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In banking education where the focus of curriculum is producing legitimate knowledge to maintain the sociocultural arrangements, the subjectivity of students and teachers is simply taken for granted. Once credentialized, students can find the source of unease within as public education—centered on conformity and competition—has overlooked their individuality. To contribute to their self-understanding and self-love, self-education starts from reconstructing student and teacher educational experiences. Once students and teachers reflect on their educational experience using autobiographical writing, they can reconstruct their understanding of their self and their education. Using emancipatory and transformative writing to liberate self through autobiographical method of Currere, this book takes a psychoanalytical and hermeneutic journey into student and teacher inner world. Once false self gets shattered following the synthetic phase of the method, students and teachers can reconnect to their true self disguised by non-ego—curriculum. As the source of aesthetic creation and inspiration, true self will connect students and teachers to their deeper layers of self-understanding and self-value using which they can recreate their lifeworlds and reconstruct their social and political spheres. Using hermeneutic dialogue following their rebirth, students and teachers will transfer their transformative and liberating understanding of lifeworld to their circumstances to reconstruct education.

Changing people’s practice is difficult, shifting the culture of an organization even more so. This book is a description of how one education preparation program did both. This is the story of how they transformed their student teaching program, creating tools and structures that resulted in mentors and student teachers working together in new ways. At the heart of their model is an assessment tool—STAT, for short—used to track the growth and development of student teachers and guide conversations between the college supervisor, cooperating teacher and student teacher. Although this book describes Hope College’s new student teaching model it is really about change. This story takes the reader through the complex change process of one institution, examining the loosely coupled dynamic between leaders and individuals. It describes the natural tension between support and autonomy as program leaders walk alongside individuals as they enact a new practice. This book is intended for teacher educators interested in a developmental model of mentor support, but also for those faced with the daunting task of making changes in their own program. There are lessons learned, however, that go beyond teacher preparation and may serve as a catalyst for others as they engage in their own change process.

The student-instructor dynamic has become more complex in recent years. Writing instructors, in particular, see the vulnerabilities expressed by students in their writing. This book provides a wide variety of theories and techniques for writing teachers on the integration of emotion into writing instruction. Current writing instructors, as well as students of the craft, can benefit from the ideas and strategies offered by a variety of practitioners in the field. This book includes offerings, such as theories in development, empirical studies, and lesson plans designed to benefit writing instructors and their students.

Joni and Rebecca Schwartz in their collaborative autoethnography, Learning to Disclose: A Journey of Transracial Adoption, are doing soul work. This adult white mother and black daughter reflect and dialogue around the places and histories that shaped their relationship. Through three voices: the voice of critical history, the daughter and the mother, the co-authors excavate the past to see if and how it lives in their present. In an intriguing mix of critical history of places like Port-au-Prince and Gulu, Uganda as well as lesser-known narratives of W.E.B. Dubois, Jean-Bertrand Aristide, and Shirley Chisholm, the co-authors tell their own personal and moving stories of becoming mother and daughter engaging such topics as racial identity, disclosure, racial appropriation, colonialism, and the complex history of transracial adoption.

For anyone interested in racial identity in the complex world of blended families and adult mother and daughter relationships, this is a must read. This book is ideal for all humanities courses across disciplines from sociology, education, qualitative research, and social work to race and communication studies. In this era of strained and confusing racial dialogue, this book is refreshing in its honesty, moving it its personal narratives, and instructive in its engagement in how the historical lives in the social imagination of our present lives and relationships.

"Why isn't sport played the way it used to be played, when football was for men who loved America, who saluted the flag, and who respected our men in blue and our troops by standing—and not kneeling—for our National Anthem!" This sentiment permeates American football today, and represents the feelings of many fans who can appreciate their Black heroes, but find the issue of "Blackness" via the two extremes of celebratory expression and protest, regressive. "This should be about sport, not politics," many feel. I concur. I wish the sporting arena didn't have to be the last battlefield for Civil Rights. But here we are.  This book explores how conflicts over diversity, culture, inclusion, exclusion, protest and control have been played out over the twentieth century in various sports and institutions, and what lessons we can learn from our overlapping—though at times, separate—cultural histories of Black and White. This book is about how we learn to act when out in public...and when playing sport. Infused in this discussion is the ever-present policing of Black bodies in sport and society, and the disconnect we have as citizens living in the same country perpetually divided by race.

Autoethnography in Undergraduate Writing Courses blends narrative and analysis in an engaging and applicable account of how the genre of autoethnography can be a valuable addition or alternative to traditional research assignments.

Many writing teachers struggle to motivate and equip students to conduct meaningful and effective research. Practicing autoethnography—the scholarly combination of personal reflection, artistic representation, and social/cultural research—provides an opportunity for students to research and write about something that genuinely interests them: their own experiences.

A genre of personal writing, autoethnography is comparable to pedagogy pioneered by expressivists like Donald Murray, Peter Elbow, and Wendy Bishop, among others. However, combining personal writing with research—as autoethnography does—is more rare. Some compositionists have already used autoethnography in their own research and teaching, but this book demonstrates why more compositionists should consider adopting autoethnography into their pedagogy.

The author shares his own experience teaching autoethnography at the undergraduate level, modeling its potential and demonstrating its impact. Written in a lively, conversational voice, the book presents substantial qualitative research, including samples of student writing, supplemented by student interviews and surveys.

These data indicate that practicing autoethnography can have unusually, if not uniquely, positive effects on students’ lives. Specifically, the author identifies and illustrates eight outcomes of practicing autoethnography: increased reflexivity, improved research and writing skills, greater awareness of ethical issues, critical empowerment, therapeutic catharsis, enjoyment, and the development of a sense of community.

Conquering Trauma and Anxiety to Find Happiness offers trauma victims suffering from anxiety and other disorders freedom from continued emotional suffering. National mental health statistics state 60% of adults, approximately 150,000,000 people, report experiencing trauma. The National Institute of Mental health states 42,000,000 American adults live with an anxiety disorder often resulting from trauma. Through this book’s focus on affect theory and affect labeling, these millions of traumatized and anxious individuals learn to stop living with chronic stress and their reactive, inflexible, and rigid responses to life.

This book offers affect theory as a biological explanation to the consequences of living as a trauma victim by understanding what happened to them and repairing the harm. Affect theory presents nine biologically-coded affects to explain emotion, motivation, behavior, and personality with two positive, one neutral, and six negative affects. Stimulus from our environment activates an affect and its preprogrammed responses within our brain and body. Through facial expressions, along with other physical manifestations, we understand when an affect activates to help us understand our feelings.

Another intervention featured in this book, affect labeling or putting feelings into words, encourages us to focus attention in the present moment to read our body’s sensory information and integrate our brain and mind. Trauma victims understand how therapy provides an important intervention for recovery. An affect management system offers various interventions, such as diet and exercise, to overcome the consequences of trauma and anxiety. We no longer need to suffer if we experience trauma and anxiety.

The purpose of Latinas Pathways to STEM: Exploring Contextual Mitigating Factors is to present transnational case studies of Latinas and Mexicanas pursuing a STEM degree/career from the states of Georgia, New York, Texas, as well as México. In this book, the authors underscore that the experiences of the participants highlighted in this book provide insights into how to support successful Latinas/Mexicanas in STEM career pipelines and pathways. In doing so, the authors address the need for a set of approaches to STEM education policy that acknowledges that institutionalized pipelines often create replication by funding intervention programs that attempt to sterilize context by identifying variables and ignoring the associated contextual mitigating factors (CMFs). Researchers and funders of STEM intervention efforts can learn from the analysis of these case studies that successful Latinas/Mexicanas developed tactical understanding, which reinforced their identity and resisted how they were positioned by negative CMFs, reaffirming their aspirations and successes in STEM. Education graduate students, research methodologists, policy makers, and practitioners will find CMF analysis as an additional useful methodological conceptual tool to interrogate how sociocultural factors position designated underrepresented people in STEM pipelines and pathways. Education policies that advocate for the existence and maintenance of pipelines that increase underrepresented Latinas/Mexicanas in STEM are important but are often crafted with blind spots that leave out how context mitigates policy especially at the individual level.

Religion and Racism provides an extensive examination of the paradox that arises from the intersection of being a Christian and a racist. A racist believes that one racial group is superior to another. Yet, since the nation’s revolutionary birth, the United States claims a pious, devout mantle of Christianity that served as the nation’s moral compass, while engaging in horrendous acts of racial violence. How can a white Christian male, sit in a church, engage in Christian prayers, and then in cold-bloodied fashion murder nine African American Christians in their own church?　Christians traditionally have always designated "churches" as places of refuge and sanctuary. The binary of whiteness and Christianity emerged and came to dominate much of the world. In the United States and other parts of the world, whiteness and Christianity have served to subjugate people of color even as such people themselves also came to embrace Christ's teachings, often at the cost of the loss of their traditional forms of religion and culture. Armed with the Bible and deep-seated belief in racial superiority, European colonizers came to shape most of the world as we know it today. The result has been an unequal control of the world’s resources and vastly disparate living standards for people of color and whites, both internationally and within specific nations. People of color have been treated as highly valued commodities, while simultaneously being stripped of their humanity—with the sanction of the Christian faith.

The ascent of Donald Trump, a person often perceived as racist and lacking in moral character, was achieved largely with the support of white evangelicals (Wehner, 2020). Rev. James Wallis (2019), founder and editor of　Sojourners magazine, called upon fellow evangelicals to reject Donald Trump’s racist attacks. Mark Galli, editor in chief of Christianity Today, called for Trump’s removal from office for his gross immorality and ethical incompetence. In both instances there has been an awakening to the paradox of strong evangelical support of a man who seems to be the embodiment of much that is antithetical to espoused evangelical beliefs. Despite the awakening by some evangelicals, there are many who continue to embrace Trump, believing that God is working through him to achieve their goals.

At a time when populist movements have gained ground across the globe and migrants have taken center stage as unwanted pariahs in the eyes of many, this book dares to tackle a culturally relevant threat, much talked about but seldom systematically uncovered or analyzed: the socio-cultural domination that permeates the minds of many Black students in the United Kingdom as they negotiate between what they learn as history at school and their lived experiences and expectations. Kay Traille shed light on this visible invisible specter and uncovers the rich tapestry of forgotten ordinary histories that should make societies richer and better. Using the words of students, teachers, government reports and fictional narratives this book challenges the audience to place themselves into this historical stream of culture to better understand and teach black students. Through the means of critical race theory, social constructivism and aspects of social constructionism, a narrative approach and personal experiences the author excavates points of personal connection through the gateway of stories to enter worlds and make meaning. Traille points out the study of history is socially constructed and not impartial academic information and most history teachers in the United Kingdom are White, female and middle class and increasingly the students they teach are not, undoubtedly making for cultural dissonance between students and teachers. Furthermore, students and teachers knowingly and unwittingly grapple with silent vivid racist experiences in and outside of the classroom that bleed into history lessons. The way students are socialized and taught may impact on their ability to function with alternative narratives or participate as active and engaged contributors to democratic life. This book invites the audience to uncover and acknowledge cultural biases, oppressive power relationships and dominating epistemologies to emerge better equipped to plan for and teach these students, allowing them to know they are valued and an integral part of British society.