Here are some new acquisitions that we have at the OISE Library!

As millions of people around the world enrolled in hundreds of massive open online courses, the New York Times declared 2012 the “Year of the MOOC”. Since then, MOOCS have become game-changers in how we perceive and offer education, particularly at the post-secondary level. Universities across the world have joined in to offer courses on everything imaginable from music and literature to finance and computer science. In MOOC, Jonathan Haber analyzes the phenomenon’s rapid rise to popularity along with its equally rapid backlash which ranged from low return on investments for companies and high dropout rates for programs.

 Skills and Inequality: Partisan Politics and the Political Economy of Education Reforms in Western Welfare States discusses the ways in which particular policies in relation to general education, school-based vocational training, and dual apprenticeship systems create conditions that impact inequality and in turn lead to the creation of a welfare state. Marius R. Busemeyer looks at how different formations of capitalism affect the ways in which our political economy is structured and how this impacts the design of post-secondary education. This book features multiple case-studies and uses historical and current data analysis from Sweden, Germany, and the United Kingdom.

New teachers are excited and ambitious about making their mark and changing the lives of students. How can you become the best teacher possible and in what ways can you teach so that you are offering your students the very best that’s available to them and their learning as well as from you? In The Best Teacher in You: How to Accelerate Learning and Change Lives, the authors cover the ways in which seven teachers have gone beyond their training and their duties to create classrooms that are exciting, creative, and dynamic. The research spans six years and the authors identify four ways or “dimensions” of effective teaching that can help to transform classroom for both old and new teachers alike.

Another new acquisition that connects well with “The Best Teacher in You” is Creative Partnerships in Practice: Developing Creative Learners. This book uses case studies from the Creative Partnerships Programme, which is the largest school-based creative learning initiative in existence. Run by the Arts Council in England, the CP is a forefront leader in bringing arts, culture, and creativity to classrooms. This book highlights the achievements of the CP but is also a fantastic guide on how to implement creative learning within schools and how to use approaches such as sculpture, storytelling, film, or multimedia in the classroom.

Here are some new titles at OISE Library that will be of interest to scholars and practitioners of social justice-informed approaches to education.

This selection of recent acquisitions calls attention to collaborative, community-driven strategies aimed at building resilience at all scales of practice in a changing global educational landscape and in diverse institutional contexts.

Affirmative Action Matters: Creating opportunities for students around the world, focuses specifically on affirmative action policies in higher education admissions, the sphere that has been the most controversial in many of the nations that have such policies. It brings together scholars from diverse nations to examine and discuss the historical, political and philosophical contexts of affirmative action and clarify policy developments to further the meaningful equality of educational opportunity. This volume includes both well established and emerging policies from the Americas, Europe, Africa, and Asia, policies which developed under a variety of political systems and target a range of underrepresented groups, based on race, ethnicity, gender, class, social background, or region.

Badass Teachers Unite! Reflections on Education, History and Youth Activism. This collection of essays on education and youth activism draws from Naison’s research on Bronx History and his experiences defending teachers and students from school reform policies which undermine their power and creativity. Naison’s focus is identifying teaching and organizing strategies that have worked effectively in New York, and could be implemented in impoverished communities elsewhere.

Diversity and Inclusion in Higher Education: Emerging perspectives on institutional reform. Diversity and equity in higher education is fast becoming a major opportunity and challenge to institutions, countries and regions. The increasing centrality of diversity is fuelled in part by changing demographics, immigration, social movements, calls for remedies to historic grievances, and the relationship between identity and access to power. This book provides an opportunity to look at efforts at institutional change with respect to diversity in several countries where issues of diversity are moving beyond simply access for diverse populations to efforts at institutional transformation.

Politics of Anti-Racism Education: In Search of Strategies for Transformative Learning. This collection of essays explores the knowledge that constitutes anti-racism education and the ways in which knowledge constitutive of anti-racism education becomes embodied through particular pedagogues. The authors are anti-racism educators with experiences in diverse settings: the chapters cover various fields and socio-historic geographies, address contemporary educational issues, and are situated within personal-political, historical and philosophical conversations. Anti-racism education is a discursive stance and steeped in politics that shape and are shaped by everyday conversations, theories, and practices. The essays in this collection work through many of the possibilities and limitations of engaging in counter-hegemonic education for transformative learning.

The Redesign of Urban School Systems: Case Studies in District Governance brings together twelve teaching cases on urban school governance developed specifically for training school boards and district leaders. The cases illustrate major shifts in district-wide reform, from traditional, hierarchical, compliance-driven bureaucracies to high-performing, student-centred systems. They describe real-life situations in which district leaders and school boards grapple with district wide reform efforts.