This book is a collection of six case studies of teacher agency in action, centering on voices of educators who engaged in activist work throughout the history of education in the US. Through a lens of teacher agency and resistance, chapter authors explore the stories of individual educators to determine how particular historical and cultural contexts contributed to these educators’ activist efforts. By analyzing specific modes and methods of resistance found within diverse communities throughout the last century of US education, this book helps to identify and place into theoretical and historical context an underemphasized narrative of professional teacher-activists within American education.

With the prominence of workshops, trainings, and anti-racist books popping up over the past few years, it may seem confusing as to what it really means to engage in deliberate and meaningful learning that challenges the many facets of racism and whiteness. 'Untangling Whiteness' directly interrogates the assumption that the teaching and learning about race and whiteness, particularly within the university context, can be condensed to one course, one workshop, or even a few trainings. It is a life-long process that may begin in one university classroom, but must continue as part of who we are as unfinished and undetermined beings. Through a deep and multi-faceted interrogation of racism and white supremacy, this book untangles critical theories of race, whiteness and resistance in an accessible and dialogical manner. It also situates whiteness in Aotearoa, New Zealand, demonstrating the importance of context and location when working to undermine and challenge it. As a theoretical provocation of existing scholarship on race and white supremacy, 'Untangling Whiteness' is underpinned by educating for critical consciousness, as well as a phenomenological engagement that aims to both interpret the world differently and transform it.

The growth of the American high school that occurred in the twentieth century is among the most remarkable educational, social, and cultural phenomena of the twentieth century. The history of education, however, has often reduced the institution to its educational function alone, thus missing its significantly broader importance. As a corrective, this collection of essays serves four ends: as an introduction to the history of the high school; as a reevaluation of the power of narratives that privilege the perspective of school leaders and the curriculum; as a glimpse into the worlds created by students and their communities; and, most critically, as a means of sparking conversations about where we might look next for stories worth telling.

This book reports an ethnographic study of thirty teachers from eighteen schools who participated in a staff development programme in multicultural education. The study examines how multicultural education was actually presented to teachers, and areas in which their classroom teaching and perception of students changed over the two-year period. Although most of the teachers reported learning a good deal, changes in their teaching and their discussions of teaching were fairly limited. After reporting the data, the book examines why changes were limited, analyzing three areas: the nature of staff development and how multicultural education was packaged; the structure of schools as institutions; and the identities and life experiences of teachers as White women, often from working class backgrounds.

This book provides a broad introduction to the critical work of leading Australian educator Garth Boomer, widely recognised as a significant figure in English teaching. This insightful text provides an accessible introduction to his work, with particular reference to English curriculum and pedagogy, and provides a fascinating account of his journey as a scholar-practitioner, from classroom teaching to the highest levels of the educational bureaucracy. Bill Green explores Boomer’s huge influence on literacy education, teacher development, curriculum inquiry, and educational policy, and critically asks why Boomer’s insights and arguments about English teaching from the last century have such importance for the field now. This text also focuses on the nature and significance of his curriculum thinking, specifically his arguments and provocations regarding English teaching, the English classroom, and the contexts that infuse and shape them. It constitutes a rich resource for rethinking English teaching in the present day and provides an important contribution to the historical imagination. With all due consideration of the larger context of social life and educational thought, this text will help any student of English in Education and Language Arts obtain a deeper understanding of Boomer’s vital contribution to the field of education.

Educational Foundations: An Anthology of Critical Readings helps new and future teachers develop habits of critical reflection about schools and schooling before entering the classroom.

This book simultaneously provides multiple analyses of critical pedagogy in the twenty-first century while showcasing the scholarship of this new generation of critical scholar-educators. Needless to say, the writers herein represent just a small subset of a much larger movement for critical transformation and a more humane, less Eurocentric, less paternalistic, less homophobic, less patriarchical, less exploitative, and less violent world. This volume highlights the finding that rigorous critical pedagogical approaches to education, while still marginalized in many contexts, are being used in increasingly more classrooms for the benefit of student learning, contributing, however indirectly, to the larger struggle against the barbarism of industrial, neoliberal, militarized destructiveness. The challenge for critical pedagogy in the twenty-first century, from this point of view, includes contributing to the manifestation of a truly global critical pedagogy that is epistemologically democratic and against human suffering and capitalist exploitation. These rigorous, democratic, critical standards for measuring the value of our scholarship, including this volume of essays, should be the same that we use to critique and transform the larger society in which we live and work.

Neoliberalism and Education: Rearticulating Social Justice and Inclusion offers a critical reflection on the establishment of neoliberalism as the new global orthodoxy in the field of education, and considers what this means for social justice and inclusion. It brings together writers from a number of countries, who explore notions of inclusion and social justice in educational settings ranging from elementary schools to higher education. Contributors examine policy, practice, and pedagogical considerations covering different dimensions of (in)equality, including disability, race, gender, and class. They raise questions about what social justice and inclusion mean in educational systems that are dominated by competition, benchmarking, and target-driven accountability, and about the new forms of imperialism and colonisation that both drive, and are a product of, market-driven reforms. While exposing the entrenchment, under current neoliberal systems of educational provision, of longstanding patterns of (racialised, classed, and gendered) privilege and disadvantage, the contributions presented in this book also consider the possibilities for hope and resistance, drawing attention to established and successful attempts at democratic education or community organisation across a number of countries. This book was originally published as a special issue of the British Journal of Sociology of Education.

The publication "Private Learning, Public Needs" looks at the devastating effects neoliberal globalization continues to have on education, schooling, and literacy development in the United States. The book is divided in three parts. Part I "Neoliberal Globalization and the Question of Adult Literacy Education" is broken into two chapers. Chapter one is a study of neoleberalism and its relationship to globalization. Specially, the changing role of the state is examined in terms that bring attention to globalization's capacity to ignore nation-state borders, especially in the context of finance and culture. The role of the state is discussed in light of its influcence on local agencies and on local instiutions. Of issue is the interiorization of neoliberal globalization at the material levels of educaional life, namely curriculum standard and development. Through the imposition of certain kinds of standards, teacher education programs must make some hard decisions about wheter they will, on the one hand, satisfy the needs manufactured by neolibral interests as they manifest themelves in curricular and pedagogic mandates, or, on the other, will use their autority to challenge and confront that which they know is detrimental to democratic principles and good teaching practices. Chapter two examines how neoliberal interests have impeded the goals of adult literacy education. Part II "The Work of Critical Theory in a Neoliberal Age" takes up the work of two prominent cirtical theorists in and beyond education: Erich Fromm and Paulo Freire. Chapter three discusses Fromm's important alternative to top-down discourses of power and authority. In chapter four, Freire's work in Sâo Paulo as Secretry of Education is studied for what it can teach us about the importance an possibility of structural transformations.