In Canaries Reflect on the Mine: Dropouts’ Stories of Schooling, Jeanne Cameron invites the reader to see schooling and early school leaving through the eyes of high school dropouts themselves. The transcendent desires revealed by this research – to be known and valued, to learn with purpose and autonomy – are spoken with poignant clarity by the young people who story these pages. This study offers a compelling and timely critique of the dominant, neoliberal discourse on schooling and early school leaving. It challenges conventional wisdom about dropouts, and shows how the experiences and needs of those who leave school early and those who persist to graduation are more similar than different. Collectively, these young people’s stories evoke a canary-in-the-mine metaphor, one where the canaries exit and the miners remain. They implore us to see the dropout crisis as a symptom of the alienating and dehumanizing school practices advanced by No Child Left Behind and Race to the Top. More importantly, they offer a vision for schooling that lovingly embraces and extends all students’ experiences, enriches their biographies, and celebrates and supports each of their talents and purposes with equal passion. Pre-service and in-service teachers, educational researchers and policy makers, administrators, and advocates for equitable and democratic schooling have much to learn from this book. Qualitative researchers will find a powerful model for working collaboratively with youth to represent their experiences and to craft solutions to the challenges they face. Students of sociology will discover a compelling illustration of C. Wright Mills’ sociological imagination and his charge to “take it big” by drawing connections between individual biographies and the social and historical structures that frame lived experience. For professional social scientists, it embodies Mills’ challenge to embrace the moral sensibilities required to understand and improve the human condition.

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.

This is a collection of essays written during the course of a career in public education spanning over forty years. The essays reflect the author's optimism and frustrations with the business of schools and the impractical way schools hire, fire, and retain teachers and administrators. The author suggests new ways to examine practices and procedures in the public schools in the United States, from core curricula to discipline, even suggesting a utopian school district. Filled with anecdotes and thought-provoking questions, the author describes the life of a public school employee in a variety of positions within a centrally isolated Upstate New York public school system. A must-read for anyone considering a profession within the public schools, for new school board members, or for parents who want to know the dirty little secrets that exist in a public school system typical of any public school system in the United States. Barbara D. Katz-Brown, MS, CCC-SP, SDA

Curriculum and Teaching Dialogue (CTD) is a publication of the American Association of Teaching and Curriculum (AATC), a national learned society for the scholarly field of teaching and curriculum. The field includes those working on the theory, design and evaluation of educational programs at large. At the university level, faculty members identified with this field are typically affiliated with the departments of curriculum and instruction, teacher education, educational foundations, elementary education, secondary education, and higher education. CTD promotes all analytical and interpretive approaches that are appropriate for the scholarly study of teaching and curriculum. In fulfillment of this mission, CTD addresses a range of issues across the broad fields of educational research and policy for all grade levels and types of educational programs.

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 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.

Popular representations of teachers and teaching are easy to take for granted precisely because they are so accessible and pervasive. Our lives are intertextual in the way lived experiences overlap with the stories of others presented to us through mass media. It is this set of connected narratives that we bring into classrooms and into discussions of educational policy. In this day and time—with public education under siege by forces eager to deprofessionalize teaching and transfer public funds to benefit private enterprises—we ignore the dominant discourse about education and the patterns of representation that typify educator characters at our peril. This edited volume offers a fresh take on educator characters in popular culture and also includes important essays about media texts that have not been addressed adequately in the literature previously. The 15 chapters cover diverse forms from literary classics to iconic teacher movies to popular television to rock ‘n’ roll. Topics explored include pedagogy through the lenses of gender, sexuality, race, disability, politics, narrative archetypes, curriculum, teaching strategies, and liberatory praxis. The various perspectives represented in this volume come from scholars and practitioners of education at all levels of schooling. This book is especially timely in an era when public education in the United States is under assault from conservative political forces and undervalued by the general public. Contributors are: Steve Benton, Naeemah Clark, Kristy Liles Crawley, Elizabeth Currin, Mary M. Dalton, Jill Ewing Flynn, Chad E. Harris, Gary Kenton, Mark A. Lewis, Ian Parker Renga, Stephanie Schroeder, Roslin Smith, Jeff Spanke, and Andrew Wirth.

Rural communities across the United States are experiencing a rapid increase in the number of immigrant students. While the number of culturally and linguistically diverse students continues to grow within midwestern states, the demographics of teachers remain white, female, and monolingual. Often teachers have little to no training working with students and their families whose backgrounds differ from their own. Thus, there is a great urgency for teachers to develop culturally competent teaching practices that address the needs of all students. The purpose of this year-long, school-based narrative inquiry was to examine the beliefs, attitudes, and practices of rural educators as they described their work with Latinx immigrant, elementary students, negotiated the “space” between a professional and personal identity and demonstrated an ethic of care. This inquiry is arranged into “livings, tellings, retellings, and relivings” (Clandinin & Connelly, 2000, p. 70) and serves to shed light on the entwined lived experiences of myself, my participants, and the community in which we reside. Grounded in Noddings (1984; 2012) work on authentic caring and Valenzuela’s (1999) concept of culture and caring relations for Latinx students, Swanson’s middle range theory of care (1991, 1993) which served as the conceptual framework that illuminated how my participants discussed working with and caring for their Latinx immigrant students. In Struggling to Find Our Way: Rural Educators’ Experiences Working with And Caring for Latinx Immigrant Students, Stephanie Oudghiri’s one-year school-based narrative inquiry is a carefully crafted balance of creativity and rigor with the right notes to engage the reader, challenge them to think, wonder at what they can do, and imagine possibilities for a more socially just education system. In this book, Oudghiri examines the beliefs, attitudes, and practices of two white teachers and one Hispanic paraprofessional working with and caring for immigrant students in a rural Indiana community. Due to the sensitive nature of this inquiry, which focuses on teachers’ relationships with vulnerable populations (immigrant and undocumented), Oudghiri’s book serves as a model for active engagement by creating a strong sense of place, a strong sense of who these teachers and students are, and a strong sense of being in the midst of community and school life. What is unique and compelling about Oudghiri’s writing, is her focus on stories of the teachers working in her school site, and the children in their classrooms. She provides strong evidence using a compassionate lens and the art of storytelling to illuminate lives in the school.

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.

In Beyond Retention: Cultivating Spaces of Equity, Fairness, and Justice for Women of Color in U.S. Higher Education, Brenda Marina and Sabrina N. Ross address the continued underrepresentation of women faculty of color at predominantly White colleges and universities through a creative convergence of scholarship focused on intellectual activism and structural change. Inspired by the African American oral tradition of call and response, this text illuminates the calls, or personal narratives of women faculty of color who identify racialized, gendered, sexualized, and class-based challenges associated with work in predominantly White institutions. Accounts of social justice-oriented strategies, policies, and practices that support women faculty of color and reflections by women of color who are senior faculty members serve as literal and metaphorical responses. The convergence of calls for social justice and equity-minded responses and reflections in this text provide intellectual foundations for the development of higher education spaces where women faculty of color can thrive. Beyond Retention is a critical geographic project intended to identify and mitigate structures of oppression that act as barriers to the full incorporation of women of color in predominantly White academic contexts. This text will be of interest to scholars interested in curriculum topics of race, gender, sexuality, and place. The text offers strategies for coping and success for women of color in doctoral programs, faculty positions, and mid-level administration positions within the academy; as such, Beyond Retention will be a valuable addition to the reading libraries of each of these groups. Men and women with interests in the experiences of educators of color within predominantly White contexts will also gain valuable insights from this book, as will individuals interested in various areas of women studies, multicultural education, and diversity. Beyond Retention also provides accounts of practices and policies that have been successful in supporting the needs of women faculty of color; knowledge gained from this text will be useful for higher education administrators seeking to improve the campus climate for faculty of color. Additionally, human resource directors, equal opportunity specialists and diversity trainers will find this text helpful when considering strategies for managing diversity.