The Trojan Horse in the Tribal Classroom: How Culture Wars are Waged and Won on the Front Lines of Education By: Thomas Alan Tobin All three hundred thirty million of us are immersed in culture wars at every turn. It’s one of the great disadvantages of diversity. One such “warfare” has been hidden from all of us despite the fact that we had to face it almost daily in our formative years. The battleground for this most common cultural conflict is where we all spent at least 40% of our school-years, preparing not just for unforeseen pandemics, such as we’re caught up in now, nor also for dealing with the economic, ecological, and political divisions that currently confront all arenas of American society. Surprisingly it’s our educational system, and especially the classroom, where the frontlines of cultural “warfare” may have kept us constantly struggling for so long. Unwittingly and unwillingly drafted into these social and cultural battles, we’ve been trained to continue this perennial struggle between academic and popular sub-cultures in our schools. The Trojan Horse in the Tribal Classroom reveals the situational factors and functions that have caused education to become an “embattled institution and teaching an embattled profession.” Most importantly it proposes social and cultural solutions to these problems that promise real institution-wide improvement and a completely reconstructed, truly academic classroom culture. One reading of this book will totally revise one’s vision of American education and our memories of thousands of hours of classroom life. -- Dr. Regina Peter, Executive Director NEWMARK Education

This myth-based reader's theater script builds fluency through oral reading. The creative script captures students' interest, so they will want to practice and perform. Included is a fluency lesson and approximate reading levels for the script roles.

The object of much debate, attention, and scholarship since it first aired more than 20 years ago, The Simpsons provides excellent, if unexpected, fodder for high school and college lesson plans. After all, laughing students are hardly sleeping students! But The Simpsons also provides a familiar student knowledge base which instructors can use as a jumping-off point to introduce concepts in literature, composition, linguistics, cultural studies, gender studies, and media appreciation. The authors, both of whom have been teaching The Simpsons for more than a decade, share exercises, prompts, and even syllabi that have proven successful in their own courses. Instructors considering this book for use in a course may request an examination copy here.

From Islamist terror to feminist equal pay campaigns and the apparent Brexit hate crime epidemic, identity politics seems to be everywhere nowadays. This is not entirely an accident. The progressive liberal-left, which dominates our public life, has taken on the politics of race, gender, religion and sexuality as a key part of its own group identity - and has used its dominance to embed them into our state and society. In The Tribe, Ben Cobley guides us around the 'system of diversity' which has resulted, exploring the consequences of offering favour and protection to some people but not others based on things like skin colour and gender. He looks at how this system has almost totally captured the Labour Party and is spreading relentlessly around our other major institutions. He also looks at how it is capturing our language, appropriating key terms like 'equality', 'tolerance' and 'inclusion', while denying a voice to those who do not play along. The system of diversity makes a challenge to us all: submit, or risk exclusion from society itself.

This book links sectarianism in Iraq to the failure of the modern nation-state to resolve tensions between sectarian identities and concepts of unified statehood and uniform citizenry. After a theoretical excursus that recasts the notion of primordial identity as a socially constructed reality, the author sets out to explain the persistence of sectarian affiliations in Iraq since its creation following the dismemberment of the Ottoman Empire. Despite the adoption of homogenizing state policies, the uneven sectarian composition of the ruling elites nurtured feelings of political exclusion among marginalized sectarian groups, the Shicites before 2003 and the Sunnis in the post-2003 period. The book then examines how communal discourses in the educational curriculum provoked masked forms of resistance that sharpened sectarian consciousness. Tracing how the anti-Persian streak in the nation-state’s Pan-Arab ideology, which camouflaged anti-Shicism, undermined Iraq’s national integration project, Sectarianism in Iraq delves into the country’s slide from a totalizing Pan-Arab ideology in the pre-2003 period toward the atomistic impulse of the federalist debate in the post-2003 period. Employing extensive fieldwork, this book sheds light on the dynamics of political life in post-Saddam Iraq and is essential reading for Iraqi and Middle East specialists, as well as those interested in understanding the current heightening of sectarian Sunni-Shicite tensions in the Middle East.

The Wedge has intruded itself successfully into educational politics at the local, state, and now national levels."--BOOK JACKET.