Education K-12

From Academic Mochilas to Reflejos Brillantes: Latina/o/x Students and their Quest for Educational Excellence was written to continue elevating the notion that education is a pathway forward for individual, family, community, and societal transformation. Anchored around two primary metaphors — the mirror and the mochila (backpack) — this book aims to engage educators, leaders, students, families, community members, and policymakers to consider how the mirror and the mochila can be used as tools to transform educational practice, pedagogy, and policy for Latina/o/x/e students across the K-12, community college, and university systems. Dr. Rodriguez begins From Academic Mochilas to Reflejos Brillantes with his own educational journey, discussing the challenges and opportunities that shaped his pathway through education and on to higher education. He discusses the intellectual foundations of reflejos as a result of research conducted in a predominantly Latina/o/x student high school in California. The remainder of From Academic Mochilas to Reflejos Brillantes focuses on strategies to build Reflejos Brillantes, beginning with affirmation-based pedagogies resulting in reflejos valiosos (worthy reflections). Then, in Chapter Four, Dr. Rodriguez explains the intellectual foundations of the academic mochila, which helps test the institutional espejo (mirror) and introduces how we can arrive at refjejos llenos (full reflections). Dr. Rodriguez believes all forms of education should strive to serve as an espejo to the students they serve. While Latinas/os/xs continue to grow as a demographic, there are deep-seated inequalities that must be understood within a historical context, and recognition must be paid to how far we actually need to go in order to advance our community in education and society. Education, even with its various challenges, has the potential to move our communities toward equity and justice. This progress will not happen by accident, and we must intentionally create the conditions that move us toward a more hopeful future. We must fight for the espejos that make sense for us. From Academic Mochilas to Reflejos Brillantes explores what this looks like. In order to build institutional espejos that reflect Latina/o/x student brilliance back to them, educators, researchers, and policy makers must be willing to recognize the gifts, skills, knowledge, and experiences that students already bring in their mochilas. This recognition of existing brilliance allows us to build on and contribute to it, but the first step in education is to recognize that the mochila exists, using education as a vehicle. The mochila is conceptualized from two key sources — the experiences of Latina/o/x high schools students and situated within the additive conceptual frameworks in education created by mostly Chicana/o/x and Latina/o/x scholars in the field of education. Throughout From Academic Mochilas to Reflejos Brillantes, Dr. Rodriguez speaks directly to all Latina/o/x students about seven essential steps to achieve reflejos victoriosos (victorious reflections), and finally, Dr. Rodriguez closes the book with a call to action by proposing a 12-point framework that can be used to advance Latina/o/x education in the U.S., or what he frames as reflejos futuros (future reflections). This framework aims to advance the conversation locally and nationally to advance education for and with the Latina/o/community, and to build Reflejos Brillantes into the collective future. From Academic Mochilas to Reflejos Brillantes aims to celebrate and facilitate Latina/o/x student success.

Literacy and Life: Serendipity, Generosity, and Goodwill in the Academic Study of Literacy as Social Practices is a retrospective account of a serendipitous academic life that unfolded over 40 years as an organic interplay of fortunate happenstance, regular acts of collegial kindness, and a personal disposition to spontaneously follow ideas, events, and arguments wherever they led. Early chapters explore how a chance encounter with Space Invaders players inspired an initial interest in literacy as a phenomenon, and how the work of Paulo Freire led to considering functional literacy and critical literacy as a social praxis. Middle chapters describe how experiences of literacy and everyday life in a rural Nicaraguan village, and exploring literacy in the context of the "new capitalism" of the 1990s, led to multiple rethinkings of critical literacy. Later chapters trace work done over more than 20 years with Michele Knobel around their shared interests in “new literacies” and pedagogical approaches to enhancing teacher research literacy. Literacy and Life celebrates rich experiences of collegiality and goodwill throughout an entire trajectory of thinking, researching, writing, and teaching about literacy as social practices. Each chapter describes how the author’s activity and endeavor were mediated and powerfully enabled by generosity, collaborative support, sharing, and trust on the part of many people, from many different walks of life in many different countries. Literacy and Life bears witness to a life blessed with everyday experiences where beneficence was very much an enabling and personally liberating norm.Perfect for courses such as: Literacy in Society; Literacy as Social Practice; Literacy Education: Research, Practice, Policy and Politics; Contemporary Literacies; Literature/Composition courses on Memoir; Approaches to Teaching and Learning in a Complex World; Thinking, Learning and Reflective Practice (Philosophy)

Teaching in PreK-12 classrooms requires not only pedagogical knowledge and field-related skill, but also creativity, flexibility, and responsiveness. Teachers, as lifelong learners and as leaders in education, must make sense of curricula, policies, research, and evidence in order to guide and shape their practices in unique and diverse contexts. How teachers make use of these “best practice” guides varies — there is no one-size-fits-all program or method that can be picked up and applied without classroom teachers’ localized and reflective contextualization. Designed for use by preservice teachers, experienced educators, mentors and coaches, school leaders, and teacher preparation faculty, Recognizing “Best Practices” as Locally Situated calls teachers into their power to disrupt, transform, and lead towards change in PreK-12 schools. This volume makes visible the critical work teachers engage in daily as they evaluate, interpret, implement, and assess the impact of particular strategies, resources, and approaches in their classrooms. Teachers must iterate on their teaching practice in cycles of continuous learning and reflection toward educational equity and social justice. Recognizing “Best Practices” as Locally Situated celebrates the voices, power, and pedagogical practices of teachers across a variety of content areas and settings, ranging from early childhood to adolescence and from transnational contexts, including multilingual classrooms in the U.S., Lebanon, and Ukraine, along with teacher preparation programs in the U.S. and Europe. Through vignettes, analysis, reflective prompts, lesson plans, resources, and activities, the authors make clear that teachers are agentic, innovative, and adaptive practitioners who translate evidence-based “best practices” into context-specific, responsive, and learner-centered pedagogical moves that build upon the assets of their students to support learning. They invite readers into their (trans)local worlds as readers’ shape and reconfigure their own (trans)local classrooms, schools, and educational ecosystems. Recognizing “Best Practices” as Locally Situated aims to bring together the voices of practitioners across K-12 education to examine their situated and expert testing, adaptation, and refusal of “best practices” within their classrooms and communities. The authors explore a best practice, as housed in this partially archived version of the U.S. Department of Education's Best Practices Clearinghouse or as explicitly named in research or practitioner literature. They explain the ways they have tested, accepted, rejected, modified, or otherwise adapted and contextualized that “best practice” within their own teaching context and with equity, inclusion, diversity, belonging, and social justice in mind. Recognizing “Best Practices” as Locally Situated provides an important overview and critique of currently circulating “best practices” for both novice and experienced educators. It provides classroom-tested pedagogical modes and resources with methodologies for engaging critically with “evidence,” including through generation of new evidence and knowledge bases situated within particular communities, times, places, and policy contexts. As part of Dr. Linsay DeMartino and Dr. Lisa Fetman's book series Demystifying Social Justice Education: Moving from Trendy to Transformative Equity and Justice Practices in Schools, this book aligns through its focus on equity and justice and the dismantling of taken-for-granted or “trendy” practices and policies in education. The collection of texts draws upon the lived experiences of educators, education researchers, community program leaders, and students and families to provide new evidence and as contributions to the literature centering around what is possible in equitable, responsive, belonging, and socially-just education.Perfect for courses such as: Introduction to Curriculum, Instruction, and Assessment in Diverse Classrooms; Introduction to Educating For Equity And Social Justice; Cultivating Culturally Responsive Classrooms; Critically Reflective Teaching; Adolescent Identities, Literacies, and Communities; Integrated Content and Language Learning (TESOL/TEFL/Bilingual Ed); Literacy Methods in Multilingual Classrooms; Resisting and Transforming the Purpose of Education: Education for Freedom; Professional Development and Leadership; Inquiry-Based Professional Learning; Introduction to Teacher Leadership And School Improvement

We STILL be lovin’ Black children.Not sometimes.Not conditionally.Not when it is convenient.We loved them in the past.We love them now.We will love them in the future. In this expanded second edition, We Still Be Lovin’ Black Children: African Diaspora Literacy, A Divine Ancestral Charge, leading scholars, educators, and community leaders deepen the call to center African Diaspora Literacy as a foundation for healing, identity, and collective thriving. Across classrooms, homes, and communities in the United States, Africa, and the Caribbean, contributors offer practical strategies, critical questions, cultural frameworks, and affirming activities that protect Black children’s spirits while nurturing their brilliance. At a time when Black histories are distorted, erased, or politicized, this book insists on truth-telling rooted in love. Grounded in African Indigenous Knowledge, Adinkra principles, intergenerational wisdom, and Pro-Black educational practices, authors demonstrate how literacy about the African diaspora is essential.This edition includes new chapters, updated chapters, expanded global perspectives, new resources for families and educators, and timely guidance for confronting anti-Blackness in schools, media, and public discourse.To love Black children is to teach them who they are.To teach them who they are is to protect their souls and spirits.To protect their souls and spirits is to secure our collective future.This is a love book.This is a liberation book.This is an urgent book.Perfect for courses such as: Foundations of Education; Black Education; African Studies; African American Studies; Introduction to Early Childhood Education;

Decoloniality and African Education is a vibrant and vital collection of essays that addresses the challenges, possibilities, and responsibilities for the future of de- and anti-colonial African education as it is taught in universities in the U.S. and Canada, particularly in Colleges of Education. It looks at the ways in which African education is taught in these countries, and how the curriculum for the topic is influenced by colonialization, thus restricting or removing altogether the essence of Africanness from the content of classes.The themes of this book go beyond the mere rhetoric of decolonialization by creating specific approaches to dismantling colonial educational systems in North American universities as well as in Africa itself, creating a new environment for African education duly informed by local cultural resource knowing, known from grounded everyday practices of authentic African educators. In other words, it is a revision of educational practices informed by what educators know and are doing for the lessons in envisioning schooling and education in North America and Africa. African educators are urged to think through solutions specific to the problems and challenges in schools today, and to meet the call of our times to provide education to young learners that not only empowers them, but also provides them with background knowledge, cultural grounding, and specific lessons that will enable them to craft their own futures. So how do we “do” decolonial education from the standpoint of African educators and learners everyday schooling practice and knowledge? Decoloniality and African Education argues that a careful embrace of African Indigenous and cultural knowings determine the successful response to this question. It engages both the “decolonial” and the “anti-colonial,” with a reading that the “decolonial” (as many have pointed out, see Parry, 1994) is a process and a path toward an end, which is the goal of the “anti-colonial” (see Dei, 2022).Decoloniality and African Education is essential reading for students and scholars committed to the improvement of educational outcomes for African American students. It’s a book that empowers educators and raises awareness about African-based teaching environments. It can be used in a variety of courses, including African Studies, African Development, Anti-Colonial Thought and Indigenous Knowledge, and the Pedagogical Implications of Decolonization.

Curriculum and pedagogy are the heartbeat of our schools. They encompass what we do and do not teach–what content and approaches we either choose or are mandated to choose, or leave out or are mandated to leave out. Curriculum entails the overall educational experience of schooling, while pedagogy is the art and craft of teaching–or the translation of curriculum into student knowledge and growth. Hence, curriculum and pedagogy are sociocultural phenomena that impact and are impacted by context (e.g., students, community, colleagues, geography, etc.). Once upon a time, curriculum and pedagogy were the spaces in which educators could exercise creativity and exploration, reflecting the individual needs of their students and communities. However, as political structures shifted and the standards movement took hold in the late 20th century, freedoms around curriculum and pedagogy began to fade with increased oversight over and standardization of “best practices” with greater emphasis placed on performance and efficiency. Pedagogical practices were soon framed around producing results (test scores, graduation rates, measurable learning objectives derived from prescribed state standards), while curriculum became a prescribed structure formatted to reflect state standards with an eye toward test performance. Curriculum and pedagogy were further impeded by hegemonic forces calling for censorship of teaching and curriculum, such as the ban on Ethnic Studies in Tucson, Arizona, and continued attacks on Critical Race Theory nationwide. Further, curriculum became a tool for concealing and/or silencing the experiences and voices of our diverse students, educators, and communities. The results of these phenomena are teachers feeling uninspired and deprofessionalized and students feeling devalued and unheard–especially marginalized students. Since curriculum and pedagogy directly impact the experiences of teachers and students, they must be transformed. However, how do we do that within today’s tenuous PreK-12 environment? How do we transform curriculum and pedagogy so that they reflect, liberate, and ensure justice for students and educators in preschools, elementary schools, middle schools, high schools and the content areas taught within them? Moving from Traditional to Transformative Curriculum and Pedagogy addresses these challenges by providing clear and direct guidance for current and aspiring educators committed to transforming the status quo in their classrooms and schools. Innovative and creative methodologies and practices that aspiring and practicing educators can use right away are the primary focus of this book. Because the editors and contributors are former or current PreK-12 practitioners and/or education scholars, this book is written for a broad educational audience. The editors and contributors provide preservice and practicing teachers entry points for transforming the educational landscape in favor of liberatory, transformative practices in PreK-12 schools across grade levels, content areas, school types, and geographic regions. Additionally, this book is ideal for teacher preparation programs as well as PreK-12 professional development, as this book guides readers through theoretical and empirical discussions, supported by hands-on applications that enable real-time application, and concludes with interactive features, like case studies, extension activities, and discussion prompts.

In a higher education landscape that seems to be increasingly focused on accreditation and accountability, administrators, faculty, and staff in higher education institutions expend considerable resources engaging in assessment activities in response to the demands of compliance-oriented external forces. Beyond Accreditation: Designing and Implementing Meaningful Quality Assurance and Continuous Improvement Systems presents an alternative paradigm for consideration: the primary purpose of assessment systems should be to provide program improvement, with the resulting data serving as supporting evidence for compliance-oriented requests. The book is intended to provide a foundation of background knowledge to empower programs, regardless of size or disciplinary context, to engage in the processes associated with assessment in pursuit of continuous improvement. It supplies data and other information in three distinct ways throughout the book. In some chapters, candid dialogues between the authors are presented in a conversational tone. In others, a more philosophical and sometimes historical perspective provides background knowledge informing why certain things are done and the purposes those activities serve. The remaining chapters present a practical approach to engaging in assessment, from identifying signature assessments to analyzing and reporting on data, all within the overarching context of designing an assessment system that serves continuous improvement efforts. The accountability mindset that has taken hold in education, and in higher education in particular, has fostered a view of assessment as a complicated, challenging, and burdensome enterprise that is done to us in pursuit of compliance. Throughout the book, assessment is presented as something to be done in pursuit of continuous improvement. The authors hope that its contents prove useful to anyone in search of assistance in these efforts. Perfect for courses such as: Educational Program Evaluation; Teacher Education; Education Policy; Teacher Education Policy; and Human Resources in Education.

Beyond Labels: Understanding Refugee Students with Disabilities in Educational Contexts is an essential text that provides educators with insight into the educational needs of refugee students with disabilities through six meticulously researched case studies and illuminates the complex relationship between displacement trauma and disability, from physical disabilities and dyslexia to autism and visual impairment. Beyond Labels offers evidence-based frameworks for differentiating between language acquisition challenges and learning disabilities, implementing culturally responsive assessments, and developing accommodations that respect both refugee experiences and disability-related needs. Each case study provides guidance on special education processes, family school partnerships, and classroom implementation strategies.Educational professionals will find analysis of critical questions regarding cultural perspectives on disability, effective accommodation strategies, and ensuring educational continuity for students experiencing both displacement and disability. The text includes practical tools such as reflection questions, assessment guidelines, and strength-based intervention approaches.This practical reference for special educators, ESL specialists, school psychologists, and administrators bridges refugee education and disability studies, creating new possibilities for supporting resilient yet vulnerable student populations.Perfect for courses such as: Inclusive Education and Diverse Learners; Special Education Policy and Practice for Refugee Children; Multicultural Education; Educational Psychology for Exceptional Children; Refugee and Immigrant Education; Social Justice in Education; Global Migration and Education; Cross-Cultural Communication in Educational Settings; Trauma-Informed Educational Practices

We Are Children of the Corn/Somos Hija/o/xs del Maíz: Husks of Hope, Resistance, and Latina/o/x Educational Success is a collection of empirical studies that explores the complex and multi-faceted journeys of Latina/o/x students. With maíz (corn) as the guiding symbol, this book incorporates indigenous teachings and knowledge to highlight the pillars and resources of support—referred to as “husks”—that nurture Latina/o/x students' growth, resilience, and achievement as they navigate the U.S. schooling system. This anthology offers examples that underscore the role of schools, families, and communities in shaping Latina/o/x students’ trajectories from pre-K to higher education.The volume builds upon the parent book, The Chicana/o/x Dream, by examining the intersectional experiences of Latina/o/x students in varied educational contexts, the resources they access within educational spaces, and their familial and community support systems. Using the Framework of Atravesada/o/xs Nepantleando (FAN), the authors in this anthology illustrate how Latina/o/x students become nepantlera/os—change agents who create and foster diverse cultural spaces and advocate for transformation. The book is organized around three themes: planting seeds to foster college access, cultivating students to foster college readiness, and harvesting to support college completion. Through these themes, the volume aims to empower educators, researchers, and policymakers to foster diverse, equitable, and inclusive school and community spaces that amplify Latina/o/x student voice and center their experiences.We Are Children of the Corn/Somos Hija/o/xs del Maíz is a valuable contribution to the scholarship on the Latina/o/x student experience in the United States. It is the perfect text for a variety of courses in Ethnic Studies and Cultural Studies.

Implementation Science: A Playbook for Instructional Leaders offers a practical approach to driving sustainable, impactful change in educational settings. Grounded in research-to-practice methodology, this essential guide is designed for district and school instructional leaders committed to elevating student outcomes through strategic, evidence-informed decisions. Dr. Carlson draws on decades of experience in teaching, leadership, curriculum development, and literacy research to deliver a step-by-step framework that empowers leaders to effectively plan, implement, monitor, and assess initiatives.In clear, accessible language, Implementation Science demystifies the core principles of implementation and bridges concepts to turnaround. It offers actionable strategies and tools for tackling complex challenges in today’s educational landscape. From curriculum selection to fostering an engaged, capable team, this playbook navigates the nuances of change management, helping leaders make data-driven decisions that stick. Each chapter culminates with key takeaways and questions for reflection, supporting instructional leaders in aligning their work with broader district goals.Perfect for superintendents, principals, curriculum directors, and aspiring leaders, Implementation Science is more than a guide—it’s a hands-on resource for building a sustainable, student-centered culture of continuous improvement. The book can also be adopted for a variety of courses such as Educational Leadership and Administration; Curriculum and Instructional Design; Data-Driven Decision Making in Education; Change Management in Education; and many more.CLICK HERE TO BUY THE PLAYBOOK/WORKBOOK BUNDLE AND SAVE!