Adolescent Cultures, School & Society – serie

The Corporate Assault on Youth examines childhood as a social construction increasingly influenced by corporations and commercialism. Through case studies, critical analysis, and historical/philosophical research, the essays collected here expose the degree to which children are unwitting targets of marketing. With topics ranging from the presence of media branding in schools and school supplies to the subtler ways in which the public education system is influenced by corporate ideologies and purposes, this book draws much-needed attention to how educators, administrators, policymakers, parents, and children can become aware of, and counterbalance, the effects of the commercialism that is overwhelming students’ understanding of the world and their place within it.

This book – the finale in a trilogy by the authors – traces the way in which a number of disadvantaged schools and communities were able to move beyond deficit, victim-blaming and pathologizing approaches and access resources of trust, relationships, connectedness and hope. It describes how these Australian schools and communities were able to benefit from working with ‘street-level’ bureaucrats who had reinvented themselves around notions of socially just forms of capacity-building. The book provides a set of insights into what is possible from a critical engagement for school and community renewal perspective, by working with the resources that exist within disadvantaged contexts, even in damaging neoliberal policy times. Critically Engaged Learning breaks new and important ground across urgent and fractured boundaries.

This book – the finale in a trilogy by the authors – traces the way in which a number of disadvantaged schools and communities were able to move beyond deficit, victim-blaming and pathologizing approaches and access resources of trust, relationships, connectedness and hope. It describes how these Australian schools and communities were able to benefit from working with ‘street-level’ bureaucrats who had reinvented themselves around notions of socially just forms of capacity-building. The book provides a set of insights into what is possible from a critical engagement for school and community renewal perspective, by working with the resources that exist within disadvantaged contexts, even in damaging neoliberal policy times. Critically Engaged Learning breaks new and important ground across urgent and fractured boundaries.

Written by a prominent array of scholars and practitioners, this book elucidates the complexities, contradictions, and confusion surrounding adolescence in American culture and education. For too long, harmful public myths and lies have portrayed teenagers as a principal cause of our nation’s social ills. Similar unfair charges have been lodged against America’s teachers and schools throughout our history. This book offers public counterpoints to those simplistic blaming-the-victim arguments. Instead, it traverses a more nuanced and realistic path toward uncovering the developmental, socio-cultural realities faced by today’s teenagers. It also provides rich pedagogical strategies, and educational wisdom for allowing adolescents to grow as worthy human beings. This important and timely book will appeal to preservice teachers, teacher educators, education and social service professionals, policymakers, and all those interested in bettering the lives of adolescents in this uncertain world.

The chapters in this edited collection examine how the culture of masculinity intersects with issues of health, homophobia, and the suppression and silencing of anxieties about body image among men and boys. Examining the bodily dividends and trade-offs associated with male participation in physical activity is central to understanding how educators in particular might better engage all boys in healthy life practices, not only those privileged by muscularity and physicality. Contributions explore evidence of intimidation and body fears that is largely unheard and unexplored in locker rooms and classrooms. Introducing critical perspectives emerging from current evidence-based international research to shed light on curricular and policy initiatives aimed at producing healthy children, this book will powerfully inform and provoke discussion.

Over time, two competing narratives have emerged to represent the experiences of LGBTQ youth, emphasizing either significant improvement or continued victimization and marginalization. This volume examines those conflicting narratives as they play out in educational settings, both formal and informal. Particular emphasis is placed on LGBTQ youths’ own expressions and representations, revealing the extent to which both oppression and opportunity interact to influence their still-emergent identities. Coming of age at the tail end of the «culture wars», these young people are situated within layers of influence across family, peers, schools, communities, and media. The simultaneous, fluid contexts of opportunity and oppression that LGBTQ youth negotiate are highlighted throughout this book in the youths’ own words, which often reveal a level of epistemological complexity that their elders would be wise to consider.

This book brings a unique, innovative and refreshing perspective to one of the most protracted issues affecting young lives – disengagement from schooling. Rather than continuing to blame young people, as most educational policies do, this book examines disengagement from the vantage point of the lives, experiences, interests and aspirations of the communities from which young people come, and within which they are embedded. It uses a narrative and representational approach that gives detailed insights into the wider context of poverty, class, power, relationships and identity. A major and defining hallmark of the book is the emphasis it places upon a number of ‘doings’, – including community voice, identity formation, critical work education and education policy – all of which provide a very different set of scripts with which to reinvent the institution of high school.

As many young adults continue to disengage with learning each day, teachers and administrators struggle to find programming that re-engages secondary students with their schooling and communities. This book profiles one program that succeeds in doing so, and should serve as a model for others. In a Midwestern alternative school, three teachers built a curriculum around hands-on learning, restorative justice Talking Circles, and multicultural education, in the hopes that it would re-engage and inspire youth. Drawing on adult transformative learning theory, this book is an in-depth, qualitative study of the ways the program transformed adult and youth perceptions of trust, connections, schooling, and human rights. This book breaks down stereotypes about youth labeled «at-risk» and provides evidence that it is never too late to become passionate about learning.

As many young adults continue to disengage with learning each day, teachers and administrators struggle to find programming that re-engages secondary students with their schooling and communities. This book profiles one program that succeeds in doing so, and should serve as a model for others. In a Midwestern alternative school, three teachers built a curriculum around hands-on learning, restorative justice Talking Circles, and multicultural education, in the hopes that it would re-engage and inspire youth. Drawing on adult transformative learning theory, this book is an in-depth, qualitative study of the ways the program transformed adult and youth perceptions of trust, connections, schooling, and human rights. This book breaks down stereotypes about youth labeled «at-risk» and provides evidence that it is never too late to become passionate about learning.

This book has received the AESA (American Educational Studies Association) Critics Choice Award 2012.Teaching History to Adolescents: A Quest for Relevance is an exploration of research, ideas, trends, and practices for educators who teach American history to adolescents from the middle grades through high school. Higher education faculty in history and professional education will also find the book germane to their work. Topics within the field of teaching history to adolescents include the use and misuse of history textbooks, implementing primary sources into lessons, subject matter selection, professional development, technology, and the issues of diversity and assessment as directly related to history. The book includes «The World of Practice» sections – contributions from practitioners on topics such as teaching history with comic books, student engagement with public history, using young adult non-fiction books, and the role of controversial topics in the history classroom.

This book has received the AESA (American Educational Studies Association) Critics Choice Award 2012.Teaching History to Adolescents: A Quest for Relevance is an exploration of research, ideas, trends, and practices for educators who teach American history to adolescents from the middle grades through high school. Higher education faculty in history and professional education will also find the book germane to their work. Topics within the field of teaching history to adolescents include the use and misuse of history textbooks, implementing primary sources into lessons, subject matter selection, professional development, technology, and the issues of diversity and assessment as directly related to history. The book includes «The World of Practice» sections – contributions from practitioners on topics such as teaching history with comic books, student engagement with public history, using young adult non-fiction books, and the role of controversial topics in the history classroom.

This book has received the AESA (American Educational Studies Association) Critics Choice Award 2012.Community Service Learning (CSL) is, potentially, the most powerful and far-reaching educational reform movement in recent memory. Yet, that potential has yet to be realized. One major reason for CSL’s limited success is found in its runaway conceptual confusion: in becoming everything to everyone, CSL has lost its philosophical bearings and, not surprisingly, its practical value. This study attempts to restore CSL’s philosophical bearings, arguing that there are particular understandings of its components that imply particular kinds of educational practices. In this philosophical clarification lies the hope that CSL can meet its immense potential as a transformative school and community practice. This book is a must-have for teachers, school administrators, educational scholars, and students who have an interest in making schools a vital community resource.

Pervasive Vulnerabilities explores the beliefs, attitudes, and behaviors of adolescent girls and boys and female teachers in order to expose the continuing persistence of sexual harassment in the United States. The book addresses the sexual double standard that continues to hold girls and women accountable for male sexual aggression, and demonstrates that this double standard still dismisses males who harass young women with a cavalier «boys will be boys» attitude, while castigating young women if they express an interest in sexual expression. It discusses issues of sexual harassment through four domains: its impact on women’s lives, sometimes long after high school; the perceptions of teachers who interact with adolescents; the experiences of young girls in middle and high school; and the behaviors and attitudes of young men in middle and high school. This book is critical reading for all pre-service and in-service teachers and is indispensable in classrooms devoted to the topic.

Although they are typically viewed as silent witnesses in schools during the worldwide infatuation with school reform, this book, in fact, reveals young people to be active agents with something worthwhile to say about their schooling and what might be done to make learning more exciting and relevant to their lives and aspirations. The authors foreground the stories of some 100 young informants from low socioeconomic backgrounds who had been repelled by school, but found their way back in to learning through alternative education programs that offered them a sense of direction, hope, and purpose – although they also presented them with some tensions and dilemmas. At a time when educational policies are bearing down heavily on schools through national testing regimes, accountability standards, and other repressive measures, it is refreshing to hear from young people about ways that schools can be made more humane and educationally rewarding places.

This book won the 2014 AESA (American Educational Studies Association) Critics Choice Award.Illuminating hip-hop as an important cultural practice and a global social movement, this collaborative project highlights the emancipatory messages and cultural work generated by the organic intellectuals of global hip-hop. Contributors describe the social realities – globalization, migration, poverty, criminalization, and racism – youth are resisting through what we recognize as a decolonial cultural politic. The book contributes to current scholarship in multicultural education, seeking to understand the vilification of youth (of color) for the social problems created by a global system that benefits a small minority. In an age of corporate globalization, Hip-Hop(e) highlights the importance of research projects that link the production of educational scholarship with the cultural activities, everyday practice, and social concerns of global youth in order to ameliorate social, economic, and political problems that transcend national boundaries.