Context: College campuses in the United States are currently engaged in public and ongoing negotiation of the value and limits of free speech in educational contexts. Responses to invited campus speakers from students, faculty, and campus leaders point to diverging perspectives on the roles and responsibilities of higher education institutions and…

Background/Context: This study contributes to ongoing work in professional learning communities, self-study, and reflection. It offers a structure and a process rooted in a philosophy of practice grounded in various thinkers like Dewey, Rogers, Curran, Freire, Gattegno, Greene, and Carini. Purpose/Objective: The purpose of this study is to explore…

Background/Context: Teacher candidates are being educated in a political and economic context that calls the value of their professional preparation into question. What is more, a rising generation of teacher candidates has only experienced education during the Era of Corporate School Reform, meaning, the political aims of public education were…

Background/Context: Grit has quickly become one of the leading educational goals and markers of success upheld by many schools, parents, and education policies. This article intends to give us pause in the rush toward grit by revealing some of its shortcomings, including the implications of its individualist and long-term goal focus which leave…

Background & Purpose: According to McClintock, persons and groups exercise formative justice as a strategy of selecting the behaviors, powers, and potentials that ought to receive educational attention to achieve their maximization. We argue that the question of what motivates individuals and collectives to utilize certain capacities to…

Background/Context: This essay takes up McClintock's (2004) critique of educational discourses as overly dependent upon a distributive model of justice and largely ignorant of the formative assumptions that ground educational policy and practice. Purpose/Objective/Research Question/Focus of Study: The question that McClintock's analysis begs is…

Improving the nation's high schools--particularly those that are low-performing--involves challenges that are far easier to catalog than to surmount. In this chapter, the authors identify a handful of promising approaches that can help to achieve the goal that all students will graduate from high school well-prepared for further learning,…

Background/Context: The rapid pace of technological change, undergirded by near ubiquitous access to the web, is producing a new learning ecology--a new ecology of information, of knowledge, of reading, of teaching, and of thinking. This instant availability of digital resources frees both time and cognitive energy that may be used to facilitate…

Background/Context: Traditional adult education in Spain treated the learner as a mere object that could be shaped by the educator. Although current practices of the democratic adult education movement in Spain reveals a completely opposite standpoint on adult education, there has been little analysis of the several influences converging and…

Drawing from the theories of racial formation theory and race marking, this chapter explores the durability of racial discourses in school curriculum over time in the United States. The authors' inquiry focuses on racial discourses located in two sources of curricula knowledge: children's literature and U.S. history textbooks.

Background: Over the past 30 years, the Brazilian Landless Workers' Movement (MST), one of the largest social movements in Latin America, has developed a series of pedagogical practices for public schools that support the movement's struggle for agrarian reform in the Brazilian countryside. The MST's educational initiatives can be viewed in terms…

Background/Context: The view of philosophy of education as "practical philosophy" initiated by Wilfred Carr has been a focus of recent educational discourses. What "practical" means here is closely associated with the educative aspect of "philosophical practice" itself. This article attempts to explore another educative aspect of philosophical…

Background/Context: In discussions about democratic education, there is a strong tendency to see the role of education as that of the preparation of children and young people for their future participation in democratic life. A major problem with this view is that it relies on the idea that the guarantee for democracy lies in the existence of a…

Background/Context: Educational historians have given a great deal of attention to the early-twentieth-century growth, development, and implementation of liberal progressive educational theories and techniques. However, with the exception of a few scholars, they have devoted far less attention to the religious dimensions of liberal progressive…

Background/Context: If education centrally involves self-cultivation, and the teacher's own robust selfhood is necessary for inspiring self-cultivation in students, then teacherly self-cultivation is a necessary condition of education. But teaching is seen as a helping profession, where helping others always seems, in practice if not in principle,…