IAP BOOK SERIES

Research on African American Education

This series will provide an annual volume that examines some of the critical issues impacting upon the education and schooling of African American youth, from pre- through post-secondary education. Our challenge will be, not only, the scholarly production of knowledge, but the transmission of that knowledge to wider audiences. In so doing, we intend to question traditional assumptions and to analyze some of the intended and unintended consequences of those assumptions.

Call for Book Proposals

We, as a nation, are constantly reminded of the acute sensitivity surrounding any discussion of the issues of race and education in American and the role they have played historically and in present day society. We now know that the educational conditions of African Americans are due to a complex constellation of mutually reinforcing factors. Failure to appreciate this reality often causes policymakers, educators and researchers to analyze system problems such as under-achievement, zero tolerance, school dropout rates, unemployment, crime and punishment, underfunding, and the overreliance on sports, among others, as unitary problems warranting unitary solutions. Our series, Research on African American Education, departs from that narrow tradition and seeks to produce scholarship demonstrating the complexity of social issues and the need for systematic, comprehensive approaches to fashioning solutions to the lack of educational advance of African Americans.

We seek volumes that examine some of the critical issues impacting upon the education and schooling of African American youth, from pre-through post-secondary education. We welcome research which questions traditional assumptions and analyzes some of the intended and unintended consequences of those assumptions. In so doing, this series will not rely upon a single paradigm or discipline to render new understandings. Multidisciplinary approaches are encouraged and valued. Thus, research written in the tradition of law, political science, psychology, history, sociology, public health, education, social work, and economics, among others, is highly encouraged. Internal factors, that is, what goes on inside the institutional frame called schools, are of signal importance; however, so too are external factors, cultural contexts, and political dynamics, which serve as contributing variables that originate outside of the institutional frame that serve to impede or advance African American schooling and education. In this series, we seek volumes which stress the centrality of race and schooling and to comprehend from both analytic and policy perspectives, the situations that increase and decrease the life chances and opportunities for African American youth.

We welcome your ideas and especially your proposals to our series, Research on African American Education.

Send all inquiries to Carol Camp Yeakey at: cyeakey@wustl.edu