SUNY series, Teacher Empowerment and School Reform – Serie

Schools have been traditionally defined as institutions of instruction, but the authors of this volume challenge that position in order to generate a new set of cultural categories and constructs through which the nature and process of schooling can be more appropriately understood. Giroux and McLaren develop a theory of schooling that takes into account not only the more traditional relationship between teaching and learning, but also the import of wider cultural dynamics such as language, mass culture, popular culture, the state, theories of readership, ethnographic research, and subcultural studies.

In Framing Dropouts, Michelle Fine challenges the dominant narratives surrounding school dropouts by turning our attention to the voices, bodies, and lived experiences of young people and educators inside an urban comprehensive high school. Through a critical ethnographic lens, Fine exposes the historic irony at the heart of public education: the promise of equal opportunity alongside the persistent production of unequal outcomes.Blending vivid narrative with rigorous social theory, the book traces how race, class, gender, and power braid together to shape whose voices are nurtured, whose bodies are discharged, and whose critiques are silenced. Students labeled "at risk," low-income mothers struggling at the margins, and educators working within constrained institutions speak back to policies and practices that too often render their pain invisible. Rather than treating dropping out as an individual failure, Fine reframes it as a deeply social and political process—one rooted in the erosion of schools as democratic public spheres.Moving from ethnographic detail to critical theory and activist politics, Framing Dropouts calls on readers to confront the harms produced by public institutions and to imagine how schools might once again serve as spaces of dialogue, critique, and collective possibility.Provocative, compassionate, and transformative, this landmark study reshapes the field of dropout research and urban education. It is essential reading for educators, scholars, policymakers, and anyone committed to understanding—and changing—the conditions that place young people at risk.

This book reframes questions about student diversity by probing the extent to which society serves the interests of all, and by examining the empowerment of members of oppressed groups to direct social change. It examines the empowerment of children who are members of oppressed racial groups, lower class, and female, based on the ideas of multicultural education. A series of ethnographic studies illustrates how such young people view their world, their power to affect it in their own interests, and their response to what is usually a growing sense of powerlessness as they mature. The authors also conceptualize contributions of multicultural education to empowering young people, and report investigations of multicultural education projects educators have used for student empowerment. Issues in teacher education are also discussed.

This book is about power — power in the classroom, in our schools, and in our society. Schools, teachers, students, and teaching exist in a churning cauldron of interrelated institutions and social forces. Power relations in schools reflect these larger societal forces and the interconnections of our institutions.This book is also about empowerment — the empowerment of teachers and students. It explores the process through which people develop more control over their lives and acquire the skills and dispositions necessary to be critical and effective participants in our society.The heart of this book, and Kreisberg's unique contribution to the empowerment literature, is his elucidation of the difference between power over and power with in his search to understand the nature of power that can empower individuals and communities. Kreisberg draws upon educational, political, feminist, and psychological theory, and, especially, the voices of teachers, in his framing of the question: What are the dynamics of power that we as teachers can create in our relationships with our students that will be empowering for both our students and ourselves?

By exploring and analyzing the experiences and impressions of nurses, Annette Fay Street provides an intimate account of clinical practice and what those experiences mean in the profession. She highlights the realities and daily conflicts with which clinical nurses must deal, and offers insights into the culture and thinking that informs and transforms their work.

This book calls for a way of reading and responding to the media culture that is more than passive reception. It argues for the fostering of critical citizenship as the key to engaging, debating, and ultimately reconstructing the concepts and beliefs society brings to bear upon popular culture. The authors analyze contemporary media culture, including television news and dramatic programming, advertising, Hollywood film, and discuss the relationships between technology, culture, and society.

This book examines the relationship between contemporary forms of critical theory and social reconstructionism, as they relate and contribute to the construction of a radical theory of education. It illustrates many of the persistent issues, problems, and goals of radical educational reform, including the importance of developing a language of possibility, utopian thought, and the critical competence necessary to reveal and deconstruct forms of oppression. Stanley perceptively and clearly reexamines new challenges posed to various forms of critical pedagogy (including reconstructionism) by the development of postmodern and poststructuralist theory, focusing on the connections and continuities between them.

This book is organized around three themes: mechanisms of domination and control; pedagogies of possibility; and theory as critique. It links education with an analysis of politics and economics, and takes as central the possibilities of schools as places where social critique and the empowerment of students can take place. The authors have considered the possibilities of student resistance and curriculum transformation, and have deepened their critiques to incorporate recent theoretical analyses influenced by feminist critiques, anti-racist approaches, and postmodernist thought.In moving from theoretical analysis to "practical" examples of curriculum transformation and classroom practice, What Schools Can Do provides both a foundation for the analysis of schooling and alternatives for teaching practice.

This book is organized around three themes: mechanisms of domination and control; pedagogies of possibility; and theory as critique. It links education with an analysis of politics and economics, and takes as central the possibilities of schools as places where social critique and the empowerment of students can take place. The authors have considered the possibilities of student resistance and curriculum transformation, and have deepened their critiques to incorporate recent theoretical analyses influenced by feminist critiques, anti-racist approaches, and postmodernist thought.In moving from theoretical analysis to "practical" examples of curriculum transformation and classroom practice, What Schools Can Do provides both a foundation for the analysis of schooling and alternatives for teaching practice.

A provocative collection that redefines literacy as a political and transformative practice, challenging readers to see reading and writing as tools for questioning power and advancing social change.What does it mean to be literate in a world shaped by power, culture, and contestation? Critical Literacy brings together some of the most influential voices in literacy studies to confront this urgent question head-on.Edited by Colin Lankshear and Peter L. McLaren, Critical Literacy reimagines literacy not as a neutral skill, but as a deeply political practice—one that can either reproduce systems of domination or become a powerful tool for liberation. Bridging theory and practice, the contributors explore how literacy operates across diverse contexts: from classrooms and communities to media, gender, culture, and revolutionary movements.Engaging with postmodern perspectives and critical pedagogy, the essays challenge readers to interrogate taken-for-granted assumptions about knowledge, language, and democracy. From ethnographic insights and feminist critiques to analyses of media and popular education, this collection opens new pathways for understanding literacy as a site of struggle and possibility.Provocative, timely, and transformative, this book invites educators, researchers, and activists alike to rethink literacy as a dynamic force in shaping more just and democratic futures.

Inquiry and Reflection shows how stories of schooling can elucidate difficult, and unexamined problems facing teachers. While professional texts tend to raise issues of power and its distribution and questions of culture and ideology, often the manner of presentation is abstract, and pre-service teachers have difficulty making connections. Yet literary, film, and video materials illuminate problems and suggest ideas to which teachers can actively respond.This book offers teacher educators a variety of resources for articulating a critical pedagogy and suggests an alternative to the technical, job training approach to teacher education by providing a unique educational curricula that illuminates issues of power, ideology, and culture.

Dedicated to a transformation of education so that it becomes an instrument of liberation rather than oppression, Freire discusses in unprecedented depth the implications and consequences of his pedagogical theory concerning three main problems faced by contemporary higher education: power and education, curriculum and social reality, and the role of intellectuals. This "dialogue" with Freire enlarges the body of knowledge regarding his thinking about educational emancipation and the role of higher education in encouraging self reliance.

Dedicated to a transformation of education so that it becomes an instrument of liberation rather than oppression, Freire discusses in unprecedented depth the implications and consequences of his pedagogical theory concerning three main problems faced by contemporary higher education: power and education, curriculum and social reality, and the role of intellectuals. This "dialogue" with Freire enlarges the body of knowledge regarding his thinking about educational emancipation and the role of higher education in encouraging self reliance.

This book examines recent efforts to rid society of addictions and finds them wanting. The author examines everyday addictive patterns within modernist and postmodernist cultures and provides practical suggestions in the areas of substance abuse prevention and the addiction recovery movement.

For two decades, colleges and universities have regularly offered, and in some cases required, courses in thinking skills. Such courses generally have focused on training students in the basics of informal and formal logic, the assumption being that good thinking is logical thinking, and that instruction in critical or "good" thinking consequently should emphasize logical procedures. This "logistic" assumption is clearly reflected in both critical thinking textbooks as well as in the professional literature.Recently, however, the epistemic and pedagogical identification of critical thinking and logical thinking has been questioned by educators from a wide diversity of disciplines. Many of these critics argue that a richer, more comprehensive model of thinking itself is needed, one that acknowledges the importance of traditionally downplayed faculties such as empathy, imagination, and insight. Others contend that thinking skills theory and pedagogy must take into consideration the contextual and sometimes political influences upon not just content but also styles of thinking. finally still other critics of the conventional model of critical thinking argue that recent research in feminist studies sheds a great deal of light upon the directions in which critical thinking instruction should go.The fourteen essays in this anthology all illustrate this new way of thinking about critical thinking. Each of them is critical of the received model, and each of them argues for one that goes beyond the conventional reduction of thinking skills to logical expertise. But each approaches the issue from a different angle, thereby providing the reader with a diversity of perspectives and accents.Re-Thinking Reason is an invaluable resource tool, research guide, and supplemental textbook, for educators across the disciplines who are concerned with incorporating thinking skills instruction in their classes.

This is the first scholarly examination of the use of dialogic theory and pedagogy by scholars and teachers of writing. Dialogic methods have become extremely important to many different approaches to pedagogy. However, no one has yet noted that such pedagogies are being espoused by scholars and teachers who have vastly differing theoretical and ideological orientations from one another. Given the fact that the same kind of pedagogy is being proposed by people from such widely differing perspectives, it is time for a substantial reassessment of the use of dialogic pedagogies in literacy education.Ward's critique of the "democratic" dialogue that expressivists, social constructionists, radical pedagogists, and poststructuralists profess should be read by all compositionists employing collaborative learning in their classrooms. Ward's pedagogy acknowledges and makes room for the differences among students that feminist and social constructionist pedagogies often ignore; it takes into account that social relationships outside the composition classroom can affect the relationships of students within it.

Summarizes and critiques theories of social and cultural reproduction as they relate to sociology of education.This book summarizes the body of knowledge about sociology of education and cultural studies as it informs educational research and critical pedagogy. It synthesizes the most relevant work in social and cultural reproduction published in the last three decades in English, French, German, Spanish, and Portuguese. The authors document and critique the theoretical discussion in developments in both advanced societies and peripheral ones, and link macro-sociological issues with social psychological ones. The book introduces theories of the state to underscore a political sociology of education, and highlights an agenda for theory building, research, and practice in sociology of education.

Applies European critical theory to North American educational research.The contributors to this anthology bring North American research traditions into conversation with the latest advances in French, German, British, and Latin American schools of social thought. Challenging the very precepts of many empirical and analytical approaches to understanding educational phenomena, this collection of essays is indispensable for educators wishing to understand present philosophical debates.The future of educational research in the United States will largely depend on how teachers and researchers deal with the urgent issues raised in this timely and iconoclastic book.

Applies European critical theory to North American educational research.The contributors to this anthology bring North American research traditions into conversation with the latest advances in French, German, British, and Latin American schools of social thought. Challenging the very precepts of many empirical and analytical approaches to understanding educational phenomena, this collection of essays is indispensable for educators wishing to understand present philosophical debates.The future of educational research in the United States will largely depend on how teachers and researchers deal with the urgent issues raised in this timely and iconoclastic book.

Proposes a pedagogy of black urban struggle and solidarity.The author argues that "race" as a social construction is one of the most powerful categories for constructing urban mythologies about blacks, and that this is significant in a dominant white supremacist culture that equates blackness and black people with both danger and the exotic. The book examines how these myths are realized in the material landscapes of the city, in its racialization of black residential space through the imagery of racial segregation. This imagery along with the racializing of crime portrays black residential space as natural "spaces of pathology," and in need of social control through policing and residential dispersion and displacement.It is in this context that Haymes proposes the development of a pedagogy of black urban struggle that incorporates critical pedagogy.

Offers a radical rethinking of the meaning of work and learning in all domains of adult life: a "best of adult education" reader.In Defense of the Lifeworld brings together five important critical commentaries on the state of the discipline and practice of adult education in North America. Jack Mezirow, Michael Collins, Mechthild Hart, Michael Welton and Donovan Plumb draw on critical theory, feminism and postmodernism. They examine the historical emergence of critical learning theory, the psycho-cultural dimensions of transformative learning theory, the vocation of the adult educator in our immoral times, the need to radically rethink the meaning of work and learning, the contribution of Habermas to the development of a new social learning paradigm and the provocative challenge from postmodernist discourses to the critical adult education project.This innovative text contends that the human lifeworld (where we learn what life means, what binds us together and what constitutes an autonomous personality) is deeply threatened in our late twentieth century world. Consequently, the task of the critical adult educator is to preserve and extend forms of communicative action through reflection, dialogue and critique.

Presents a critical, Neo-Marxist philosophy of education.

Examines the theories of Bakhtin and Freire in relation to bilingual education and second language learning.Bilingual Education: A Dialogue with the Bakhtin Circle is the first book to make a connection between bilingual education and the theories of the Bakhtin circle. The analysis is focused on language as a social entity from the perspective of Bakhtinian dialogic existence. The author includes a discussion of critical/radical pedagogy connected to Paulo Freire's dialogic pedagogy. Also addressed are the major laws and policies of bilingual education in the U. S. and the current debate involving English-only versus English-plus instruction.

Critiques the modernist tenets and moral integrity of contemporary adult education practice. Challenges educators to reconceptualize adult education as a postmodern pedagogy of engagement.Briton challenges the dominant depoliticized vision of adult education, calling into question the modernist tenets and moral integrity of contemporary adult education practice. By examining his own struggle to escape the confines of modernist thought, the author delivers a succinct yet decisive critique of modern educational practice and challenges educators to reconceptualize their field of endeavor as a postmodern pedagogy of engagement.In refusing to deny its conjectural foundations, to mask its tenuous structure, or to defend its precarious integrity, the book assumes a form that distinguishes it markedly from its modernist counterparts. In favoring commentary over empirical evidence, a multiplicity of voices over a prescriptive narrative, the development of an ethical attitude toward practice over formulaic prescriptions for practice, and inter-over intra-disciplinary sources to substantiate its claims, this work calls into question a whole range of modernist predilections. By repeatedly breaching the narrowly prescribed parameters of adult education's orthodoxy and constantly promoting reflective inquiry, this book reveals how different, yet equally valid, forms of evidence can be drawn upon to develop an ethical postmodern perspective that calls the modern instrumental practice of adult education into question.