African-American/Afro-Canadian schooling

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John Dewey

Publisher description: John Dewey (1859-1952) believed that learning was active and schooling unnecessarily long and restrictive. His idea was that children came to school to do things and live in a community which gave them real, guided experiences which fostered their capacity to contribute to society. For example, Dewey believed that students should be involved in real-life tasks and challenges: maths could be learnt via learning proportions in cooking or figuring out how long it would take to get from one place to another by mule history could be learnt by experiencing how people lived, geography, what the climate was like, and how plants and animals grew, were important subjects Dewey had a gift for suggesting activities that captured the center of what his classes were studying. Dewey's education philosophy helped forward the "progressive education" movement, and spawned the development of "experiential education" programs and experiments.

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Stuart Parker

This is a book about two stories of education. In one story there is a vocabulary of means, efficiency, bureaucracy, inspection and science; in the other, one of autonomy, democracy, emancipation and action research. One is the story of positivist managerialist approaches to education, the other is the story of reflective teaching. This book displaces both of these stories. By applying the techniques of deconstruction, Stuart Parker overturns the assumptions common to both of these positions and, in doing so, jettisons some widely cherished beliefs about education, autonomy and rationality. Moving beyond current debates, this book articulates a new manifesto for education in postmodernity and highlights the implications for educational practices and institutions.

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Andrew Stables

"Philosophical accounts of childhood have tended to derive from Plato and Aristotle, who portrayed children (like women, animals, slaves, and the mob) as unreasonable and incomplete in terms of lacking formal and final causes and ends. Despite much rhetoric concerning either the sinfulness or purity of children (as in Puritanism and Romanticism respectively), the assumption that children are marginal has endured. Modern theories, including recent interpretations of neuroscience, have re-enforced this sense of children's incompleteness. This fascinating monograph seeks to overturn this philosophical tradition. It develops instead a "fully semiotic" perspective, arguing that in so far as children are no more or less interpreters of the world than adults, they are no more or less reasoning agents. This, the book shows, has radical implications, particularly for the question of how we seek to educate children. One Aristotelian legacy is the unquestioned belief that societies must educate the young irrespective of the latter's wishes. Another is that childhood must be grown out of and left behind."--Bloomsbury Publishing.

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Fatma Nevra Seggie

This book explores educational and cultural experiences of "part-time unveilers" during their degree programs in public institutions in Turkey. The term "part-time unveiler" is coined to refer to undergraduate female students who cover their hair in their private lives, but who remove the headscarf while at a Turkish university as a result of the higher education headscarf ban policy. The book is based on a qualitative study that involved one-on-one interviews with thirty participants. The book highlights how part-time unveilers understand and negotiate the policy, the challenges and opportuni.