This April, OISE welcomes delegates from the annual meeting of the American Educational Research Association (AERA). AERA is an international organization that has been active since 1916, composed of faculty, researchers, graduate students, and other professionals and experts in studies in education. In line with AERA’s goal of promoting excellent research, and on the heels of the announcement of OISE’s QS ranking as the seventh best educational institution in the world, and the top-ranked such institution in Canada, the OISE Library is celebrating faculty publications in this month’s lobby display.
OISE’s departments in Applied Psychology & Human Development (APHD), Curriculum, Teaching & Learning (CTL), Leadership, Higher & Adult Education (LHAE), and Social Justice Education (SJE) are incredibly active. Their faculty members are renowned as leaders in their fields, and we are currently showcasing publications from the last five years in our multi-departmental faculty display.
The APHD department has published many works in the last few years, of which, Active Learning from Infancy to Childhood, co-edited by OISE’s own Patricia A. Ganea, is one of the most recent. In the book, the ways in which children drive their own learning at various stages of development are examined. As the editors outline in the introduction, active learning takes place when a child recognizes a gap in their knowledge, knows where to find a solution to that gap in knowledge, and is inclined to seek out this knowledge accordingly. Active Learning from Infancy to Childhood situates itself between classic and contemporary research on cognitive and language development.
Among publications in the CTL department, Kathy Bickmore’s book Comparative and International Education: Issues for Teachers, co-edited with colleagues Ruth Hayhoe, Caroline Manion, and Karen Mundy from LHAE, explores educational practices from around the globe. The book grew out of OISE’s Comparative, International, and Development Education Centre, with the goal of introducing international issues in education and diverse cultural perspectives to both practicing and pre-service educators. Now in its second edition, Comparative and International Education: Issues for Teachers pulls in new authors to dive deep into international issues, perspectives, and practices related to school organization, social justice, and education more broadly.
Apart from research, faculty members from CTL also regularly publish curriculum resources, like Shelley Stagg Peterson’s and Larry Swartz’s co-authored book, “This Is a Great Book!” This resource, subtitled “101 events for building enthusiastic readers inside and outside the classroom—from chapter books to young adult novels,” provides suggestions on how to approach and run classroom activities with a range of reading material. Peterson and Swartz, define a “great book” as being one that has a significant impact on a child; they aim to make reading exciting for all readers by allowing room for readers to engage with all kinds of texts in meaningful ways. The book includes activities, classroom worksheets, suggested titles and book series for children, and a list of recommended professional literature for teachers.
LHAE has also recently published Alternative Schooling and Student Engagement: Canadian Stories of Democracy within Bureaucracy, co-edited by OISE’s Nina Bascia and Malcolm Levin. The book begins by outlining the history of alternative schools in Toronto in the 1960s and 1970s, highlighting these progressive schools’ continuing attendance and success. Multiple essays then explore contemporary critical approaches to alternative schooling, historical perspectives, approaches to teaching, and case studies of six alternative schools.
From SJE, John P. Portelli’s co-edited book Key Questions for Educational Leaders examines the relationship between educational theory and practice as it relates to the development of equitable and ethical educational leadership. The book is composed of a series of essays written by scholars from around the world that explore the purpose of education and the nature of educational leadership. It comprehensively addresses current issues in educational leadership in an effort to “make the student experience genuinely educational, meaningful, fair and equitable, enriching and socially just.”
All of these books and more can be found on display in the OISE building lobby, across from the OISE Library. Ask a librarian for assistance in removing books from the display case.
