Preface
We three editors met in 2006 through our mutual involvement conducting evaluation research of school programs supported through the U.S. Department of Education’s Partnerships in Character Education (PCEP) grant program. While we have different training, academic, and career paths, we discovered through casual conversations at conferences and project-related events that we shared some common views and frustrations about education and our work. We each found that the varied and different program approaches we were investigating could be very effective in facilitating school renewal, teacher engagement, and student development; however, the conceptual and theoretical underpinnings of the success stories were fragmented and even unknown to most of the school personnel implementing them. Further, each of us saw clearly that the complementary strategies and practices that made up the core of the best of the PCEP school programs shared uncharted and often unrecognized common origins that crossed through different primary fields of study, including developmental and educational psychology, the philosophy of education, and the history of public education as a democratizing institution.
History of the Project
By 2007, the talk among ourselves and our colleagues about this kettle of fish turned from conference chatter to acknowledgment of a serious issue. We saw more and more examples of how badly we needed to find ways of working together more coherently. We were tired of attending meetings with competing and overlapping PowerPoint presentations delivered as if each were in its own separate world. We railed against the lack of leadership in bringing the importance of the socializing goals of education into appropriate alignment with the increasing stress on the academic and cognitive side of development. We saw how difficult it was for educators who wanted to invest in their students’ lives, not just in their intellectual accomplishments, to find reliable guidance in the face of this informational morass.
Clearly, we felt, it was time for an umbrella concept that would bring together these disparate strands of theory and research, these seemingly different implementation platforms. Our first idea as we began our e-mails and conference calls was not to write a book but to create and produce a series of symposia under our new banner, prosocial education, a term that we believed would be immediately recognizable, a term with face validity in pointing to the role that schools have in positive youth development. We were heartened by the well-reasoned approach that our colleague Jonathan Cohen had taken in advancing a similar argument a year before in the Harvard Educational Review (2006). He suggested that there should be an umbrella term that encompasses and defines the varied educational research efforts related to character education, social-emotional learning, and school climate improvement. He noted that these fields have shown a number of significant outcomes: a stronger sense of school community and more positive school climate; enhanced teacher professionalism and effectiveness as mentors; increased academic and prosocial achievement; decreased academic, personal, and interpersonal risks and challenges; and improvements in encouraging civically engaged youth.
Our first thought about how to operationalize our discussions was to hold two national symposia of prosocial education researchers, theorists, interventionists, and policy leaders who already recognized that the prosocial side of education is critical to the full development of our children and youth, and who were interested in promoting positive school climate and culture, enhancing the professionalization of teachers, and creating genuine prosocial education in curricula, classrooms, and schools. Our initial goal was a collegial call to peaceable arms, an effort to mobilize and join together with others to make the voices of parents, students, teachers, and towns heard by raising our voices for educational change. As we put it then, our goal was to make recommendations based on rigorous research for new and better educational policies that would promote educational practices that appreciate and truly integrate goals for developing students’ social and prosocial skills and knowledge with goals for academic learning, knowledge, and achievement.
We developed a concrete agenda and objective expectations of what might come out of the initial symposium:
The first symposium was envisioned to address differences and find commonalities across the fields that represent prosocial education in the broadest and deepest sense and offer an opportunity for a rich discussion of conceptual issues revealed in current research in order to (1) identify contextual-individual processes of prosocial development, (2) focus on measurement issues in research and evaluation, and (3) formulate recommendations for directions of future research and for whole child educational policies. We hoped that the collaborative emerging from the symposia would encompass the wide range of theorizing and empirical research work done in disparate fields that share an underlying focus on school reform and teaching excellence to optimize student development, learning, and achievement as students and as young people.
At conferences we attended, we began exploring the idea with colleagues and received positive feedback from leaders in our fields, such as Phil Vincent, Jonathan Cohen, Marvin Berkowitz, David Osher, and the late Mary Utne O’Brien. After discussing the responses, we realized that conference proceedings or a white paper articulating our position was an insufficiently ambitious goal. This convinced us that we should consider a book that would pull together in one place cogent summaries of the research and programmatic themes to which we were dedicated. By the fall of 2008 we had garnered support from the Pacific Institute for Research and Evaluation (PIRE), which offered financial support through a unique partnership with the Center for Applied Psychology at Rutgers University, and moral support from the Center for the Study of the President and Congress and from the Character Education Partnership. Thus the first vision of this volume was born. The original title, The Case for Prosocial Education, was consistent with our original vision, but it was limited to the voices of our research-oriented academic colleagues. To bind these colleagues to our project and get their suggestions for the scope of the book, and to help guide their contributions, we held a chapter author symposium on May 7 and 8, 2009, at Rutgers University’s Graduate School of Applied and Professional Psychology. We were grateful to have our PIRE resources to support the meeting logistics. There was enthusiasm for the project, conceptual debates about how we should proceed, and commitment to do the work necessary to produce a book with the vision we had articulated.
As we began writing and adding additional authors to the project, we also began the search for the right publisher. When Rowman & Littlefield expressed interest and asked for a full proposal, we were ready. What we hadn’t anticipated was the communication from Patti Davis, the education acquisitions editor, who, in her best direct but supportive way, informed us that she liked our proposal but that it needed to be more than a graduate text; it needed to be a handbook, and double the projected size! After some quick consultations and brainstorming, we realized the potential that had been offered to us. We expanded the scope of each chapter to include a discussion of practices and models of education as well as of the theory and research that grounds the approach. In addition, we wanted to expand our audience and speak directly to educators and policy makers as well as to researchers. We decided to add the voices and insights of practitioners in two ways: as case studies accompanying the main chapters and by developing a “voices from the field” section. This section would represent the perspective of educators who have served in key roles in schools and have experience in adopting, implementing, and evaluating prosocial education reform strategies. With the amended proposal accepted, we eagerly began our work.
Purpose and Organization of the Handbook
The purpose of the Handbook of Prosocial Education remains consistent with the history of the project—to provide in one place a convincing body of knowledge arguing for the importance of the social development of young people in American public schools, using history, research, and current practice to make the case. Using the prosocial education umbrella, we have brought to the project a host of first-rate researchers, educators, and practitioners who all believe as we do: now is the critical time to bring new articulation to a viewpoint that is grossly underrepresented in current educational policy and practice.
The handbook is organized in four sections. In part 1, we define prosocial education conceptually (chapter 1) and examine its historical roots and the history of support for related research (chapters 2 and 3). We complete this section with a review of contemporary efforts to foster and define best prosocial educational practices (chapter 4) and provide a summary of how theory drives program creation and design in chapter 5.
Part 2 presents a comprehensive view of the fields and themes that represent the content of prosocial education. In thirteen chapters (6 through 18) and thirty-three accompanying case studies, authors provide the reader with accessible summaries of theory, concepts, and research for the topic or program area, along with at least two examples for each topic of high-quality practice written by educators and practitioners who were chosen because they have been recognized for their achievements, creativity, and effective leadership.
Part 3, “Voices from the Field” (chapters 19 through 22), offers the reader the opportunity to hear four distinctive voices regarding how their roles facilitate prosocial approaches to student development and well-being. The positions represented include the viewpoints and experience of a district superintendent, a school principal, a teacher, and a student services support staff member.
Part 4 summarizes the evidence presented elsewhere in the book and reviews some key issues on which researchers need to focus to ensure that prosocial strategies and education are elevated to the next level of credibility and practice (chapter 23). Chapter 24 provides a perspective and a critique of the history of educational policy through a prosocial lens and ends with recommendations for policy makers and thoughtful educators.
How to Use The Handbook of Prosocial Education
Three main approaches are recommended as you open this handbook. The first is to consider your professional or academic role. Think about what kind of knowledge would assist you in becoming a more competent and fulfilled school administrator, teacher, student services professional, researcher, or undergraduate or graduate student. Ask yourself a few key questions as you are thumbing through the table of contents. If you are a school administrator, ask, “Am I here because I know my school’s climate needs to be improved and I am looking for programs that work?” Proceed to look first at chapter 4 for the overview of prosocial educational practice and then go to chapter 9 on school climate, along with the case studies that provide examples of how school administrators have successfully taken on this challenge. Next, you will want to read the chapter in part 3 that is closest to your role as a superintendent (chapter 19) or principal (chapter 20).
If you are a graduate student with a particular interest, you might ask, “Will this book provide me with cutting edge research in a particular field of study and thus be more efficient and offer me more guidance by starting with a coherent synopsis rather than doing a general literature search?” Have a look at chapter 5 and chapter 23 to orient yourself and then go to one or more specific chapters in part 2 that match your area of study, such as chapter 6 on character education or chapter 10 on service learning. Reading several chapters in part 2 will enrich your understanding of how your particular interests are expressed by different theoretical and research approaches.
If you are a teacher who is frustrated with the predominance of high-stakes testing aimed only at the cognitive development of your students, you may ask, “Where can I find a place that will help me understand the history of educational policy and read about the research that supports the civic mission of public education?” Start with chapter 1, which answers your important questions in terms of educational practice and human development, and then look at chapters 2 and 24, which offer short histories of prosocial education and educational policy, along with recommendations to consider. You will want to dig into a chapter that is close to your own practice, for example chapter 15 on early childhood education and the accompanying case studies that provide vivid examples of programs and approaches that meet children’s cognitive and social developmental needs.
The second approach to this handbook is to start at the beginning because you want to understand the potential power of this new prosocial education concept, preparing yourself to digest the contributions that follow your interests in the history of education, the current state of the research, the best and most effective practices or programs, and how prosocial education can successfully lead school reform. A reading path within the handbook can be mapped out for each of these thematic interests, and the chapter titles do a good job of facilitating that objective.
The third approach to this handbook that we recommend is to be a jungle adventurer. Having made the decision to spend time here, dig in, muck around, and let your natural inclinations and interests take you from author to author. Perhaps you are intrigued that James Comer has coauthored a case study or that a renowned superintendent, Shelly Berman, has contributed his “voice from the field” and you think one of them may help you find a pathway to the next prosocial oasis. Or perhaps your approach to the jungle is to move back and forth between the table of contents and chapters you select until you hit upon a particularly compelling voice or story or set of research findings. Maybe you know next to nothing about positive youth development and wonder what it is all about, or you see a case study on a social-emotional learning program in Birmingham, England, and, charging ahead, you love the clear, descriptive writing.
Whatever approach you take when you pick up this book, we hope and trust that you will find many intellectual, academic, and practical insights for your continuing professional development. Most importantly, we hope that we have, in some measure, achieved our primary purpose of making the case that the prosocial side of the education coin is equally important as the academic side and deserves considerably more attention in our individual and collective efforts to enhance the future of schooling in America, and in fact throughout the world.
Acknowledgments
Though opting not to share a coeditor position with us, Betty Straub edged closer and closer to that role as our work together progressed. We thank her for numerous hours spent helping us in recruiting authors and cowriting a few of the contributions. We discovered that Betty loves copyediting and has a talent for improving material while maintaining the original author’s voice. She helped with numerous administrative tasks that are burdensome in a project this size, such as communications with authors and maintaining project databases. Betty was the compelling force in obtaining financial support from the Pacific Institute for Research and Evaluation that funded the gathering of experts at Rutgers that moved us from white paper to book. Her own voice became important enough to us that we persuaded her to write a chapter as well.
Acknowledgment must also go to Ua-aree Sangpukdee who graciously provided assistance in copyediting, formatting, and checking references in the handbook. Her dedication and attention to detail has helped in getting the book in a closer-to-final format than we could have done on our own. Her graciousness and steadfast devotion to the project made her not only a welcome addition to our team but helped keep us on track when our energies flagged by reminding us that we could make it better with just a little more effort.
Finally, we want to offer our heartfelt thanks to the authors who agreed to contribute their knowledge, experience, and wisdom to the handbook. Many of them are leaders in their own fields, and we wouldn’t have launched the project without their encouragement and affirmation that the time had come when we could all gather productively under the prosocial education tent.