Prof. Michael W. Apple (University of Wisconsin, Madison)
Michael W. Apple is the John Bascom Professor of Curriculum and Instruction and Educational Policy Studies at the University of Wisconsin, Madison. He also holds Distinguished Professor appointments at the University of Manchester and Northeast Normal University in China. A former elementary and secondary school teacher and past-president of a teachers union, he has worked with educational systems, governments, universities, unions, and activist and dissident groups throughout the world to democratize educational research, policy, and practice. Professor Apple has written extensively on the politics of educational reform, on the relationship between culture and power, and on education for social justice. Among his many books are: Ideology and Curriculum; Education and Power; Teachers and Texts; Official Knowledge; Democratic Schools; Cultural Politics and Education; Power, Meaning, and Identity; The State and the Politics of Knowledge; Educating the "Right" Way: Markets, Standards, God, and Inequality; and The Subaltern Speak: Curriculum, Power, and Educational Struggles. Among his recent books are: The Routledge International Handbook of Critical Education; The Routledge International Handbook of Sociology of Education; Global Crises, Social Justice, and Education; and most recently Knowledge, Power, and Education; and Can Education Change Society? His books and articles have won numerous awards and have been translated into many languages.
Professor Apple has been selected as one of the fifty most important educational scholars in the 20th Century. His books Ideology and Curriculum and Official Knowledge were also selected as two of the most significant books on education in the 20th Century. He is the editor of an international series of books published by Routledge, Critical Social Thought.
He has been awarded a Lifetime Achievement Award by the American Educational Research Association, the UCLA Medal for "Outstanding Academic Achievement," and a number of honorary doctorates by universities throughout the world. Professor Apple has worked on educational reform, lectured, and taught in a considerable number of countries throughout the world, where his material has been extremely influential in the development of more socially critical and democratic educational policies and practices.