Society as School Context

Society as School Context: In the Mindset of Emergent Teacher and Democratic Subject provides students with a moral and theoretical understanding of education and its implications for schooling in a democratic society. The book elucidates primary social, political, and historical ideas that have influenced schooling from pre-kindergarten through 12th grade throughout the early 21st century. The text helps teachers-in-training become culturally literate, critically conscious, and well prepared to serve student populations from various backgrounds and diverse lived experiences.

The text asks of readers five open-ended questions that are framed to foster critical reflexivity and self-aware responses about schools in contemporary American society. The book also includes seminal readings across theoretical, philosophical, deconstructive, and reconstructive orientations that align with these questions. Students explore the aims of education in a democratic society, the significance of the social and political context of pre-K through 12th grade schools, the teaching ramifications of culturally relevant pedagogy, making meaning of being an emergent teacher, and the foundational philosophical ideas that shape education in a democratic society.

Society as School Context is well-suited for courses in the social, historical, political, and/or cultural foundations of education, and introduction to educational policy studies. It is also a valuable resource for novice and seasoned teachers alike.
Sheron Fraser-Burgess earned her Ph.D. and M.A. in philosophy, and M.Sc. in education from the University of Miami. She is an associate professor of social foundations and multicultural education in the Educational Studies department at Ball University, where she teaches courses in social justice, cultural pluralism, and identity in education. As a scholar activist, she seeks to come alongside pre-service and practicing teachers in cultivating their practitioner voice and realizing empowerment in addition to acquiring the requisite knowledge, skills, and dispositions of their future profession. Her research interests are in the ethical, epistemological, and political implications of cultural identity and social positionality through research methodologies of the scholarship of engagement and theoretical and conceptual inquiry in philosophy of the education.