Product Description: In this book, the contributors challenge dominant discourses and practices in the fields of early childhood and middle grades education that are based on the last century's grand developmental theories.

Not a Stage! is written for teachers, students, and scholars interested in the academic, social, and emotional needs of young adolescents. It is unique because it actively resists basing the practice, research, and theory of young adolescent education on developmentalism and the developmental stage of young adolescence. The purpose of this book is to begin to reorient the discourse on young adolescent growth and change and in turn reconceptualize the education of young adolescents. The book infuses a contingent, recursive conception of adolescent growth and change into the discourse around young adolescence by making three pleas to those interested in the schooling of young adolescents: to move away from a developmentally responsive vision to a contingently and recursively relational vision; to move from «characterizing» young adolescenCE to «particularizing» young adolescenTS; and to move from a «sameness» curriculum to a «difference» curriculum.