This volume offers a critical examination of educational policy in Ontario, Canada, and critiques the success of such policies in ensuring diversity and equity of access in teacher hiring. Providing comprehensive coverage of historical marginalization in the Canadian education system, the book explains the rationale and objectives of policies enacted with the aim of ensuring "bias-free", or "colourblind" hiring. Drawing on qualitative data to illustrate how educators’ lived experiences often sit at odds with the inclusivity that such policies claim to achieve, the book presents the "Equity Hiring Toolkit" as a practical framework enabling educational administrators to recognize how unconscious biases and relative positions of power can implicate hiring decisions. This text will benefit researchers, doctoral students, and academics in the fields of teacher education, educational policy, and multicultural education more broadly. Those interested in the school leadership and management, as well as race and ethnic studies will also enjoy this volume.

Social justice is a philosophy that has gathered momentum over the past few years to bring to light the inequities that exist within our society. In the field of education, social justice illuminates the challenges that marginalized students and minority students face compared to other students. Social Justice and Culturally-Affirming Education in K-12 Settings seeks to bring together social scientists, researchers, and other practitioners to delve into social justice issues in K-12 settings and considers the various challenges and future directions that are associated with this field. Covering key topics such as inclusive education, educational reform, and school policies, this reference work is ideal for administrators, policymakers, researchers, academicians, practitioners, scholars, instructors, and students.

Enacting Anti-Racist and Activist Pedagogies in Teacher Education is a timely edited collection that examines the complexities, challenges, spaces of resistance, and possibilities when faculty—specifically Black, Indigenous, and racialized faculty—advocate and implement anti racism approaches and pedagogies in Canadian teacher education programs. Taking an explicitly critical anti-racist approach, the text challenges the pedagogical, curricular, structural, and institutional underpinnings in teacher education framed by whiteness. As a collective, the chapters explore how to disrupt white normalcy by dismantling the hierarchies in place and unpacking intersectionalities, positionalities, and knowledge production through transformative anti-racist pedagogies. Established and emerging academics, as well as field practitioners, present a holistic and nuanced understanding of anti-racism within the educational context and seek to reframe teacher education through resistance and activism, preparing teacher candidates as practitioners for anti-racist work with racialized students, families, and communities. Including key terms, discussion questions, and “toolbox” sections highlighting advice for pre-service K–12 teachers, this text is an essential resource for undergraduate and graduate students in teacher education.

Equity as Praxis in Early Childhood Education and Care aims to map, deconstruct, and engage with different models of equity as they pertain to the early childhood education landscape in Ontario. Drawing on marginalized narratives of gender, race, Indigeneity, dis/ability and inclusion, and migration, immigration, and displacement, the authors discuss how to advance the field and make it more equitable for children, families, early childhood educators, and all other practitioners. This edited collection outlines the current political climate of early childhood education and care in Ontario through a critical analysis of policies and dominant discourses of equity and inclusion. By prompting readers to reflect on and critique their understandings of children, families, communities, and practices in the field, the authors seek to provide counternarratives to Eurocentric developmentalist hegemonies and an alternative strength-based approach to critical and transformative praxis. This vital text encourages rethinking how narratives of equity and inclusion are constructed and what this means for young children and their families in Ontario, as well as throughout Canada. This is an essential resource for students in early childhood education and care, early childhood studies, and education programs. FEATURES: - Includes perspectives from multiple positionalities in the field to provide a critical and interdisciplinary approach - Draws on a reconceptualist lens to present a critique of developmentalist approaches - Encourages readers to engage with the content by practising critical self-examination and considering social factors and forces that inform their own concepts

This book takes a critical view of masculinities through an investigation of first-in-family males transitioning to higher education. Drawing on six in-depth longitudinal case studies, the focus is on how young men from working-class backgrounds engage with complex social inequalities, as well as the various capitals they draw upon to ensure their success. Through the longitudinal approach, the work problematises the rhetoric of ‘poverty of aspirations’ and foregrounds how class and gender influence the lives and futures of these young men. The book demonstrates how the aspirations of these young men are influenced by a complex interplay between race/ethnicity, religion, masculinity and social class. Finally, the book draws connections between the lived experiences of the participants and the implications for policy and practice in higher education. Drawn from a larger research project, each case study compels the reader to think critically regarding masculinities in relation to social practices, institutional arrangements and cultural ideologies. This is essential reading for those interested in widening participation in higher education, gender theory/masculinities, longitudinal research and social justice.

This volume explores the importance of inter-generational oral culture and stories that transcend time, space, and boundaries transmitted historically from one generation to the next through proverbs, idioms, and folklore tales in different geographical and spatial contexts. These important stories and their embedded life lessons are introduced, explained, and supplemented with pre and post educational activities and lesson plans to be used as learning resources. The centering of orality as a tool and medium for educating the future generation is a reclamation and reaffirmation of Indigeneity, Indigenous knowledges. and non-hegemonic approaches to support students in a socio-culturally sustaining manner. Through this understanding, this book explores the interconnectedness between culture, traditions, language, and way of life through oral storytelling, sharing, and listening.

Drawing on participatory action research conducted with students, parents, families, and school staff in a Southwest community in the United States, this volume contests the interpretation of the achievement gap for students of Mexican descent in the American education system and highlights asset-based approaches that can facilitate students’ academic success. By presenting the Asset-Based Bicultural Continuum Model (ABC) and demonstrating the applications in a variety of family, school, and community-based initiatives, this volume demonstrates how community and cultural wealth can be harnessed to increase educational opportunities for Latino students. The ABC model offers new strategies which capitalize on the bicultural and linguistic assets rooted in local communities and offers place-based strategies driven by communities themselves in order to be tailored to students’ strengths. The text makes a significant contribution to understanding the social ecology of Latinx students’ experiences and offers a new direction for effective and evidence-based academic and health programs across the United States. This book will be a valuable resource for researchers and academics with an interest in the sociology of education, multicultural education, urban education, and bilingual education. It will be of particular interest to those with a focus on Hispanic and Latino studies.