This book collects recent and creative theorizing emerging in the fields of curriculum studies and curriculum theory, through an emphasis on provoking encounters. Drawn from a return to foundational texts, the emphasis on an ‘encountering’ curriculum highlights the often overlooked, pre-conceptual aspects of the educational experience; these aspects include the physical, emotional, and spiritual dimensions of teaching and learning. The book highlights that immediate components of one’s encounters with education—across formal and informal settings—comprise a large part of the teaching and learning processes. Chapters offer both close readings of specific work from the curriculum theory archive, as well as engagements with cutting-edge conceptual issues across disciplinary lines, with contributions from leading and emerging scholars across the field of curriculum studies. This book will be of great interest to researchers, academics and post-graduate students in the fields of curriculum studies and curriculum theory.

How can Canadian educators begin to instill cultural sensitivity and social awareness in elementary and secondary school students? This vital text attempts to answer that question by bringing together literacy scholars and practicing teachers in a unique cross-Canadian exploration of children’s literature and social justice. Through reflection on the experience of teaching with various Canadian texts including picture books, novels, and graphic novels, the contributors behind Challenging Stories create a “pedagogy of discomfort” that will encourage both educators and their students to develop critical literacy skills. The compelling contributions to this collection highlight the complexities of teaching with texts that address issues of discrimination, historical marginalization, colonialism, racial and gender intolerance, sexual orientation, language, and cultural diversity. The authors offer first-hand insight into the possibilities and challenges of implementing curricular and pedagogical changes to promote equity and social justice in the classroom. Featuring the stories of participating teachers and an annotated bibliography of children’s literature, this invaluable resource will prove to be essential reading for current and future educators.

In this book, Johnston and Mangat consider ways in which particular postcolonial and multicultural literary texts are able to provide a space of cultural mediation for readers from various backgrounds. The studies described in the five chapters of the book explore the spaces of convergence of identity, culture and literature with students and teachers in high school contexts and undergraduates in university settings. In each study, readers are responding to texts that are culturally distant from their own literary and experiential histories. An objective of each study was to consider the nature of the cultural locations of the reader and the text, and the interstitial spaces between these locations. The book interrogates readers’ attempts to negotiate cultural difference in literary contexts and questions how this negotiation requires reading practices traditionally ignored in North American classrooms. The book will offer educators at the secondary and post-secondary levels rich material to draw upon for a rethinking of the school curriculum and will be of interest to scholars of postcolonial and literary studies.

Social justice language teacher education conceptualizes language teacher education as responding to social and societal inequities that result in unequal access to educational and life opportunities. In this volume authors articulate a global view of Social Justice Language Teacher Education, with authors from 7 countries offering a theorized account of their situated practices.

Taking up the idea that teaching is a political act, this collection of essays reflects on recent trends in ecocriticism and the implications for pedagogy. Focusing on a diverse set of literature and media, the book also provides background on historical and theoretical issues that animate the field of postcolonial ecocriticism. The scope is broad, encompassing not only the Global South but also parts of the Global North that have been subject to environmental degradation as a result of colonial practices. Considering both the climate crisis and the crisis in the humanities, the volume navigates theoretical resources, contextual scaffolding, classroom activities, assessment, and pedagogical possibilities and challenges. Essays are grounded in environmental justice and the project to decolonize the classroom, addressing works from Africa, New Zealand, Asia, and Latin America and issues such as queer ecofeminism, disability, Latinx literary production, animal studies, interdisciplinarity, and working with environmental justice organizations.

Resisting Divide-and-Conquer Strategies in Education: Pathways and Possibilities examines the ways in which divide-and-conquer strategies operate in the American public education system. In U.S. education, these mechanisms are endemic and enduring, if not always evident. Coordinated, strategic, well-funded, politically-viable campaigns continue to stoke fear, othering, villainization, and dehumanization of minoritized groups, pushing false and problematic narratives that inhibit progress toward social justice. Weaponizing hegemony and leveraging misinformation, reactionary agents and institutions seek to suppress truth, block access to democratic participation, and dismantle education and other sites of emancipatory possibility through the strength of divide-and-conquer mechanisms, pitting relatively disempowered groups against one another to preserve the dominant social order. Readers of this book will encounter conceptual and critical interrogations of divide and conquer. The text will help facilitate inquiry and engagement into how divide and conquer operates and how it can be resisted. It looks at the history of the phenomenon, as well as its current state, especially as it relates to education. What insights and lessons might we learn from a focused examination of divide and conquer, and what strategies of resistance are both possible and necessary for challenging it? This text is designed for undergraduate and graduate classrooms in education and social sciences. Part I, Ideology and Sociopolitical Contexts, dissects how divide-and-conquer mechanisms operate ideologically and sociopolitically. Part II, Policies and Practices, focuses on how divide-and-conquer mechanisms shape exclusionary U.S. educational policies and practices. Part III, Resistance and Liberation, documents efforts of liberatory communicative, curricular, and pedagogical possibilities. Each chapter concludes with a set of critical questions for reflection and engagement. Perfect for courses such as: Foundations of Education; Schools and Society; Schooling in America; History of Education; Philosophy of Education; Sociology of Education; Social Studies; Critical Theory in Education

This open access book provides a current view on education, equity and inclusion within the lens of education for a sustainable North. The first book published by the University of the Arctic Thematic Network for Teacher Education for Social Justice and Diversity (Including the North: A comparative study of the policies on inclusion and equity in the circumpolar North, 2019) highlighted policies of inclusion and equity in education in national and regional contexts. This new book explores in more depth the provision of education across the north, focusing on challenges and innovations in meeting the needs of diverse learners in remote and rapidly changing contexts. While many texts address issues of equity, inclusion and diversity, they are almost all focused on the global South, and miss the lessons that can be learned from Northern regions. This book offers an extended essay on teaching and learning through various perspectives and experiences with the aim of creating a more sustainable North. It is structured around two main themes: 1) Supporting Teachers for Diversity and Inclusion in the Classroom including consideration of language and identity issues, 2) Engendering community solutions to structural and geographical challenges in education in the circumpolar north.

Proceedings of the Conference on Christianity & Literature Northeast Regional Meeting, Nov. 2-3, 2012 King's College, Wilkes-Barre, PA Rev. Anthony R. Grasso, CSC, Ph. D., Editor

This book is the first of four edited volumes designed to reconceptualize teaching and learning in higher education through a critical lens, with this inaugural publication focusing on the fundamentals behind the experience. Chapter authors explore recent research on the cognitive science behind teaching and learning, dispel myths on the process, and provide updates to the application of traditional learning theories within the modern, diverse university. Through reviews of fundamental theories of teaching and learning, together with specific classroom practices, this volume applies social justice principles that have been traditionally seen as belonging to K-12 or adult education to higher education.