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Sage College DEI - Foundations of Education

From the Editor's Desk page

Improving a Foundations of Education Text:
Systematic Manuscript Checks and Focused Content Reviews 

By Eve Oettinger, Executive Content Development Manager, and Leah Fargotstein, Senior Acquisitions Editor
February 9, 2022

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This is the story behind a 2021 revision of a Foundations of Education text, designed for a first course for future teachers and educational administrators. This project reflects the level of care and concern we bring to bear in DEI-sensitive texts and markets, often using incremental and pragmatic approaches while keeping schedules in check. We balanced content concerns with evolving standards, deeper revisions of the text, and timely publication. Our work resulted in a stronger, more ethical, and more marketable product by strategically tackling the most prominent concerns.

Originally published by another company, this book was last revised in 2014. We had to be certain this large survey text—spanning educational philosophy, history, reform, law, finance, educational trends, social justice debates, scholarly research, and analysis—was in tune with the current climate in the Education discipline and academia as a whole and was sensitive to the tenor of public discourse on equity and inclusivity. DEI considerations would be crucial to this new edition.  

Among the challenges we were tackling with our authors: 

  • A comprehensive volume spanning many topics that needed significant updating across the board.
  • Revisions in accordance with InTASC standards.
  • Readiness for use in our Vantage courseware platform with strict requirements for content alignment with learning objectives, consistent “chunking” of the content, and the addition of assessments and video activities to complete the product. 

The DEI updates extended throughout the development and production phases, including time-sensitive 11th hour revisions right before publication. The authors were committed partners to making the book better and were committed to DEI principles, but they needed—and welcomed—the guidance and the collaborative efforts of the content development editor, acquisitions editor, copyeditor, and production editor. All these roles at Sage are focused on different aspects of the editorial process and help the authors see the importance of their DEI revisions and updates in terms of course curriculum and content needs, changing market dynamics, new professional association or accreditation standards, bias-free language guidelines, and the selling environment. 

Some of the strategies and tools we utilized:

  • Close review of in-text research and examples that might be subject to misinterpretation or negative connotation if the surrounding context was not adequately developed. In many instances, questionable or older research had to be removed or revised.   
  • Identification of outdated terms and phrases (e.g., “illegal alien” from a speech that was cited in the text) and replacement with terminology from our bias-free language guidelines.
  • Multiple passes on areas where race, gender, sexuality, ability, and ethnicity were mentioned in the text—using a macro we’ve developed in-house that helps editors quickly and efficiently detect instances of outdated or potentially offensive cultural, ethnic, or gender-related language to assist—where we gave them a close read and worked with authors to remediate and revise appropriately.

Since this title’s release, we are better armed with a rubric for conducting systematic manuscript spot checks and with guidelines for more focused content reviews to detect bias, stereotyping, and potentially harmful language.