Addressing the issues of educational equity and social class diversity, Donna Marie San Antonio documents the challenges adolescents face when making the transition from elementary school to middle school. The book explores the values, resources, and ways of interacting that students from diverse economic backgrounds bring from their families and communities, and how they are enabled or discouraged from integrating these assets in their new school environment.

What can teachers, administrators, families, and communities do to create schools that provide rich learning experiences for African American children? Based on a critical reinterpretation of several key educational frameworks, African-Centered Pedagogy is a practical guide to accomplished teaching. Murrell suggests integrating the historical, cultural, political, and developmental considerations of the African American experience into a unified system of instruction, bringing to light those practices that already exist and linking them to contemporary ideas and innovations that concern effective practice in African American communities. This is then applied through a case study analysis of a school seeking to incorporate the unified theory and embrace African-centered practice. Murrell argues that key educational frameworks—although currently ineffective with African American children—hold promise if reinterpreted.

In After-Education Deborah P. Britzman raises the startling question, What is education that it should give us such trouble? She explores a series of historic and contemporary psychoanalytic arguments over the nature of reality and fantasy for thinking through the force and history of education. Drawing from the theories of Anna Freud and Melanie Klein, she analyzes experiences of difficult knowledge, pedagogy, group psychology, theory, and questions of loneliness in learning education. Throughout the book, education appears and is transformed in its various guises: as a nervous condition, as social relation, as authority, as psychological knowledge, as quality of psychical reality, as fact of natality, as the thing between teachers and students, as an institution, and as a play between reality and fantasy.

A Pulitzer Prize–winning poet who confessed the unrelenting anguish of addiction and depression, Anne Sexton (1928–1974) was also a dedicated teacher. In this book, Paula M. Salvio opens up Sexton’s classroom, uncovering a teacher who willfully demonstrated that the personal could also be plural. Looking at how Sexton framed and used the personal in teaching and learning, Salvio considers the extent to which our histories—both personal and social—exert their influence on teaching. In doing so, she situates the teaching life of Anne Sexton at the center of some of the key problems and questions in feminist teaching: navigating the appropriate distance between teacher and student, the relationship between writer and poetic subject, and the relationship between emotional life and knowledge. Examining Sexton’s pedagogy, with its “weird abundance” of tactics and strategies, Salvio argues that Sexton’s use of the autobiographical “I” is as much a literary identity as a literal identity, one that can speak with great force to educators who recognize its vital role in the humanities classroom.

Offers discussion and examples of how white scholars can use anti-racist scholarship as part of the long-term civil rights struggle to create real equality in the United States. Most would agree that racism is a moral and spiritual violation of the human spirit and the human community and one of the most destructive social problems in the United States. In this thought-provoking and challenging book, Scheurich contends that white racism is interwoven within social science research, social institutions such as public education, and society in general, directly destroying any legitimate claim to democracy. This volume offers discussions and examples of how white scholars can use anti-racist scholarship as part of the long-term civil rights struggle to create real equality in the United States. Other scholars, who both agree and disagree with Scheurich’s perspective, contribute to the volume.

Arts of Living presents a social history of the humanities and a proposal for the future that places creativity at the heart of higher education. Engaging with the debate launched by Allan Bloom, Harold Bloom, Bill Readings, John Guillory, and others, Kurt Spellmeyer argues that higher education needs to abandon the “culture wars” if it hopes to address the major crises of the century: globalization, the degradation of the environment, the widening chasm between rich and poor, and the clash of cultures.

Arguing for a recognition of the contradictory and ambivalent identifications that both attract and repel those who live the social category “girl,” Marnina Gonick analyzes the discourses and practices defining female sexuality, embodiment, relationship to self and other, material culture, use of social space, and cultural-political agency and power. Based on a school-community project involving collaborative production of a video which tells the stories of several fictional girl characters, Gonick examines the contradictory and textured structure of the discourses available to girls through which their identities are negotiated. Woven throughout the book is the integral concern with the way in which ethnographic writing as a discursive practice is also implicated in the production and signification of social identities for girls.

Burning Down the House presents a riveting analysis of one of the most nationally prominent and bitterly contested policy battles in the history of American higher education: the struggle to eliminate affirmative action at the University of California. A timely and essential addition to the literature on affirmative action, it examines the political, economic, legal, and organizational factors that shaped the debate in California and offers unique insight into the contemporary politics of admissions policy, university governance, and the role of higher education in broader state and national political contests to come.

Education and Culture, an international peer reviewed journal published twice yearly by Purdue University Press, takes an integrated view of philosophical, historical, and sociological issues in education. Included are articles of Dewey scholarship, as well as work inspired by Dewey’s many interests.