over such tests, and information about how testing has fostered the privatization of public education in the U.S.

The number of Asian American students in schools and colleges has soared in the last twenty-five years, and they make up one of the fastest growing segments of the student population. However, classroom material often does not include their version of the American experience. Teaching about Asian Pacific Americans was created to address this void. This resource guide provides interactive activities, assignments, and strategies for classrooms or workshops. Those new to the field of Asian American studies will appreciate the background information on issues that concern Asian Pacific Americans, while experts in the field will find powerful, innovative teaching activities that clearly convey established and new ideas. The activities in this book have been used effectively in classrooms, workshops for staff and practitioners in student services programs, community-based organizations, teacher training programs, social service agencies, and diversity training. Teaching About Asian Pacific Americans serves as a critical resource for anyone interested in race, ethnicity, and Asian Pacific American communities.

The Routledge International Handbook of Critical Education is the first authoritative reference work to provide an international analysis of the relationship between power, knowledge, education, and schooling. Rather than focusing solely on questions of how we teach efficiently and effectively, contributors to this volume push further to also think critically about education's relationship to economic, political, and cultural power. The various sections of this book integrate into their analyses the conceptual, political, pedagogic, and practical histories, tensions, and resources that have established critical education as one of the most vital and growing movements within the field of education, including topics such as: * social movements and pedagogic work * critical research methods for critical education * the politics of practice and the recreation of theory * the freirian legacy. With a comprehensive introduction by Michael W. Apple, Wayne Au, and Luis Armando Gandin, along with thirty-five newly-commissioned pieces by some of the most prestigious education scholars in the world, this Handbook provides the definitive statement on the state of critical education and on its possibilities for the future.

The Routledge International Handbook of Critical Education is the first authoritative reference work to provide an international analysis of the relationship between power, knowledge, education, and schooling. Rather than focusing solely on questions of how we teach efficiently and effectively, contributors to this volume push further to also think critically about education's relationship to economic, political, and cultural power. The various sections of this book integrate into their analyses the conceptual, political, pedagogic, and practical histories, tensions, and resources that have established critical education as one of the most vital and growing movements within the field of education, including topics such as: social movements and pedagogic work critical research methods for critical education the politics of practice and the recreation of theory the freirian legacy. With a comprehensive introduction by Michael W. Apple, Wayne Au, and Luis Armando Gandin, along with thirty-five newly-commissioned pieces by some of the most prestigious education scholars in the world, this Handbook provides the definitive statement on the state of critical education and on its possibilities for the future.

Challenging and complex questions around inequality and power have been persistent within modern systems of education since their inception. But in the last four or five decades the vibrant field of critical education has developed and grown in response to such issues. Specifically, education scholars adopting a critical approach seek to interrogate how social, economic, cultural, linguistic, racial, sexual, and other forms of difference intersect and play out within school policy and classroom practices. Additionally, such scholars have shed light on the ways in which education can transform schools and society to be more just and radically democratic. The learned editors of this landmark Routledge Major Work collection argue that the field of critical education has become central within educational research. Most teacher-training programmes include courses that examine both the problems of inequality in education, and also how teachers and scholars can work to ameliorate those same problems. Moreover, the reach of critical educational research, policy, and practice is now truly international. The influence of these perspectives in Brazil and throughout Latin America, in part due to the work of Paulo Freire, is particularly striking. Powerful currents of critical education can also be found in Europe, Asia, and Africa. For example, entire states within India have based their efforts in school reform and the interruption of educationally driven inequalities around the principles of critical pedagogic and curricular traditions, arguments, and practices that have been enunciated in the literature. Another example can be found in China, where Beijing Normal University-which has the most influential school of education in China-has established a research centre in the name of the lead editor of this collection to document and spread the national and international influences of critical education. With the established and growing potency and influence of critical education across national borders, this new Routledge title answers the need for an authoritative reference work to enable users to map and make sense of critical approaches to education. The volumes focus on both historical antecedents in the field (including key works produced before the term 'critical education' gained wide currency but which anticipate approaches now included under that rubric), as well as what might be considered foundational or guiding texts that broke new theoretical or political ground in their time. They also address crucial controversies and contradictions, while bringing together some of the sharpest and most insightful pieces of contemporary critical education scholarship and points towards significant new directions in the field. Supplemented with a full index, and general and volume introductions, newly written by the editors, which situate the collected materials in their historical and intellectual context, Critical Education is certain to be appreciated by scholars, students, and researchers as a vital reference and pedagogic resource.

In A Marxist Education: Learning to Change the World, professor and education activist Wayne Au traces both his own development as a Marxist educator, as well as the development of Marxist educational theory. Arguing that dialectical materialism is at the heart of Marxist theory, Au uses dialectics to not only analyse the relationship between capitalism and schools, but also to understand teaching, learning, and curriculum. In the process, A Marxist Education challenges the idea that Marxism is Eurocentric, reclaims noted educators such as Lev Vygotsky and Paulo Freire as being within the Marxist tradition, and integrates racial and feminist traditions into analyses of education, consciousness, and power.

Mapping Corporate Education Reform outlines and analyzes the complex relationships between policy actors that define education reform within the current, neoliberal context. Using social network analysis and powerful data visualization tools, the authors identify the problematic roots of these relationships and describe their effects both in the U.S. and abroad. Through a series of case studies, each chapter reveals how powerful actors, from billionaire philanthropists to multinational education corporations, leverage their resources to implement free market mechanisms within public education. By comprehensively connecting the dots of neoliberal education reforms, the authors reveal not only the details of the reforms themselves, but the relationships that enable actors to amass troubling degrees of political power through network governance. A critical analysis of the actors and interests behind education policies, Mapping Corporate Education Reform uncovers the frequently obscured operations of educational governance and offers key insights into education reform at the present moment.

Mapping Corporate Education Reform outlines and analyzes the complex relationships between policy actors that define education reform within the current, neoliberal context. Using social network analysis and powerful data visualization tools, the authors identify the problematic roots of these relationships and describe their effects both in the U.S. and abroad. Through a series of case studies, each chapter reveals how powerful actors, from billionaire philanthropists to multinational education corporations, leverage their resources to implement free market mechanisms within public education. By comprehensively connecting the dots of neoliberal education reforms, the authors reveal not only the details of the reforms themselves, but the relationships that enable actors to amass troubling degrees of political power through network governance. A critical analysis of the actors and interests behind education policies, Mapping Corporate Education Reform uncovers the frequently obscured operations of educational governance and offers key insights into education reform at the present moment.

The number of Asian American students in schools and colleges has soared in the last twenty-five years, and they make up one of the fastest growing segments of the student population. However, classroom material often does not include their version of the American experience. Teaching about Asian Pacific Americans was created to address this void. This resource guide provides interactive activities, assignments, and strategies for classrooms or workshops. Those new to the field of Asian American studies will appreciate the background information on issues that concern Asian Pacific Americans, while experts in the field will find powerful, innovative teaching activities that clearly convey established and new ideas. The activities in this book have been used effectively in classrooms, workshops for staff and practitioners in student services programs, community-based organizations, teacher training programs, social service agencies, and diversity training. Teaching About Asian Pacific Americans serves as a critical resource for anyone interested in race, ethnicity, and Asian Pacific American communities.

A CHOICE Outstanding Academic Title 2012! Critical Curriculum Studies offers a novel framework for thinking about how curriculum relates to students' understanding of the world around them. Wayne Au brings together curriculum theory, critical educational studies, and feminist standpoint theory with practical examples of teaching for social justice to argue for a transformative curriculum that challenges existing inequity in social, educational, and economic relations. Making use of the work of important scholars such as Freire, Vygotsky, Hartsock, Harding, and others, Critical Curriculum Studies, argues that we must understand the relationship between the curriculum and the types of consciousness we carry out into the world.