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This book documents how preservice and inservice English teachers negotiate the transfer of the social justice pedagogies they learn in university methods classes to their own work as beginning full-time teachers. Based on a set of teacher narratives, this critical and evidence-based view of English teachers’ interpretations of, responses to, and embodiments of social justice explores the complex shifts and concessions that English teachers often make when transitioning between preservice and inservice spaces – shifts which cause teachers to embrace and negotiate a social justice agenda in their classrooms, or for some, to modify, or even abandon it altogether. This work also offers a fresh perspective on the specific, context-dependent pathways and mechanisms through which English teachers enter school culture and respond to their own racial, sexual, and financial positions in relation to the gendered, raced, and classed positions of their schools, students, and classrooms. The book will be useful to social justice researchers, English teacher educators, inservice and preservice teachers, policymakers, cross-disciplinary teacher education fields, and interdisciplinary audiences, particularly in the fields of anthropology, sociology of education, philosophy, and cultural studies.

Community and Difference: Teaching, Pluralism, and Social Justice contains seven very different chapters. In each chapter, educators describe how their experiences with oppression came to inform their commitment to teaching for social justice. Relying on principles taken from heuristic inquiry to show what people know and what experience has spun, this book provides evidence of the promise of narrative storytelling as a means of teaching for social justice. The voices of the storytellers are honest and compelling, inviting readers to listen, to know others as they know themselves, and to experience a journey that is largely collective – that knows hope, and that offers a semblance of understanding and grace.

Debbie Rodan adds breadth and depth to the field of literary, cultural and gender studies through a meticulous investigation of notions such as re-presentation, justice and legitimation. She examines their historical and philosophical trajectories as well as their politico-juridical underpinnings through an ambitious and timely recuperation of the Enlightenment projects of rationality and emancipation.
The point of departure is a critical engagement with the theoretical work of John Rawls, Jürgen Habermas and Jean-François Lyotard. Rodan claims each can be read as foregrounding diverse ways of constituting identity within the social world. Recognition of other people’s identity at the social, cultural and national level is crucial to the possibility of justice.
Rodan tests the concepts of justice, legitimation and identity through detailed critical readings/analyses of a range of texts. The range includes the film East is East, a number of auto/biographical narratives as well as the Australian government report, Bringing Them Home, which is concerned with the removal of Aboriginal children from their families. She avoids polarising Aboriginal/non-Aboriginal notions of justice, identity etc. by including texts which raise and problematise questions of ethnicity and gender.

Present and Past provides a critical analysis of major public school issues. The narrative is organized around problems created in the public schools by a lack of social justice in the broader society. Rather than a chronological treatment of educational history, historical incidents and case studies are used to provide perspectives on crucial issues. The author's point of view is explicit, but throughout the text, he invites challenges to his interpretation by his readers.

The fusion of critical pedagogy, holistic (moral) education, and disability studies continues to be uncharted waters and, in some academic venues, a hotly contested topic. A discourse advocating for a liberating pedagogy for the disabled is still absent. Based on critical and moral pedagogy, The Moral Debate on Special Education is the self-narrative of a disabled special education teacher who is searching for the answers and spaces where this dialogue and narrative can take place. What started as mere research for social justice in education has morphed, unintentionally, into the moral quest for justice and equality in special education. Celebrating the legacy of Paulo Freire, Joe L. Kincheloe, Shirley Steinberg, David Purpel, Peter McLaren, Cameron White, Michael Connelly, Jean Clandinin, and other contemporaries, Bernardo E. Pohl, Jr. delves into the tensions, promises, and challenges of special education from the unique perspective of a disabled educator.

Critical storytelling, a rich form of culturally relevant, critical pedagogy, has gained great urgency in a world of standardization. Crafting Critical Stories asks how social justice scholars and educators narrate, craft, and explore critical stories as a tool for culturally relevant, critical pedagogy. From the elementary to college classroom, this anthology explores how different genres of critical storytelling – oral history, digital storytelling, testimonio, and critical family history – have been used to examine structures of oppression and to illuminate counter-narratives written with and by members of marginalized communities. The book highlights the complexity of culturally relevant, social justice education as pedagogues across the fields of education, sociology, communications, ethnic studies, and history grapple with the complexities of representation, methodology, and the meaning/impact of employing critical storytelling tools in the classroom and community.

In Defense of Partisan Criticism is a far-reaching exploration of the legal, philosophical, and rhetorical basis for understanding social justice in the United States. Through a thoughtful investigation of key political, social, and legal events in the history of the United States, Omar Swartz develops a compelling argument for engaged political scholarship by American academics, and offers readers a critical understanding of the place of race and class in American cultural history. Central to this understanding is an awareness of the «communication imagination» – the power of citizens to name the constraints placed upon them by U.S. political and legal institutions and to counter those constraints with narratives constructing a more socially just society based upon a wider sense of human identification and partisan engagement than is currently practiced in the normative U.S. public sphere.

PAR EntreMundos: A Pedagogy of the Américas challenges the standard narratives of "achievement" to think about how Latinx students can experience an education that forges new possibilities of liberation and justice. Growing Latinx student populations have led to concerns about "assimilating" them into mainstream academic frameworks. This book offers an alternative, decolonizing approach that embraces complex Latinx identities and clears a path toward resisting systems of oppression. Educating Latinx students should involve more than just helping them achieve in school but rather having them recognize their agency to transform the larger structure of education to promote justice-oriented practices. The authors offer a framework for such transformation by honoring their theoretical lineages, proposing a set of guiding principles, and sharing stories about collective social action within and outside Latinx communities. PAR EntreMundos: A Pedagogy of the Américas is a practice of liberation and freedom.

Contemporary Ireland is undergoing a radical shift in its sense of national identity, as the traditional narratives that shaped its past have come under intense scrutiny. The essays gathered here investigate the impact of different forms of education on Irish culture, society, politics, religion and economic success. While education for the knowledge economy has been prioritized across funding agendas, this book focuses on exploring education as a transformative enterprise that supports the personal and intellectual development of the learner.

The volume brings together diverse perspectives on the role of education in the areas of leadership, social justice and service in the community. Challenging the current prioritization of a vision of education that primarily serves the interests of the economy, the contributors explore the social, political and personal value of transformative education.

What were once distinct professions for serving others and building knowledge are now communities of workers struggling against a tide of increasingly unregulated capitalism that is being fed by human greed. Teachers have become education workers, joining a working class that is rapidly falling behind and that is increasingly being silenced by the power elite who control nearly all the wealth that once supported a thriving middle class. Working for Social Justice Inside and Outside the Classroom delivers critical counter-narratives aimed at resisting the insatiable greed of a few and supporting a common good for most. The book is dedicated to hopeful communities working against perpetual war, the destruction of our natural environment, increasing poverty, and social inequalities as they fight to preserve democratic ideals in a just and sustainable world. Written by some of the most influential thinkers of our time, this collection is a tapestry of social justice issues woven in and out of formal and informal education.