Traditionally, American educators and communities have looked to Europe and Asia for ideas for rethinking and reforming education for America’s diverse children. This book, Contemporary Voices from the Margin: African Educators on African and American Education, brings together new voices of diverse African-born teacher educators and Africanist scholars who share personal experiences as well as researchbased perspectives about education in Africa and America that will be valuable to rethinking and reforming education for America’s struggling schools. The book is a comprehensive work of experienced educators and scholars in the field of teacher education and African Studies. The editors of the book invited a diverse group of African-born teacher educators and scholars from different countries of Africa who teach in the U.S. The contributors share a common African experience, but they are geographically diverse in countries of origin and research. Their knowledge about African communal living as well as colonial powers and imperialism as they operated in various African countries enables them to compare and contrast various educational models and practices, including traditional ones. They are also diverse in their fields of specialization but have expertise in multicultural education, urban education, and culturally responsive pedagogy that have become the focus of U.S. discourses in public education and teacher preparation programs. Given that these scholars were born or socialized, and educated in, as well as, taught schools and colleges in their respective African countries before settling in the United States, they bring a wealth of experience and insights into what it means to successfully educate children and youth. The book is divided into three parts. Part 1 examines African processes and practices of education, both formal and informal, as contributing authors share perspectives about African indigenous education including cultural socialization and formal western-type education and organization of schools. Part 2 focuses on patterns and structures of formal, western-type education in selected African countries. Part 3 explores cross-cultural perspectives on American education. The contributors provide chapters of stimulating and rich perspectives that will engage the discourse on rethinking and reforming education and schooling for America’s diverse students.

Maps the changing nature of popular music and considers how popular music studies has expanded and developed to deal with these changes. The book discusses the participation of women in the industry, the changing role of gender and sexuality in popular music, and the role of technologies in production and distribution.

What is Sufism? Contemporary views vary tremendously, even among Sufis themselves. Contemporary Sufism: Piety, Politics, and Popular Culture brings to light the religious frameworks that shape the views of Sufism’s friends, adversaries, admirers, and detractors and, in the process, helps readers better understand the diversity of contemporary Sufism, the pressures and cultural openings to which it responds, and the many divergent opinions about contemporary Sufism’s relationship to Islam. The three main themes: piety, politics, and popular culture are explored in relation to the Islamic and Western contexts that shape them, as well as to the historical conditions that frame contemporary debates. This book is split into three parts: • Sufism and anti-Sufism in contemporary contexts; • Contemporary Sufism in the West: Poetic influences and popular manifestations; • Gendering Sufism: Tradition and transformation. This book will fascinate anyone interested in the challenges of contemporary Sufism as well as its relationship to Islam, gender, and the West. It offers an ideal starting point from which undergraduate and postgraduate students, teachers and lecturers can explore Sufism today.

This handbook explores the evolution of African education in historical perspectives as well as the development within its three systems–Indigenous, Islamic, and Western education models—and how African societies have maintained and changed their approaches to education within and across these systems. African education continues to find itself at once preserving its knowledge, while integrating Islamic and Western aspects in order to compete within this global reality. Contributors take up issues and themes of the positioning, resistance, accommodation, and transformations of indigenous education in relationship to the introduction of Islamic and later Western education. Issues and themes raised acknowledge the contemporary development and positioning of indigenous education within African societies and provide understanding of how indigenous education works within individual societies and national frameworks as an essential part of African contemporary society.

For a long time, many American educators and educational stakeholders have drawn their ideas for educational reforms from ideas generated in Europe and Asia for the changing demographics of America’s diverse classrooms. This book is therefore motivated by a bold attempt at advocating for the revision of existing pedagogic fora and the creation and addition of new fora that would provide for the inclusion of thoughts, perspectives and practices of African traditional oral literature in the pedagogical tools of content area classrooms especially in North America. The articles that are presented in this book provide theoretical frameworks for using African traditional oral literature and its various tenets as teaching tools. They bring together new voices of how African literature could be used as helpful tool in classrooms. Rationale for agitating for its use as ideal for pedagogic tool is the recurrent theme throughout the various articles presented. The book explores how educators, literacy educators, learners, activists, policy makers, and curriculum developers can utilize the powerful, yet untapped gem of African oral literature as pedagogical tools in content area classrooms to help expand educators repertoire of understanding beyond the ‘conventional wisdom’ of their pedagogic creed. It is a comprehensive work of experienced and diverse scholars, academicians, and educators who have expertise in multicultural education, traditional oral literature, urban education, children’s literature and culturally responsive pedagogy that have become the focus of U.S. discourses in public education and teacher preparation. This anthology serves as part of the quest for multiple views about our ‘global village’, emphasizing the importance of linking the idea of diverse knowledge with realities of global trends and development. Consequently, the goal and the basic thrust of this anthology is to negotiate for space for non-mainstream epistemology to share the pedagogical floor with the mainstream template, to foster alternative vision of reality for other knowledge production in the academic domain. The uniqueness of this collection is the idea of bringing the content and the pedagogy of most of the genres of African oral arts under one umbrella and thereby offering a practical acquaintance and appreciation with different African cultures. It therefore introduces the world of African mind and thoughts to the readers. In summary, this anthology presents an academic area which is now gaining its long overdue recognition in the academia.

Navigating the Common Good in Teacher Education Policy examines the changing relationships between the state and the common (or public) good. Using teacher education policy as the frame of analysis, the authors examine history, cultural context, and lived experiences in 12 countries and the European Union to explicate which notions of justice, social inclusion and exclusion, and citizenship emerge. By situating teacher education policy within a larger philosophical framework regarding the relationship between the state and conceptions of the "common good," this book analyzes the ideological and political desires of the state---how the state understands the common good, the future of national identity, and to what end schooling is imagined.

This helpful guide serves as an introduction to contemporary literary theory. Contemporary Literary and Cultural Theory: The Johns Hopkins Guide is a clear, accessible, and detailed overview of the most important thinkers and topics in the field. Written by specialists from across disciplines, its entries cover contemporary theory from Adorno to Žižek, providing an informative and reliable introduction to a vast, challenging area of inquiry. Materials include newly commissioned articles along with essays drawn from The Johns Hopkins Guide to Literary Theory and Criticism, known as the definitive resource for students and scholars of literary theory and for philosophical reflection on literature and culture.

This book provides the historical framework for the shift in Native American literary studies away from cultural analyses toward more politically inflected and motivated perspectives, and examines the key moments in this turn.