In this exploration of the social context of reading and writing in pre-industrial England, David Cressy tackles important questions about the limits of participation in the mainstream of early modern society. To what extent could people at different social levels share in political, religious, literary and cultural life; how vital was the ability to read and write; and how widely distributed were these skills? Using a combination of humanist and social-scientific methods, Dr Cressy provides a detailed reconstruction of the profile of literacy in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century England, looking forward to the eighteenth century and also making comparisons with other European societies.

Persian has been a written language since the sixth century B.C. Only Chinese, Greek, and Latin have comparable histories of literacy. Although Persian script changed—first from cuneiform to a modified Aramaic, then to Arabic—from the ninth to the nineteenth centuries it served a broader geographical area than any language in world history. It was the primary language of administration and belles lettres from the Balkans under the earlier Ottoman Empire to Central China under the Mongols, and from the northern branches of the Silk Road in Central Asia to southern India under the Mughal Empire. Its history is therefore crucial for understanding the function of writing in world history. Each of the chapters of Literacy in the Persianate World opens a window onto a particular stage of this history, starting from the reemergence of Persian in the Arabic script after the Arab-Islamic conquest in the seventh century A.D., through the establishment of its administrative vocabulary, its literary tradition, its expansion as the language of trade in the thirteenth century, and its adoption by the British imperial administration in India, before being reduced to the modern role of national language in three countries (Afghanistan, Iran, and Tajikistan) in the twentieth century. Two concluding chapters compare the history of written Persian with the parallel histories of Chinese and Latin, with special attention to the way its use was restricted and channeled by social practice. This is the first comparative study of the historical role of writing in three languages, including two in non-Roman scripts, over a period of two and a half millennia, providing an opportunity for reassessment of the work on literacy in English that has accumulated over the past half century. The editors take full advantage of this opportunity in their introductory essay.

This edited volume aims to critically discuss in how far the national orientation of schools and teacher education is appropriate in light of increasing migration and transnationality. The contributions offer ideas from teacher education research and school pedagogical practice in different nation-state contexts such as Austria, Canada, Chile, Greece, Israel, Japan, Switzerland, Turkey, the UK, and the USA. They ask which empirical and theoretical approaches are suitable for describing the phenomena of pedagogical-professional dealings with migration-related and transnational demands on schools. In raising this question, they do not reduce the analytical focus on migrants, their migration paths, actions or attitudes. Instead, the authors analyse the global interconnectedness and entanglements – each embedded in their specific national and global societal power structures and hierarchical relationships – and the country-specific and transnational structures and contextual conditions of schools and teacher education.

Social Structure and Behavior: Essays in Honor of William Hamilton Sewell is a collection of 16 essays dealing with the social psychological aspects of schooling and achievement, social stratification and mobility, measurements and methods, and social structures and wellbeing. The collection discusses the political dimension of stratification, the results of observation of first-graders in their reading group assignments against their social background, and stereotyping practices held by dominant groups of society. Anther papers use a causal model to analyze occupational status and earnings of Cuban exiles in the U.S.; other authors discuss the effects of institutionalization of formal employment in Brazil, and propose a revision of the Duncan Scale by a more comprehensive set of occupational prestige scale. The book also analyzes measurements of ranked preferences using a single latent factor behind the ranked items. One authors points that some sociological terms can be misleading in propounding a sound theory when these terms themselves confound what they are supposed to correlate. The text also addresses the fundamental problems concerning welfare that include order, collective action, and consensus. This collection of essays can interest social workers, sociologists, psychologists, and researchers involved in community development.

Spoken Word and Social Practice: Orality in Europe (1400-1700) addresses historians and literary scholars. It aims to recapture oral culture in a variety of literary and non-literary sources, tracking the echo of women’s voices, on trial, or bantering and gossiping in literary works, and recapturing those of princes and magistrates, townsmen, villagers, mariners, bandits, and songsmiths. Almost all medieval and early modern writing was marked by the oral. Spoken words and turns of phrase are bedded in writings, and the mental habits of a speaking world shaped texts. Writing also shaped speech; the oral and the written zones had a porous, busy boundary. Cross-border traffic is central to this study, as is the power, range, utility, and suppleness of speech. Contributors are Matthias Bähr, Richard Blakemore, Michael Braddick, Rosanna Cantavella, Thomas V. Cohen, Gillian Colclough, Jan Dumolyn, Susana Gala Pellicer, Jelle Haemers, Marcus Harmes, Elizabeth Horodowich, Carolina Losada, Virginia Reinburg, Anne Regent-Susini, Joseph T. Snow, Sonia Suman, Lesley K. Twomey and Liv Helene Willumsen.

This timely book looks at social literacy within the revised National Curriculum which places an obligation on schools and teachers to promote social cohesion, community involvement and a sense of social responsibility among young people. Social Literacy, Citizenship Education and the National Curriculum is an introduction to the social purposes and aims contained in the revised National Curriculum. It provides the theory behind the movement for social literacy as well as providing information for teachers, lecturers and policy makers on putting the government's ideas into practice.

First Published in 1996. This first of its kind Encyclopaedia charts the influence of philosophic ideas that have had the greatest influence on education from Ancient Greece to the present. It covers classical thinkers as Plato, Augustine, Hypatia, Locke and Rousseau, as well as recent figures such as Montessori, Heldegger, Du Bois and Dewey. It illuminates time-hounded ideas and concepts such as idealism, practical wisdom, scholasticism, tragedy and truth, as well as modern constructs as critical theory, existentialism, phenomenology, Marxism and post-Colonialism. The coverage consists of 228 articles by 184 contributors who survey the full spectrum of the philosophy of education.