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Democracy

• "Bending the Future to Their Will": Civic Women, Social Education, and Democracy
  This book examines the lives and work of women who forged a distinctive tradition of social education from the late 19th century to the late 20th century, one that offered an alternative set of ideas about its means and ends to those propounded by mainstream educational theorists. In the book, the term "social education" is used to suggest that education about democracy and citizenship has occurred in a variety of settings beyond the school.
• "E Pluribus Unum": What Does it Mean? How Should We Respond?
  Charts the intellectual history of competing conceptions of national unity, diversity, and ethnic identity. Explicates three models: monolithic integration (monocultural assimilation of diversity), pluralistic preservation (diversity and unity as equal values), and pluralistic integration (stressing consensus about core civic values while acknowledging the compatibilities and tensions regarding unity and diversity).
• A Call for a Multicultural Revolution. Challenges & Hopes: Multiculturalism as Revolutionary Praxis. An Interview with Peter McLaren
  Discusses Peter McLaren's theories of critical pedagogy, which is underwritten by a Marxist philosophy and a critique of global capitalism. McLaren believes that capitalist exploitation is the driving force for the institutionalized racism that is so prevalent in Western society.
• Building Civic Education for Democracy in Poland
  This book provides a reflective analysis of the effort since 1991 of a group of Polish and U.S. educators to develop civic education programs for schools and teachers in Poland.
• Citizenship, Democracy and Political Literacy
  Draws on the Crick Report, Education for Citizenship and the Teaching of Democracy in Schools, to examine citizenship, democracy, and political literacy, considering the report's potential as a framework for promoting racial equality in European schools. Discusses the following issues: racism and the education system; racism, democracy, and citizenship education; and human rights and political literacy.
• Class, Cultism, and Multiculturalism
  Globalization has hurt both developed and developing countries. Capitalism's relations of exploitation can hurt people of color in disabling ways.
• Creating World Peace, One Classroom at a Time
  Recounts activities from a kindergarten classroom to illustrate how a multicultural approach cultivates a school environment embracing diversity and educating students about responsibilities associated with freedom. Stories include those related to students viewing each other in terms of individual characteristics rather than their ethnic group, creating a mind map for Earth Day, and cooperating with older students to write class letters against child labor.
• Culture and Power in the Classroom: A Critical Foundation for Bicultural Education. Critical Studies in Education and Culture
  This book articulates theoretical principles from which to develop a critical practice of bicultural education. It confronts the dominant cultural values and practices that function in the schooling process to marginalize and silence the voices of African American, Hispanic American, Asian American, Native American, and other bicultural students in the United States.
• Democratic Understanding: Cross-National Perspectives
  Compares goals, policies, and practices related to citizenship education in the United States and other countries, illustrating how social studies in the United States can give greater attention to democratic discourse, decision making, and civic education. To adequately prepare citizens for the future, social studies educators must pay greater attention to multicultural and global content and pedagogy.
• Developing a Rationale for Multicultural Education in Rural Appalachia
  Because of their ethnic/racial homogeneity, Appalachian schools often see multicultural education as irrelevant. Teacher education must link the oppression of Appalachia with that of more visible minority groups; show how knowledge is subjective; and emphasize that true national unity results from honoring diversity.
• Education & Justice: A View from the Back of the Bus
  This collection of essays reflects a lifetime commitment to education and democracy, bringing together views on race, justice, and equity for all students.
• Education for Democracy: Contexts, Curricula, Assessments. Research in Social Education
  Liberal democracies depend on the knowledge, character, and imagination of their citizens. Three assumptions underlie this collection of essays on democracy and education: (1) democracy is morally superior to autocracy, whether religious or secular, utopian or mundane; (2) democracies are rare historically and inherently fragile; and (3) there can be no democracy without democrats.
• Five Reviews of McLaren's "Revolutionary Multiculturalism"
  Presents five reviews of McLaren's 1997 book, with comments on critical pedagogy, multicultural education, capitalism, social justice, and remarks about student responses to "Revolutionary Multiculturalism." (SLD).
• Ideals for Citizenship Education
  Discusses the importance of citizenship education in the United Kingdom and throughout Europe, explaining that citizenship education in schools provides an opportunity for young people to see justice as everyone's business and to learn how to ask questions, think critically, and see that injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere. (SM).
• Instilling Civic and Democratic Values in ALL Students: A Multicultural Perspective
  The key elements of promoting human traits such as building trust through proactive communication, empowering individuals, affirming civic values through diversity, serving as a symbol, and increasing accountability and responsibility as they relate to teachers and students are the focus of this article, which provides educators with useful guidelines to instill these virtues in themselves and their students in U.S. schools.
• Multicultural Education and the Civic Mission of Schools
  This paper discusses key elements of current multicultural challenges of the traditional civic mission of schools. It appraises these challenges to suggest their strengths and weaknesses--contributions and pitfalls--with regard to fundamental U.S.
• Reading, Writing, and Justice: School Reform as if Democracy Matters. SUNY Series, INTERRUPTIONS: Border Testimony(ies) and Critical Discourse/s
  This book asks what would it means to take democracy seriously in today's debates about school reform. Its six chapters offer case studies, examples, and conversation starters for teachers, administrators, and citizens who wish to build on the contribution of each and every citizen.
• School Choice and Social Justice
  This book presents a view of what constitutes social justice in education, arguing that justice requires that all children have a real opportunity to become autonomous people, and that the state use a criterion of educational equality for deploying educational resources. Through systematic evaluation of empirical evidence, the book suggests that existing plans do not fare well against the criterion of social justice, yet this need not impugn school choice.
• Strategies of Transformation toward a Multicultural Society: Fulfilling the Story of Democracy. Praeger Series in Transformational Politics and Political Science
  Multicultural education helps fulfill the story of democracy by encouraging each person and each community to become present and heard in individual identity. Strategies of transformation are necessary to enable people from all backgrounds to ask questions about current society and to participate in the creation of the nation's history.
• Uprooting and Replacing Positivism, the Melting Pot, Multiculturalism, and Other Impotent Notions in Educational Leadership through an African American Perspective
  Examines traditional notions of positivism and rational-linear thinking that have guided public school practice, interrogating modernist concepts of the melting pot and multiculturalism through an African American and critical theoretical voice. Offers a postmodernist perspective grounded in spirituality that welcomes involving the whole self in school leadership and encourages constructing schools that celebrate democracy, equity, and social justice.
• Whose Community Schools? New Discourses, Old Patterns
  Describes the history of community schools, which link schools, families, and communities via family-support initiatives and school-linked services. Discusses family involvement in schools; partnerships for improvement that emphasize families without creating dependency; and new citizenship (building communities and promoting competence), which provides a stronger conceptual basis for community schools than did partners for improvement discourse.