Since its inception, action research has been the subject of confusion and controversy. Can something be research if it doesn’t «prove» anything? Can something be action research if it’s a project run by an expert who does not consider participants co-researchers? Questions multiply when the general term is limited to critical action research. What makes critical action research different from action research generally? Can the action research project of a classroom teacher intended to raise standardized test scores properly be considered critical? Is there a role for advocacy in any enterprise calling itself research? If critical action research is distinct from traditional empirical research, then what formats make sense for sharing results? This highly diverse collection of previously unpublished and published works offers a sampling of opinions on key theoretical and methodological questions, complemented by a wide range of critical action research reports illustrating what various theories look like in practice. The book provides a sketch of the topography of critical action research terrain and illuminates some diverse paths through it.

Product Description: Education policy over the past thirty years has been powerfully influenced by well-funded and slickly produced research reports produced by advocacy think tanks. The quality of think tank reports and the value of the policies they support have been sharply debated...read more

Product Description: Since its introduction in 1998, Finding Freedom in the Classroom has impacted countless educators and preservice teachers by providing provocative questions about taken-for-granted educational routines as well as an alternative, imaginative view of what classrooms might become...read more

Product Description: Despite the fact that publishers and policy-makers have had increasing influence over classrooms, it is the teacher who must make decisions on a minute-by-minute basis about what will help specific students learn. Similarly, local administrators must make key decisions at the school and district level that will best serve particular communities of teachers, students, and parents...read more

Product Description: A survey of the evolution of student rights, from children as property to free speech, prayer in the classroom, compulsory flag salutes, school searches, drug testing, and the right to equal education.• Provides a chronology of selected legislation and Supreme Court cases from the Bill of Rights in 1791 to the 2000 ruling in Santa Fe Independent School District v...read more (view table of contents, read Amazon.com's description)

Product Description: Examining common assumptions and routines through the lens of critical theory, the authors question several aspects of graduate education, including the conception of graduate students as institutional capital; institutionalized prejudice based on age, gender, sexual orientation, race and class; and competing power and value systems...read more (view table of contents, read Amazon.com's description)

Product Description: This volume argues that while twentieth century educational psychology has made important advances, a time for reassessment has arrived. Recent years have seen the rise of neo-Vygotskian analysis and situated cognition within the discipline of cognitive psychology...read more (view table of contents, read Amazon.com's description)