This book is for educators who believe that schools need to be improved and are hopeful that real change can be achieved. The authors argue that if educators want to create more equitable, socially just, and learner-focused schools, then they need a more robust, transformational theory of school change--an UnCommon Theory. After describing the…

Globalization has become one of the most recurrent concepts in social and political sciences. More often than not, however, the concept is handled without much of a properly articulated theory capable of explaining its historical origin and expansion. For education researchers attempting to elucidate how global changes and processes affect their…

Middle school is a critical time in students' learning of mathematics, something a Learning Management System (LMS) is designed to help parents support. What remains unknown is how parents use an LMS to monitor their children's progress in mathematics. This qualitative case study explored how parents from one midAtlantic middle school with 543…

Middle school is a critical time in students' learning of mathematics, something a Learning Management System (LMS) is designed to help parents support. What remains unknown is how parents use an LMS to monitor their children's progress in mathematics. This qualitative case study explored how parents from one midAtlantic middle school with 543…

This important, timely, and thought-provoking reader is a collection of original chapters by authors from five different countries, each of whom explores a facet of transformative leadership. Transformative leadership is fundamentally a critical approach to leadership that goes well beyond the tenets of most current leadership theories to focus on…

"Change Matters," written by leading scholars committed to social justice in English education, provides researchers, university instructors, and preservice and inservice teachers with a framework that pivots social justice toward policy. The chapters in this volume detail rationales about generating social justice theory in what Freire calls "the…

This book introduces critical theory, providing a practical starting point for teachers interested in exploring alternatives for creating a new kind of classroom experience, both for themselves and their students. Critical theory offers most educators an approach to education that is radically different from the norm. This book provides the…

The relationship among schooling, religion, and social justice in a framework of theory and practice is explored in this book. Emphasis is placed on the importance of integrating critical discourse with Catholic education. Values underlying liberation theology and critical pedagogy epitomize the characteristics of good Catholic schooling. The…

Many current social and political developments, such as no-fault divorce and voluntary single motherhood, have systematically eroded the father's role in American family life. In the face of these and other challenges to the traditional concept of fatherhood, an essential question is raised: Why would an American man still want to be a social…

This book describes the important theoretical ideas of critical pedagogy and explains how to put strategies consistent with them into practice. Chapter 1 explores Ivan Illich's Deschooling Society (1970) and his work highlighting ways in which institutions and conventional approaches to education are failing ordinary men and women. In contrast,…

The sociology of education is concerned with the study of groups of people within educational institutions. This book analyzes the sociology of American education from a historical viewpoint. The chapters in the book derive from social theory, the sociology of organizations, the sociology of work and professions, and the study of class, race, and…

This book explores relationships among democracy, social capital, and community-based mediating structures, focusing on Appalachia because of the obvious failures of market capitalism there. It suggests that mediating structures protect communities from the savage side of market capitalism and promote the democratic prospect by increasing and…

This volume of essays enables readers to see utility in the practice of social mapping as it opens traditional cartographic representation to multiple perspectives and the play of difference. This book argues that social mapping is useful in constructing more comprehensive and reasonably accurate representations of social and cultural phenomena.…

This monograph, one in a series on theory and educational issues in Australia, explores links between education and political and economic structures. Two sections provide an analysis of an education-work program and five readings. The Transition Education Program is described as a government response to the 1979 economic crisis. The policy and…

This second volume of the Bochum Studies in International Adult Education presents a variety of different perspectives on the topics of citizenship and civil society. Its goal is to give an overview of the European discourse on citizenship and civil society and on the discourse in some selected countries. Part I is comprised of the first of 14…