Advocating Heightened Education

Colleges and universities face unprecedented pressure to streamline and reduce their infrastructure. A new generation of reformers, frustrated by bureaucratic obstacles and rising costs, dream of education without schools. Those reforms, if realized, promise to render education indistinguishable from other social spheres. Advocating Heightened Education mobilizes situated theories of learning to advocate the labor and expense that goes into maintaining campuses. Higher education’s bulky and incommensurable institutions—from the community colleges and Ivy Leagues to the regional public universities and small liberal arts campuses—serve a critical modality. They ensure that educational forms remain visible and available for critique. Their diversity of form retains the possibility of divergent and transformative educational futures. This ethnographic and archival study of two alternative campuses, The Evergreen State College and California State University, Monterey Bay, illustrates how educators advocate their work by heightening its visibility and by modeling appreciation for situated teaching and inquiry. It provides examples of those advocacy techniques with stories of professional life and close readings of historical documents that include institutional and legislative reports, facilities memoranda, and course descriptions. These materials offer a vibrant counter-narrative to reform movements that seek to standardize the college experience. Scholars of higher education, pedagogy, and communication will find this book particularly interesting.

This volume addresses teaching and research across disciplines, communication and identity development, and the centrality of communication in our quickly changing world. Contributors convey the social and global need, value, and responsibility of communication instruction across disciplines.

Family engagement varies in education literature and often includes collaboration, involvement, and partnership. The term “family in schools” has changed to include extended family members such as grandparents, aunts, uncles, siblings, cousins, and others who interact with the child, such as step-parents, caregivers, and neighbors. Family engagement is a practice, an interactive process, and a goal-oriented relationship involving professionals and families, allowing families to share their perspectives about their children, their learning, and their customs to improve their children's education. Advocating and Empowering Diverse Families of Students With Disabilities Through Meaningful Engagement provides the knowledge, skills, and dispositions for effective engagements of all families with children in special education. With recent changes in student population diversity among those enrolling in special education, the diversity of family compositions in the school system is also evolving. Covering topics such as laws and legal infrastructure, special education, and family engagement, this book is ideal for classroom teachers, administrators, researchers, and students in education programs.

This collection, edited by Daniel S. Strasser, was unearthed from the demand for more inclusive and expansive dialogues on intersectional identities, ethnicity, neuro-diversity, physical ability, religion, sexual orientation, class, and gender performance in academia. The autoethnographic and narrative accounts within Communication and Identity in the Classroom: Intersectional Perspectives of Critical Pedagogy offer personal, experiential perspectives on the power of identity to influence educators in classroom and mentoring spaces. The multiple perspectives offered here promote dialogue about how personal experience provides the ground upon which we build more dynamic relationships and communities. The contributors’ experiences offer examples for a more expansive understanding of privilege, oppression, and identity. These seeds for conversation nourish discourses that build new communicative bridges between educators and students as we prepare to face the next interaction, class, and challenges and opportunity for resilience. This collection invites educators to be critical of their bodies, of their politics, of their intersecting identities, and acknowledge in words and actions that our bodies are political. Throughout this collection the contributors expand upon theories and methods of critical communication scholarship, radical love, and intersectionality using their embodied pedagogical experiences to ground the scholarship.

"The authors examine obstacles to teacher involvement in policy, analyze preservice and practicing teachers' experiences, and present a model for collaborative professional development for teacher policy advocacy. Case studies are used to explore four contemporary policy areas: school safety, student assessment, public health, and digital learning"--

Pedagogies of Post-Truth explores the national and international political developments in what has been called a post-truth society; specifically, in which conservative groups target media outlets claiming fabrication of news and that the veracity of evidence-based reporting should be questioned. Truth has been reduced to the validation of opinions instead of the presentation of scientific facts. This collection responds to these issues by initiating a scholarly dialogue about teaching in the era of post-truth in which research-based findings that do not align with political viewpoints are judged, criticized, and often described as “fake.” Contributors evaluate the pedagogical challenges of post-truth discourse and how post-truth messages negatively affect instructors and students. By highlighting ways instructors and students can resist the hegemony of post-truth, this book creates a dialogue among scholars, illustrates the challenges, and offers pedagogical techniques to discuss “post-truth,” the role of the educator, the role of media, and the role of other story-makers of our society.

Disability law can be complex and intimidating, so how can concerned parents use it to ensure their child with a disability receives the appropriate education they are legally entitled to? A Guide to Special Education Advocacy gives strategies for advocating for better provision of special education in schools. Despite the many services and accommodations that have been made for students with disabilities, such as the use of Braille or providing specialized education in a regular or special classroom, many children with disabilities do not get the services they need and are not placed in appropriate programs or settings. Because of this, the perception of disability often remains unchanged. Matthew Cohen's insightful manual gives a practical vision of how a parent or a professional can become an advocate to achieve a more inclusive and rewarding education for the child with a disability. This book will provide parents, people with disabilities, professionals and clinicians thinking about special education advocacy with an overview of current disability law and how it works, identifying practical ways for building positive and effective relationships with schools.

This book focuses on English teacher educators’ experiences concerning professionalization and teacher identity. The term professionalization, itself, can be problematized (Popkewitz, 1994), as it connotes adherence to realities to professional norms that are based within particular histories. Yet, teacher educators must confront how to mentor prospective teachers into the field and how changes to the field manifest changes to what it means to be a professional. In research about changes in English teacher education over the past twenty years, Pasternak, Caughlan, Hallman, Renzi and Rush (2017) presented five distinct foci of ELA programs that have evolved: 1) changes to field experiences within teacher education programs, 2) altered conceptions of teaching literature and literacy within the context of ELA, 3) increased adherence to standardization, 4) changing demographics of students in K-12 classrooms, and 5) increased expectations for use of technology within ELA. These foci impact how professionals in ELA are viewed both from inside and outside the profession and how they navigate these tensions in teacher education programs to define what it means to identify as an English teacher. Throughout the book, chapter authors articulate dilemmas that focus around professionalization and teacher identity, questioning what it means to be an English teacher today. While some chapters suggest methods for increased awareness of tensions within practice, other chapters approach professionalization and teacher identity by asking what the limits of methods classes and teacher education might be in preparing ELA teachers and supporting them to remain in the profession. Today’s political environment devalues teachers and teaching, a situation that has critics deriding the educational standards at institutes of higher education while concurrently lauding alternative programs that do not have to adhere to the same rigorous teacher certification requirements. English teacher educators are now being asked to design programs, soften requirements, and recruit and mentor teacher candidates to a profession that, in the past, certified more new English teachers than it could employ. The chapters in this book explore what it means to educate and be an English teacher educator under these conditions.