Description: Not a Stage! is written for teachers, students, and scholars interested in the academic, social, and emotional needs of young adolescents. It is unique because it actively resists basing the practice, research, and theory of young adolescent education on developmentalism and the developmental stage of young adolescence. The purpose of this book is to begin to reorient the discourse on young adolescent growth and change and in turn reconceptualize the education of young adolescents. The book infuses a contingent, recursive conception of adolescent growth and change into the discourse around young adolescence by making three pleas to those interested in the schooling of young adolescents: to move away from a developmentally responsive vision to a contingently and recursively relational vision; to move from «characterizing» young adolescenCE to «particularizing» young adolescenTS; and to move from a «sameness» curriculum to a «difference» curriculum.
Review Quotes: «This volume offers a timely international critique of 'development' as it frames and regulates the policies and practices of young adolescent education. Beyond critique, however, this book is a call to action. Mark D. Vagle and contributors provide readers with vivid examples and strong arguments for understanding teaching and learning as a dynamic relational phenomenon that places young adolescents and their teachers - rather than a technical set of best practices - front and center.» (Cynthia Lewis, Professor of Critical Literacy and English Education, Department of Curriculum and Instruction, University of Minnesota)
«Without repudiating developmentalism altogether, contributors to this landmark collection particularize it, in place (not always the United States, as the final section makes explicit), as informing individuals who are also citizens-in-the-making, gendered, racialized, victims and beneficiaries of hierarchies of power. From babies' growth charts to the fate of the nation, these essays invoke the inextricability of subjective and social reconstruction in the education of (not only) adolescents. This is, as Mark D. Vagle knows, a 'scratching, gnawing, playful text'.» (William F. Pinar, Professor and Canada Research Chair, University of British Columbia, Vancouver, Canada)
«'Not a Stage!' unsettles the most foundational assumptions within young adolescent education and illuminates contexts that reveal the significance and the limits of what we can know about the diversity of youth. Mark D. Vagle and colleagues engage in a conversation that is timely, provocative, and necessary - and we should all join in today.» (Kevin Kumashiro, Author of 'Bad Teacher!: How Blaming Teachers Distorts the Bigger Picture')