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Authors are cordially invited to submit proposals and/or full manuscripts by e-mail to Acquisitions Editor Evelien van der Veer.
The various reference works will present comprehensive and accurate portraits of the various disciplines. What readers will encounter in these reference works is what the various fields are saying, and/or have been saying during their various histories. This can open up conversations among current established scholars and future, next generation scholars nationally and internationally. These complicated conversations would further expand the various fields and lead to possibilities for praxis. Praxis emphasizes the increase of critical knowledge and understandings both for self-development and social reconstruction.
There is a uniqueness in Critical Understanding in Education in the commitment to the focus on the historical development and comprehensive critical presentation of a particular discipline.
Authors are cordially invited to submit proposals and/or full manuscripts to the Acquisitions Editor, Evelien van der Veer.
All educational concepts and issues have a home and belong to a context. This is the starting premise for this new series. One of the big intellectual breakthroughs of post-war science and philosophy was to emphasise the theory-ladenness of observations and facts—facts and observations cannot be established independent of a theoretical context. In other words, facts and observations are radically context-dependent. We cannot just see what we like or choose to see. In the same way, scholars are argue that concepts and constructs also are relative to a context, whether this be a theory, schema, framework, perspective or network of beliefs. Background knowledge always intrudes; it is there, difficult to articulate, tacit and operates to shape and help form our perceptions. This is the central driving insight of a generation of thinkers from Ludwig Wittgenstein and Karl Popper to Thomas Kuhn and Jürgen Habermas. Increasingly, in social philosophy, hermeneutics, and literary criticism textualism has given way to contextualism, paving the way for the introduction of the notions of ‘frameworks’, ‘paradigms’ and ‘networks’—concepts that emphasize a new ecology of thought.
This new series is predicated upon this insight and movement. It emphasises the importance of context in the establishment of educational facts and observations and the framing of educational hypotheses and theories. It also emphasises the relation between text and context, the discursive and the institution, the local and the global. Accordingly, it emphasizes the significance of contexts at all levels of inquiry: scientific contexts; theoretical contexts; political, social and economic contexts; local and global contexts; contexts for learning and teaching; and, cultural and interdisciplinary contexts.
Contexts of Education, as handbooks, are conceived as reference texts that also can serve as texts.
Much theoretical and research-based writing in educational texts tends towards the inaccessible end of the readability dimension. So the brief for intending authors in this series will be to reflect on their research, and those of others, in such a way as to help educate the generalist, as well as the specialist.
A few words about the build up to this period are in order. Before the mid-twentieth century school teaching, especially at the primary level, was as much a trade as a profession. School teachers were trained primarily in normal schools or teachers colleges, only rarely in universities. But in the 1940s American normal schools were converted into teachers colleges, and in the 1960s these were converted into state universities. At the same time school teaching was being transformed into an all-graduate profession in both the United Kingdom and Canada. For the first time, school teachers required a proper university education.
Something had to be done, then, about what was widely regarded as the deplorable state of educational scholarship. James Conant, in his final years as president at Harvard in the early 1950s, envisioned a new kind of university-based school of education, drawing scholars from mainstream academic disciplines such as history, sociology psychology and philosophy, to teach prospective teachers, conduct educational research, and train future educational scholars. One of the first two professors hired to fulfil this vision was Israel Scheffler, a young philosopher of science and language who had earned a Ph.D. in philosophy at the University of Pennsylvania. Scheffler joined Harvard’s education faculty in 1952. The other was Bernard Bailyn, who joined the Harvard faculty in 1953 after earning his Ph.D. there, and who re-energized the study of American educational history with the publication of Education in the Forming of American Society: Needs and Opportunities for Study (University of North Carolina Press, 1960). The series has been exceptionally fortunate that Scheffler provided a foreword to the volume on philosophy of education, and that Bernard Bailyn provided a foreword for the volume on the history of American education. It is equally fortunate that subsequent volumes have also contained forewords by similarly eminent scholars, including James Banks of the University of Washington, who has been a creative force in social education for decades and the prime mover in the field of multi-cultural education.
The Leaders in Educational Studies series continues to document the growing and changing literature in educational studies. Studies conducted within the established academic disciplines of history, philosophy, and sociology comprised the dominant trend throughout the 1960s and 1970s. By the 1980s educational studies diversified considerably, in terms of both new sub-disciplines within these established disciplines and new interdisciplinary and trans-disciplinary fields.
Curriculum studies, both in general and in the particular school subject matter fields, drew extensively from work in philosophy, history and sociology of education. Work in these disciplines, and also in anthropology and cultural studies among others, also stimulated new perspectives on race, class and gender.
This volume, like previous volumes in the series, brings together personal essays by established leaders in a major field of educational studies. Subsequent volumes in the series will continue to document other established and emerging disciplines, sub-disciplines and inter-disciplines in educational scholarship.
[http://www.ffst.hr/ENCYCLOPAEDIA/]
This new series is devoted to the general theory and practice of open education in all its forms.
Written in the most accessible way, the theory and its application will likely appeal not only to researchers, but also to teachers and school administrators. Norris has created a real applicability to school leadership in various international contexts.
Written in the most accessible way, the theory and its application will likely appeal not only to researchers, but also to teachers and school administrators. Norris has created a real applicability to school leadership in various international contexts.
Critical Leaders and the Foundation of Disability Studies in Education is a sub-series to the book series Studies in Inclusive Education. The series and subseries have independent editorial teams that work closely together. For the volumes published in the main book series, please visit its webpage.