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210 books match the query 'Philosophy, Theory & Social Aspects' and 7 start with b

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Becoming Educated

Simone C. Drake

The Ohio State University Press, 2026

A memoir of race, public schooling, and identity as an "integration guinea pig" in the 1980s Midwest.

Becoming Educated is Simone C. Drake’s engaging and bold memoir about race, class, gender, and the meaning of education in the urban Midwest. Drake, a scholar of literature, culture, and law, uses her own story as a Black girl attending recently desegregated Columbus public schools in the 1980s and 1990s to explore the United States’ most entrenched social problems and how local systems have tried to combat them. From starting kindergarten the year after an Ohio court decision called for busing to end school segregation, to climbing the ranks of academia, to her decision to send her sons to highly rated but largely white suburban schools, Drake weaves a lively and erudite accounting of her identity formation as an “integration guinea pig.” She punctuates her story with rich evocations of the music, TV, and film that shaped her generation, powerful reflections on relevant works by Black writers and artists from Dawoud Bey to Jay-Z, and images of her own artwork. This prismatic book is a must-read for Gen Xers, Midwesterners, and Americans of any race wanting to think more deeply about how our nation’s educational systems—and by extension, all of us—must reckon with inequalities past and present.

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Becoming Rwandan

Education, Reconciliation, and the Making of a Post-Genocide Citizen

S. Garnett Russell

Rutgers University Press, 2020

In the aftermath of the genocide, the Rwandan government has attempted to use the education system in order to sustain peace and shape a new generation of Rwandans. Their hope is to create a generation focused on a unified and patriotic future rather than the ethnically divisive past. Yet, the government’s efforts to manipulate global models around citizenship, human rights, and reconciliation to serve its national goals have had mixed results, with new tensions emerging across social groups. Becoming Rwandan argues that although the Rwandan government utilizes global discourses in national policy documents, the way in which teachers and students engage with these global models distorts the intention of the government, resulting in unintended consequences and undermining a sustainable peace.

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Being a Presence for Students

Teaching as a Lived Defense of Liberal Education

Jeff Frank

Lever Press, 2019

This book offers a lived defense of liberal education. How does a college professor, on a daily basis, help students feel the value of liberal education and get the most from that education? We answer this question, as professors, each day in the classroom. John William Miller, a philosophy professor at Williams College from 1924-1960 and someone noted for his exceptional teaching, developed one form that this lived defense can take. Though Miller published very little while he was alive, the archives at Williams College hold unpublished notes and essays of this master teacher. In this book, Jeff Frank offers an extended commentary on one of these unpublished essays where Miller develops his thinking on liberal education. Frank refines the idea that presence is central to liberal education and offers suggestions for how professors can become an educative presence for students. The goal of this book is an invitation to other professors who value liberal education to think with Miller about how to foster their own lived defense of liberal education, each day, in their own classrooms. The tone of the book is meant to be invitational, at times even conversational, and the book concludes with some direct suggestions for how professors can live their own defense of liberal education.

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Beyond Education

Radical Studying for Another World

Eli Meyerhoff

University of Minnesota Press, 2019

A bold call to deromanticize education and reframe universities as terrains of struggle between alternative modes of studying and world-making

Higher education is at an impasse. Black Lives Matter and #MeToo show that racism and sexism remain pervasive on campus, while student and faculty movements fight to reverse increased tuition, student debt, corporatization, and adjunctification. Commentators typically frame these issues as crises for an otherwise optimal mode of intellectual and professional development. In Beyond Education, Eli Meyerhoff instead sees this impasse as inherent to universities, as sites of intersecting political struggles over resources for studying.

Meyerhoff argues that the predominant mode of study, education, is only one among many alternatives and that it must be deromanticized in order to recognize it as a colonial-capitalist institution. He traces how key elements of education—the vertical trajectory of individualized development, its role in preparing people to participate in governance through a pedagogical mode of accounting, and dichotomous figures of educational waste (the “dropout”) and value (the “graduate”)—emerged from histories of struggles in opposition to alternative modes of study bound up with different modes of world-making.

Through interviews with participants in contemporary university struggles and embedded research with an anarchist free university, Beyond Education paves new avenues for achieving the aims of an “alter-university” movement to put novel modes of study into practice. Taking inspiration from Black Lives Matter, Occupy Wall Street, and Indigenous resurgence projects, it charts a new course for movements within, against, and beyond the university as we know it.

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Bitter Milk

Women and Teaching

Madeleine R. Grumet

University of Massachusetts Press, 1988

The text is arranged in a pattern that mirrors Grumet's argument that women who teach make this passage between the so-called public and private worlds daily and that is also what we teach children to do. The chapters go back and forth between the experience of domesticity and the experience of teaching, between being with one's own children and being with the children of others, between being the child of one's own mother and the teacher of another mother's child, between feeling and form, family and colleagues.

The first and last chapters address the familial relations that fall under the category of reproduction, a frame designed to emphasize the relations of reproduction and their importance to educational theory. The chapters closest to this margin are those that address women's work in schools, and the juxtaposition is chosen to accentuate the dialectical relation of our public and private meanings. The middle chapters are the ones most directly concerned with curriculum, that provisional ground that Grumet is naming as our mediating space, the place where we can heal. The fundamental argument of this text is that knowledge evolves in human relationships.

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Bringing Powerful Knowledge into Classrooms

Subject teachers as agents of recontextualisation

Edited by Mark Hardman, Marie Nilsberth, and Mikko Puustinen

University College London, 2026

An empirically grounded, yet theoretically sound, study of how teachers bring powerful knowledge into classrooms and develop effective thinking among their students.

Powerful knowledge equips students with the capacity to engage with systematic, disciplinary thinking, to imagine futures that are not yet conceived, and to think what is yet to be thought. Bringing Powerful Knowledge into Classrooms explores how teachers develop such knowledge in classrooms by transforming disciplinary understandings through subject teaching that responds to the educational needs of society.

Drawing on sociologist Basil Bernstein’s concept of recontextualization and theories of teacher agency, this book examines how teachers navigate the boundaries between academic disciplines, school subjects, and everyday knowledge. Through empirical case studies from the UK, Finland, and Sweden, it illustrates how teachers’ decisions are shaped by national expectations, institutional frameworks, and classroom dynamics. Combining Anglophone and Nordic traditions in subject teaching with curriculum theory and classroom research, the book offers a theoretically grounded yet practical account of how teachers recontextualize knowledge. It develops new insights into teacher agency and recontextualization that are highly relevant to teacher education, curriculum design, and educational policy. By focusing on real-life teaching across a range of subjects, the book deepens our understanding of how powerful knowledge is brought into classrooms and how teachers can be supported in this vital work.

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