PRODUCTS

The Critical Importance of Teacher Advocacy: Empowered Educators on the Front Lines is a powerful and timely anthology that amplifies the voices of education activists from across the United States who are committed to reimagining what it means to be an educator in today's challenging climate. At its heart, this book is a testament to the unwavering spirit of those who enter the classroom not just to teach, but to make a lasting impact on the lives of their students and the future of our society.

In these pages, readers will find stories of courage, resilience, and resistance—narratives that highlight the importance of holding onto one’s core values amid increasing political, social, and institutional pressures. The educators featured in this compilation don’t just teach curriculum—they build authentic relationships with their students, create inclusive learning environments, and refuse to accept the status quo when it harms the very children they serve.

More than a celebration of individual triumphs, The Critical Importance of Teacher Advocacy serves as a call to view education through a broader societal lens. It urges educators and readers alike to acknowledge how systemic inequities, policy decisions, and cultural narratives shape our schools and the experiences within them. Without this context, burnout is inevitable and attrition becomes a painful norm.

This book also challenges its audience to think beyond immediate outcomes. The fight for justice and equity in education is a long game—one that may not yield tangible change within a single career or even a single lifetime. But these stories affirm that the work must continue. Educators must rise, speak out, organize, and even disrupt unjust systems to protect the very soul of our democracy.

For new teachers, seasoned educators, and anyone invested in the future of public education, The Critical Importance of Teacher Advocacy is both a rallying cry and a source of deep inspiration. The work is hard—but these stories prove that it is always worth it. The book is a valuable teaching tool and textbook in a variety of classes for preservice teachers. It also is a great research tool for scholars working in teacher advocacy.

Why is the sense of taste so conspicuously absent from contemporary educational research and so severely rationed in the ways it is lived in universities and schools? After all, in the world, taste is a perceptual and epistemological powerhouse in the complicated process of staying alive as well as living a life. Taste is also a process of world making. It’s a way of reading, naming, mapping, imagining, remembering, and making worlds and connecting to the worlds of others--therefore it is curricular.

In attending to how taste matters and matters of taste, chapters in Tasting Education: Viewing Curriculum, Pedagogy, Learning, and Educational Research Through the Sense of Taste invite participants to think about taste as a sense, and/or the sense of taste, as it plays out in the thinking and doing of education and its inquiry. This book takes up taste as an embodied set of meanings that are sensuous, pragmatic, and political: as a key part of the sensorium, and as engagement with the sensuosity of the olfactory, the nose, the mouth, the tongue as a way of making meaning of food, but also ways for making meaning from the food for thought and action that theory can provide. It also asks us to take into account the culture of food as it relates to education; whose palates are catered to and whose remain marginalized, deliberately destroyed, or are left-unfed? Taste, then, also becomes a way of resisting, challenging, and reimagining such modes as they play themselves out in curriculum and pedagogy and reveal collective commitments that include shared pleasure alongside political and social action (Siniscalchi, 2018). This book offers a space for deeper conversations around taste in curriculum and elsewhere, and how taste is being used to dismantle oppression in these spaces. The slow-food movement argues that “taste and pleasure” must return to the table (Siniscalchi, 2018). Tasting Education invites the mixed pleasures and problematics of taste to the table of educational research as well.

Tasting Education will appeal to faculty and students in graduate-level courses related to curriculum, instruction, social foundations and leadership studies, as well as those involved with food studies courses.

Walking the Doctoral Trail: A Fully Relatable (and Occasionally Humorous) Guide for Successful Completion and Beyond is not a how-to manual—and that is exactly the point.

For many prospective and current doctoral students, beginning a doctorate is one of the most meaningful, and most underestimated, undertakings of their lives. This book meets doctoral sojourners where they are: curious, hopeful, anxious, determined, sometimes discouraged, and often more alone than expected. Rather than offering a prescriptive formula for “how to finish,” it invites readers into honest reflection, grounded conversation, and realistic preparation and action for the doctoral journey as it is truly lived. Co-authored by three doctoral completers, the book reflects decades of experience walking alongside doctoral students as educators, advisors, and practitioner-scholars who understand the academic and personal demands of doctoral life. Together, the authors offer diverse perspectives without promoting a single theoretical, methodological, or disciplinary stance.

Using the metaphor of a hiking trail, Walking the Doctoral Trail supports doctoral students across disciplines and program structures and acknowledges that journeys differ in terrain and pacing, yet share common challenges and turning points. Organized into seven chapters representing stages of the doctoral journey, each topic includes reflection, guidance, warnings, trail tales, and space for readers’ own notes. Humor—through original cartoons—is woven throughout, reminding readers they are not alone and that completing the hike is achievable.

Ideal for doctoral orientation courses and mentoring conversations, this book offers companionship, perspective, wisdom, and steady encouragement for those committed to walking the doctoral trail to the end. It will be a meaningful gift for someone considering—or beginning—a doctorate program as well! Walking the Doctoral Trail is an invaluable tool for every doctoral student, regardless of the stage that they find themselves in in their program.

Perfect for courses such as: Introduction to Doctoral Education; Doctoral Research Seminar; Dissertation/Thesis Proposal Writing; Doctoral Dissertation Seminar; Foundations of Social Science Research; Foundations of Behavioral Science Research; Foundations of Organizational and Leadership Research; Introduction to Educational Research; Doctoral Mentoring and Advising; Inquiry as Practice

Beyond Compensation: Empowering Teachers’ Unions to Think Beyond Bread-and-Butter Issues is an incredibly important book that explores the value of union representation of teachers on the front lines of public education. After the 2018 Supreme Court ruling on Janus v. American Federation of State, County, and Municipal Employees (AFSCME), educators and other union members wondered why they should belong to a union. This book provides an answer and demonstrates that the role of teachers’ unions goes far beyond bread-and-butter issues as shown in the myriad priorities they are involved in. Teachers’ unions today are requesting additional funding for education to improve outcomes for all students—including those who are disadvantaged, as well as racial and ethnic and sexual-minority students and English-language learners. The goal of teachers’ unions is not simply to represent the rights of their members, but rather to improve education on the whole. They are seeking smaller class sizes, safer schools, and the addition of nurses and counselors, issues that go beyond increased pay for teachers. The book explores in detail the role of one teachers’ union, the Washington Teachers’ Union and its parent organization, the American Federation of Teachers, and their priorities as a roadmap for how other teachers’ unions might pursue these goals and the hazards they might face. The author discusses major educational issues such as teacher evaluation, merit pay for teachers, standardized testing, and community schools and warns about the dangers of vouchers and charter schools.

Beyond Compensation is a volume in The Badass Teachers Association Education Series. The series serves to contribute to educators’ and educational leaders’ understandings of the need for teacher education, activism, and leadership in these areas. It will provide a place for future and current educators to learn more about these issues and how they can build their classrooms and communities into the spaces all students deserve. The series consists of print books and e-books for current educators, pre-service teachers, parents, and others in the greater community.

2026 SPE Outstanding Book Award Winner

Transforming Education for Social Justice: Empirical Insights from Leadership, Equity, and Research in Action is a powerful anthology that brings together a collection of articles originally published in the Journal of Leadership, Equity, and Research (JLER). These chapters reflect a shared commitment to confronting systemic inequities and transforming PreK–12 and higher education through critical scholarship, equity-minded leadership, and community collaboration. As part of the Myers Education Press Ethnic Studies Revival Series, this volume is organized around three central themes:

• the role of educational leadership and transformative research for education reform and student empowerment,
• countering inequitable disciplinary practices through alternative and transformative approaches,
• the importance of student voice and activism for promoting equity and social justice.

“If you want to achieve tenure, you should know a bit more about what it means and why it exists, and its benefits. All too often, even faculty don’t understand why tenure is important."

Thus begins the Preface of the first edition of Candid Advice for New Faculty Members, the most comprehensive “how to” guide for graduate students, post-docs, and junior faculty across a variety of academic disciplines. Now, in the Second Edition of this award-winning volume, Marybeth Gasman has added a variety of new topics, including teaching in a post-COVID environment, the use of Artificial Intelligence (AI) in writing and research, new views of DEI, navigating our new politic world, managing your social media and many other important and timely topics. Drawing upon her own extensive experiences and that of many colleagues, Gasman provides you with an incredibly valuable tool for attaining tenure and for the things that you should do to advance your academic career. She provides practical (and sometimes humorous) advice about a range of topics, including:

• negotiating job offers
• planning a research agenda
• improving your teaching skills
• managing service
• advising students
• applying for research grants
• achieving life/work balance
• managing academic politics

2026 SPE Outstanding Book Award Honorable Mention

In metropolitan areas across the United States, city and suburban public school students receive grossly unequal funding. Since funding is critical to student success, this means the primarily Black, Latinx, and low-income students attending city schools are being denied an equal education. So entrenched is this system, that it can feel normal, or too big to undo. Yet recent student activism in the form of an innovative, cross-community school partnership offers new hope. The Metropolitan Community: Partnering for Equality Across the Educational Divide tells the story of two Chicago-area schools—one suburban, one urban—whose students come together to examine the disparities between their schools and advocate for change. It follows these students over a year as they meet, tour each other’s schools, wrestle with how to discuss unfairness, and ultimately commit to fighting together for a more equal education. In-depth interviews and detailed observations chronicle the students’ advocacy, which unfolds in conversation with teachers and administrators and eventually brings them to the table with legislators, from whom they demand better policies. Through the examples set by students, readers are invited to develop their own “metro outlook,” to see how our seemingly separate worlds are connected by the educational system we hold in common and must work together to reshape. The first book to depict sustained allyship between city and suburban students, The Metropolitan Community offers an invigorating pedagogical approach, organizational model, and political strategy for achieving educational justice through youth-led partnerships and collaboration.

Perfect for courses such as: School and Society; Curriculum and Instruction; Diversity and Equity in Education; Socio-cultural Foundations; Educational Policy; Culturally Relevant Pedagogy; Sociology of Education; Urban Education; Social Studies Methods; Multicultural Education; Anthropology of Education; School Counseling; School Psychology; and School Social Work

For any educator, administrator, or school leader who is committed to promoting student success, Unreached: What Every Educator Wants to Know About Engaging Families for Equity and Student Achievement is an indispensable resource. The premise of the book is grounded in the research that confirms that student achievement is closely tied to effective family partnerships, yet for many educators, identifying how to engage families as partners can feel overwhelming and nebulous. As a result, there is often a disconnect between schools and families that leads to families feeling excluded from the type of meaningful partnership efforts that can support student achievement. Unreached tackles this challenge by offering a clear roadmap for overcoming these barriers and cultivating trust between families and schools. One of the standout features of this volume is its focus on relevant, real-world applications designed to help districts and schools implement a sustainable approach that can support clear and meaningful gains for students.

Trice Moore presents a series of practices, tips and a process for addressing the barriers that often prevent families from participating in their student’s education as partners. Drawing on research and practical scenarios, the book highlights the importance of viewing partnerships with families as a tool for advancing educational equity and offers insights on ways effective partnerships can play a pivotal role in promoting success for all students. At the heart of the book is a compelling overview of some of the systemic inequities and barriers that often exist in schools and how educators and school leaders can play a role in either perpetuating or dismantling those systems.

Written by a leading voice in the field of family outreach and engagement, the book delves into the power of meaningful connections and offers four specific partnership recommendations and five authentic leadership practices to transform how schools partner with families to support student success. Unreached is not just a theoretical guide; it is a practical, hands-on resource filled with actionable strategies for educators, school teams and education leaders. Readers will learn how to earn trust with families, share responsibility and balance expectations respectfully across and beyond cultural differences within an environment where all parties feel valued and heard.

The book also includes tools for developing family engagement plans, assessing your partnership approach and a recommendation summary for school teams. This workbook provides a thoughtful examination of the challenges linked to family engagement and a variety of tools for overcoming those challenges. It is an essential guide for educators seeking to bridge the gap between families and schools in ways that can help create an inclusive, equitable, and high-achieving environment for students. With a blend of practical scenarios, tools, tips and actionable insights, Unreached is a must-read for anyone interested in making gains in student achievement through culturally responsive family and community partnerships.

Perfect for courses such as: Introduction, Intermediate, and Advanced courses in Family and Community Engagement, Leadership

2026 SPE Outstanding Book Award Honorable Mention

In Transforming Teaching Through the Cycle of Care: A Comprehensive Guide to Empowering Education Through Relationships, Listening, Thinking, and Responding, author Mona Beth Zignego introduces a groundbreaking model that reshapes the way educators approach their profession. Drawing from decades of experience as a teacher, mentor, and researcher, Zignego offers a unique perspective on the vital role of care in the classroom. Through her "Cycle of Care" model, she breaks down the process of care into four critical elements: relationships, listening, thinking, and responding. This powerful framework is designed to help teachers not only support their students academically but also foster environments of trust, empathy, and social justice.

Zignego dives deeply into real-life examples from her own experience and research, illustrating both the profound impact of care on student outcomes and the devastating effects of its absence. From stories of students like Emily, who struggled under an uncaring teacher’s response, to educators like Mr. Price, who embodied the very essence of care in his practice, Transforming Teaching Through the Cycle of Care illuminates the path toward transformative education. A key focus of the book is the concept of self-directed care for teachers—a practice Zignego argues is essential for preventing burnout and for sustaining a healthy, effective teaching career. She acknowledges the emotional, physical, and professional challenges teachers face and provides practical tools to help them navigate these challenges while maintaining a caring, student-centered approach. With exercises like the "Emotionater Tool" and the "Teaching Identity Map," she guides teachers in reflecting on their own needs, biases, and emotional well-being, ensuring that care is directed not only at students but also at themselves.

This book is an invaluable resource for teachers, administrators, and anyone involved in education who wants to cultivate a nurturing and inclusive learning environment. Zignego’s insights remind us that care is the foundation upon which all meaningful education is built, and that by embracing care in teaching, we can create classrooms where every student feels seen, valued, and capable of success. Whether you are a new teacher seeking guidance or an experienced educator looking to deepen your practice, Transforming Teaching Through the Cycle of Care offers the inspiration and tools you need to transform your teaching through the power of care.

Perfect for courses such as: Foundations of Culturally Responsive Teaching; Principles of Classroom Management and Relationships; Introduction to Social and Emotional Learning in Education; Educating for Equity and Social Justice; Foundations of Culturally and Linguistically Responsive Practice; Introduction to School Leadership and Improvement; Teaching in a Diverse Society; Supportive Classroom Communities; Sociocultural Perspectives in Education; and Teacher Leadership and Professional Collaboration