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Unsettling the Gap: Race, Politics and Indigenous Education examines pressing issues of inequality in education. The notion of gap—and the need to close it—is used widely in public and policy debates to name the nature and scope of disadvantage. In the competitive world of education, gaps have become associated with students who are seen to be "falling behind," "failing" or "dropping out." A global deficit discourse is, therefore, mobilised and normalised. But this discourse has a history and is deeply political. Unsettling the Gap examines this history and how it is politically activated through an analysis of the "Australian Closing the Gap in Indigenous Disadvantage" policy. In this policy discourse the notion of gap serves as a complex and multiple signifier, attached to individuals, communities and to national history.

In unravelling these diverse modalities of gap, the text illuminates the types of ruling binaries that tend to direct dynamics of power and knowledge in a settler colonial context. This reveals not only the features of the crisis of "Indigenous educational disadvantage" that the policy seeks to address, but the undercurrents of a different type of crisis, namely the authority of the settler colonial state. By unsettling the normalised functions of gap discourse the book urges critical reflections on the problem of settler colonial authority and how it constrains the possibilities of Indigenous educational justice.

The stories in The Teacher’s Closet: Lesbian and Gay Educators in Georgia’s Public Middle Schools reveal the intricate and multifaceted process of identity management that lesbian and gay Georgia middle school teachers regularly engage in, with the intention of carefully negotiating the conservative, heterosexist, and at times homophobic culture of education. Disclosure for a homosexual teacher is not a one-time event. As the stories reveal, managing one's sexual identity is an ongoing process. A feeling of uneasiness surrounding acceptance from others is also a regular occurrence in the homosexual community. To understand why lesbian and gay teachers feel the need to conceal and protect their homosexual identities, it is necessary to understand the social and political climate that forces them to surrender their real identity. In our heterosexist society where homosexuals are often portrayed as different, even sinful, it is not surprising that many homosexual teachers refrain from disclosing their sexual identity to their students, especially in the conservative state of Georgia. The Teacher’s Closet is relevant to courses that include diversity in teacher education and teach inclusion and equality in education.

Education Reform and Gentrification in the Age of #CamdenRising: Public Education and Urban Redevelopment in Camden, NJ examines the perceptions and interpretations of Camden—a New Jersey community whose population is predominately minority, historically impoverished, and rapidly employing neoliberal strategies in public education and urban redevelopment. Using the framework of standpoint theory as a lens to alternatively view change and "progress" in Camden (dubbed by city officials as #CamdenRising), this book highlights the views of Camden residents who hold little sociopolitical capital yet are profoundly impacted by the city’s efforts in employing neoliberal approaches within urban development and public education.

This book will center current and future resident viewpoints on living in a city whose leadership employs neoliberal tactics in redevelopment and in rebranding public education. Participants in this work reported feelings of political alienation pertaining to participation in redevelopment and public education decision-making. Further, participants also believe such recent efforts for change in Camden are intended to benefit a targeted, potentially gentrifying, population and not the majority low-income minorities who currently reside there.

Using a three-tiered format, The What, The So What, and the Now What of Social Justice Education presents the What of social justice education by addressing primary and secondary terminology and definitions, and an overarching conceptual framework within this field of inquiry. The So What of social justice education highlights the reasons why this field of inquiry is important to study and promote, and why one should care to reduce social inequities and transform our world into a more socially just environment. And the Now What of social justice education provides some "best (theoretical) practices" that can be taped and developed by individuals, institutions, and larger societies to work toward short- and long-term solutions in the attainment of a more equitable and less oppressive environment. Each tier introduces influential researchers, theorists, and practitioners who have significantly advanced our understanding of issues connected to social justice education pedagogy and practice. As the scope of Social Justice Education is wide and diverse, so too is the potential audience for this book. Though it can function as a primary academic and training source for educators – K-12 through university graduate professors, administrators, school psychologists – and high school, and college graduate and undergraduate students (education, social justice education, multicultural education, educational psychology, civil rights history, law, journalism) it can also serve as a reference for academic researchers in several disciplines as well as journalists.

African American Studies: The Discipline and Its Dimensions is a comprehensive resource book that recounts the development of the discipline of African American Studies and provides a basic reference source for sixteen areas of knowledge of the discipline: anthropology, art, dance, economics, education, film, history, literature, music, philosophy, psychology, religion, sociology, political science, science and technology, sports and religion. African American Studies defines bodies of knowledge, methodologies, philosophies, disciplinary concepts, contents, scope, topics scholars have concerned themselves, as well as the growth, development, and present status of the discipline. African American Studies validates that African American Studies is a unique and significant discipline—one that intersects almost every academic discipline and cultural construct—and confirms that the discipline has a noteworthy history and a challenging future. The various bodies of knowledge, the philosophical framework, methodological procedures, and theoretical underpinnings of the discipline have never been clearly delineated from an African-centered perspective.

Read, Write, Rhyme Institute: Educators, Entertainers, and Entrepreneurs Engaging in Hip-Hop Discourse describes how entertainers, entrepreneurs and educators, participating in Read Write Rhyme Institute (RWRI) examine today’s youth, hip-hop and social responsibility. Read, Write, Rhyme Institute provides a forum to engage in hip-hop Discourse (represented with a capital D) which includes a world view, ways of doing, being, and knowing (Gee, 1996) that is used in rap music, graffiti, spoken word poetry, and daily conversation. This book seeks to capitalize on the diversity within the hip-hop community by including successful individuals that grew up not only listening to hip-hop, but also living it, and therefore included participants who were entertainers, educators or were entrepreneurs.

In this narrative rooted in auto-ethnography, the author juxtaposes her personal story with that of international stories of resistance to oppression and calls on educators to include children’s personal stories as critical pedagogy to honor their funds of knowledge and foster their historical consciousness. With a focus on 18^th-century freedom fighter Nanny of the Maroons, the text emphasizes the historical connections between Indigenous people worldwide who have harnessed their ancestral roots to disrupt cultural hegemony. The book emphasizes the imaginative and radical assertions of the enduring resistance of the formerly colonized, going back to the era of slavery through to the Civil Rights Movement and Black Lives Matter and calls for a radical shift in the global curriculum to include these stories.

Storytelling is acknowledged as an intergenerational teaching methodology rooted in Indigenous Epistemology which serves to honor our common humanity. The essential message of the text is conveyed through the socio-educational and cultural interventions that are asserted as transformational pedagogy that will serve to elevate students’ voices and promote their academic achievement. This book bears witness to the ways in which the history and sociocultural background of Indigenous people have been ignored and at times rendered invisible or inconsequential, and offers innovative strategies to correct history and write Indigenous people into the literature with creativity and sensitivity. From the Middle Passage to Black Lives Matter is a narrative of social justice which seeks to raise the reader’s historical consciousness and provide authentic strategies to decolonize the global curriculum.

Contrasting Arguments: The Culture War and The Clash in Education is a small study that presents the variable story of the culture wars and the clash in education from the point of view of the principle actors on the two sides. This makes it a very different story from the one told by their disciples and followers in the schools of education. Indeed, the two are diametrical opposites of one another. According to the main actors, the root of the contemporary culture clash goes back to the Enlightenment and beyond that to the historical Socrates and the platonic dialogues, dramatizing his form of teaching and the issues it raises and are still disputed by the best thinkers on the traditional side. Tolstoy’s critique of the traditional school in the Europe of his day is well known to the literate public. And Goethe famously greeted the Encyclopedie as "a dark, sumerian corpse-like affair," from which life, color, and spirit have been drained off. What, then, were the issues down deep and on a more fundamental level? With this the main issue comes to light on the level of pure theory. These issues are: (1) The subject-object distinction deriving from Hegel, (2) The nature of human consciousness either as perception or as experience, (3) The rejection of consciousness as an entirety and its acceptance by the other side from Gramsci and Freire to Bruner and associates, (4) The consequent development of a theory of instruction (to use Bruner’s phrase) and a craft of teaching, and (5) The phenomenon of "inversion" as explaining the moral force of the evangelical coming from the left. Each of these is taken out in a separate chapter devoted to the theme in question, with the appropriate title to guide the reader.

The book closesby contrasting the productive and best in Britain with the best and most erudite of the conservative side in the United States for the readers of these two countries to make their choice as those in Italy and Brazil are invited to make theirs and cut through the culture clash. Contrasting Arguments is a must read for students of Goethe, Freire, Gramsci, Socraties, Bruner, Hegel, and beyond who are interested in how these great minds clash in our global education efforts.