Personal Passionate Participatory Inquiry Into Social Justice In Education

Scope of the Book: Personal~Passionate~Participatory Inquiry into Social Justice in Education, the first book in the series, features 14 programs of social justice oriented research on life in schools, families, and communities. This work, done by a diverse group of practitioner researchers, educators, and scholars, connects the personal with the political, the theoretical with the practical, and research with social and educational change. These inquiries demonstrate three distinct qualities. Each is personal, compelled by values and experiences researchers bring to the work. Each is passionate, grounded in a commitment to social justice concerns of people and places under consideration. Each is participatory, built on long-term, heart-felt engagement, and shared efforts. The principle aspect of the inquiries featured in the book series that distinguish it from others is that researchers are not detached observers, nor putatively objective recorders, but active participants in schools, families, and communities. Researchers have explicit research agendas that focus on equity, equality, and social justice. Rather than aiming solely at traditional educational research outcomes, positive social and educational change is the focal outcome of inquiry. The researchers are diverse and their inquiries are far ranging in terms of content, people and geographic locations studied. These studies reflect new and exciting ways of researching and representing experience of the disenfranchised, underrepresented, and invisible groups seldom discussed in the literature, and challenge stereotypical or deficit oriented perspectives on these groups. This book informs pre-service and in-service teachers, educators, educational researchers, administrators, and educational policy makers, particularly those who advocate for people who are marginalized and those who are committed to the enactment of social justice and positive educational and social change.

In Internationalizing Teacher Education for Social Justice: Theory, Research, and Practice, editors Suniti Sharma, JoAnn Phillion, Jubin Rahatzad, and Hannah L. Sasser present a collection of personal, passionate, and participatory global perspectives of teacher educators on internationalizing teacher education for social justice. The reader will encounter each author’s personal and professional journey into global classrooms for internationalizing teacher education and supporting future teachers in developing competencies necessary for addressing the academic needs of diverse K-12 classrooms. This collection provides a broad, critical, and interpretive overview of shifts in U.S. and global perspectives to offer transformative frameworks and strategies on preparing K-12 teachers to meet the complex demands for skills in the twenty-first century. The global tenor of this book, framed by theory, research, and practice spanning several countries provides a timely contribution to internationalizing teacher education for social justice in the twenty-first century. The authors’ dedication to preparing teachers who have knowledge of world cultures and global issues, combined with a deep commitment to social justice for promoting equity in education, informs each chapter. The authors take up the internationalization of teacher education for social justice as both an opportunity and a challenge, transcending rhetoric to meaningful action, situating their global understanding to inform readers of critical engagement with, and examination of, theory, research, and practice for effecting social and educational change.

The SAGE Guide to Curriculum in Education integrates, summarizes, and explains, in highly accessible form, foundational knowledge and information about the field of curriculum with brief, simply written overviews for people outside of or new to the field of education. This Guide supports study, research, and instruction, with content that permits quick access to basic information, accompanied by references to more in-depth presentations in other published sources. This Guide lies between the sophistication of a handbook and the brevity of an encyclopedia. It addresses the ties between and controversies over public debate, policy making, university scholarship, and school practice. While tracing complex traditions, trajectories, and evolutions of curriculum scholarship, the Guide illuminates how curriculum ideas, issues, perspectives, and possibilities can be translated into public debate, school practice, policy making, and life of the general public focusing on the aims of education for a better human condition. 55 topical chapters are organized into four parts: Subject Matter as Curriculum, Teachers as Curriculum, Students as Curriculum, and Milieu as Curriculum based upon the conceptualization of curriculum commonplaces by Joseph J. Schwab: subject matter, teachers, learners, and milieu. The Guide highlights and explicates how the four commonplaces are interdependent and interconnected in the decision-making processes that involve local and state school boards and government agencies, educational institutions, and curriculum stakeholders at all levels that address the central curriculum questions: What is worthwhile? What is worth knowing, needing, experiencing, doing, being, becoming, overcoming, sharing, contributing, wondering, and imagining? The Guide benefits undergraduate and graduate students, curriculum professors, teachers, teacher educators, parents, educational leaders, policy makers, media writers, public intellectuals, and other educational workers. Key Features: Each chapter inspires readers to understand why the particular topic is a cutting edge curriculum topic; what are the pressing issues and contemporary concerns about the topic; what historical, social, political, economic, geographical, cultural, linguistic, ecological, etc. contexts surrounding the topic area; how the topic, relevant practical and policy ramifications, and contextual embodiment can be understood by theoretical perspectives; and how forms of inquiry and modes of representation or expression in the topic area are crucial to develop understanding for and make impact on practice, policy, context, and theory. Further readings and resources are provided for readers to explore topics in more details.

In Queer Multicultural Social Justice Education: Curriculum (and Identity) Development Through Performance, I take a pragmatic approach sharing my intimate journey, my stories, and myself with you—the reader—as I actively perform and model the development of queer explorations (i.e., lessons) and curriculum. I begin this journey with three accessible histories of multicultural education, queer perspectives, and autoethnography, respectively. These easy-to-navigate stories provide you with important background knowledge, highlighting the evolution of, commonalities between, and need for each discipline, along with their connection to identity and identity awareness as a form of social justice practice and advancement. Next, I share and perform the nine explorations developed for this project, collectively titled Queer Explorations of Identity Awareness. Modeling for you in practical terms how to queer curriculum and its development, I openly examine my raw performances, discuss my personal and analytical reflections, and embrace my own personal experiences and revelations that occurred throughout this project. Finally, I close with a creative, reflective, and story-like analysis of the process that includes a call to action from you to share your stories as a way of knowing yourself—and others—as a form of social justice education and advancement. This book is intended for all formal and informal educators interested in performing and developing queer multicultural social justice curriculum and practices. Inspired by Ayers (2006), I invite you on this “voyage” with “hope and urgency” (p. 83). It is time we share our stories as a form of curriculum, activism, and coming together.

This narrative ethnography adopts an aesthetic lens to relay the various lived experiences of a non-traditional, Midwestern public high school during its final year in its original building. Extending upon previous research of high school dropouts, I examine how this one particular high school incorporated a self-paced curriculum with a focus on “family” to address the unique learning needs of students at risk of not graduating. By employing elements of grounded theory, narrative inquiry, and autoethnography, I share the stories of Walgut High School’s (a pseudonym) roughly sixty students as they struggle to navigate their respective roles in a dominant cultural narrative to which they’ve never felt like they belonged. Through the extensive and organic voices of the primary participants—as well as my observations of my own participation in the school culture over the course of a year—this project serves to offer insights not only into the school experiences of marginalized adolescents, but also into Walgut’s myriad successes and failures. In particular, this piece highlights the vitality of unconditionally caring or “hospitable” teachers (Derrida, 2000), while ultimately questioning the presumed utility of a high school diploma. The story concludes not by lauding the alternative mine created for Walgut’s canaries, but by questioning the purpose and stability of all scholastic minds. As American schools continue making strides to accommodate and support the complex and oftentimes contradictory needs of their students, what it means to succeed as a teacher in (and prepare teachers for) these diversified, inclusive learning spaces is growing increasingly complicated. Indeed, given the shifting paradigm of American public education, teacher preparation programs must continue to adapt their practices and philosophies in order to equip their teacher candidates with the skills needed not only to thrive but also find purpose and meaning in schools similar to this project’s Walgut. While this book doesn’t claim to offer any answers to the myriad questions concerning the future of public schools, it does endeavor to offer a springboard from which all education stakeholders can continue engaging in healthy and productive discussions of how best to prepare students (and teachers) for autonomous, democratic, curious, creative, and compassionate citizenship both in and apart from their academic communities. To this end, rather than write from a detached, traditionally academic vantage, I have sought in these pages to compose from a personal (albeit limited), passionate (albeit subjective) and participatory (albeit someone marginalized) perspective. In my pursuit of social justice for the characters of Walgut High School, I begin first by exposing my own privileged role in perpetuating injustice. Only through recognizing and naming our own demons can we ever begin to exorcize the System writ large. Thus, in this book’s lack, there is possibility; in its futility, hope.

In Esperanza School: A Grassroots Community School in Honduras, Eloisa Rodriguez takes us into the daily lived experiences of members of a community school, Esperanza School, situated in a rural area in Honduras. Her work engages readers in a critical analysis of what Esperanza School represents for the community. Rodriguez explores the characteristics that have made Esperanza School a community school; in vivid, life-like detail, she describes how Esperanza School functions as the heart of the community by providing opportunities for impoverished youth to attend the school, facilitating relationships with a nearby orphanage, and developing professional development workshops for rural teachers. Rodriguez narrates the story of Esperanza School’s establishment, interactions within the community, and the characteristics of the school personnel that illuminate the social justice mission of the school and create new possibilities for the community. Throughout Rodriguez discusses how Esperanza School represents hope for quality education in this community, and ultimately, in her country, Honduras. Unlike many studies on community schools, this book deals with the reality of the community and the school’s impact on the community. The book compliments and extends the existing literature on community schools by focusing on the students’, teachers’ and founders’ experience of studying and working in Esperanza School. Rodriguez has been involved with Esperanza School for ten years; her personal passionate commitments to this school, and to her country, are illuminated in stories of her participation in the school. Through a multicultural and cross-cultural narrative inquiry methodological framework, a deeper understanding of the ideological, cultural and educational experiences of creating a community school, working in one, and the impact of having a community school are presented. A philosophical framework developed from the work of Paulo Freire and John Dewey provides an analytical lens to examine schooling in Honduras. The picture that emerges from this book provides a guide for ways to make a difference in the Honduran educational system and other developing countries. Pre-service and in-service teachers, educational researchers, administrators, educational policy makers, and those who advocate for educational settings and schools for impoverished communities can learn from this book. It is a representation of a necessity for developing countries to improve the education in schools: from ineffective public schools to community schools for all.

Cultivating Curious and Creative Minds presents a plethora of approaches to developing human potential in areas not conventionally addressed. Organized in two parts, this international collection of essays provides viable educational alternatives to those currently holding sway in an era of high-stakes accountability. Taken together, the chapters in Part I of Cultivating Curious and Creative Minds provide a sampling of what the cultivation of curious and creative minds entails. The contributing authors shed light on how curiosity and creativity can be approached in the teaching domain and discuss specific ideas concerning how it plays out in particular situations and contexts.

In Are You Mixed?, Sonia Janis explores the spaces in-between race and place from the perspective of an educator who is multi-racial. As she reflects on her own experiences as a seventh grade student up to her eventual appointment as a school administrator, she learns of the complexity of situating oneself in predetermined demographic categories. She shares how she explores the intricacies of undefined spaces that teach her to embrace differences, contradictions, and complexities in schools, neighborhoods and communities. Exploring the in-betweenness (Anzaldua & Keating, 2002; He, 2003, 2010) of her life as a multi-race person problematizes imbedded notions of race, gender, class, and power. The power of this memoir lies in its narrative possibilities to capture the contradictions and paradoxes of lives in-between race and place, “to honor the subtleties, fluidities, and complexities of such experience, and to cultivate understanding towards individual ... experience and the multicultural/multiracial contexts that shape and are shaped by such experience” (He, 2003, p. xvii). This memoir creates new ways to think about and write about in-between experience and their relevance to multicultural and multiracial education. Janis challenges educators, teachers, administrators, and policy makers to view the educational experience of students with multiracial, multicultural, and multilingual backgrounds by shattering predetermined categories and stereotyped classifications and looking into unknown and fluid realms of the in-betweenness of their lives. This challenge helps create equitable and just opportunities and engender culturally responsive and inspiring curricular and learning environments to bring out the best potential in all diverse schools, communities, neighborhoods, tribes and societies.