Introduction
Dear students, colleagues, and readers,
When we published Foundations of Education: A Collective Reimagining in 2023, we never could have predicted how warmly it would be received! Realizing that your work is being so widely used brings a healthy amount of pressure to keep it at its absolute best! That’s why we rolled up our sleeves to give this text another look. We attempted to refine prose, cut out extra verbage, fix broken video links, integrate QR codes, and tackle a wide variety of accessibility issues to make the book more user-friendly. We also finally got to include a dream chapter we’ve wanted to write for ages: one that centers authentic student voices and explores global educational systems, rooted in our firm belief that the U.S. education system can—and must—improve by learning from international perspectives.
This updated version Foundations of Education: Cultivating Diverse Perspectives explores the rich history of educational systems while directly addressing the contemporary realities confronting today’s students. As a dynamic force, education must continually adapt to changing human and societal needs. While students remain at the center of this pursuit—eager to learn and grow—the modern educational landscape is filled with both exciting opportunities and complex obstacles that require our collective, critical attention.
We are very passionate about championing Open Educational Resources (OER) because we believe learning should be accessible and inclusive. By offering this text as a free, open resource, we are eliminating heavy financial burdens for our students, so that money is not a barrier to academic success. Beyond affordability, OER allows us to bypass traditional gatekeepers to build a richer, more representative curriculum. We are proud to feature diverse voices, global perspectives, and the authentic insights of our own students—making this textbook a true reflection of the communities we serve.
We owe a huge debt of gratitude to our partner authors, Lisa AbuAssaly George and Dr. Kanoe Bunney, who were instrumental in creating the first version of this text. Back in 2023, the four of us juggled full-time jobs while weaving together several sources to write that initial edition across a two year period. We completely underestimated the blood, sweat, and tears it would take, but the collaboration was beautiful and the deep dives into these important educational concepts were incredibly gratifying. One of the best parts of OER work is that it is iterative—anyone can take our text and continue the cycle of improvement. Deepest thanks to our wonderful co-writers and partners of the first version.
We are especially grateful to the following OER Foundations of Education textbooks for their original work in the following texts:
- Foundations of Education: Collective Reimagining by George, L. A., Bunney, D. K., Valdenebro, C. D., & Mead, T. (2023). Foundations of Education: A Collective Reimagining. In openoregon.pressbooks.pub. https://openoregon.pressbooks.pub/foundationsofeducation/
- Foundations of Education by Tasneem Amatullah, Rosemarie Avanzato, Julia Baxter, Thor Gibbins, Lee Graham, Ann Fradkin-Hayslip, Ray Siegrist, Suzanne Swantak-Furman, Nicole Waid is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, except where otherwise noted.
- Foundations of American Education: A Critical Lens Copyright © by Melissa Wells and Courtney Clayton is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License, except where otherwise noted.
- Foundations of Education Copyright © 2014 by Jacqueline M. DiSanto, Hostos Community College (Lumen Learning) is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, except where otherwise noted.
We recognize the enormous amount of work that went into all of these OER texts. Thanks to their having created the original OER texts, we had the great privilege to build on their work and offer newer texts for our students.
As usual, it takes a village to pull off this effort! We wish to express our heartfelt gratitude to our content readers Andreina Velasco and Anne Grey. Your feedback raised the bar, asking great questions and helping us to continue to improve the text! A huge thank you to Jennifer Margolis who hung in there with us despite numerous kerfuffles as she reviewed each chapter probably three times adding QR codes, fixing headings, checking the sequencing of images and videos, and not quitting on us despite all the challenges! Thank you to Rachel Bridgewater from Portland Community College for believing in this project- and supporting us along the way which meant so much to us when the chips were down. Thank you Amy Hofer for your OER leadership, supporting the earlier version and providing technical support with Pressbooks, and a special thank you to Kaela Parks and her team at PCC for their willingness to help with last minute accessibility issues.
Finally, a very special thank you to our student authors who contributed to chapter 12 on different educational systems of the world! We are only able to feature these student voices because our students produced such insightful, high-quality work that truly deserved to be shared. These authors included: Jack Allen, Jaese Jaecuyer, Junyan Chen, Man Cing, Lenox Morey, Odontuya Tsegmed, Oliveria Garcia, Rachel Stark, Cathy Nguyen, Elizabeth Brinkman, Sarah LoPresti, Virgilio Marin-Valderrabano, Samantha Soenyun, Jamel Tayeb, Morgan Land, Ashley Rodriguez, Katya Salazar, Frankie Anzalone, and Nancy Gutierrez.
Sincerely,
Tanya Mead and Ceci De Valdenebro
June 30, 2026
