Pedagogical Pleasures inquires into pleasure (understood as enjoyment, delight, and/or gratification) as a crucial but neglected aspect of teachers' lives and work. Pleasure is examined as an historically contingent and unstable product of language use, rather than as a spontaneous, personal, and psychological«feeling.» This book is a departure from conventional accounts of pedagogy in two ways It is unashamedly about teachers rather than students, and it does not offer any solution to pedagogical problems. Instead, it seeks to extend pedagogical knowledge by inquiring into the sorts of pleasure that are available to teachers at this historical time.

In Disturbing Pleasures Henry Giroux demonstrates how his well-known theories of education, critical pedagogy and popular culture can be put to use in the classroom and in other cultural settings. Adding an entirely new dimension to his thinking about the cultural sites at which pedagogical practice takes place, Giroux illustrates how professors, school teachers and other cultural workers can appropriate what he refers to as a "pedagogy of cultural studies."

The essays cover girlhood around the world and cover such key areas as schooling, sexuality, popular culture and identity.

Reading for pleasure urgently requires a higher profile to raise attainment and increase children’s engagement as self-motivated and socially interactive readers. Building Communities of Engaged Readers highlights the concept of ‘Reading Teachers’ who are not only knowledgeable about texts for children, but are aware of their own reading identities and prepared to share their enthusiasm and understanding of what being a reader means. Sharing the processes of reading with young readers is an innovative approach to developing new generations of readers. Examining the interplay between the ‘will and the skill’ to read, the book distinctively details a reading for pleasure pedagogy and demonstrates that reader engagement is strongly influenced by relationships between children, teachers, families and communities. Importantly it provides compelling evidence that reciprocal reading communities in school encompass: a shared concept of what it means to be a reader in the 21st century; considerable teacher and child knowledge of children’s literature and other texts; pedagogic practices which acknowledge and develop diverse reader identities; spontaneous ‘inside-text talk’ on the part of all members; a shift in the focus of control and new social spaces that encourage choice and children’s rights as readers. Written by experts in the literacy field and illustrated throughout with examples from the project schools, it is essential reading for all those concerned with improving young people’s enjoyment of and attainment in reading.

How did this nineteenth-century novelist change the way we think? “A fine contribution to the sociology of literature . . . Highly recommended.” —Choice What are the sources of the commonly held presumption that reading literature should make people more just, humane, and sophisticated? Looking at literary history in relation to the cultural histories of reading, publishing, and education, The Pleasures of Memory illuminates the ways in which Dickens’s serial fiction shaped not only the popular practice of reading for pleasure and instruction but also the school subject we now know as “English.” Sarah Winter shows how Dickens’s serial fiction instigated specific reading practices by reworking the conventions of religious didactic tracts from which most Victorians learned to read. Incorporating an influential associationist psychology of learning founded on the cumulative functioning of memory, Dickens’s serial novels consistently led readers to reflect on their reading as a form of shared experience. Dickens’s celebrity authorship, Winter argues, represented both a successful marketing program for popular fiction and a cultural politics addressed to a politically unaffiliated, social-activist Victorian readership. As late-nineteenth-century educational reforms consolidated British and American readers into “mass” populations served by state school systems, Dickens’s beloved novels came to embody the socially inclusive and humanizing goals of democratic education.

Bringing together feminist theory, girlhood studies, and curriculum theory, this book contributes an in-depth critical analysis of curriculum in single-gender schooling for girls in postfeminist landscapes of "unlimited choices" and resurgences of proper girlhood. The arguments challenge the mainstream assumptions and promotions about the guarantees of female success via small school supports, tailored curricula, protection, school choice and class advantage. Single-gender schools are not homogenous; they have different histories, student populations, finances and organization. Recognizing this diversity, Girls, Single-sex Schools, and Postfeminist Fantasies draws on rich data collected in two US secondary schools over a two-year period to identify and explore the ambiguities of success in single-sex schools for girls. Rich classroom observations and interviews with teachers and students reveal the resounding message delivered to girls - that they can "have it all" by going to college. By exploring students’ imaginings, hopes, and doubts around college, the text illustrates how this catalyzes girls’ critiques of their futures and of the schooled storylines of female success. While teachers might trumpet college, career, and limitless horizons, girls seek to understand their social positions and try to make sense of family, passions, and future happiness. This book will be of great interest to graduate and postgraduate students, academics, researchers, libraries in secondary education, girlhood studies, sociology of education, gender and sexuality in education, single-sex schooling, and feminist theory.

Pleasure and desire have been important components of the vision for sexuality education for over 20 years. This book argues that there has been a lack of scrutiny over the political motivations that underpin research supportive of pleasure and desire within comprehensive sexuality education. In this volume, key researchers in the field consider how discourses related to pleasure and desire have been taken up internationally. They argue that sexuality education is clearly shaped by specific cultural and political contexts, and examine how these contexts have shaped the development of pleasure’s inclusion in such programs. Via such discussions, this volume incites a re-configuration of thought regarding sexuality education’s approach to pleasure and desire.