UND professor authors new book on gender and education

Kate Menzies

Document Type

News Article

Publication Date

8-21-2013

Campus Unit

College of Education & Human Development

Abstract

Marcus Weaver-Hightower, associate professor and chair of Educational Foundations and Research at the University of North Dakota, has published a new collection of personal essays written by some of the world's leading researchers in the field of gender and education.

Edited with Christine Skelton from the University of Birmingham (England), the collection ― Leaders in Gender and Education: Intellectual Self-Portraits ― includes the professional autobiographies of 16 scholars from the United States, Canada the United Kingdom and Australia who have made substantial impacts in understanding how gender influences education at every educational level.

The book is part of Sense Publishers' series Leaders in Education Studies.

Weaver-Hightower was inspired to publish the collection because he always wondered how the knowledge and research questions people ask as scholars are shaped by the forces of history, politics, gender, race, social class and more.

"The book provides an opportunity for these leading voices to look to the future of our field," he said. "It's always important to sometimes pause and reflect about what questions we still don't know the answers to."

Weaver-Hightower focuses his research on boys because early research on gender and education almost exclusively focuses on girls. He mainly concentrates on boys' literacy skills and social problems in and out of school. Weaver-Hightower has paid particular attention to boys of color, non-heterosexual boys and boys with a lower socioeconomic status.

"Schools can either be dangerous and limiting places or springboards for great futures," Weaver-Hightower said. "I want to know how we do the latter."

Weaver-Hightower's areas of research and interest include:

•Boys' education

•Masculinity studies

•Male learning across the lifespan

•School food politics

•Educational policy

•Curriculum and Instruction

•Sociology of education

•Qualitative research

•Critical ethnography and autoethnography

•Sequential Art, Comics, & Graphic Novels

Weaver-Hightower is no stranger to the authoring world. He has also written The Politics of Policy in Boys' Education: Getting Boys 'Right' (2008), and was co-editor, with Wayne Martino and Michael Kehler, for The Problem with Boys' Education: Beyond the Backlash (2009), as well as numerous journal articles. Weaver-Hightower also recently wrote School Food Politics (2011), a book co-edited with Sarah Robert of the University of Buffalo.

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