This comprehensive handbook addresses issues related to anti-discriminatory education as it relates to children, youth, young adults, families, and practitioners across a series of age groups, sectors, communities, and countries. It seeks to map a holistic interdisciplinary overview of the field examining how policies, practices, and initiatives within unique social, political, and cultural contexts have been enacted to advance anti-discriminatory education for improved equity, diversity, and inclusion outcomes leading to thriving school-community ecosystems. The work draws on a range of theoretical frameworks, hybrid perspectives, and research projects to provide multiple examples about the challenges, complexities, and nuances involved in theorizing and doing the work of anti-discriminatory education in local communities and on a macro institutional level. With intentionality, authors from various backgrounds, identities, fields, and positionalities describe and discuss various social justice and equity issues and how they strategize, mobilize, and navigate unique micro and macro dynamics affiliated with power and privilege for the purpose of advancing the field of anti-discriminatory education. Overall, the chapters cover a range of topics and issues from various practitioners and community perspectives around the intersectionality and divergence of navigating micro lived experiences and macro institutional policies and practices to bridge the gap between theory and action with respect to anti-discriminatory education. The book is divided into 4 sub-sections: Early Childhood Education (Early years up to approx. 10 years old), Elementary and Middle School Years (approx. 11 to 14 years old), Secondary Schools (approx. 15 to 19 years old), and Higher Education (Post-Secondary).
Dr. Ardavan Eizadirad is an Assistant Professor in the Faculty of Education at Wilfrid Laurier University. He is also a community activist and Senior Manager of Research, Evaluation, and Knowledge Mobilization at the non-profit organization Youth Association for Academics, Athletics, and Character Education (YAAACE) in the Jane and Finch community in Toronto. He was an educator with the Toronto District School Board and a former member of the Race and Identity-Based Data Collection Community Advisory Panel with the Toronto Police Service (2021-2023). Dr. Eizadirad is the author of Decolonizing Educational Assessment: Ontario Elementary Students and the EQAO (2019), and co-editor of Equity as Praxis in Early Childhood Education and Care (2021 with Drs. Zuhra Abawi & Rachel Berman), Counternarratives of Pain and Suffering as Critical Pedagogy: Disrupting Oppression in Educational Contexts (2022 with Drs. Andrew Campbell & Steve Sider), The Power of Oral Culture in Education: Theorizing Proverbs, Idioms, and Folklore Tales (2023 with Dr. Njoki Wane), Enacting Anti-racism and Activist Pedagogies in Teacher Education: Canadian Perspectives (2023 with Drs. Zuhra Abawi & Andrew Campbell), Activist Leadership for Inclusive Schools: Canadian Insights (2025) and a major international handbook approximately 57 chapters titled The International Handbook of Anti-Discriminatory Education (2025). Dr. Eizadirad is also the founder and Director of EDIcation Consulting offering equity, diversity, and inclusion training, audits, and capacity-building sessions to organizations, corporations, and schools to thrive and achieve to their full potential.
Peter Pericles Trifonas is Professor at the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education/University of Toronto. His areas of interest include ethics, philosophy of education, cultural studies, and technology. Among his books are the following:
Converging Literacies, Deconstructing the Machine (with Jacques Derrida),
International Handbook of Semiotics, International Handbook of Research and Pedagogy in Heritage Language Education,
CounterTexts: Reading Culture, Revolutionary Pedagogies: Cultural Politics, Instituting Education, and the Discourse of Theory, The Ethics of Writing: Derrida, Deconstruction, and Pedagogy, Institutions, Education, and the Right to Philosophy (with Jacques Derrida), Roland Barthes and the Empire of Signs, Umberto Eco & Football, Pedagogies of Difference.
