Books published by Common Ground Publishing

This book is an important addition to the growing literature which addresses the issue of Australia's policies towards people seeking asylum. In the early stages of the Tampa crisis, the government dominated discussions around Australian refugee policy. Australians would decide who would live amongst us. Such decisions were was when asylum seekers were depicted as non-law abiding, unruly and inhumane 'others' who were very different from us. Slowly other voices have been added to this discussion and in different forums we have begun to hear from some of those people who sough asylum and who describe horrors, fears and terrors which made remaining where they were, unthinkable. These stories began to challenge the idea that these refugees were different from us. Still, the Australian hardline policies have continued. This volume broadens the debate by adding to the voices of some of those seeking asylum, the voices of people who have been working directly with refugees, as well as those of experts able to comment on the impact of the laws created around the refugees.

Indigenous education in Australia and Canada has been a site of struggle since colonisation. At the beginning of the 21st century the struggle for equitable outcomes continues.Since the 1970's in Canada and the 1980's in Australia, Indigenous teachers have been graduating from rural and urban-based programs. The two programs for the education of Indigenous teachers which are at the heart of this book - the Aboriginal Rural Education Program (AREP) in Sydney, NSW and the Northern Teacher Education Program (NORTEP) at La Ronge, Saskatchewan - reflect the shifting struggles in the racialised field of Indigenous education.Drawing on a comparative socio-historical overview of racialisation in the Australian and Canadian contexts and interviews with staff, students and administrators in the AREP and NORTEP, Carol Reid reveals how the tensions and contradictions of Indigenous teacher education can be productive. The book identifies critical issues of education in Diasporic communities; highlights the politics of colour in higher education; signals how privilege is reproduced through education; shows how culture emerges as pathology and demonstrates the importance of creating a third space for the constant negotiation of the meaning of cultural difference in education.

Why Video Games are Good for Your Soul is about pleasure and learning. Good video games allow people to create their own 'music', to compose a symphony from their own actions, decisions, movements, and feelings. They allow people to become 'pros', to feel and act like an expert soldier, city planner, world builder, thief, tough guy, wizard and a myriad of other things. They allow people to create order out of complexity, to gain and feel mastery, and to create new autobiographies, careers and histories. In his earlier book, What Video Games Have to Teach Us About Learning and Literacy, James Paul Gee offered thirty-six reasons why good video games create better learning conditions than many of today's schools. In this new book, built entirely around games and game play, he shows how good video games marry pleasure and learning and, at the same time, have the potential to empower people. James Paul Gee is the Tashia Morgridge Professor of Reading at the University of Wisconsin at Madison. He is the author of the acclaimed What Video Games Have to Teach Us About Learning and Literacy and the more recent Situated Language and Learning: A Critique of Traditional Schooling, both of which deal with video games and their implications for learning in the modern world.

Is there anything beyond death? And is it worth having? This book begins with the latest science on the Near-death Experience, then explores the passage through physical death to the states of conscious being beyond. These states ~ often blissful ~ are outlined by our great religious traditions, and detailed in Tibetan Buddhism and the perennial philosophy, particularly in the Alice Bailey books. Traditional sources are compared with findings of science and medicine, and psychology from Jung and Piaget to Wilber. Later chapters examine clinical studies by reputable psychiatrists and psychologists: These were undertaken after they accidentally took subjects into 'the place the Tibetans call the Bardo' ~ the state after death /between lives.