Place- and community-based education – an approach to teaching and learning that starts with the local – addresses two critical gaps in the experience of many children now growing up in the United States: contact with the natural world and contact with community. It offers a way to extend young people’s attention beyond the classroom to the world as it actually is, and to engage them in the process of devising solutions to the social and environmental problems they will confront as adults. This approach can increase students’ engagement with learning and enhance their academic achievement.

What’s So Important About Music Education? presents a new philosophy of music education for the United States, rooted in history and current perspectives from ethnomusicology. J. Scott Goble explores the societal effects of the nation's foundations in democracy and capitalism, the constitutional separation of church and state, and the rise of recording, broadcast, and computer technologies. He shows how these and other factors have brought about changes in the ways music teachers and concerned others have conceptualized music and its importance in education.

Reconstructing Policy in Higher Education highlights the work of accomplished and award-winning scholars and provides concrete examples of how feminist poststructuralism effectively informs research methods and can serve as a vital tool for policy makers, analysts, and practitioners. The research examines a range of topics of interest to scholars and professionals including: purposes of Higher Education, administrative leadership, athletics, diversity, student activism, social class, the history of women in postsecondary institutions, and quality and science in the globalized university.

A volume in Transforming Education for the Future Series Editors Jing Lin, University of Maryland and Rebecca L. Oxford, Alabama A & M University This book will expand the horizon of higher education, helping students, faculty and administrators to return to their roots and be in touch with their whole being. This book stresses that learning is much more than just accumulating knowledge and skills. Learning includes knowing ourselves-mind, body, and spirit.

This book brings together a diverse range of researchers to profile new pedagogical developments in teaching and learning. This includes pedagogies in the fields of mathematics and science education, literacy, computer supported learning, and specialist fields such as special education, indigenous education, music education and the learning processes and relationships that are evident in many of these fields.