Education

Richard Clark’s observation that “…media are mere vehicles that deliver instruction but do not influence student achievement any more than the truck that delivers our groceries causes changes in our nutrition” is as misunderstood today as it was when first published in the Review of Educational Research in 1983. The convincing if little read scientific evidence presented by Clark has divided the field and caused considerable concern, especially among the providers of newer media for learning.

A collection of writings about the “media effects debate,” as it has come to be called, was published in 2001. Edited by Clark, Learning From Media was the first volume in the series “Perspectives in Instructional Technology and Distance Education.” The series editors are convinced that the writings of Clark and those who take issue with his position are of critical importance to the field of instructional technology, Thus, a revised, second edition of Learning From Media is now being offered.

The debate about the impact of media on learning remains a fundamental issue as new mediated approaches to teaching and learning are developed, and Clark’s work should be at the center of the discussion. The critical articles on both sides of this debate are contained in Learning From Media, 2nd Edition.

COVID-19 ravaged the United States and the rest of the world in a similar manner as a Category V hurricane would, leaving no one safe in its wake. Unlike a hurricane though, where appropriate provisions and supports are possible and past experiences can help to prepare, how do you prepare for something Volatile, Uncertain, Complex, and Ambiguous such as a worldwide pandemic? Imagine having your high school graduation and prom ripped away from you with little to no warning. Imagine being a 40+ year professor and being told that 'you are now going to teach hybrid with some students in the class and some students online,' or imagine that you were accepted into the 2nd most prestigious Ph.D. program in the United States and dream of being a professor and look for those face-to-face mentoring opportunities on campus. This book addresses the lived experiences of many throughout the onset, duration, and the after-effects of the COVID-19 pandemic, and helps prepare readers for the never ending storm ahead.

Our book offers guidance from leaders from different walks of life. We visit with a pastor who had to 'get creative' to combat the pandemic, examine how school board members have interacted with parents and other community stakeholders, hear from a current superintendent in a large school district in Maine, and other stakeholders impacted by COVID-19. Our message is cautious, yet optimistic, to prepare the reader for life in a VUCA world.

An important goal in contemporary educational psychology research is adolescent students’ development of higher-order thinking, which includes, among other things, that these students become competent and independent learners and problem solvers. This goal comes forth from the notion of education for life that emphasizes that students can direct their learning and problem solving of their own accord. Especially high-school students can encounter difficulties in independent learning and problem solving when they make the transition to higher education. To counter this, these students need to possess, among other things, metacognitive knowledge, which they may have insufficiently.

This book offers new insights about late adolescent students’ understanding of their metacognitive knowledge regarding learning and problem solving. It offers a description of a research project conducted to obtain a better understanding of the students’ abilities and views with respect to what their metacognitive knowledge encompasses, and how they attempt to develop, apply, and improve this knowledge regarding learning and the solving of mathematical and first-language problems in a more effective way of their own accord. Specifically, the results of the studies of the research project enable us to understand metacognitive knowledge better, in that it provides explanations about the students’ development of this knowledge across domains. This book offers further details in terms of providing evidence for theory building regarding metacognitive knowledge.

Moments that Matter in the Learning and Development of Children: Reflections from Educators explores the significant moments that unfold for young people in their schooling from the perspectives of teachers and school staff. Educators often reflect on “moments” as being a critical piece of their work with children. They can help make things better for students and produce a difference in lives. They are meaningful for young people, as well as consequential for teachers and school staff as they reflect on the outcomes of their efforts. Yet, as they are difficult to define and capture, these moments often are not studied for the value they offer. This book promotes awareness of these moments, as well as their connected meanings and possibilities. Recognizing the significance of moments extends an opportunity to situate schooling in broader contexts and to understand learners as whole embodied beings, engaged in social interactions, making sense of their surrounding world, and generating transformations in it. When educators reflect deeply about the possibilities connected to the moments they share with children, they recognize the multitude of opportunities that support their learning and development. They become “awake” to some of moments’ promises.

This volume gathers some of the methods being developed by evaluators from university settings and the private sector. While providing models and methods, these authors also raise larger questions, such as: "How can schools meet the challenge of educating all children without being limited by the educational legacy of a 'one size fits all' curriculum and normative testing?" More than documenting an "apprenticeship to gadgetry," evaluators are seeking to measure meaningful learning and changes in teaching - investigating approaches that are not possible or that are less accessible when students are in traditional classrooms without technology.

In this first volume of the series Research Methods for Educational Technology (RMET) the contributing authors draw upon examples of their work evaluating the implementation and development of educational technology as well as the impact of policies and programs in this field. Within this volume several authors have written about the implementation and evaluation of technology across cultures and national boundaries, pointing to an area of research that will rapidly expand in this decade. The concern for meeting the needs of policymakers is also apparent in several of these chapters, but there is tension between providing them with positive results to support their efforts and reexamining the questions they are asking and how these questions are developed. We know that evaluation is not the extended arm of public relations, and yet it becomes clear that evaluators are often asked to demonstrate a project "is successful" on the threat that the funding will be cut. While this decision-making process fits the timetable of the fiscal year, it does not acknowledge that evaluation can be formative and strengthen programs. This timetable also ignores the investment of time that is needed when implementing innovations like the Internet into teaching and learning.

Many of the authors included in this volume write from the context of evaluating federally-funded programs, and they provide valuable insight for future projects which are created and evaluated at the state-level. As technology initiatives are developed and funded outside of the federal arena, more evaluators will be called upon. From approaches developed from federally-funded projects, we can build upon these methods and models for evaluation within regional projects to answer questions related to budgets and accountability. As we answer these immediate questions, we can move forward to examine the long-term impact of technology, and the possibility that exercises in conformity will replace the adventure of human enlightenment for our children.

The goal of this book is to bring together the concept of self-efficacy theory with practical how-to strategies for both teachers and parents to use in heightening their students’ levels of self-efficacy. The book examines how self-efficacy theory relates to the acquisition of mathematical competence. The text also provides specific and practical how-to strategies for both teachers and parents in applying these principles to classroom mathematics instruction and activities. The self-efficacy practices and applications to mathematics are also suitable for families working with learners outside the school environment.

Acquiring mathematical skills requires more than knowing arithmetic tables, memorizing rules, and knowing proofs. It requires a basic belief that one is capable of obtaining this information, making sense of it, and applying and generalizing it in mathematical problems. In addition, a student must believe that obtaining these skills leads to a positive outcome, whether it is perceived to be a good or passing grade, comfort-level in tackling mathematical problems, being able to advance to the next mathematics course, being able to score highly on the math section of the SAT and/or be competitive for a desired job.

The ability of students to achieve and exceed grade level competence in mathematics is addressed through the lens of Albert Bandura’s Self-Efficacy Theory. This theoretical position states that one will persist in mastering a behavior (in this case, mastering mathematical principles and skills), in the face of obstacles or failures—to the extent that one believes he or she has the ability to do so, and that there is a desired outcome for doing so. The research literature on the role of self-efficacy in mathematic instruction is examined to demonstrate the validity of using this concept to increase student (and parent/teacher) confidence in learning and applying grade-appropriate math content. Specific teaching methodologies will be provided that infuse self-efficacy strategies for students. Lastly, teachers and parents are provided strategies to increase their own self-efficacy when it comes to conveying mathematics principles to their child or student, as well as strategies to assess their students’ level of self-efficacy over time.

Teaching and learning mathematics so that students achieve success at their grade level or above can present a variety of challenges. One barrier that affects learners is the belief that one is not capable of learning mathematics or not naturally talented in the field, not a “math person.” As a result, learners may not believe they are capable of a positive outcome for achieving mathematics success. This book is an important resource for pre-service and in-service teachers, as well as families in applying the theory of self-efficacy to support learners in becoming confident and assured in their ability to understand and apply mathematical principles and procedures. Coupled with classroom ready mathematics instructional strategies, the book provides readers with the background, tools and strategies needed to carry content success and confidence forward to remain persistent in solving all future mathematical problems.

This edited volume brings together conceptual and empirical work from various professional fields to inform a perspective on mentoring that goes beyond what is needed for today and orients toward what is needed for the future in order to promote healthy and productive organizations. This perspective is important because the pace of change in organizations is rapid--and increasingly so. Under conditions of rapid and on-going change, employees, students, and colleagues all are learners; and the learning needs of these adults demand meaningful and focused strategies for professional development. A major strategy with demonstrated value for fostering learning among adults is mentoring, which contributes both relational and structural support for such learning. This support helps organizations build communities of practice in which colleagues alternate the role of mentor and mentee by sharing different types of expertise and different perspectives on organizational challenges.

Chapters within the book focus on theoretical perspectives on mentoring, the connection between change and mentoring, the character of the leadership that mentoring entails, the developmental processes that mentees experience, the transformation of the mentee as a result of mentoring, the value of matching mentor and mentee styles, and the role of mentoring in organizational team building. Furthermore, some chapters explore the similarities and differences in individual versus group mentoring. And some of the contributions elaborate linkages among mentoring concepts and those used in related practices such as coaching and distributed leadership.

Leading in Change: Implications for School Leadership Preparation in England and the United States considers the ways in which school leadership, and its preparation has changed and developed in response to a rapidly changing educational scenario over the past decade. Drawing together leading thinkers, researchers, and practitioners in the field of school leadership and management this text takes an international perspective to consider what we know about school diversification, and school leadership preparation. Theoretically and conceptually informed, the contributors’ draw on recent empirical research studies and practitioner experience into school leadership preparation to examine how neoliberal and neoconservative policies are working in unison to privatize and corporatize public schools. It looks at how these policies have impacted the preparation of school leaders. In addition to information, critique, and analysis, multiple perspectives are provided that readers can draw upon to ensure aspiring school leaders are successfully prepared to lead in a diversified and corporate school context.

Leading in Change: Implications for School Leadership Preparation in England and the United States is essential reading for those who work, study, or research in k-12 school reform. Contributors examine the current research and best practices on present school leadership preparation programs in England and the US adding to the discourse on effective training methods for 21st century school leaders. Given the crucial importance of leadership for effective school performance, a number of strategies are proposed by chapter authors to help future school leaders operate successfully in demanding and changing times.

Exploring the field of peace education, the bulk of the book analyzes and critically evaluates contemporary schools and universities. Providing some successful and not-so-successful alternative school and university projects and experiments, the book proposes peace and development education as a life process and presents a whole array of non-conventional tools and approaches.

The unique feature of the book is that instead of putting emphasis on teaching peace and development, it insists on being and becoming what we teach. It makes a great textbook for education courses and programs, and a good handbook for peace educators and peace researchers around the world.

The authors of the book are two teachers who are not attached to any regular educational institution anywhere in the world and are qualified to say what they have said in the book. The two authors have played significant, instrumental roles in promoting peace studies.

The driving forces behind mathematics learning trajectories is the need to understand how children actually learn and make sense of mathematics—how they progress from prior knowledge, through intermediate understandings, to the mathematics target understandings—and how to use these insights to improve instruction and student learning. In this book, readers will come to understand what learning trajectories are, the research and methodology that are necessary for developing them, and gain insight into potential applications of learning trajectories.

A synthesis and research outcome in their own right, learning trajectories provide detailed description of instructionally-grounded development of mathematical concepts and reasoning from the perspective of student learning, and, overall, building on decades of accumulated experience in mathematics education research. However, their greater importance may lie in their potential as frameworks that contribute an unprecedented coherence across classroom instruction, professional development, standards, and assessment, by focusing squarely on conceptual understanding and reasoning instead of assessment-driven procedural knowledge. This potential was sufficiently compelling as an organizing framework to have been cited as a basis for the Common Core mathematics standards, the new mathematics learning expectations that are now consistent across most of the United States. (Among the conference attendees were the writers of the Common Core State Standards for Mathematics, at the beginning of the Standards drafting process.)

This book is an outgrowth of a conference on learning trajectories, hosted in 2009 at North Carolina State University, which examined research on learning trajectories. An overarching message of the chapters in this volume is that learning trajectories, by focusing on how children’s mathematical reasoning develops, are coming into their own as a rigorous underpinning for both instruction and accountability. Some of the learning scientists featured in this volume have played major roles learning trajectories’ evolution--from small-scale day-to-day conjectures by individual teachers, to systematic research endeavors that teachers and scientists alike can use to interpret standards, plan instruction, and formatively assess student work. The work in this volume will be of interest to mathematics educators, teachers, and professional development specialists.

Mentoring in Formal and Informal Contexts is a collection of invited works on mentoring in the many contexts in which it exists. Working with AHEA, the editors identified authors that have demonstrated experience and/or have published in this area. The book is arranged thematically (health care, education, the workplace, etc.) and further sub-themed as appropriate. Mentoring in Formal and Informal Contexts is important because it fills a unique niche in the field of adult education, extends the scope of AHEA to a larger audience, and offers a current volume for scholars and practitioners based on both research and practice-based research. The audience: This collection is appropriate for a wide variety of professors, researchers, practitioners, and students in the field of adult education.

Over the past 30 years our public school system has received an unprecedented amount of attention as this concerns methods of school reform and policy strategies for bringing about this reform. During the 1980s the emphasis of school reform was on transparency through school-community partnerships. Business and philanthropy, for example, became involved with issues of schooling that was unheard of prior to this period. The 1980s also gave rise to issues of school finance and student performance that went beyond traditional views that tended to focus on finance “adequacy” to views that focused more on school finance arrangements that would lead to actual “equitable outcomes” in student performance.

The 1990s witnessed the emergence of the comprehensive school reform movement whereby curriculum outsourcing occurred at rates that had never occurred before. With this movement, the role of teachers and school leaders in the creation of school curriculum diminished as school districts increasingly purchased vendor-related curriculum packages, which included teacher and leader training modules and methods of curriculum assessment. On the heels of the increasing tendency of school districts to outsource school curriculum to curriculum-vendors came a rise in demands for school accountability and school outcomes. This was particularly evident with the passage of No Child Left Behind Act (NCLB) (2001). NCLB was also developed within a political context that called for demands in the academic improvement of schools and school districts that housed historically disenfranchised students. These demands were particularly important as the nation experienced and continues to experience dramatic increases in student racial and ethnic diversity.

This volume, entitled, Leading Schools in Challenging Times: Eye to the Future, discusses varying types of school leadership in the context of key topics that have been at the center of on-going school reform in the United States. These topics include challenges, opportunities and issues associated with our administrator and teacher leadership pipeline, preparation and development; leadership and school finance reform, leadership and changing student and population demographics; leadership and the role of community; issues of leadership, policy, public accountability and school performance outcomes. The authors also explicate these issues with a view to the future and the status of leadership in our public school system.

The purpose of the volume is to explore the theory, development and use of visual displays and graphic organizers to improve instruction, learning and research. We anticipate five sections that address (1) frameworks for understanding different types of displays, (2) research-tested guidelines for constructing displays, (3) empirically-based instructional applications, (4) using displays to promote research and theory development, and (5) using displays to report test and research data to improve consumer understanding. Authors represent a variety of perspectives and areas of expertise, including instructional psychology, information technology, and research methodologies.

The volume is divided into four sections. Section 1 provides a conceptual overview of previous research, as well as the contents of the current volume. Section 2 includes theoretical perspectives on the design and instructional uses of visual displays from major theorists in the field. These chapters discuss ways that visual displays enhance general cognition and information processing. Section 3 provides eight chapters that address the use of visual displays to enhance student learning. These chapters provide examples of how to organize content and use visual displays in a variety of ways in the real and virtual classroom. Section 4 includes three chapters that discuss ways that visual displays may enhance the research process, but especially improved data display.

Middle Grades Research Journal (MGRJ) is a refereed, peer reviewed journal that publishes original studies providing both empirical and theoretical frameworks that focus on middle grades education. A variety of articles are published quarterly in March, June, September, and December of each volume year.

Just inside the school doors from the back parking lot, in the farthest reaches from the school entrance, there is a short corridor that leads to the hallway that houses Washington River High School’s two English Learning classrooms. These classrooms offer both safe sanctuary for the school’s growing population of Latinx students and a troublingly hidden space that allows most of the school and community to maintain the pretense of the generally prosperous, White, neighbor-helping-neighbor place of their myopic nostalgia. This Mayberry-like imaginary excludes the divisive sociopolitical battles of the last decade that have earned Washington River both local and national attention for a city ordinance that would fine landlords who rented to undocumented residents, a de jure policy that became de facto racial profiling. The English Learning classrooms are thus sites for the work of learning English and other academic subjects alongside the more abstract but no less important work of constructing citizen identities. In these spaces, adolescent Latinx newcomers negotiate and assert complicated claims about how they get to be of Washington River High School, the wider community of Washington River, and of the United States.

As established residents and newcomers interact with each other (or not) in Washington River, they confront people who are linguistically, culturally, racially, and socially different from themselves. The polarized and contentious sociopolitical context of the United States in the wake of Donald Trump’s election to the United States presidency in 2016 provides the backdrop to this nine-chapter book. The book centers the experiences of newcomer students as they construct citizen identities within the microcontext of their classroom and school and the macro-context of a changing and polarized United States. While this is an account of the local context of Washington River, the issues raised—welcome, unwelcome, belonging, and claiming rights—are not particular to Washington River. As part of the changing sociocultural landscape of the Midwestern United States, in which historically distinct groups come together in common spaces, Washington River High School offers an example of the concurrently familiar and uncomfortable ways that new receiving communities in the New Latino Diaspora (Hamann & Harklau, 2015; Hamann, Wortham, & Murillo, 2002) “host newcomers” (Lamphere, et al., 1992) within the common and complex institution of high school.

Democratic decline in the United States and globally, a lack of confidence in political institutions and an increasingly violent and divisive political climate raise many questions for the state of political learning and civic engagement. A decade ago, a task force commissioned by the United States Department of Education called on colleges and universities to affirm their missions to educate for democracy. Relatively few have made the investment, though dozens of higher education associations and organizations have publicly committed their support to prepare students to address the persistent public issues they are inheriting.

While there has been a recent upward spike in rote civic knowledge and historically high youth voting rates, the United States has seen a decline in political rights and civil liberties and has been listed as a backsliding democracy. Since 2010, state legislatures have passed laws making it harder to vote, with access to the ballot increasingly dependent on which party controls the state legislature. Meanwhile, substantial dysfunction and hyperpartisanship in Congress, concerns over the impartiality of the judiciary and limited accountability and oversight of the executive branch have contributed to the loss of institutional capacity to address public problems and to declining public confidence in political institutions.

These trends coincide with problematic rhetoric and growing scrutiny from public officials on how colleges and universities educate students on public issues, particularly those centered on class, race, ethnicity and social justice. Issues of free speech and expression have been further nationalized following a high-profile hearing of the House Committee on Education and the Workforce that questioned the presidents of Harvard, Massachusetts Institute of Technology and University of Pennsylvania about antisemitism on their campuses and as campus protests regarding the Israeli-Palestinian conflict have been met with heavy-handed responses. These episodes serve as loud warning shots to colleges and universities across the country. Academic freedom and freedom of speech - core tenets of a liberal education - are at risk. Can higher education step up and meet the moment? Collectively, contributors to this volume - who come from a broad range of institutions, experiences and perspectives - provide critical research and analyses, as well as innovative approaches for how higher education can fulfill its public role and contribute to building the democratic societies we need.

The perspective espoused by this volume is that collaboration among universities, schools, and communities is a crucial element in ensuring the provision of optimal learning environment for both im/migrant children and their parents. Chapter authors share their practice and theorizing regarding the many questions that arise when schools and universities collaborate with communities and build supportive structures to nurture literacy among im/migrant students. Enlightened teaching and culturally aware approaches from teachers engender support and cooperation from parents. Enlightened leadership is a constant thread through all the endeavors that are chronicled by contributors, as are the implications for socially just outcomes of successful implementation of inclusive pedagogies.

Writing about the Children Crossing Borders study which began in 2003, Tobin (2019) asserted that “the social and political upheavals surrounding migration has (sic) put increasing pressure on the ECEC [early childhood education and care] sector to build bridges between the host and newly arrived communities” (p. 2). Tobin recalled that the original grant proposal for the Children Crossing Borders described young migrant children as “the true transnationals, shuttling back and forth daily between the cultures of their home and the ECEC [programs]” (p. 1)—programs staffed by well-intentioned individuals who nevertheless may “lack awareness of im/migrant parents’ preferences for what will happen in their children’s ECEC program” (p. 2). To extrapolate from Tobin’s summary of the findings of Children Crossing Borders, for both the true transnationals (the children) and their parents, “the first and most profound engagement they have with the culture and language of their new host country” (p. 1) may well be mediated by a teacher who is unaware of the intricacies of the community.

Middle Grades Research Journal (MGRJ) is a refereed, peer reviewed journal that publishes original studies providing both empirical and theoretical frameworks that focus on middle grades education. A variety of articles are published quarterly in March, June, September, and December of each volume year.

This book is about the learner side of the teaching and learning equilibrium, centering on the educational experiences and perspectives of Chinese students in the United States. These students ranged from kindergarteners, adolescents, undergraduate, graduate, to adult learners, across the educational spectrum. Because Chinese students are the largest cohort among all international students in the U.S., and their prior educational experiences and perspectives in China are so different from those in the U.S., exploring who they are, what their learning experiences have been, and how their learning needs can be better met, may not only allow U.S. educators to teach them more effectively, but also help the educational community in both countries better learn about and from each other.

The chapters in the book examine the constructs of learner privilege and responsibility in the teaching and learning equation, cultural and linguistic challenges and transitional adjustments, self-concept, learning strategies, comparison and contrast of differences and similarities between Chinese and American students, and/or critical reflections on significant issues confronting Chinese learners. While each chapter is situated in its own research literature and connects with its own teaching and learning practices, all of them are united around the overarching themes of the book: the experiences and perspectives of diverse learners from Chinese backgrounds in the United States. The chapters also flesh out some of the larger theoretical/pedagogical issues between education in China and in the United States, provide useful lenses for rethinking about and better understanding their differences and similarities, as well as offer pertinent suggestions about how the educational community in both countries may benefit from learning about and from each other.

This volume gathers some of the methods being developed by evaluators from university settings and the private sector. While providing models and methods, these authors also raise larger questions, such as: "How can schools meet the challenge of educating all children without being limited by the educational legacy of a 'one size fits all' curriculum and normative testing?" More than documenting an "apprenticeship to gadgetry," evaluators are seeking to measure meaningful learning and changes in teaching - investigating approaches that are not possible or that are less accessible when students are in traditional classrooms without technology.

In this first volume of the series Research Methods for Educational Technology (RMET) the contributing authors draw upon examples of their work evaluating the implementation and development of educational technology as well as the impact of policies and programs in this field. Within this volume several authors have written about the implementation and evaluation of technology across cultures and national boundaries, pointing to an area of research that will rapidly expand in this decade. The concern for meeting the needs of policymakers is also apparent in several of these chapters, but there is tension between providing them with positive results to support their efforts and reexamining the questions they are asking and how these questions are developed. We know that evaluation is not the extended arm of public relations, and yet it becomes clear that evaluators are often asked to demonstrate a project "is successful" on the threat that the funding will be cut. While this decision-making process fits the timetable of the fiscal year, it does not acknowledge that evaluation can be formative and strengthen programs. This timetable also ignores the investment of time that is needed when implementing innovations like the Internet into teaching and learning.

Many of the authors included in this volume write from the context of evaluating federally-funded programs, and they provide valuable insight for future projects which are created and evaluated at the state-level. As technology initiatives are developed and funded outside of the federal arena, more evaluators will be called upon. From approaches developed from federally-funded projects, we can build upon these methods and models for evaluation within regional projects to answer questions related to budgets and accountability. As we answer these immediate questions, we can move forward to examine the long-term impact of technology, and the possibility that exercises in conformity will replace the adventure of human enlightenment for our children.

In a most timely volume addressing many of the connections among current fiscal and employment crises to adult education, Learning for Economic Self-Sufficiency highlights the problems and challenges that low-literate adults encounter in various environments. Moreover, this book presents strategies for addressing the chronic illiteracy among low-income workers. The power of this volume is that the reader gains a holistic view of the complexities of educating a population of low-literate adult learners from various life conditions. From language literacy issues in corrections, the workplace and access to higher education, and migrant workers literacy learning barriers, to technology literacies, and consumerism myths, Learning for Economic Self-Sufficiency goes far deeper than prior volumes in exploring the complex scope of issues face by low-income, low-literate adults as they seek learning for economic self-sufficiency.

The overall objective of the book is to help readers explore economic self-sufficiency for low literate and low-income adults from various contexts and the role of adult and higher education in developing these learners for greater economic independence. Noting that literacy is only a first step to economic, mental, and physical health as well as responsible citizenship, each chapter provide specific case examples and recommendations to educators and trainers of adults for creating learning programs and environments to facilitate the development of a more literate and economically stable population.

This guidebook is designed to be the middle-level teacher’s friend in addressing a wide variety of questions regarding the use of educational and instructional technologies. It can serve as a companion and guide through the myriad challenges and opportunities related to the effective use of technology in one’s classroom and school.

A sample of middle level U.S. teachers provided us with detailed answers about their experiences with using technology in their teaching. Specifically, they shared their challenges, barriers, ideas, and suggestions for working successfully with administrators, technology specialists, students, fellow teachers, and parents when teaching with technology. We have organized the teachers’ experiences and recommendations according to each stakeholder.

Rather than recommending or reviewing specific educational technology companies, applications, or tools, we provide a large number of strategies that are “built to last” and should be applicable regardless of the specific tool under consideration. We assume that it doesn’t ultimately matter what the tool or technology is that you’re using—it’s how and why you’re using it for teaching and learning that will determine whether it is successful or not. The “how” and “why” aspects encompass the built-to- last strategies included in this guidebook.

High stakes testing, standards, and accountability politics is taking us away from the importance of the affective domain in curriculum development. This critical learning domain is often an unrecognized and infrequently considered topic in the literature. Through this book we extend the current knowledge base by addressing a curriculum model developed in the 1980s. We add a 2012 knowledge base as we delineate the role of self-perceptions in school-related learning, how middle level curriculum affects self-perceptions, and the type of curriculum planning which enhances self-perceptions and improves learning in the cognitive, affective, and psychomotor domains.

The combination of sound psychological principles and practical teaching and curriculum suggestions with an empirical basis makes the book attractive to both higher education and local school professional libraries. In the former it will serve as the primary text in graduate and advanced undergraduate middle level education programs and practices courses. It might also be a primary text in courses or workshops in affective education or other experiences which emphasize affective, values, and self-concept. It also has potential as a supplementary text in undergraduate educational psychology courses. At the in-service level this book could be used as a workshop resource or as a professional reference for middle level teachers, administrators, curriculum workers, and supervisors.

Our interest in young adolescents and their school setting coincides with the fourth edition of This We Believe (NMSA, 2010). The self-enhancing school is characterized by “from-to” statements; for example, “from” avoiding parents “to” working with parents. Using theory and research we discuss the costs of staying in the “from” position and the benefits derived from moving to the “to” position. By combining educational psychology and curriculum development we make a unique contribution to middle grades curriculum developers.

This monograph lays out a qualitative, collective case study designed to assess how students in a secondary Latina/Latino Literature class began to think dialectically about issues of social justice. By using various methods of data collection, I ascertained how the students’ thoughts and perceptions of Latinas/Latinos in this country changed over the course of the study. I introduced the students to both print and nonprint texts (e.g., news articles, documentary films) which, when presented through Karl Marx’s dialectical method, helped them see social justice issues, such as racism, poverty, and subjugation, more clearly and critically.

After analysis, several important themes emerged from the data: stereotyping and invisibility in the media, immigration, the notion of power, racism and discrimination, education, anger and frustration, and questioning. By the end of the Latina/Latino Literature class, all of the students in the study were able to identify particular social justice issues, explain the historical context which framed the current debates (e.g., immigration reform), and articulate their opinions of the issues. Each student participant started to use social justice terminology, which I introduced and used frequently in class (e.g., equity), and these words became a part of the students’ everyday vocabularies. Furthermore, by the completion of the class, the student participants began to realize that they had their own individual voices and could help transform societal issues in order to make the United States more equitable for all.

Middle Grades Research Journal (MGRJ) is a refereed, peer reviewed journal that publishes original studies providing both empirical and theoretical frameworks that focus on middle grades education. A variety of articles are published quarterly in March, June, September, and December of each volume year.

The intent of this playbook is to enable PK-12 teachers, teachers-in-training, counselors, and coaches to use character and peace education lessons to enrich their curriculum and help students expand their knowledge and understanding of themes and content in each of the book’s chapters.

The lesson plans will help students discover, learn, reflect on, and make connections between and among each of the chapters in the book, such as Character Development, Peace Awareness, Special Skills, Self-discipline, Respect, Responsibility, Relationships, and Conflict Resolution.

This playbook is designed in such a way that you may take any one of the lessons and implement it at any time you find a teachable moment or want to focus on a particular topic or theme. The lessons have been designed to help you and your students "reflect” upon and make "connections" between the content and activities of each lesson.

At the end of each chapter is a stop-sign symbol suggesting one “read/reflect/respond.” The playbook is rich in references, research, and resources.

Multilevel Modeling Methods with Introductory and Advanced Applications provides a cogent and comprehensive introduction to the area of multilevel modeling for methodological and applied researchers as well as advanced graduate students. The book is designed to be able to serve as a textbook for a one or two semester course in multilevel modeling. The topics of the seventeen chapters range from basic to advanced, yet each chapter is designed to be able to stand alone as an instructional unit on its respective topic, with an emphasis on application and interpretation.

In addition to covering foundational topics on the use of multilevel models for organizational and longitudinal research, the book includes chapters on more advanced extensions and applications, such as cross-classified random effects models, non-linear growth models, mixed effects location scale models, logistic, ordinal, and Poisson models, and multilevel mediation. In addition, the volume includes chapters addressing some of the most important design and analytic issues including missing data, power analyses, causal inference, model fit, and measurement issues. Finally, the volume includes chapters addressing special topics such as using large-scale complex sample datasets, and reporting the results of multilevel designs.

Over the past twenty years, educational policy has been characterized by top-down, market-focused policies combined with a push toward privatization and school choice. The new Every Student Succeeds Act continues along this path, though with decision-making authority now shifted toward the states. These market-based reforms have often been touted as the most promising response to the challenges of poverty and educational disenfranchisement. But has this approach been successful? Has learning improved? Have historically low-scoring schools “turned around” or have the reforms had little effect? Have these narrow conceptions of schooling harmed the civic and social purposes of education in a democracy?

This book presents the evidence. Drawing on the work of the nation’s most prominent researchers, the book explores the major elements of these reforms, as well as the social, political, and educational contexts in which they take place. It examines the evidence supporting the most common school improvement strategies: school choice; reconstitutions, or massive personnel changes; and school closures. From there, it presents the research findings cutting across these strategies by addressing the evidence on test score trends, teacher evaluation, “miracle” schools, the Common Core State Standards, school choice, the newly emerging school improvement industry, and re-segregation, among others.

The weight of the evidence indisputably shows little success and no promise for these reforms. Thus, the authors counsel strongly against continuing these failed policies. The book concludes with a review of more promising avenues for educational reform, including the necessity of broader societal investments for combatting poverty and adverse social conditions. While schools cannot single-handedly overcome societal inequalities, important work can take place within the public school system, with evidence-based interventions such as early childhood education, detracking, adequate funding and full-service community schools—all intended to renew our nation’s commitment to democracy and equal educational opportunity.

Middle Grades Research Journal (MGRJ) is a refereed, peer reviewed journal that publishes original studies providing both empirical and theoretical frameworks that focus on middle grades education. A variety of articles are published quarterly in March, June, September, and December of each volume year.

This work captures the voices of TFA novices who offer candid accounts of their experiences in Becoming Teach For America Teachers. Previously unanswered questions are addressed: Why do recent college graduates apply to Teach For America? How are they recruited, trained, and hired? How do they learn the culture (s) of the community, schools, grade level, curriculum, and children they teach? Is there a “culture” of the TFA organization? What recommendations do they offer to TFA donors, policy-makers, future corps members and the public?

Woven into this book, are perspectives from mentors who worked alongside TFAers, administrators who hired them, corporate C.E.O.’s who supported them, and policies (both local and national) that privileged TFA over non-TFA teachers. Finally, a compelling series of eyewitness narratives introduces each chapter’s theme, documented from the author’s own, “Notes from the Field.” These accounts offer rich, descriptive vignettes that present the challenges TFAers faced, as they occurred. Schools reflect the multitiered and often non-level playing field that comprises America’s educational landscape. Learning on Other People’s Kids: Becoming a Teach For America Teacher provides readers a glimpse into the corps member experience in a rare ethnographic account.

With new student assessments and teacher evaluation schemes in the planning or early implementation phases, this book takes a step back to examine the ideological and historical grounding, potential benefits, scholarly evidence, and ethical basis for the new generation of test based accountability measures. After providing the political and cultural contexts for the rise of the testing accountability movement in the 1960s that culminated almost forty years later in No Child Left Behind and Race to the Top, this book then moves on to provide a policy history and social policy analysis of value-added testing in Tennessee that is framed around questions of power relations, winners, and losers.

In examining the issues and exercise of power that are sustained in the long-standing policy of standardized testing in schools, this work provides a big picture perspective on assessment practices over time in the U. S.; by examining the rise of value-added assessment in Tennessee, a fine-grained and contemporary case is provided within that larger context. The last half of the book provides a detailed survey of the research based critiques of value-added methodology, while detailing an aggressive marketing campaign to make value-added modeling (VAM) a central component of reform strategies following NCLB. The last chapter and epilogue place the continuation of test-based accountability practices within the context of an emerging pushback against privatization, high stakes testing, and other education reforms.

This book will be useful to a wide audience, including teachers, parents, school leaders, policymakers, researchers, and students of educational history, policy, and politics.

Although cultural diversity in classrooms is hardly a new phenomenon, its influences on teaching and learning are increasingly discussed. Cultural diversity could lead to better learning and democracy outcomes. However, it also poses challenges for educators and schools. For example, research has revealed marked cultural differences in motivation, learning attitudes, thinking styles and school achievement. Attempts have been made to assure teaching and learning quality by designing standardized curricula and giving standardized tests. However, it is questionable whether standardized tests could capture the diverse aptitudes and skills students with different cultural experiences bring to the classroom. It is also question-able whether a standardized curriculum would lead to positive learningoutcomes for all.

In 1998, we convened a conference in the University of Hong Kong, and invited experts from different parts of globe to discuss how to apply psychology to enhance learning and teaching quality. Probably because of the cultural diversity of the conference participants, multicultural education emerged as one of the dominant themes in the conference. For example, in the Opening Address, Robert Sternberg argued for the importance of cultural sensitivity in ability testing. In another keynote address, Martin Maehr discussed the implications of motivation research for designing an optimal achievement environment for culturally diverse students. Professor Sternberg’s paper is included in this volume, and Professor Maehr’s article was published in a previous volume we edited (Student Motivation: The Culture and Context of Learning, Plenum, 2001).

The contributors of this volume include psychologists and education researchers from Africa, Asia, Australia and North, and some of them have extensive experiences in multicultural education. Despite their diverse cultural and professional background, the contributors agree that to meet the challenges posed by cultural diversity, educators need to have the sensitivity to multiplicity of student abilities in aptitude and achievement assessment.

(Orginally published in 2005)

This monograph represents the work of many mathematics teacher educators explored the content knowledge and pedagogical knowledge that make up the middle grades learning experience. The middle grades remains a unique period of time in students' development and as such provides both challenges and promising opportunities for those who prepare teachers of middle grades mathematics. This work is the final product of an exciting NSF supported endeavor that gathered leaders in the field and explored curriculum, case studies of program models at several institutions, as well as issue papers on such key topics as assessment, technology, and preparing culturally responsive teachers. AMTE hopes this monograph will stimulate discussion and bring attention to this critical period of schooling.

The dangers of age segregation and the benefits of age integration are examined. Each generation should be recognized as an essential source for learning. Harmony will increasingly depend on general awareness of how other age groups interpret events, respect for values that guide their behavior, responsiveness to their needs and concerns, consideration of their criticisms and solutions, and acknowledgement of their contributions.

This book describes: (a) personality assets and mental abilities to focus learning at each stage of development; (b) obstacles to anticipate and overcome; (c) a rationale to make reciprocal learning common; (d) research findings which identify generational learning needs; and (e) benefits of providing lifelong education. Six stages are explored: infancy and early childhood (birth-age 6); middle and later childhood (ages 6-10); adolescence (ages 10-20); early adulthood (ages 20-40); middle adulthood (ages 40-60); and older adulthood (age 60+). Some outcomes of lifelong learning include self-control, patience, integrity, resilience, persistence, problem solving ability, acceptance of criticism, and generativity. The intended audiences for this book are professionals working with individuals and families.

International Advances in Education: Global Initiatives for Equity and Social Justice is an international research monograph series of scholarly works that primarily focus on empowering students (children, adolescents, and young adults) from diverse current circumstances and historic beliefs and traditions to become non-exploited/non-exploitive contributing members of the global community. The series draws on the research and innovative practices of investigators, academics, and community organizers around the globe that have contributed to the evidence base for developing sound educational policies, practices, and programs that optimize all students' potential. Each volume includes multidisciplinary theory, research, and practices that provide an enriched understanding of the drivers of human potential via education to assist others in exploring, adapting, and replicating innovative strategies that enable ALL students to realize their full potential. This volume provides the reader with promising policies and practices that promote social justice and educational opportunity for the many displaced populations (migrants, asylum-seekers, refugees, and immigrants) around the globe. The volume is divided into four sections that offer: (1) insights into the educational integration of displaced children in industrialized nations, (2) methods of creating pedagogies of harmony within school environments, (3) ways to nurture school success by acknowledging and respecting the cultural traditions of newcomers, and finally (4) strategies to forge pathways to educational equity. Overall, this volume contributes to the body of knowledge on equitable educational opportunities for displaced youth and will be a valuable resource for all who seek to enable the displaced a place at the political, economic, and social table of civil society.

Political rhetoric and popular concern about the presence in the United States, Canada, and Western Europe of immigrants from predominantly-Muslim societies has remained largely detached from the actual reality of the lives and the contributions of these immigrants and their children. The studies presented here seek to correct this ignorant reaction by presenting objective information from schools that such immigrants have created and sustained. The first looked at seven explicitly-Islamic secondary schools, focusing on the formation of character and American citizenship, while the other studied public charter schools established by immigrants from Turkey, focusing on academic outcomes.

Do faith-based schools cause social divisions? Do their students fail to become good citizens who can cooperate with those of other faiths? This familiar accusation against Catholic, and more recently against Evangelical, schools, is now directed against Islamic schools in Western societies. The studies presented here offer objective information from schools established by Muslim immigrants across the United States, with reassuring results.

Life Stories: Exploring Issues in Educational History Through Biography consists of 13 essays, each of which offers perspective on one of four key questions that have long drawn scholarly attention: What should schools teach? Who gets to decide? How should educators adapt to a changing world to provide opportunity for all students? How should educators’ experiences be interpreted for future audiences?

The book is written to commemorate the thirtieth anniversary of the International Society for Educational Biography and its journal, Vitae Scholasticae. All of the essays have appeared in the journal, and they are set in a variety of educational environments that span 174 years. Taken together, the essays demonstrate the important contributions that biography can make to educational history.

Life Stories would be of interest to educational biographers and historians for use in their own scholarly work. Instructors might also consider assigning Life Stories as a required text in educational history courses.

This book culminates five years of extensive field-based inquiry with teachers and principals in four reforming school contexts. It arises from living alongside teachers and principals, entering into their realities, engaging them in conversations, seeing school life through their eyes, and employing the words and images they use to wrap around their experiences. It involved thinking narratively about schools as sites of high drama within which teachers and principals negotiate meaning as knowledgeable and knowing human beings. It gave primacy to everyday events taking shape on school landscapes. It meant creating spaces and devoting enormous amounts of time to observing and listening hard to what teachers and principals say and do when reform initiatives become personally lived in context--from their points of view.

This edited book contains chapters related to the excellent management and leadership practices currently taking place at historically Black colleges and universities (HBCUs) in the context an economic recession. Each chapter highlights successful operations at HBCUs from management, leadership, and administrative standpoints in a manner that is not comparative of or overly reliant upon dominant literature, standards, or theories. Amongst the deficit-laden literature regarding the fiscal, accreditation, and governance status of HBCUs are few studies highlighting those institutions successfully operating in a difficult economy. This book fills that gap of information by offering chapters on excellent management and leadership practices occurring at a variety of HBCUs today.

This primer is about learning how to teach. As its name suggests, it provides a basic introduction to what is involved in becoming an effective, efficient, and efficacious educator. The targeted audiences are (a) preservice teachers (PST) (i.e., nonprofessional student teachers enrolled in a university Bachelor of Education degree), (b) early-career (novice) inservice teachers (c) or any educator for that matter who wants to build or bolster their essential foundation for teaching. The primer is unabashedly oriented to a synthesis of the technical (how-to) aspects of teaching because without prowess in these skills, even the most dedicated and committed teacher may not be effective and efficient let alone efficacious. Although teaching is both a science and an art, this primer is about the science of teaching. Other books focus on teaching as inquiry, thinking educators, reflective educators, and the sociocultural/political aspects of teaching.

The book adopts a before-during-after class approach. It addresses how to (a) prepare lessons before a class (learning styles, learning objectives, lesson planning, and learning environments); (b) deliver lessons during a class (instructional strategies, questioning strategies, and classroom management); and (c) evaluate learning after the class (student assessment and evaluation strategies, and teacher self-reflection). This basic tool kit is further underscored with details about the larger constructs of (d) developing courses, modules, and units from which daily lessons emerge. Higher level notions of (e) educational philosophies, (f) curriculum theories and (g) curriculum development approaches are also included to illustrate how they, as the educational context, shape teachers’ pedagogies.

The interplay between sociopolitical forces and economic agendas becomes apparent when one examines the June 28, 2007 United States Supreme Court Decision, Parents Involved In Community Schools v. Seattle School District . In a reversal of the 1954 Brown Decision, the United States Supreme Court ruled that public schools could not use race as a factor when assigning children to public schools. Given demographic shifts, globalization, economic instability, and ideological shifts, the reversal was expected. However, it is essential that policymakers, educators, and other stakeholders consider the impact of attending segregated schools on the achievement gap that continues to exist between minority groups and European Americans attending resegregated neighborhood schools.

This book will focus on the test score gaps between African American and European American students. The achievement gaps between these two groups will be analyzed will be presented and elaborated. Additionally, the authors will analyze how changes in school characteristics such as: racial composition; school composition; school expenditures, and socio economic level of neighborhoods affect achievement gap trends in the Norfolk School District. An examination of the achievement gap trends in an urban school district will serve to better inform public policy and school reform efforts.

The specific goals of this book are to describe the achievement gap between minority African-American students and European-American students in the Norfolk school district and to present strategies utilized by urban districts to narrow the gap. One unique feature of this book is that it provides a data-driven research-based analysis of the achievement gap between minority and European-American students.

This book embraces the idea of listening to and learning from students. Although many educational theorists have long argued that incorporating children’s perspectives about teaching and curriculum has the potential for increasing students’ interest and participation in learning, their radical perspectives are still ignored or dismissed in theory and practice. Through featured essays, historical excerpts, and provocative poetry, this collection provides research literature and inquiry ideas that ought to be part of educational debates, policy discussions, and decision makings. Articulated through thoughtful prose and discerning analysis, youth, teachers, and scholars featured in this collection illuminate the power and promise of not only listening to and learning from students, but also acting upon the insights of students. This book calls for the 21st century educational workers--teachers, educators, parents, community workers, administrators, and policy makers--to perceive students as massive reservoirs of knowledge that invigorate possibilities for teaching, learning, and curriculum in the contested educational landscape.

With new student assessments and teacher evaluation schemes in the planning or early implementation phases, this book takes a step back to examine the ideological and historical grounding, potential benefits, scholarly evidence, and ethical basis for the new generation of test based accountability measures. After providing the political and cultural contexts for the rise of the testing accountability movement in the 1960s that culminated almost forty years later in No Child Left Behind and Race to the Top, this book then moves on to provide a policy history and social policy analysis of value-added testing in Tennessee that is framed around questions of power relations, winners, and losers.

In examining the issues and exercise of power that are sustained in the long-standing policy of standardized testing in schools, this work provides a big picture perspective on assessment practices over time in the U. S.; by examining the rise of value-added assessment in Tennessee, a fine-grained and contemporary case is provided within that larger context. The last half of the book provides a detailed survey of the research based critiques of value-added methodology, while detailing an aggressive marketing campaign to make value-added modeling (VAM) a central component of reform strategies following NCLB. The last chapter and epilogue place the continuation of test-based accountability practices within the context of an emerging pushback against privatization, high stakes testing, and other education reforms.

This book will be useful to a wide audience, including teachers, parents, school leaders, policymakers, researchers, and students of educational history, policy, and politics.

This volume continues IAP’s dedication to the diverse field of international adult learning in the tradition of those books related to the We Learn and AAHE conferences. It is an edited and refereed collection and part of the larger body of scholarly publications associated with professional organizations such as AAACE, MAACE, We Learn, Women Studies Association, African Studies Association, Gender Studies Association and Global Studies network.

Literacy as gendered discourse is important because it fills a unique niche in the canon of studies that investigate the challenges and prevailing norms associated with women and literacy studies, adult learning and development. It also offers a current volume for scholars and practitioners based on both research and practice-based research. This collection is appropriate for a wide variety of professors, researchers, practitioners, and students in the field of adult literacy studies, women/gender and development studies.

In order to create this valuable contribution to the literacy and women’s studies literature, international scholars have contributed their research in which they study and explore the lives of women in various countries. Their work establishes findings that help to illuminate and analyze the different manifestations of women’s global experiences through the unique lens of local respondents or through their own lens as academic researchers. In these ways the results provide powerful insight and useful lessons applicable to the fields of gender study, women’s studies, adult literacy, development studies, international studies, etc..

Teaching is not merely a technical process- it is one that requires creative and inspirational thinking, not only on the part of students but for teachers themselves as artful, reflective beings. The purpose of this book is to provide educators with creative experiences which unlock their imaginative potential so they can re-envision their curriculum to promote active learning, culturally relevant pedagogy, and differentiated instruction.

This book guides the reader through a series of experiences intended to tap into the right side of the brain, and provide educators opportunities to re-imagine their existing curriculum in new ways. Through this re-imaging (or re-envisioning) of the creative potential within themselves, teachers can redesign their curricula in ways that best meet the needs of their learners, schools, and communities. This book emphasizes creativity in teaching as a collaborative effort. The experiences and ideas presented in this book are intended to inspire small groups or whole communities (including schools) to work together and support each other in their creative efforts. Creativity does not just exist for individuals in isolated contemplation but resides instead in the relational work that community members create together toward a shared vision. In order to encourage imaginative students who will have the capacities to see the world, not merely as it is, but as it could be, we need to encourage teachers to tap into their creative imaginative capacities to teach as well. Such work cannot be performed in isolation. Creative social change requires that we imagine together that which we cannot do alone.

In striving to reduce racial achievement gaps, schools and youth development programs are increasingly turning to youth mentoring programs. But how to ensure success? Here, accomplished educators Graig Meyer and George Noblit reveal how one such program challenged institutional racism and eliminated persistent achievement disparities in a local school system that boasts a national reputation for excellence. The authors share personal lessons, strategic guidance, and detailed practical advice for education and community leaders seeking to create successful youth mentoring programs. Their story, backed by research, offers real-world perspective on the important work of challenging systemic racism in schools. Meyer and Noblit demonstrate how mentoring and advocacy come together in a strengths-based program that boosts academic success and post-secondary enrollment for youth of color, while also creating change to benefit all students in a school system.

As educators in the United States and Europe develop national history standards for K-12 students, the question of what to do with national history canons is a subject of growing concern. Should national canons still be the foundation for the teaching of history? Do national canons develop citizenship or should they be modified to accommodate the new realities of globalization? Or should they even be discarded outright? These questions become blurred by the debates over preserving national heritages, by so-called 'history wars' or 'culture wars,' and by debates over which pedagogical frameworks to use. These canon and pedagogical debates often overlap, creating even more confusion. A misconceived “skills vs. content” debate often results. Teaching students to think chronologically and historically is not the same as teaching a national heritage or a cosmopolitan outlook. But what exactly is the difference? Policy-makers and opinion leaders often confuse the pedagogical desirability of using a ‘framework’ for studying history with their own efforts to reaffirm the centrality of national identity rooted in a vision of their nation's history as a way of inculcating citizenship and patriotism. These are the issues discussed in this volume.

Today's students are citizens of the world and must be taught to think in global, supranational terms. At the same time, the traditionalists have a point when they argue that the ideal of the nation-state is the cultural glue that has traditionally held society together, and that social cohesion depends on creating and inculcating a common national culture in the schools. From an educational perspective, the problem is how to teach chronological thinking at all. How are we to reconcile the social, political and intellectual realities of a globalizing world with the continuing need for individuals to function locally as citizens of a nation-state, who share a common past, a common culture, and a common political destiny? Is it a duty of history education to create a frame of reference, and if so, what kind of frame of reference should this be? How does frame-of-reference knowledge relate to canonical knowledge and the body of knowledge of history as a whole?

This is the first in the book series on educational research sponsored by Chinese American Educational Research and Development Association (CAERDA, www.caerda.org).

The purpose of Literacy Instruction for Students with Emotional and Behavioral Disorders: Research-Based Interventions for Classroom Practice is to provide educators with effective, research-based interventions to improve the literacy skills of students with emotional and behavioral disorders (EBD) in K-12 classrooms. This book identifies, defines, and describes a number of research-based literacy interventions, and discusses their effectiveness as supports for students with EBD. Also included are examples of and guidance for how educators can implement the interventions in the classroom. Topics on integrating the use of technology-based instruction, culturally and linguistically diverse learners, and considerations for working with students with EBD in alternative educational settings are discussed as well.

Sponsored by the Middle Level Education Research SIG of AERA, this inaugural volume in the new IAP book series, The Handbook of Resources in Middle Level Education, focuses on the contributions and impact of the leaders of the modern middle school movement. Contained with this volume are the edited transcripts from 20 extensive interviews of the most influential leaders of the middle level movement, including such notable figures as William Alexander, Donald Eichhorn, John Lounsbury, Conrad Toepfer, and Gordon Vars. This historic volume will be an invaluable resource to proponents, advocates, and students of the middle school concept and developmentally appropriate education for young adolescents.

This book documents and compares the social organization and academic arrangement of instruction in two remaining modern, public one-teacher schools in rural Nebraska. Neither school is an educational intervention and both stand far removed from reform consciousness, in both the minds of reformers and in those of the people who inhabit them. Each school's teacher does what comes naturally to her or him and the two teacher engage in remarkable distinct practices. One creates an especially efficient form of traditional, conservative teaching that echoes strongly the old country school recitation. The other sees his work as encouraging his students ""to think"" and has created a conversation-based pedagogy to achieve this. For both teachers the school size and rural circumstance play into what they believe they can and cannot do and profoundly shape their teaching practices. This book asks simply: How do the teachers in these small schools manage to teach? The research reported here is concerned with how teachers and students organize themselves and ""do school"" that is small is scale. If school size is emerging as some important variable in student achievement and school improvement, and smallness is some key to that variable, then it stands to reason that one-teacher schools still have something to tell us. While the primary audience for this book is teachers, teacher educators and education policymakers, others, such as parents, might pick up this book and see some images of schooling that are both familiar and strange to them. The book offers portraits of instruction that can offer readers something to think with as we consider what it takes to improve school life for our own and other people's children.

The current volume, entitled Motivation and Engagement in Various Learning Environments, includes research studies from different domains related to students’ motivation, engagement and learning, parents’ experiences, and teachers’ involvement with novel interdisciplinary programs. Different perspectives are presented in this collection of work, namely those of students, teachers, and parents. This volume compiles research on motivation and engagement in various domains, such as Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics (STEM), Literacy, Design, and Computer Science. A particular focus is placed on interdisciplinarity, as learning occurs across multiple domains, and in various contexts, such as formal and informal education. Additionally, the current volume provides examples of studies discussing different modalities in designing and implementing innovative educational programs, inquiry-based learning, and useful applications for instruction. Motivation and Engagement in Various Learning Environments appeals to a wide audience, including researchers, teachers, parents, students, and education specialists.

Most education and social science research methodology texts offer detailed and often prescriptive advice to higher degree students generally following established paradigmatic frameworks for qualitative and/or qualitative research. Lived Experience and Educational Research Methodology: Reflections on the PhD Journey offers instead a set of retrospective narrative accounts of the complex lived process of developing a thesis project in the field of education. Challenging myths, stereotypes and related linear research imaginaries, the focus of this book is both the particular, messy, located research problems that tend to drive education research as well as how differently positioned recent graduates situated their academic writing in relation to their diverse ethical and personal commitments, theoretical and political passions, methodological choices and community membership.

Each chapter in this book is a narrative account of the how-did rather than the how-to of qualitative social science dissertation writing in the field of education. Lived Experience and Educational Research Methodology: Reflections on the PhD Journey also demonstrates how doctoral writing reflects both experiential politics, but also geographic location. The authors in this collection are graduates of a small, technologically hybrid, rural-regional doctoral program which is both unique to its place, but also representative of a growing number of non-metropolitan higher degree programs explicitly designed to provide broad access to populations that are geographically and otherwise marginalized from/in established metropolitan institutions.

This volume focuses on research related to mathematics curriculum. But rather than focusing on results of research, it focuses on lessons learned about conducting research on curriculum, whether about design and development, analysis of curriculum in the form of official standards or textbook instantiations, teacher intentions related to curriculum implementation, or actual classroom enactment. For scholars interested in curriculum research, the volume offers lessons about conducting curriculum research that have been learned by others engaged in such work, including frameworks, tools, and techniques, as well as challenges and issues faced, with solutions to address them. Sharing lessons from authors of different countries strengthens the broader mathematics research community and provides insights that can help researchers make important strides forward in research on mathematics curriculum.

There is an urgent need to provide academic professionals with individual, institutional, and contextual accounts of their careers and career-making endeavors. An individual account makes academicians think about what they do and how they might do it better. An institutional account makes academicians reflect upon the organizational environment in which they function and ponder what they might do to improve it. A contextual account connects academicians and their work to knowledge, the knowledge enterprise, and the larger social structure so that they know and understand the impact they and their career-making efforts have on themselves, academia, and general social processes.

This book examines academic careers and career-making activities with respect to their main aspects, milestones, and general pathways. In content, it divides into four identifiable parts. Part I focuses on professional preparation. It examines education, degree, reeducation, job search, and job change. Part II centers on organizational employment. It investigates position, research, teaching, service, and tenure. Part III revolves around professional networking. It looks into publication, conference presentation, application for grants and awards, and membership in academic associations. Part IV rises above specific issues. It explores general career pathways and overall scholarly identity.

Moving Towards Action: Centering Anti-Racism in Leadership Learning speaks to communities of people within and surrounding higher education and specifically, leadership educators, partners, researchers, administrators, and student affairs practitioners. The text expands thinking on the concepts of socially and racially just leadership education by unpacking the ways in which individual, structural, and systemic racism can be embedded in curricular, co-curricular, community-based, and unstructured leadership courses and programs. By centering how implicit and explicit racism are woven into leadership education, the text asks leadership educators to critically explore their own anti-racist approaches, reimagine their leadership program outcomes, and think more broadly about how leadership education can be more anti-racist and move towards action with equitable and just outcomes. Beatty and Manning-Ouellette assemble the text for all audiences to gain a deeper, more complex perspective on racism, anti-racist frameworks, and leaving leadership education better than when they arrived.

The text is organized in such a way that leadership educators can take away new practices for navigating personal struggle, fragility, and resistance around topics of racism that occur in both curricular and co-curricular collegiate leadership programs. Beatty and Manning-Ouellette arrange the text in three sections: 1) Theoretical and Conceptual Considerations of Anti-Racism Approaches to Leadership Learning, 2) Innovations in Research & Practice, and 3) Moving Towards Action with contributions from leadership educators and scholars. Therefore, the text serves as an entry point to dialogue, think, and coalesce about anti-racism in leadership learning and explore what possibilities exist for us to move toward anti-racist praxis and pedagogy in leadership education.

It is said that crisis is the true test of a leader. The leaders who contributed to this volume and their peers at HBCUs nationwide were tested in unprecedented ways by the events of 2020 and 2021. The crisis caused by COVID-19 was unique in its wide-ranging effects, its duration, and the need for a multi-pronged and comprehensive response. This was a test to challenge even the strongest leaders. Accustomed to challenges and to adversity, the leaders of our nation’s HBCUs stepped up, marshalled their forces, and developed and implemented plans to mitigate and to combat the impact of COVID-19 on their institutions and on African American higher education.

While each president who contributed to this volume brought their own unique perspective, skills, and experience to the crisis on their particular campus, they confronted common challenges. Racial disparities in the United States affect every aspect of life, and the pandemic magnified and exacerbated those disparities. The racial disparities that we see in our health and health care in this country are evident in the numbers of African Americans, including college students, who contracted the virus and who suffered significant health ramifications and even death. At the same time, COVID-19 forced our nation online and the racial and economic digital divide which some thought had been bridged turned out to be wider than ever. As jobs were lost, particularly in service industries and other key sectors, people of color, especially Black and Brown people, took a disproportionate economic hit.

Not only did HBCU leaders have to develop and implement plans to mitigate COVID’s deadly threat to the health and safety of their students, faculty, and staff, they also had to address the challenges associated with trying to provide remote learning for students who lacked computers and internet access at home; transporting students back home who didn’t have the resources to pay for transportation; and in some cases finding housing for students who could not return home or didn’t have a home or sufficient food, among other issues.

Living at the Intersections: Social Identities and Black Collegians brings together 21 diverse authors from 14 different institutions, including our nation’s most prestigious public and private universities, to advance the use of intersectionality and intersectional approaches in studying Black students in higher education.

Chapters cover a diversity of topics, ranging from spirituality to sexuality and masculinity, from Black students at HBCUs to those in STEM majors, and a host of issues related to race, class, gender, and other identities. Authors draw upon a wealth of data including national surveys, interviews, focus groups, narratives, and even historical research. A smooth blend of anthropology, historiography, psychology, sociology, and intersectional approaches from multiple disciplines, this book breaks new ground on the “who, what, when, where, and how” of intersectionality applied to social problems affecting Black collegians. The authors go beyond merely stating the importance of intersectionality in research, but they also provide countless examples, recommended strategies, and tools for doing so. This book is an important resource for higher education and student affairs professionals, scholars, and graduate students interested in intersectionality and Black collegians.

Between 1980 and 2005, 45 states were involved in lawsuits around equity of funding and adequacy of education provided to all students in the state. Indeed, this investigation could have included any cities in America, and the themes likely would have been the same: Lower funding and resources, disproportionate numbers of teachers and school leaders who do not look like the students they serve, debates over the public’s responsibility to provide fair and equitable education for all students in the jurisdiction, implicit biases from the top to the bottom and a resegregation of schools in America.

Integration for Black families was never about an idea that Black students were better off if they could be around White students, it was about the idea that Black students would be better off if they could have access to the same education that White students had — but residential segregation still enables de facto school segregation, when it isn’t coded into policy.

For the overwhelming majority of Black students, they’re stuck in segregated, underperforming schools. Schools where the teachers are dedicated to the mission, but where the cities and districts and states have failed to uphold their basic responsibility to maintain the upkeep of the schools and provide enough desks for each child and current textbooks.

This book is not a comprehensive history of moral education in American schools. Rather, it is an episodic history that deals with selected periods, movements, and individuals throughout the course of American education history from the time of colonial Massachusetts in the 17th century up to present times. It is almost entirely devoted to public schools. It is a tale that is fraught with friction and controversy, even legal challenge. Given the nature of the topic, and the passion with which it has been and is currently viewed, it will ever be thus.

Radford University was founded as a Normal School for teachers in 1910 and has remained a leader in teacher education ever since. Today, the School of Teacher Education and Leadership is defined by our strong partnerships with public schools and our diverse programs that prepare teachers and administrators to serve children from birth through high school. The voices of undergraduate students are often silenced and omitted from scholarly literature beyond serving participants in research studies.

This volume legitimizes the voices and life experiences of Radford University undergraduate teacher education students as emerging authorities on the subject of teacher education. Contributors employ a critical storytelling methodology to illuminate the ways in which classroom practices of teachers impacted them academically, socially, and emotionally. The editors hope that these stories, anecdotes, and analysis will be valuable to preservice and classroom teachers who are engaged in educating Pre-K through 12 students.

Digital literacy practices have often been celebrated as means of transcending the constraints of the physical world through the production of new social spaces. At the same time, literacy researchers and educators are coming to understand all the ways that place matters. This volume, with contributors from across the globe, considers how space/place, identities, and the role of digital literacies create opportunities for individuals and communities to negotiate living, being, and learning together with and through digital media.

The chapters in this volume consider how social, cultural, historical, and political literacies are brought to bear on a range of places that traverse the urban, rural, and suburban/exurban, with emphasis placed on the ways digital technology is used to create identities and do work within social, digital, and material worlds. This includes agentive work in digital literacies from a variety of identities or subjectivities that disrupt metronormativity, urban centrism (and other -isms) on the way to more authentic engagement with their communities and others. Featuring instances of research and practice across intersections of differences (including, but not limited to race, class, gender, sexuality, ability, and language) and places, the contributions in this volume demonstrate the ways that digital literacies hold educative potential.

Improving the use of evidence in teacher preparation is one of the greatest challenges and opportunities for our field. The chapters in this volume explore how data availability, quality, and use within and across preparation programs shed light on the structures, policies, and practices associated with high quality teacher preparation. Chapter authors take on critical questions about the connection between what takes place during teacher preparation and subsequent outcomes for teachers and students – which has remained a black box for too long. Despite a long history of teacher preparation in the U.S. and a considerable investment in preservice and in-service training, much is still to be learned about how pre-service preparation impacts teacher effectiveness.

A strong empirical basis that informs how specific aspects of and approaches to teacher preparation relate to outcomes for graduates and their preK-12 student outcomes will provide a foundation for improved teaching and learning. Our book responds to stakeholders’ collective responsibility to students and teachers to act more deliberately. Issues of data availability and quality, the uses of data for improvement, priorities for future research, and opportunities to promote evidence use in teacher preparation are discussed throughout the volume to inspire collective action to push the field towards more use of evidence. Chapters present research that uses a variety of research designs, methodologies, and data sources to explore important questions about the relationship between teacher preparation inputs and outcomes.

Lack of knowledge about immigrant and minority students’ learning outside school has contributed to the difficulties educators encounter when trying to embrace cultural diversity. Many educators do not have the knowledge base about immigrant and minority children’s culturally-specific ways of learning in nonschool settings. Given the changing cultural landscapes in today’s schools, we have an imperative to develop more situated understandings of immigrant and minority children’s literacy learning experiences embedded in the social and cultural fabrics of their everyday lives outside school. This volume of research meets this important need in the field. It not only focuses on the complexity of literacy learning in diverse home contexts, but also examines how literacy is practiced and lived in multiple ways within families of various backgrounds including those of Asian, African and African-American, Hispanic, White European and mixed heritages. In addition, it explores how these various culturally embedded home practices will inform school education and policy making in a larger socio-political context. The book makes an original and significant contribution to the fields of literacy education and school, home, and community partnerships.

Since immigrant and minority families’ literacy activities and the cultural contexts of their practices at home are not readily accessible to school personnel, program developers, policy makers or even researchers and educators, this book will serve as an important resource for teachers, practitioners, undergraduate and graduate students, teacher educators, and university researchers who are in the fields of literacy education, family literacy and new literacy studies, minority and/or immigrant education, and second language education.

In striving to reduce racial achievement gaps, schools and youth development programs are increasingly turning to youth mentoring programs. But how to ensure success? Here, accomplished educators Graig Meyer and George Noblit reveal how one such program challenged institutional racism and eliminated persistent achievement disparities in a local school system that boasts a national reputation for excellence. The authors share personal lessons, strategic guidance, and detailed practical advice for education and community leaders seeking to create successful youth mentoring programs. Their story, backed by research, offers real-world perspective on the important work of challenging systemic racism in schools. Meyer and Noblit demonstrate how mentoring and advocacy come together in a strengths-based program that boosts academic success and post-secondary enrollment for youth of color, while also creating change to benefit all students in a school system.

Being a “student” has been and remains a highly desirable status for young people and their families in Kyrgyzstan. “Giving their children education” (dat detyam obrazovaniye) – meaning “higher education” - has become an imperative for many parents, even in a time of serious economic and social decline. The numbers of universities and university enrollments have increased dramatically – in fact quadrupled – since Kyrgyz independence from the former USSR in 1991. All this is happening just as the overall system of secondary education has basically collapsed. School quality and outcomes of learning for most Kyrgyz youth have become increasingly marginal – even as those who run universities widely proclaim quality improvements and desires/intentions to join international higher education space. The book thus seeks to explain the manifest versus the latent functions of higher education in Kyrgyzstan. Relying on explanations of lived experience, the research attempts to explain how the seeming contradiction of a declining resource and intellectual base of universities yet appeals to parents and students as the system continues to expand with easily compromised accountability measures. The study approaches these topics by seeking to define what it now means to be a university student in Kyrgyzstan, as well as what many state universities have turned into" in contrast in contrast to how they were remembered by those who attended and taught within them two decades ago. The work also considers a number of private and inter-governmental universities which are allowed to operate in Kyrgyzstan and award both state and international diplomas. I portray the different organizational and ideological pursuits of these universities as they contrast with those of the state universities.

Lost in Transition is an empirical look at higher education reform in Kyrgyzstan, employing several methodological strategies. These include a student survey given to over 200 students at five different universities; surveys and interviews with senior instructors and administrators at these same institutions; and a two-year case study of a student and faculty cultures and subcultures at one particular national university particular university faculty in one of the larger state universities. The case study utilized participant observation, ethnographic interviews, document analysis, and social media.

As the educational landscape of America continues to evolve and diversify, college faculty and administrators must be cutting edge in their approaches to create a variety of educational experiences with a greater level of multicultural cognizance. Unlike in previous generations, higher education in the 21st Century is no longer a luxury reserved for the elite and wealthy, but is an increasing necessity for access to labor markets. Community colleges and universities are working hard to respond to the demands of the labor market, by attempting to provide skills for jobs that may not yet exist.

Colleges and universities should aim to make all of their students feel welcome and a part of the campus being committed to celebrating differences. Additionally, filling faculty seats with varied races, cultures, perspectives and identities will aid in providing mentors and role models everyone can relate to. These are some of the vital steps toward building a campus community that helps students develop a sense of belonging that allows them to persist and thrive in college.

The scholarship in this volume illustrates the state of multicultural education on college and university campuses. The authors bridge foundational knowledge with contemporary understandings; making the work both accessible for novices and beneficial for the authorities on multicultural education. This volume provides thoughtful discourse on issues ranging from the racial and ethnic diversity of the student and faculty bodies, and important topics like disability issues, to different educational contexts such as community colleges, HBCUs and HSI institutions.

(sponsored by the Educational Statisticians, SIG)

The use of multilevel analyses to examine effects of groups or contexts on individual outcomes has burgeoned over the past few decades. Multilevel modeling techniques allow educational researchers to more appropriately model data that occur within multiple hierarchies (i.e.- the classroom, the school, and/or the district). Examples of multilevel research problems involving schools include establishing trajectories of academic achievement for children within diverse classrooms or schools or studying school-level characteristics on the incidence of bullying. Multilevel models provide an improvement over traditional single-level approaches to working with clustered or hierarchical data; however, multilevel data present complex and interesting methodological challenges for the applied education research community.

In keeping with the pedagogical focus for this book series, the papers this volume emphasize applications of multilevel models using educational data, with chapter topics ranging from basic to advanced. This book represents a comprehensive and instructional resource text on multilevel modeling for quantitative researchers who plan to use multilevel techniques in their work, as well as for professors and students of quantitative methods courses focusing on multilevel analysis. Through the contributions of experienced researchers and teachers of multilevel modeling, this volume provides an accessible and practical treatment of methods appropriate for use in a first and/or second course in multilevel analysis. A supporting website links chapter examples to actual data, creating an opportunity for readers to reinforce their knowledge through hands-on data analysis. This book serves as a guide for designing multilevel studies and applying multilevel modeling techniques in educational and behavioral research, thus contributing to a better understanding of and solution for the challenges posed by multilevel systems and data.

Moving Towards Action: Centering Anti-Racism in Leadership Learning speaks to communities of people within and surrounding higher education and specifically, leadership educators, partners, researchers, administrators, and student affairs practitioners. The text expands thinking on the concepts of socially and racially just leadership education by unpacking the ways in which individual, structural, and systemic racism can be embedded in curricular, co-curricular, community-based, and unstructured leadership courses and programs. By centering how implicit and explicit racism are woven into leadership education, the text asks leadership educators to critically explore their own anti-racist approaches, reimagine their leadership program outcomes, and think more broadly about how leadership education can be more anti-racist and move towards action with equitable and just outcomes. Beatty and Manning-Ouellette assemble the text for all audiences to gain a deeper, more complex perspective on racism, anti-racist frameworks, and leaving leadership education better than when they arrived.

The text is organized in such a way that leadership educators can take away new practices for navigating personal struggle, fragility, and resistance around topics of racism that occur in both curricular and co-curricular collegiate leadership programs. Therefore, the text serves as an entry point to dialogue, think, and coalesce about anti-racism in leadership learning and explore what possibilities exist for us to move toward anti-racist praxis and pedagogy in leadership education.

Motivation to engage in reading is a consistent problem for students in general and boys in particular. To solve this problem, we often seek answers from everyone but those we are hoping to motivate. We read the latest article on motivation and think we have finally come up with the recipe that will motivate all of the boys in our class. When it doesn’t work for everyone, we go back to the drawing board and try something else until we finally understand that all boys are motivated by different things.

That is the basis of this book: nothing will work for ALL boys, but there are ways to equip teachers to find out how the boys in their classes are motivated. It provides them with a direction to go once they’ve established the needs of their students and offers suggestions for how to meet individual motivational needs. Each chapter addresses a different motivational need, providing background information and practical classroom applications.

Volume V of The Handbook of Research in Middle Level Education highlights action research in middle grades education. As a method of inquiry, action research compels educators to take action and think reflectively about those actions in order to effect positive educational change (Mills, 2000). Teachers, administrators, university professors, and other professionals conduct action research in different ways to examine classroom practices and school issues. Educational action researchers initiate their inquiries in various contexts: alone, in small peer teams, or larger faculty groups (Zeichner, 2001). Using individual and collaborative approaches, educators gain insights into teaching and learning processes. As evidenced throughout this volume, action research in the middle grades occurs in a variety configurations. This volume examines the dynamic ways that preservice and inservice teachers, school administrators, university faculty, and educational consortia use

action research.

Multiliteracies: Beyond Text and the Written Word emphasizes literacies which are, or have been, common in American culture, but which tend to be ignored in more traditional discussions of literacy—specifically textual literacy. By describing multiliteracies or alternative literacies, and how they function, we have tried to develop a broader understanding of what it means to be literate in American culture. The 39 topical essays/chapters included in this work represent a sampler of both old and new literacies that are clearly at work in American culture, and which go beyond more traditional textual forms and models.

Multiliteracies: Beyond Text and the Written Word asks: How is the experience of students changing outside of traditional schools, and how do these changes potentially shape the work they do, how they learn, and the lives they lead in schools and less formal settings? This work assumes that our increasing diversity in a postmodern and increasingly global society brings with it demands for a broader understanding of what it means to be literate. Multiliteracy “literally” becomes a necessity. This work is a guidebook to the new reality, which is increasingly so important to schools and the more general culture.

In 2015-16, the Middle Level Education Research Special Interest Group (MLER SIG), an affiliate of the American Educational Research Association, undertook a collaborative project—the development of a new middle grades education research agenda. The purpose of the MLER SIG Research Agenda (Mertens et al., 2016) was to develop a set of questions that would guide the direction of middle grades education research. Ideally, this Research Agenda would serve to prompt discourse and generate research projects that could contribute to the middle grades knowledge base. Members of the MLER SIG identified eight research areas: (a) young adolescent development, (b) cultural responsiveness, (c) special populations, (d) educator development, (e) curriculum, (f) social and emotional learning, (g) digital technologies, and (h) school structures. This volume contains the extensive literature reviews and subsequent research questions for each of the research topics.

Today, the meaning of literacy, what it means to be literate, has shifted dramatically. Literacy involves more than a set of conventions to be learned, either through print or technological formats. Rather, literacy enables people to negotiate meaning. The past decade has witnessed increased attention on multiple literacies and modalities of learning associated with teacher preparation and practice. Research recognizes both the increasing cultural and linguistic diversity in the new globalized society and the new variety of text forms from multiple communicative technologies. There is also the need for new skills to operate successfully in the changing literate and increasingly diversified social environment.

Linguists, anthropologists, educators, and social theorists no longer believe that literacy can be defined as a concrete list of skills that people merely manipulate and use. Rather, they argue that becoming literate is about what people do with literacy—the values people place on various acts and their associated ideologies. In other words, literacy is more than linguistic; it is political and social practice that limits or creates possibilities for who people become as literate beings. Such understandings of literacy have informed and continue to inform our work with teachers who take a sociological or critical perspective toward literacy instruction.

Importantly, as research indicates, the disciplines pose specialized and unique literacy demands. Disciplinary literacy refers to the idea that we should teach the specialized ways of reading, understanding, and thinking used in each academic discipline, such as science, mathematics, engineering, history, or literature. Each field has its own ways of using text to create and communicate meaning. Accordingly, as children advance through school, literacy instruction should shift from general literacy strategies to the more specific or specialized ones from each discipline. Teacher preparation programs emphasizing different disciplinary literacies acknowledge that old approaches to literacy are no longer sufficient.

Literacy in Teacher Preparation and Practice: Enabling Individuals to Negotiate Meaning introduces the reader to a collection of thoughtful, research-based works by authors that represent current thinking about literacy across disciplines and the preparation of teachers to enter classrooms. Each chapter focuses on teaching guided by literacies across disciplines and the preparation of teachers who will enter classrooms to instruct the next generation of students.

Dr. Jones returned to the high school classroom after 15 years in higher education, most recently as an Associate Dean. This text chronicles his journey into his new teaching career. The premise of the text is framed on the attributes of a relational pedagogy. As such, the book discusses the relationships that Dr. Jones developed throughout the academic year. In this capacity, relational pedagogy allows the reader a unique lens through which to view the schooling process in this metropolitan southern town.

In the book, Jones examines topics such as standardized testing, racism, sexuality, cheating, among other topics, through a critical theory paradigm. In doing so, Jones is able to interweave theoretical concepts within the daily actions of the schooling process. As such, the text is a unique reconceptualization of schools and the purpose of schools.

Lack of knowledge about immigrant and minority students’ learning outside school has contributed to the difficulties educators encounter when trying to embrace cultural diversity. Many educators do not have the knowledge base about immigrant and minority children’s culturally-specific ways of learning in nonschool settings. Given the changing cultural landscapes in today’s schools, we have an imperative to develop more situated understandings of immigrant and minority children’s literacy learning experiences embedded in the social and cultural fabrics of their everyday lives outside school. This volume of research meets this important need in the field. It not only focuses on the complexity of literacy learning in diverse home contexts, but also examines how literacy is practiced and lived in multiple ways within families of various backgrounds including those of Asian, African and African-American, Hispanic, White European and mixed heritages. In addition, it explores how these various culturally embedded home practices will inform school education and policy making in a larger socio-political context. The book makes an original and significant contribution to the fields of literacy education and school, home, and community partnerships.

Since immigrant and minority families’ literacy activities and the cultural contexts of their practices at home are not readily accessible to school personnel, program developers, policy makers or even researchers and educators, this book will serve as an important resource for teachers, practitioners, undergraduate and graduate students, teacher educators, and university researchers who are in the fields of literacy education, family literacy and new literacy studies, minority and/or immigrant education, and second language education.

This installment in the book series "Advances in Service-Learning Research", edited by Shelley H. Billig and Marshall Welch, focuses on New Perspectives in Service-Learning.

Today, we live in changing times and how we respond to these changes creates some uneasiness in our daily lives. Some of these changes reflect demographic shifts in power and paradigm in the United States, while others reflect the reckless assumption that our problems are insurmountable. Multiculturalism Still Matters in Education and Society: Responding to Changing Times urges us to collaborate, consult, and cooperate for our common good. It rightly emphasizes that multiculturalism will always matter in whatever we do in our complex world. In addition, it challenges us to continue to see differences as strengths that must be valued in dealing with our students, educational professionals, leaders, and communities. Finally, this book inspires us to expand our discourses, create avenues for “hearty” conversations, look for ways to make invisible voices visible, and help culturally and linguistically diverse (CLD) and vulnerable populations to maximize their fullest potential.

Through insiders’ perspectives and narratives, this edited collection provides insight into the lived experiences of recent graduates of various English Applied Linguistics and/or TESOL doctoral programs in North America. The authors document how their personal and professional identities intersected during their doctoral studies and how these doctoral programs, as learning environments, supported them in their professional development and dissertation research. As such, their insider perspectives and narratives are of special value to those contemplating pursuing such a program, or are in progress towards their own degree, as well as the faculty members who advise and support these doctoral students. Chapters focus on topics immediately relevant to success and persistence in a doctoral program, such as developing a network of mentors, establishing a work-life balance, and professional socialization, among others.

All authors are recent graduates of their programs who have been intentionally selected for their recent memories in navigating the process. At a time when doctoral program persistence declines at the intersection of students’ gender and racial background (see Okahana & Zhou, 2019) there is a pressing need to share the insights and lived experiences of those less commonly featured in narratives of the successful doctoral scholar. This need is especially true among TESOL professionals who will teach and learn in diverse, global settings throughout their careers following their graduation. This book contributes to that need, and it is an essential resource for scholars in TESOL/English Applied Linguistics and other similar doctoral programs.

(sponsored by the Educational Statisticians, SIG)

The use of multilevel analyses to examine effects of groups or contexts on individual outcomes has burgeoned over the past few decades. Multilevel modeling techniques allow educational researchers to more appropriately model data that occur within multiple hierarchies (i.e.- the classroom, the school, and/or the district). Examples of multilevel research problems involving schools include establishing trajectories of academic achievement for children within diverse classrooms or schools or studying school-level characteristics on the incidence of bullying. Multilevel models provide an improvement over traditional single-level approaches to working with clustered or hierarchical data; however, multilevel data present complex and interesting methodological challenges for the applied education research community.

In keeping with the pedagogical focus for this book series, the papers this volume emphasize applications of multilevel models using educational data, with chapter topics ranging from basic to advanced. This book represents a comprehensive and instructional resource text on multilevel modeling for quantitative researchers who plan to use multilevel techniques in their work, as well as for professors and students of quantitative methods courses focusing on multilevel analysis. Through the contributions of experienced researchers and teachers of multilevel modeling, this volume provides an accessible and practical treatment of methods appropriate for use in a first and/or second course in multilevel analysis. A supporting website links chapter examples to actual data, creating an opportunity for readers to reinforce their knowledge through hands-on data analysis. This book serves as a guide for designing multilevel studies and applying multilevel modeling techniques in educational and behavioral research, thus contributing to a better understanding of and solution for the challenges posed by multilevel systems and data.

Living Faithfully is for anyone interested in education and education policy, whether parent, community member, teacher, student of leadership or policy maker. It looks at school leadership and reform in an alternative way, following the story of change at Washington School, a troubled grades 5-6 center in a small town in Western Oklahoma. Not only does the book address a neglected population, the more than 1/3 of the nation’s children who go to school in small towns and rural areas, it uses the occasion to invert thinking about school reform. It argues that in today's policy climate where guaranteed, standard outcomes are touted as goals of education, leadership schemes, even those designed to challenge topdown, bureaucratic models, are quickly co-opted to produce the appearance of learning. Prevailing leadership theories beg the question of who is being transformed and to what end, failing to challenge assumptions and dominant ideas of contemporary education and leadership thinking.

Drawing on Philip Phenix’s idea of the faithful life, the book proposes an alternative way forward. Phenix talks about connections between school and life. According to Phenix, the faithful life is concerned with the normative question of what is good, true, right, just, beautiful, and holy. This is not the vocabulary of current education policy. But it describes the kind of community created at Washington School despite its history of failure. And it describes what most families want for their children whether they live in the city or country, America or elsewhere: an education that matters.

The Race To The Top (RTTP) federal education policy fostered a new generation of state tests. This policy advocated adopting common core standards which set a higher level of learning targets for students in the US K-12 education. These standards are intended to assess higher order thinking skills and prepare students ready for college and career. In the meantime, they are aligned with those for international assessments which keep US students abreast of their international peers. Furthermore, the new generation of state tests requires the use of technology enhanced items to align student assessments with student learning environment. Computer technology is indispensable to accomplish this goal. Computer based tests related to common core standards are different from previous state computer based tests in two important aspects, one is that the current version requires accurate assessment of students along all ability levels and the other is that it promotes the use of an efficient test delivery system, essentially the use of computerized adaptive assessment in K-12 state testing programs. In addition to providing summative information about student learning, the new common core tests add formative assessment component in the whole assessment system to provide timely feedback to students and teachers during the process of student learning and teacher instruction. As with its predecessor, the new assessment policy also holds teachers and schools accountable for student learning.

With the requirements by the new federal education policy, states formed two consortia: Partnership for Assessment of Readiness for College and Careers (PARCC) and Smarter-Balanced Assessment Consortium (SBAC) to develop assessments in alignment with the new common core standards. This book is based on the presentations made at the Thirteenth Annual Maryland Assessment Research Center’s Conference on “The Next Generation of Testing: Common Core Standards, Smarter-Balanced, PARCC, and the Nationwide Testing Movement”. Experts from the consortia and nationwide overviewed the intention, history and the current status of this nationwide testing movement. Item development, test design, and transition from old state tests to the new consortia tests are discussed. Test scoring and reporting are specially highlighted in the book. The challenges related to standard setting for the new test, especially in the CAT environment and linking performance standards from state tests with consortium tests were explored. The issues of utilizing the consortium test results to evaluate students’ college and career readiness is another topic addressed in the book. The last chapters address the critical issue of validity in the new generation of state testing programs.

Overall, this book presents the latest status of the development of the two consortium assessment systems. It addresses the most challenging issues related to the next generation of state testing programs including development of innovative items assessing higher order thinking skills, scoring of such items, standard setting and linkage with the old state specific standards, and validity issues. This edited book provides a very good source of information related to the consortium tests based on the common core standards.

One may view the idea of the nation as a fundamental "assumption" which defines the manner in which modern man perceives, and experiences, social reality. Thus, just as persons in earlier historical periods tended to possess an absolute faith in the reality of God, so, we may suggest, do persons in contemporary cultures tend to possess an absolute faith in the reality of the nation.

With the publication of this book, the scholarly journal Issues in Education: Contributions from Educational Psychology is moving to a book series publication format. Carlson (University of California-Riverside) and Levin (University of Arizona) present material on aspects of the No Child Left Behind legislation.

Making the Connection: Data-Informed Practices in Academic Support Centers for College Athletes is practical and ideal for those who seek to use research to inform their individual and organizational practices. This volume is primarily intended for upper-level undergraduate and graduate students, though scholars, researchers, teachers, practitioners, coaches, athletics administrators, and advocates of intercollegiate athletics will also find it useful. It comprises a series of chapters that cover a wide range of evidence-based approaches designed to enhance the practices of those who work closely with college athletes. Given the breadth of the field overall, this single volume is not exhaustive, but the current concerns, challenges, and themes of relevance to higher education researchers, practitioners, and others are well addressed.

The intent of the text is to spark conversation about how college and university constituents can reframe their thinking about the importance of innovative research to careful, informed practice. Likewise, the contributors hope that it will inspire greater awareness and action among practitioners, as well as advance scholarship in the area of athletics. Each chapter includes current research, and in some cases theoretical perspectives, which should assist practitioners enhance the well-being of college athletes. Each chapter also offers guided discussion questions that are ideal for use as the basis of further conversation in the classroom setting.

Adopters of this text will benefit from leading voices in the field who delve into complex issues, shedding new light and presenting unique opportunities for understanding a diversity of perspectives on evidence-based practices in support centers for athletes. In all, this volume provides a rich portrait of data-driven practices designed to assist practitioners and others who work closely with college athletes, and lays the groundwork for an ambitious and long overdue agenda to further develop innovative research that informs the practices of athletics stakeholders and improves the quality of experiences for college athletes.

Love, Justice, and Education by William H. Schubert brings to life key ideas in the work of John Dewey and their relevance for the world today. He does this by imagining continuation of a highly evocative article that Dewey published in the New York Times in 1933. Dewey wrote from the posture of having visited Utopia. Schubert begins each of thirty short chapters with a phrase or sentence from Dewey's article, in response to which a continuous flow of Utopians consider what is necessary for educational and social reform among Earthlings. Schubert encourages the Utopians, who have studied Earthling practices and literatures, to recommend from their experience what Earthlings need for educational and social reform and how they can address obstacles to that reform. The Utopians speak to myriad implications of Dewey's report by drawing upon a wide range of philosophical, literary, and educational ideas - including many of Dewey's other writings. Their central message is that loving relationships and empathic dedication to social justice are necessary for educational reform that responds wholeheartedly to learner needs and interests. True to Dewey's original position, such education must be built upon social reform that works to overcome acquisitive society based on greed: the principal impediment to realizing human potential, democratic society, and educational relationships that enhance it. To overcome the debilitating acquisitiveness that plagues Earth is the challenge for educators and all human beings who seek to involve the young in composing their lives and cultivating a world of integrity, beauty, justice, love, and continuously evolving capacities of humanity.

American democracy is at a critical crossroads. Rancor, division, and suspicion are the unfortunate byproducts of the contentious 2016 presidential election. The election also bred a measure of civic uncertainty where citizens of all ages struggle to find and define their roles within a functioning democracy. No Reluctant Citizens: Teaching Civics in K-12 Classrooms is designed to help social studies teachers reinforce the centrality of civic education through a series of hands-on, participatory, and empowering activities. From civic literacy to human rights, from service learning to controversial issues, No Reluctant Citizens: Teaching Civics in K-12 Classrooms explores an array of topics that ultimately provides K-12 students the conceptual and practical tools to become civically engaged.

National identity has been the subject of much controversy and debate. Some have even suggested dropping the concept entirely. One group, Essentialists, argue that national identity is fixed, cultural, based on birth and ancestry. Another viewpoint is posited by Postmodernists who argue that national identity is malleable, invented or imagined. As alternatives, some have suggested that national identity is a hybrid of both Essentialist and Postmodernist views. And still others bypass this argument and suggest that national identity should be based on civic factors, such as shared values and norms about citizenship.

While controversy and debate are healthy exercises in any science, at some point order must be established if science is to proceed. The present volume is based on the idea that national identity is an ideal-type concept; it does not completely capture reality, but is used for analytic purposes. In addition, rather than focusing on these theoretical debates, we pursue research with the idea that results from research will contribute to the field of national identity. Three areas of national identity are discussed: theoretical, national, and individual. Two chapters focus on the major theories about national identity, provide critiques, and make suggestions about the topic. In section two, six chapters provide case studies of national identity on Scotland, Ireland, Russia, Bosnia-Herzegovina, Germany, and France. In section three, two case studies focus on immigrants and the challenges they face in forming their identities, especially identifying with their host countries—Belgium, and the United Kingdom.

Several important conclusions may be gleaned from the contributions of the present volume. To begin with, while national identity is a slippery concept, if the field wishes to move beyond debate about fundamentals, it would be well advised to view the concept as an ideal-type as suggested by the great German scholar, Max Weber. Secondly, the case studies included in the present volume indicate that national identity is not only based on ethnicity and culture, but on such external factors as governance regimes and their changes, economic crises, wars and other forms of aggressive activity, and social demographic changes in a population. These factors affect a population at the national level. For immigrants at the individual level, developing national identity is greatly affected by four interrelated factors: 1) the degree to which they are accepted by members of the host society; 2) immigrants’ language skills and physical appearances; 3) how well they are able to balance their host national identity, their ethnic identity, and acceptance of their native country; 4) and their generational status. Generally, at the national and individual levels, context and circumstances matter in developing national identity.

Even though diversity is currently conveyed as a ubiquitous principle within institutions of higher education, professionals of color still face issues such as discrimination, the glass ceiling, lack of mentoring, and limited access to career networks. Unfortunately, an open channel does not exist for professionals of color to express their frustrations and genuine concerns.

The narratives in No Ways Tired present a powerful voice about the experiences of student affairs professionals of color in higher education, including intersecting identities such as race, class, and gender. Furthermore, the narratives are nuggets of personal truth that can serve as a lens for professionals of color who wish to develop strategies to succeed as they traverse their careers in higher education. Through the sharing of their visions of success, lessons learned, and cautionary tales, the authors openly offer insights about how they have created a way to survive and thrive within higher education in spite of challenges and distractions. They also articulate a vision where student affairs professionals of color can develop fully, be authentic, use their agency, and effectively contribute.

This book includes recommendations for professionals of color at all levels within higher education and ways to construct opportunities to flourish. The ultimate goal for this book is to promote discussions regarding how professionals of color can be more proactive in developing strategies that are conducive to their professional and personal success as they navigate their higher education careers.

STEM (science, technology, engineering and mathematics) is a fairly new concept in American education. As separate subjects, science and math have been around for a long time but have rarely been taught as a seamless unit of skills; rather as discreet content areas. This is not how the real world outside of the classroom functions however; in actual research laboratories scientists infuse their science with math, and their math with science, and along with technology and engineering they solve real life problems. In practice you cannot separate the various fields, as you need all of them in order to discover the underpinnings of the natural world, cure a disease, or solve a problem with the space rover. The American future depends on a scientifically literate workforce, armed with knowledge about the laws and theories of science, based on empirical facts instead of beliefs. In addition, there is a shortage of graduates in STEM related disciplines. Economic data show that 1 million additional STEM graduates will be needed over the next decade to fill America’s economic demand. STEM based jobs are expected to grow 17% in the next 10 years, outpacing the overall job growth of 10%. If teachers across America were trained with fundamental and impending scientific concepts in their science-methods courses at the university level, scientific literacy can only dramatically improve. Nanoscience is one such concept; as it is multidisciplinary in nature and is regarded as the basis for innovated technologies in many fields. The authors of this book seek to provide pre-service and in-service science teachers with high-quality STEM modules, with which to create lesson plans and problem-based lessons to use in their future classrooms, both at the elementary and secondary level. Nanoscience was chosen since its applications reaches across virtually every scientific field; from biology to physics and for that matter all STEM domains.

This book addresses how to assess and instruct students while also honoring their cultural and linguistic backgrounds. Many individuals want to support their multilingual learners but do not have the language skills to work in a bilingual or dual-language setting. The chapters in this book examine assessment in classrooms where English is the language of instruction; yet, students are also encouraged to communicate in multiple languages.

The thesis of this book revolves around the idea that linguistically diverse learners may engage in critical thinking in ways that we may not anticipate. Students who are learning in an additional language do not need to “catch up.” Assessment should instead measure the new ways that students are interacting with the world. This book helps you discover the many ways to help students develop as critically thinking readers, writers and speakers.

There is a scarcity of research addressing literacy among linguistically diverse learners within math and science. The information contained in this book will hopefully advance a dialogue between teachers and linguistically diverse students as they read and write multiple genres together. This book also encourages teachers, family, and community members to come together to form supportive environments where best practices are fostered.

Some of the questions addressed by this book:

1. How do I determine a student’s strengths and needs if he or she is not talking in class in any language?

2. Do I teach monolingual and multilingual learners to read in similar ways?

3. How can I support my students as they read math word problems?

4. What do students need to know about the structures of science texts?

5. How should we develop math and science literacy assessments?

6. Should I have specific language goals for students as speakers?

In this book, noted Nordic researchers and teacher educators provide insights into early childhood discourses and practices in Denmark, Finland, Iceland, Norway and Sweden. In addition to these insiders’ perspectives, an American scholars explore Nordic themes, trends, and practices as they emerge in the book's chapters on such varied topics as Nordic childhoods, children's perspectives, preschool teacher education reforms and developments, transition from preschool to primary school, learning through play, caregiving and instruction.

Learning and identity development are lifetime processes of becoming. The construction of self, of interest to scholars and practitioners in adult development and adult learning, is an ongoing process, with the self both forming and being formed by lived experience in privileged and oppressive contexts. Intersecting identities and the power dynamics within them shape how learners define themselves and others and how they make meaning of their experiences in the world. The series, I Am What I Become: Constructing Identities as Lifelong Learners, is an insightful and diverse collection of empirical research and narrative essays in identity development, adult development, and adult learning. The purpose of this series is to publish contributions that highlight the intimate and intricate connections between learning and identity. The series aims to assist our readers to understand and nurture adults who are always in the process of becoming. We hope to promote reflection and research at the intersection of identity and adult learning at any point across the adult lifespan. The rich array of qualitative research designs as well as autobiographic and narrative essays transform and expand our understanding of the lived experience of people both like us and unlike us, from the U.S. and beyond.

Narratives on Becoming: Identity and Lifelong Learning, Volume Three of the series, explores a myriad of ways that authors’ personal and professional growth has influenced identity development. These chapters provide insights into the intersectional identities and learning of writers. Drawing from the multiple paths that comprise the journey of lifelong learning, these authors present powerful stories that identify the ways relationships, environments, culture, travel, and values shape their identities; use literacy, teaching, and learning as vehicles for experimenting with new identities, negotiate multiple identities, contexts, and transitions involved in becoming, and construct meaning. Through their narrative essays and ethnographic/autobiographical accounts, the authors in this volume illuminate the power of transformational learning during life-changing events and transitions.

Navigating the American Education System: Four Latino Success Stories showcases the educational journey of four Latino/a men and women who navigated the American education system successfully. Their success is significant given the multiple and varied challenges that most Latinos/as encounter throughout the K–20 educational continuum. The purpose of this book is not only to show and tell, but to describe ordinary people attaining extraordinary results, who might also stand as good role models for the youngest- and fastest-growing group—Latinos/as—in this country. Researchers of this topic offer compelling statistics, such as the following projection: Out of 100 Latino/a students, a few more than 50 will finish high school; out of this number, five will enroll in college; and out of the original 100, less than one percent will complete a doctorate. While the causes of low academic attainment for Latinos may vary, including limited financial resources and cultural differences, the lack of Latino role models in K–20 education may be a significant contributing factor.

The expression, “You can’t be what you don’t see” is especially applicable to Latino/a students who seldom see people like them in positions of prominence and power in educational environments. Across the country, and in particular in states with high numbers of Latino/a students, as the K–20 student body becomes darker, the teaching and decision-making personnel remain light-skinned. Consequently, the absence of role models for an increasing number of students of color may contribute to low levels of aspiration. Many attempts and existing literature regarding the achievement gap of students of color, especially Latinos/as, seem to have had modest or no impact, even when statistical analysis and sound rationales are provided. On the other hand, the stories included in this book offer an alternative that may have an impact and long-lasting effect in the lives of students of color.

Story messages tend to stay longer with us and enable us to make sense of complex situations, such as education, culture, and personality traits—persistence, motivation, resilience. Consequently, the stories in this book become vehicles to learn from real-life examples the abstractions of education, home and school culture, and other factors that contribute to academic success. Furthermore, the stories encourage people to write, tell, and share experiences to address ongoing problems; invite change where change is needed; organize thoughts and seek meaningful solutions; invite us to become cognizant about how our emotions direct our thoughts and “move mountains”; enable us to discover undercurrents that hinder organizational communication; direct us to pay attention to the little things that matter and build trust; awaken the good in people through an invitational approach, as opposed to one that it’s mandated; push us to avoid playing it safe and stick out our emotional necks when dealing with people; seek authentic voices to make room for new thinking; make time for people; and allow our voices to define the values we embrace.

Following on from the preceding volume in this series that focused on innovation and implementation in the context of school-university-community collaborations in rural places, this volume explores the positive impact of such collaborations in rural places, focusing specifically on the change agency of such collaborations. The relentless demand of urban places in general for the food and resources (e.g., mineral and energy resources) originating in rural places tends to overshadow the impact of the inevitable changes wrought by increasing efficiency in the supply chain. Youth brought-up in rural places tend to gravitate to urban places for higher education and employment, social interaction and cultural affordances, and only some of them return to enrich their places of origin. On one hand, the outcome of the arguable predominance of more populated areas in the national consciousness has been described as “urbanormativity”—a sense that what happens in urban areas is the norm. By implication, rural areas strive to approach the norm. On the other hand, a mythology of rural places as repositories of traditional values, while flattering, fails to take into account the inherent complexities of the rural context.

The chapters in this volume are grouped into four parts—the first three of which explore, in turn, collaborations that target instructional leadership, increase opportunities for underserved people, and target wicked problems. The fourth part consists of four chapters that showcase international perspectives on school-university-community collaborations between countries (Australia and the United States), within China, within Africa, and within Australia. The overwhelming sense of the chapters in this volume is that the most compelling evidence of impact of school-university community collaborations in rural places emanates from collaborations brokered by schools-communities to which universities bring pertinent resources.

By relying on the educational models of Wilberforce University and Morehouse College, this study gathered historical artifacts that provide critical responses to the following research questions: What were the similarities and differences between the social, historical, political and cultural forces that led to the founding of the colleges? What were the similar and different motivations and interests of the founding leaders? What were the similar and different effects of these founding leaders on their institutions in their time period? What similar and different supports did these institutions receive from their religious organizations? What can we learn from the impact of these institutions on Black higher education over the last 150 years?

Applied Anthropology provides a new perspective on today’s higher education environment. Volatile and unpredictable forces affect research and instruction across many sectors and levels, and global dynamics are among the strongest drivers of change. Further, within American higher education, daunting complexity and multiple layers of activity weave a rich tapestry of environment, structure, and culture.

This book provides three complementary anthropological perspectives as a framework for analyzing the ground-shifting changes underway in higher education – the higher education mindset, political and policy perspectives, and instruction and learning. These domains intersect with many operational dimensions of higher education – research, health care, athletics, economic development, fiscal management, planning, and faculty roles/challenges – another way of framing the complexity of the situation we are addressing. Book chapters also provide a set of implications for higher education policy. The book concludes with a vision of next steps in research and practice to further anthropology’s contribution to higher education policy and practice.

The intended audience includes both academic and professionals—e.g., faculty and students in departments of higher education, anthropology, and education policy. Higher education leaders, administrators, governing board members, and many others will find the book helpful in providing insight into today’s challenges. The book will also be of use to professionals outside higher education who work on policy issues, on meeting the needs of employers, and on preparing students for careers in public service.

The launching of Sputnik in 1957 sparked an education movement that stressed the importance of curricular rigor and standardization as a means to improve education and bolster national defense. Within six months of Sputnik's launch, Congress passed the National Defense Education Act (NDEA) that approved an unprecedented amount of federal funding toward the math, science, and foreign language disciplines. The teaching of English was left out and through the leadership of the National Council of Teachers of English (NCTE), the discipline maneuvered public relations and political connections in its quest to acquire federal funds. In doing so, the NCTE mimicked strategies that galvanized funding for math, science, and foreign language disciplines by arguing the importance of the teaching of English for national security and advocating for a teaching model that aligned with Cold War Era pedagogical trends.

These tactics marked a major shift in how the NCTE advocated for the teaching of English. In the early twentieth century, the organization embraced student-centered education practices connected to the ideas of progressive educators. This perspective continued with the creation and expansion of life adjustment education during the 1930s and 40s. During this era, many NCTE authors recommended this movement that advocated connecting education to future adult experiences. Following Sputnik, NCTE leaders supported content-centered reforms. Instead of curriculum recommendations based in discovering and fostering relevant student experiences, the NCTE's focus became adjusting student learning to predefined skills it thought all students should possess. This trend was supported by conceptions of Cold War education models, including those advocated by their rival English organization, the Modern Language Association (MLA). The MLA had successfully worked with federal actors in attaining funding for foreign language training institutes and the NCTE's collaboration with the MLA represented a shift in adopting ideas it was previously opposed to promoting.

Despite their efforts, the NCTE was not a part of NDEA reauthorization in 1961 the federal government, led by U.S. Commissioner of Education, Sterling McMurrin, funded teacher-training institutes for the study of English through a program called "Project English." The 1960s continued with the NCTE representing stronger content-centered ideas before shifting in less than a decade as indicated by the materials produced by the 1966 AngloAmerican Conference on English at Dartmouth. Here, NCTE leaders reassessed their beliefs after meeting with British educators who advocated student-centered curriculum models and reintroduced benefits of experiential education. These ideas would manifest into studentcentered curriculum models during the late 1960s and 1970s.