Book Review 2011: Conducting Educational Research: A Primer for Teachers and Administrators, P.D. Morrell &J.B. Carroll

Conducting Educational Research: A Primer for Teachers and Administrators is designed to provide the step-wise, content-specific information masters students must possess to design, conduct, and disseminate a qualitative, quantitative or mixed methods classroom or school research study. The text will help school professionals to see both the value of being life-long critical consumers of educational research and the merit of using research in helping them to become teacher leaders and/or change agents in their own professional settings.

Specifically, the text would provide master level students with:
the background they need to see the importance of educational research in their daily professional lives instruction in all aspects of a typical five-chapter research design (introduction/literature review/methodology/results/conclusion, discussion, implications)
the tools needed to locate and critically review published educational research instruction on common qualitative methodologies instruction on the types of quantitative methodologies that master level candidates would be most likely to use knowledge of the importance of being intelligent consumers of existing research ways to engage the student in a reflection plan for the future.-From the publisher.

Book Review 2011: A Carpenter’s Daughter, Renny Christopher

A Carpenter’s Daughter is the story of the difficulties and rewards of the educational system for one who was not meant to go through it. The single most reliable predictor of whether someone will earn a BA is whether at least one of their parents has one-yet, today, there are an increasing number of first-generation college students.

A Carpenter’s Daughter is both a memoir of the author’s experiences growing up, going to school, and becoming an academic and a thoughtful commentary on the meaning of class in American culture. By connecting her own story with ideas from scholarly works on class and identity, Christopher shows how her individual experiences reflect common struggles that people of working-class background face when their education, profession, income, and lifestyles change. This work reminds us forcefully that “moving up” isn’t necessarily good and that changing one’s class isn’t as simple as going to class or even becoming the teacher of the class.
–Sherry Linkon, author of Teaching Working Class

The work is stellar, merging the tangled and complex webs of social mobility through education in ways that leave lots of loose ends dangling just the way it should. No pretty bows adorning carefully wrapped packages here. No straight and narrow trajectory toward a mainstream version of success. Instead, readers will be pulled along by nuanced narratives portraying the warped nature of society’s construction of success and a careful crafting of the book in its entirety as a disjointed text presenting shards of a life that can never be visible in a tidied-up tale. -From the publisher.

Book Review 2011: Urban Science Education for the Hip-Hop Generation, Christopher Emdin

Christopher Emdin is an assistant professor of science education and director of secondary school initiatives at the Urban Science Education Center at Teachers College, Columbia University. He holds a Ph.D. in urban education with a concentration in mathematics, science and technology; a master’s degree in natural sciences; and a bachelor’s degree in physical anthropology, biology, and chemistry.

His book, Urban Science Education for the Hip-Hop Generation is rooted in his experiences as student, teacher, administrator, and researcher in urban schools and the deep relationship between hip-hop culture and science that he discovered at every stage of his academic and professional journey. The book utilizes autobiography, outcomes of research studies, theoretical explorations, and accounts of students’ experiences in schools to shed light on the causes for the lack of educational achievement of urban youth from the hip-hop generation.- Editorial Review, Amazon.com

Book Review 2011: The Elements Of Creativity And Giftedness In Mathematics, Bharath Sriraman & Kyeonghwa Lee

he Elements of Creativity and Giftedness in Mathematics edited by Bharath Sriraman and KyeongHwa Lee covers recent advances in mathematics education pertaining to the development of creativity and giftedness. The book is international in scope in the “sense” that it includes numerous studies on mathematical creativity and giftedness conducted in the U.S.A, China, Korea, Turkey, Israel, Sweden, and Norway in addition to cross-national perspectives from Canada and Russia.

The topics include problem -posing, problem-solving and mathematical creativity; the development of mathematical creativity with students, pre and in-service teachers; cross-cultural views of creativity and giftedness; the unpacking of notions and labels such as high achieving, inclusion, and potential; as well as the theoretical state of the art on the constructs of mathematical creativity and giftedness. The book also includes some contributions from the first joint meeting of the American Mathematical Society and the Korean Mathematical Society in Seoul, 2009.

Topics covered in the book are essential reading for graduate students and researchers interested in researching issues and topics within the domain of mathematical creativity and mathematical giftedness. It is also accessible to pre-service and practicing teachers interested in developing creativity in their classrooms, in addition to professional development specialists, mathematics educators, gifted educators, and psychologists.- From the publisher.

Book Review 2011: Key Works in Critical Pedagogy, Joe L. Kinchelo

Joe L. Kincheloe comprises sixteen papers written within a twenty-year period in which Kincheloe inspired legions of educators with his incisive analyses of education. Kincheloe was a prolific thinker and writer who produced an enormous number of books and chapters and journal articles.In a career cut short by his untimely death, Kincheloe led the way with an approach to research and pedagogy that incorporated multiperspectival approaches that examined a wide range of topics including schooling, cultural studies, research bricolage, kinderculture, Christotainment, and capitalism. In these works Kincheloe used accessible, elegantly produced language to capture his emotional yet scholarly ways of engaging with the world.

He was a champion of the disenfranchised and his writing consistently examined social life from the perspective of participants who were often treated harshly because of their marginalization. The articles in this book were selected to encompass Kincheloe’s impressive scholarly career and to draw attention to the necessity for educators to take a critical stance with respect to the enactment of education to reproduce disadvantage. Among the theoretical frameworks included in the works are critical pedagogy, research, hermeneutics, phenomenology, cultural studies, and post-formal thought.- From the publisher