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This chapter discusses what special education means for students with visual impairments (that is, those who are blind or have low vision) including what is being done and how traditions are maintained. More specifically, this chapter explores the importance of advancing values for the diverse population of students with visual impairments, focusing on cultivation of supportive, inclusive, and collaborative educational environments that continue to stand the test of time. This chapter highlights the increasing heterogeneity of this population of students and specific instructional strategies to support the cultural and linguistic diversity of learners with visual impairments in today's classrooms. This chapter also discusses the significance of promoting core concepts that are rooted in a traditional and specialized instructional framework for students who are visually impaired.

This chapter argues that the near-universal exclusion from the academy of the Shakespeare Authorship Question (or SAQ) represents a significant but little-understood example of an internal threat to academic freedom. Using an epistemological lens, this chapter examines and critiques the invidious and marginalizing rhetoric used to suppress such research by demonstrating the extent to which it constitutes a pattern of epistemic vice: that, by calling skeptics “conspiracy theorists” and comparing them to Holocaust deniers rather than addressing the substance of their claims, orthodox Shakespeare academics risk committing acts of epistemic vice, injustice and oppression, as well as foreclosing potentially productive lines of inquiry in their discipline. To better understand this phenomenon and its implications, the chapter subjects selected statements to external criteria in the form of the Association of College and Research Libraries’ 2015 Framework for Information Literacy for Higher Education, which provides a set of robust normative dispositions and knowledge practices for understanding the nature of the scholarly enterprise. The analysis reveals that the proscription against the SAQ constitutes an unwarranted infringement on the academic freedom not only of those targeted by this rhetoric, but – by extension – of all Shakespeare scholars as well.

Certain elements of Hayek’s work are prominent precursors to the modern field of complex adaptive systems, including his ideas on spontaneous order, his focus on market processes, his contrast between designing and gardening, and his own framing of complex systems. Conceptually, he was well ahead of his time, prescient in his formulation of novel ways to think about economies and societies. Technically, the fact that he did not mathematically formalize most of the notions he developed makes his insights hard to incorporate unambiguously into models. However, because so much of his work is divorced from the simplistic models proffered by early mathematical economics, it stands as fertile ground for complex systems researchers today. I suggest that Austrian economists can create a progressive research program by building models of these Hayekian ideas, and thereby gain traction within the economics profession. Instead of mathematical models the suite of techniques and tools known as agent-based computing seems particularly well-suited to addressing traditional Austrian topics like money, business cycles, coordination, market processes, and so on, while staying faithful to the methodological individualism and bottom-up perspective that underpin the entire school of thought.

Does civic participation, especially in the arts, increase democracy? This chapter extends this neo-Tocquevillian question in three ways. First, to capture broader political and economic transformations, we consider different types of participation; results change by separate participation arenas. Some are declining, but a dramatic finding is the rise of arts and culture. Second, to assess impacts of participation, we include multiple dimensions of democratic politics, including distinct norms of citizenship and their associated political repertoires. Third, by analyzing global International Social Survey Program and World Values Survey data, we identify dramatic subcultural differences: the Tocquevillian model is positive, negative, or zero in seven different subcultures and contexts that we explicate, from class politics and clientelism to Protestant and Orthodox Christian civilizational traditions.

Scholars and reform activists see district-level leaders as key actors in improving teaching and learning. This study examines the efforts of one district that successfully narrowed achievement gaps by largely focusing on teacher professional development. I employ the concepts of physical capital, human capital, and social capital as key ingredients of the process of instructional reform. I highlight the district's role in creating system-wide changes in instruction through investment in developing teachers’ knowledge and pedagogical skills.