One of the greatest resources a school has is its staff. How teachers themselves, and their work, are defined are therefore matters of utmost importance. Major trends of increased control and 'new mangerialism' are occurring in most OECD countries, radically altering both the content and form of teacher education. This book outlines recent changes in teacher education and professional development and, by drawing on recent research findings, explores the positive and negative impacts on the nature of teaching and the shape of the profession.

One of the leading historians of education in the United States here develops a powerful interpretation of the uses of history in educational reform and of the relations among democracy, education, and the capitalist state. Michael Katz discusses the reshaping of American education from three perspectives. First is the perspective of history: How did American education take shape? The second is that of reform: What can a historian say about recent criticisms and proposals for improvement? The third is that of historiography: What drives the politics of educational history? Katz shows how the reconstruction of America’s educational past can be used as a framework for thinking about current reform. Contemporary concepts such as public education, institutional structures such as the multiversity, and modern organizational forms such as bureaucracy all originated as solutions to problems of public policy. The petrifaction of these historical products—which are neither inevitable nor immutable—has become, Katz maintains, one of the mighty obstacles to change. The book’s central questions are as much ethical and political as they are practical. How do we assess the relative importance of efficiency and responsiveness in educational institutions? Whom do we really want institutions to serve? Are we prepared to alter institutions and policies that contradict fundamental political principles? Why have some reform strategies consistently failed? On what models should institutions be based? Should schools and universities be further assimilated to the marketplace and the state? Katz’s iconoclastic treatment of these issues, vividly and clearly written, will be of interest to both specialists and general readers. Like his earlier classic, The Irony of Early School Reform (1968), this book will set a fresh agenda for debate in the field.

Tracing the first two decades of state-funded African American schools, Educational Reconstruction addresses the ways in which black Richmonders, black Mobilians, and their white allies created, developed, and sustained a system of African American schools following the Civil War. Hilary Green proposes a new chronology in understanding postwar African American education, examining how urban African Americans demanded quality public schools from their new city and state partners. Revealing the significant gains made after the departure of the Freedmen’s Bureau, this study reevaluates African American higher education in terms of developing a cadre of public school educator-activists and highlights the centrality of urban African American protest in shaping educational decisions and policies in their respective cities and states.

This book maps out a new paradigm of teacher education an, by implication, professional education generally. The book opens with two alternative theories of teacher education and training and explains the concepts and assumptions on which they rest including beliefs about the nature and role of education in society. It then proposes a 'natural science' paradigm and its implications for establishing a coherent view of teacher education. Subsequent chapters indicate the professional implications of such a model.

Manuscripts have played a crucial role in the educational practices of virtually all cultures that have a history of using them. As learning and teaching tools, manuscripts become primary witnesses for reconstructing and studying didactic and research activities and methodologies from elementary levels to the most advanced. The present volume investigates the relation between manuscripts and educational practices focusing on four particular research topics: educational settings: teachers, students and their manuscripts; organising knowledge: syllabi; exegetical practices: annotations; modifying tradition: adaptations. The volume offers a number of case studies stretching across geophysical boundaries from Western Europe to South-East Asia, with a time span ranging from the second millennium BCE to the twentieth century CE.

First Published in 2013. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

First published in 1978, Reconstructing Educational Psychology presents a new look at topics of central social concern such as children’s rights, the community approach to children’s problems, the inutility of traditional concepts of intelligence and personality, the interactionist approach to the concept of ‘deviant’ behaviour and the invalidity of psychiatric concepts of ‘maladjustment’. New ideas are the core of the book. It begins with historical and personal accounts of the origin and the nature of the situation of educational psychology. It spells out the way in which new thinking determines new practice, and the extent to which progress has been made. The book will be of interest to teachers, psychologists as well as to students of pedagogy and psychology.