Category: Book Reviews

Reviewed by Robby Anggriawan Illinois State University

Play has long been recognized as central to children’s growth, yet schools often struggle to embrace it fully. In A Pedagogy of Play: Supporting Playful Learning in Classrooms and Schools, Mardell and colleagues argue that play is not an extra activity but a guiding principle for how schools can cultivate curiosity, joy, and meaningful learning.

Rather than treating play as separate from academics, the authors show how it can shape classroom culture, teaching practices, and even assessment. Drawing on case studies from around the world, they highlight both the opportunities and challenges of bringing playful learning into traditional systems still shaped by accountability and testing.

Echoing Dewey’s constructivist vision, this book positions play as essential to co-constructing knowledge, standing in contrast to rigid, instructionist models. It is not presented as a quick fix but as a cultural shift toward valuing imagination and exploration in education. For educators and policymakers alike, A Pedagogy of Play offers both a framework and an invitation to rethink what counts as learning.

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Reviewed by Watsachol Narongsaksakul, Illinois State University

Algorithmic Rights and Protections for Children is part of a series of publications written by Connected Learning Alliance scholars (2020) addressing algorithms and platforms for children through a power, justice, and equity lens. In a data-driven society, predictive systems and artificial intelligence (AI) functions performing human-like tasks are embedded in digital platforms such as learning management systems, website third-party cookies, and social media. Data including numbers, characters, symbols, images, electromagnetic recorded, sorted, or commodified is not equally represented (e.g., gender, race, power, identity) by governments and private companies, causing discrimination and preferential treatment by identified technologies. 

Reviewed by Viraj Patel, Illinois State University

While noting that dialogues about literacy can serve as a vehicle for developing critical consciousnessFreire (1996) noted, “the content of that dialogue can and should vary in accordance with historical conditions” (p. 65). In contemporary society, Hip Hop music and culture play a pivotal role in the identity development of young adults (Nguyen & Ferguson, 2019).Accordingly, educational research has examined how the critical literacy capacities of Hip Hop texts have helped high school students explore post- 9/11 racial tensions in the U.S. (Hill, 2006), helped adolescentBlack males disturb Eurocentric notions of masculinity (Love, 2013) and young Black females deconstruct notions of femininity (Kelly, 2016), increased high school students’ engagement and connection with ELA curricula (Belle, 2016), and assisted middle school students in reimagining the world and their place in it (Hall & Devirgilio, 2022). Such studies make a compelling case for the use of Hip Hop to engender students’ critical literacies and engage their world- building capacities. However, such studies do not explicitly outline pedagogical considerations such as lesson plans or teaching procedures for using HipHop texts. Teaching with Hip Hop in the 7–12 Grade Classroom by Lauren Leigh Kelly (2023) aims to bridge this gap. Specifically, Kelly identifies Critical Hip Hop Literacies as “approaches to reading and creation of Hip Hop texts and culture that analyze and challenge relation-ships of power and equity” (p. 7).

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Reviewed by Michael S. Jones Illinois State University

United States Educational technology, or edtech, has long been heralded as the equalizer of public education with the hopes of increasing students’ learning and promoting equity and inclusion. Reich argues that edtech is simply the latest innovation to struggle with “basic obstacles that time and time again have tripped up the introduction of large-scale learning systems”(p. 6). Failure to Disrupt: Why Technology Alone Can’t Transform Education differs from what might be considered a traditional edtech review. Instead, it criticizes our educational system and the remnants of its collision over different stakeholders’ visions and goals. It asks the reader, if edtech is a tool, can it repair what is broken in our educational system? Many themes of this book can be summarized by his use of Ellen Lagemann’s quote, ‘“One cannot understand the history of education in the United States during the twentieth century unless one realizes that Edward L. Thorndike won and John Dewey lost”’ (p. 24). In contrast to Dewey’s social constructivism, Reich argues that current educational policy embraces Thorndike’s “instructionism” approach, which uses best practices and standardized testing to “fill the pails” of our students through the science of learning.

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