Counterpoints Primers – serie

The Pedagogy Primer raises questions and provides explanations that are central to the study and practice of teaching. Most educational research and policy, and even teaching practice, fails to recognize the complexities of pedagogy. This primer unearths the various histories, structures, and narratives that undergird teaching in U.S. schools. Modern teaching practice is revealed to be an uncritical historical layering of irreconcilable worldviews, intermixed with a craft or guild perspective, and undermined by cultural and political ideologies that promote one perspective at the expense of others. Understanding pedagogy requires sorting out these conflicting worldviews embedded in educational policy, research, and practice. Professionalism requires developing a personal schema for balancing the values of each worldview. This primer investigates the socio-cultural context and aims of teaching, pedagogical content knowledge, uses of disciplinary knowledge, and the epistemology and language of teaching. Aimed at new as well as experienced teachers, and innovative researchers and policymakers, the Pedagogy Primer is essential reading for those who study teaching and learning and those who engage in the profession of teaching.

Despite the fact that publishers and policy-makers have had increasing influence over classrooms, it is the teacher who must make decisions on a minute-by-minute basis about what will help specific students learn. Similarly, local administrators must make key decisions at the school and district level that will best serve particular communities of teachers, students, and parents. Action research offers educators and other stakeholders a systematic way to research and reflect on specific students, classrooms, schools, and communities in order to solve local problems and improve local conditions. This book offers an overview of various definitions and perspectives on action research without prescribing any single approach. Instead, key questions are explored: Who conducts action research? Why? How? Possible answers sketch the many types of possible projects, ranging from an individual teacher trying to improve the experience of a particular student to a group of educators and community members striving to improve local socioeconomic conditions. The Action Research Primer presents an accessible but comprehensive introduction to the field, providing a basic compass and map for the interested practitioner. Chapters include a brief historical overview, an introduction to competing research paradigms, discussion of key issues that inform project design, a serviceable guide to process, and an extensive list of resources pointing to more detail on the many categories, communities, and publication outlets of action research.

The second edition of the Critical Pedagogy Primer not only introduces the topic but also provides a vision for the future of the critical pedagogy. Kincheloe’s notion of an «evolving criticality» makes sure that critical pedagogy will continue to be a vibrant and creative force that makes a powerful difference in education and in the world in general. As it prepares readers for the challenges of the future, it focuses on the traditions and individuals who have helped construct the discipline. This attention to the past and the future provides readers with an introduction unlike most initiations into academic disciplines. In a richly textured but direct manner, Kincheloe captures the spirit of critical pedagogy in a language accessible to diverse audiences. Both the uninitiated and those with experience in critical pedagogy can learn from this unique and compelling perspective on the field.

The Aesthetics Primer is intended for anyone interested in the topic of aesthetics and how it can influence directions in education. The text is suitable for university courses that address aesthetics specifically, but also art education, values education, philosophy of education, and qualitative research methods. While examples are frequently taken from art, the primer is applicable beyond the discipline of aesthetic education. The text approaches its topic from two directions. First, there is a theoretical and philosophical section, providing a historical context for the term «aesthetics». It then provides a practical application, describing a research protocol that examines how participants respond to, record, and reflect on their aesthetic encounters. These activities result in a merging of aesthetic responses and, in the examples provided, art criticism. The implication is that the exercise could be extended to include other educational disciplinary foci as well. The research clearly indicates emerging patterns of self- and social awareness that result from subjects’ participation.

The Social Theory in Education Primer shows how classical sociology sets the frame for theory and research in education. Three major paradigms are explained in their historical context, and are used as a key to making sense of contemporary work that understands education from a sociological point of view. The central classical theorists considered are seen both in their own context, and also as the founders of the major movements that have continuing influence. The social theories of Durkheim, Marx, and Weber are used to frame and orient concepts for the different models of contemporary work. This primer is essential reading for courses devoted to social theory and education; sociology of education; social foundations of education; history of education; history of sociology; sociological theory; and sociology of knowledge.

The Charter School Primer presents an overview of public charter schools in the United States. The book discusses what charter schools are; the history of public charter school choice in the United States; the role of teachers, parents, boards, and unions in the charter school movement; and gives examples of innovations in education made possible under charter school legislation.

The Vygotsky on Education Primer serves as an introduction to the life and work of the Russian psychologist Lev Vygotsky. Even though he died almost eighty years ago, his life’s work remains both relevant and significant to the field of education today. This book examines Vygotsky’s emphasis on the role of cultural and historical context in learning, while challenging theories that emphasize a universalistic view of learning through fixed, biologically determined stages of development. Given our current preoccupation with standardized outcomes and the corporatization of schooling, Vygotsky’s most important ideas about education need to be reconsidered. The primer provides an overview of his two best-known ideas: the zone of proximal development and the development of thinking and speech as a means of empowerment, and discusses Vygotsky’s views of the roles of critical and creative imagination in the formation of personal agency and in creative collaboration. Applications to current practices from a wide range of sources clarify and promote relevance to diverse audiences. This primer presents the essence of Vygotsky’s work in language that is accessible to all students of education.

The Arts-Based Research Primer explores the arts-based research paradigm and its potential to intersect with and augment traditional social science and educational research methods. The arts-based research (ABR) paradigm may be broadly understood as a flexible architecture of practice-based theory-building methodologies. This text aims to reveal how arts-based ways of knowing and doing lend themselves to blended spaces of naturalistic inquiry, and is intended to aid artists and scientists alike in their research and professional practices.This text also highlights the utility of arts-based research concepts toward building innovative curriculum-making strategies for educational practice both within and beyond the classroom setting. Accessible examples of analytic, synthetic, critical-activist, and improvisational arts-based research methodologies and their outcomes were solicited from a wide range of researchers in varying disciplines, including senior faculty and emerging graduate level scholars. Chapters include a paradigm analysis of the characteristics of arts-based research; brief historical overviews along with a review of recent ABR literature; charts, diagrams and photographs representing ABR approaches for addressing diverse kinds of questions; suggestions for using an ABR inquiry model when writing a research paper; and detailed glossaries of key concepts and terms.

What makes for peace as lived? What images of peace issue from examination of daily experience? What can be gleaned from reflection upon the topic for the meanings and makings of peace in our world? Considering that to work for peace, we must begin with ourselves and with our children, Molly Quinn addresses these questions through her own life and work. She does so with those who would, and do, teach children, and with the children they teach. The text is rooted in inquiry with aspiring elementary teachers through a university social studies course in New York City, where East Harlem first-graders engage peace curriculum, and in the South Bronx, where fourth-graders attempt to understand and respond to neighborhood violence. The author seeks to elucidate educational possibilities for dreaming peace anew, and passionately living and laboring, singularly and together, for its realization among us.

Apparent political apathy among youth in the United States has led to a moral panic about the future of democracy. Many researchers question the facts, while others seek to engage and mobilize young people around public issues they care about in order to master the citizen role and to bring social change. Civic youth work has its modern roots in this work. Its guiding ethos is authentic, meaningful, just, inclusive, and consequential youth involvement in everyday civic life through a small-group process, with the goal of supporting citizenship for young people as a life-long practice.Using their U.S. and international experience, the authors discuss civic youth work touchstones, promising practices, and activities. The text expands earlier notions of youth engagement by grounding them to a conception of the lived-citizen. A substantive bibliography lists the sources on the subject of civic youth work and provides links to scholarly work for researchers and practitioners to effectively support youth involvement in community, social, and political development.

This clear, readable introductory text for undergraduate and graduate Education Law courses or modules offers a practical guide to everyday problems such as student expression, discipline, religion, curriculum, social media, privacy, charter schools, discrimination, special education, and more. Features include distinctions among school, district, state, and federal law; the Facts and Find research method; the Cascade approach to the American legal system; lobbying advice; and the new federal Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA), the replacement to No Child Left Behind. Written by the ex-Counsel to the New York City Board of Education and a graduate of Columbia University Law School, American Public Education Law Primer is more than an academic text, presenting the real world of Education Law to benefit professionals, parents, and the general public.

Transformative Leadership: A Primer both delivers a complete and engaging overview of transformative leadership and also clearly distinguishes it from other popular approaches to leadership. Hence, this will be the text of choice for many graduate courses in educational leadership. Carolyn M. Shields shows how the tenets of transformative leadership interact with one another, and how they provide a lens for leadership that offers an excellent, inclusive, equitable, and socially just education for all students. Using anecdotes and narratives drawn from empirical research, as well as current data, Dr. Shields establishes how transformative leadership comprises a comprehensive approach to leadership in highly diverse contexts, and how it can empower students who are traditionally marginalized due to race, ethnicity, sexual orientation and gender identity, home language, or religion. Accepting a mandate for educational change, reconstructing knowledge frameworks, and redistributing power in more equitable ways are starting points for transformative leaders. Changing the structures, cultures, curricula, and pedagogies of the school to be more democratic and emancipatory; acknowledging our interconnectedness and interdependence with global neighbors; and accepting responsibility for promoting both public and private good are processes that implement the transformation. Taken together, these changes cannot be accomplished without considerable collaboration, conversation, and moral courage. No leader wanting to promote excellence and equity for all should be without this primer that offers a new way of thinking about all aspects of schooling, from facilities and fiscal issues to academic programs and school policy. Transformative leadership offers a promising and robust theory of change for all situations and contexts.

Uncovering Black Heroes: Lesser-Known Stories of Liberty and Civil Rights is a series of stories regarding real people who are not so well known in the mainstream of American freedom and civil rights discussions. These people have made a difference by the events of their lives and by the deliberate contributions they made. In some chapters depictions of fugitive slaves create awareness of the perils of freedom runs and of the desperate, dangerous, and terrifying life of being a hunted person. In other chapters the degree of local level blockage individuals needed to confront is exposed. Still other chapters point out major efforts by diligent, but for the most part unknown, local people that result in court case settlements and state laws to advance civil rights, in particular suffrage. One chapter takes a close look at leaders in women’s clubs and how those leaders defined women’s roles in the Black freedom and civil rights movements. Themes stand out as they all build upon each other and are seen from one chapter to the next. In the end, a subtle evolution of ideas can be realized that forms the notion that the great and recognized Black leaders in history have their important place but that freedom and civil rights advancements are made on the backs of the local unknowns who need to be recognized for what they have contributed. This uncovering of unknown players involved in crucial events of their times in the quest for social, political, civil, and personal equality and freedom provides a unique perspective somewhat counter to mainstream thinking.

Engaging in a bricolage of critical personal history self-study allowed one school administrator to better understand his roles, responsibilities, and formation of identity within the context of a school system while envisioning the divergent possibilities of a yet-to-be-known future through the lens of love. Pedagogies of love can be understood as more than the embodiment of romantic notions of the word. Pedagogies of love enact relationality and challenge historically adequate practices that conjure a monological, prescriptive, and safe understanding of living classrooms—dynamic systems that are ever-emergent and continually adapting. These classrooms, better understood through a sense of ecological sensibilities, are spaces of the possible and not yet imagined. They can be the fertile locations of growth and change.This book sets out to share the story and journey towards self-knowledge for one school leader; however, the process will likely apply to others interested in social research. Through the recursive journey towards better understandings, the author has come to a place of increased awareness of his relationality and a better recognition of interconnected nature of all social interactions.