This anthology introduces some of the most influential literature shaping our understanding of the social and cultural foundations of education today. Together the selections provide students a range of approaches for interpreting and designing educational experiences worthy of the multicultural societies of our present and future. The reprinted selections are contextualized in new interpretive essays written specifically for this volume.

John Ogbu has studied minority education from a comparative perspective for over 30 years. The study reported in this book--jointly sponsored by the community and the school district in Shaker Heights, Ohio--focuses on the academic performance of Black American students. Not only do these students perform less well than White students at every social class level, but also less well than immigrant minority students, including Black immigrant students. Furthermore, both middle-class Black st...

The Igbo are one of the most populous ethnic groups in Nigeria and are perhaps best known and celebrated in the work of Chinua Achebe. In this landmark collection on Igbo society and arts, Toyin Falola and Raphael Chijioke Njoku have compiled a detailed and innovative examination of the Igbo experience in Africa and in the diaspora. Focusing on institutions and cultural practices, the volume covers the enslavement, middle passage, and American experience of the Igbo as well as their return...

This book is the definitive and final presentation of John Ogbu’s cultural ecological model and the many debates that his work has sparked during the past decade. The theory and empirical foundation of Ogbu’s scholarship, which some have mistakenly reduced to the "acting white hypothesis," is fully presented and re-visited in this posthumous collection of his new writings plus the works of over 20 scholars. Ogbu’s own chapters present how his ideas about minority education and culture deve...

In 1910 Protestant missionaries from around the world gathered to explore the role of Christian missions in the twentieth century. In this collection, leading missiologists use the one hundred year anniversary of the Edinburgh conference as an occasion to reflect on the practice of Christian mission in today's context: a context marked by globalization, migration, ecological crisis, and religiously motivated violence. The contributors explore the meaning of Christian mission, the contempor...