Special education in the United State is based on the concept of access—public schools are open to all children. But access is no longer a sufficient foundation. Approaches and accommodations that lead to academic success are increasingly demanded for those with learning disabilities. Functional, independent-living, and employable skills are requisite, but rare, for those with serious handicapping conditions. Since the last reauthorization of the Individuals with Disabilities Act, four eve...

We’re In This Together: Public-Private Partnerships in Special and At-Risk-Education is a timely book that explores the use by public schools of private education companies to meet the needs of some of the nation’s most challenged and challenging students. The book examines variations of use by states as well as the cultural attitudes toward the private sector to address these core functions of public schooling. The book offers grounded and thought provoking perspectives on: the legal fram...

Despite the best efforts of educators, our nation's schools are dangerously obsolete. Instead of teaching students to be critical thinkers and problem-solvers, we are asking them to memorize facts for multiple choice tests. This problem isn't limited to low-income school districts: even our top schools aren't teaching or testing the skills that matter most in the global knowledge economy. Our teens leave school equipped to work only in the kinds of jobs that are fast disappearing from the ...

Should we stop teaching critical thinking? Meant as a prompt to further discussion, Critical Condition questions the assumption that every student should be turned into a “critical thinker.”The book starts with the pre-Socratics and the impact that Socrates’ death had on his student Plato and traces the increasingly violent use of critical “attack” on a perceived opponent. From the Roman militarization of debate to the medieval Church’s use of defence as a means of forcing...

This book provides a unique examination on the ways in which educating the whole child in the community school serves to ameliorate the conditions of poverty and obstacles to learning faced by students. Using a case study approach the book will highlight the successful journey of one school that transformed itself into a community school. Given the rise in poverty nation-wide and the unprecedented economic crisis, many school districts are looking for innovative ways to garner resources fo...

The papers in this volume show the origin and development of Bernstein's theoretical studies into the relationships between social class, patterns of language use and the primary socialization of the child.**'Bernstein's hypothesis will require [teachers] to look afresh not only at their pupils' language but at how they teach and how their pupils learn.'**Douglas Barnes, Times Educational Supplement**'His honesty is such that it illuminates several aspects of what it...

Conducting Hermeneutic Research: From Philosophy to Practice is the only textbook that teaches the reader ways to conduct research from a philosophical hermeneutic perspective. It is an invaluable resource for graduate students about to embark in hermeneutic research and for academics or other researchers who are novice to this research method or who wish to extend their knowledge. In 2009, the lead author of this proposed text was one of three co-founders of the Canadian Hermeneu...

Relational Ontologies uses the metaphor of a fishing net to represent the epistemological and ontological beliefs that we weave together for our children, to give meaning to their experiences and to help sustain them in their lives. The book describes the epistemological threads we use to help determine what we catch up in our net as the warp threads, and our ontological threads as the weft threads. It asks: what kind of fishing nets are we weaving for our children to help them ma...

First published in 1991, this work critically analyses the competing claims about alternative arrangements for schooling. It does so in light of major popularly understood agendas for social and political purpose, and of the troubled and much less clearly understood assumptions and issues behind them. The book examines closely four generic types of arrangements for schooling in light of a comprehensive framework for understanding the publicness or privateness of schools, and the relationsh...

The memoirs in this collection represent a cross-section of critical reflections by a queerly diverse set of individuals on their experiences inhabiting a variety of spaces within the field of education. In their stories, the authors share how they queered and are continuing to queer the academy in relation to questions of teaching, research, policy, and/or administration. Their memoirs speak across generations of queer educators and scholars; collectively their work highlights an array of...

What does it look and feel like to communicate, create, compose, comprehend, teach, and learn with our bodies? Reaching beyond existing scholarship on multimodality and literacies, Moving Ideas expands our capacity to understand the embodied dimensions of learning and stretches our repertoires for more artfully describing them. Wresting language away from its historically privileged place at the center of social science research and practice, this collection examines the strategic...

The book focuses on European Integration in the Field of Higher Education and Research, as well as the Implementation of the Bologna Process in Slovenia. The common policy of higher education and research belongs to the most important fields in the process of European integration and to the constitutive elements of the European Union. The authors analyse the process constituting the framework of higher education and research policy in Poland and Slovenia. The book analyses the political pr...