New Books in Education: Recent Episodes
Marshall Poe
Interviews with Scholars of Education about their New Books Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/education
Bookshop.org is an online book retailer that donates more than 80% of its profits to independent bookstores. Launched in 2020, Bookshop.org has already raised more than $27,000,000. In this interview, Andy Hunter, founder and CEO discusses his journey to creating one of the most revolutionary new organizations in the book world. Bookshop has found a way to retain the convenience of online book shopping while also supporting independent bookstores that are the backbones of many local communities. Andy Hunter is CEO and Founder of Bookshop.org. He also co-created Literary Hub. Caleb Zakarin is the Assistant Editor of the New Books Network. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/education
Parents, educators, and activists are passionately fighting to improve public schools around the country. In This Is Our School!: Race and Community Resistance to School Reform (NYU Press, 2021), Hava Rachel Gordon takes us inside these fascinating school reform movements, exploring their origins, aims, and victories as they work to build a better future for our education system. Focusing on a school district in Denver, Colorado, Gordon takes a look at different coalitions within the school reform movement, as well as the surprising competition that arises between them. Drawing on over eighty interviews and ethnographic research, she explores how these groups vie for power, as well as the role that race, class, and gentrification play in shaping their successes and failures, strategies and structures. Gordon shows us what happens when people mobilize from the ground up and advocate for educational change. This Is Our School! gives us an inside look at the diverse voices within the school reform movement, each of which plays an important role in the fight to improve public education. Joao Souto-Maior is a postdoc at the New York University’s Institute of Human Development and Social Change. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/education
Why are academics encouraged to be rigorous and exhausted, instead of innovative and engaged? What learning outcomes are we sacrificing by being so serious? Dr. Alison James joins us to share insights from her research and practice of emphasizing play in higher education. This episode explores:
How having fun can strengthen problem solving skills and learning outcomes.
Why higher education doesn’t take play, creativity, and fun seriously enough.
What led her to prioritize play when other educators weren’t.
A discussion of her books The Value of Play in Higher Education, and The Power of Play in Higher Education.
Our guest is: Dr. Alison James, who is Professor Emerita of the University of Winchester. She is the author of numerous articles and publications on play and creativity in university learning, and of the three year study The Value of Play in HE, supported by the Imagination Lab Foundation and available free here. She is the co-editor, with Chrissi Nerantzi, of The Power of Play in HE: Creativity in Tertiary Learning, and the co-author, with Stephen D. Brookfield, of Engaging Imagination: Helping Students Become Creative and Reflective Thinkers. Our host is: Dr. Christina Gessler, who is a freelance book editor. She has served as content director and producer of the Academic Life podcast since she launched it in 2020. The Academic Life is proud to be an academic partner of the New Books Network. Listeners to this episode may also be interested in:
Awe: The New Science of Everyday Wonder and How It Can Transform Your Life, by Dacher Keltner
Hanging Out: The Radical Power of Killing Time, by Sheila Liming
Enchantment: Awakening Wonder in an Anxious Age, by Katherine May
The Fun Habit: How the Pursuit of Joy and Wonder Can Change Your Life, by Dr. Mike Rucker
The Well-Gardened Mind: The Restorative Power of Nature, by Sue Stuart-Smith
This conversation about seeking meaning instead of happiness
This conversation about the importance of spending time in nature
This conversation about the need to take a break from overworking and underliving
This conversation about belonging and the science of creating human connections
This conversation about the value of living a “good-enough” life
Welcome to the Academic Life! Join us here each week to learn from experts inside and outside the academy, and around the world, and embrace the broad definition of what it truly means to live an academic life. Missed any of the 150+ Academic Life episodes? You can find them all archived here. And check back soon: we’re in the studio creating more episodes for your academic journey—and beyond! Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/education
Commemorative Literacies and Labors of Justice: Resistance, Reconciliation, and Recovery in Buenos Aires and Beyond (Routledge, 2021) examines literacy practices of commemoration marking the 40th anniversary of the March 24, 1976 coup in Argentina. Drawing on research conducted across three distinct sites in Buenos Aires in March 2016—a public university, a Catholic church, and a former naval base and clandestine detention center transformed into a museum space for memory and justice—this book sheds light on the ways commemorative literacies at these locations work spatially to mobilize memory of the past to address and advance justice concerns in the present. These labors of justice manifest in three ways: as resistance, reconciliation, and recovery. Damico, Lybarger, and Brudney also demonstrate how these particular kinds of commemorative literacies resonate transnationally in ways that necessitate a commitment to commemorative ethics. This book is ideal not only for researchers, graduate students, and scholars in literacy studies but also for all those working in related fields, including memory studies, religious studies, area studies, and Latin American studies, to address issues pertaining to memory, testimony, transitional justice, state repression, and human rights in Argentina, Latin America, or the Global South, more generally. Madden Gilhooly is a public high school geography/social science teacher, writer, poet and casual academic. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/education
From white-collar executives to mail carriers, public workers meet the needs of the entire nation. In Public Workers in Service of America: A Reader (U Illinois Press, 2023), Frederick W. Gooding Jr. and Eric S. Yellin provide an edited collection of new research on this understudied workforce: Part One begins in the late nineteenth- and early twentieth century to explore how questions of race, class, and gender shaped public workers, their workplaces, and their place in American democracy. In Part Two, essayists examine race and gender discrimination while revealing the subtle contemporary forms of marginalization that keep Black men and Black and white women underpaid and overlooked for promotion. The historic labor actions detailed in Part Three illuminate how city employees organized not only for better pay and working conditions but to seek recognition from city officials, the public, and the national labor movement. Part Four focuses on nurses and teachers to address the thorny question of whether certain groups deserve premium pay for their irreplaceable work and sacrifices or if serving the greater good is a reward unto itself. Contributors: Eileen Boris, Cathleen D. Cahill, Frederick W. Gooding Jr., William P. Jones, Francis Ryan, Jon Shelton, Joseph E. Slater, Katherine Turk, Eric S. Yellin, and Amy Zanoni. Stephen Pimpare is a Senior Fellow at the Carsey School of Public Policy at the University of New Hampshire. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/education
Lit Hub's Most Anticipated of 2021. Winner of the Studs and Ida Terkel Award. A year in the life of a Chicago high school that has one of the highest proportions of refugees of any school in the nation. “A wondrous tapestry of stories, of young people looking for a home. With deep, immersive reporting, Elly Fishman pulls off a triumph of empathy. Their tales and their school speak to the best of who we are as a nation—and their struggles, their joys, their journeys will stay with you.” —Alex Kotlowitz, author of There Are No Children Here. For a century, Chicago’s Roger C. Sullivan High School has been a home to immigrant and refugee students. In 2017, during the worst global refugee crisis in history, its immigrant population numbered close to three hundred—or nearly half the school—and many were refugees new to the country. These young people came from thirty-five different countries, speaking among themselves more than thirty-eight different languages. For these refugee teens, life in Chicago is hardly easy. They have experienced the world at its worst and carry the trauma of the horrific violence they fled. In America, they face poverty, racism, and xenophobia, but they are still teenagers—flirting, dreaming, and working as they navigate their new life in America. Elly Fishman's book Refugee High: Coming of Age in America (The New Press, 2021) is a riveting chronicle of the 2017–8 school year at Sullivan High, a time when anti-immigrant rhetoric was at its height in the White House. Even as we follow teachers and administrators grappling with the everyday challenges facing many urban schools, we witness the complicated circumstances and unique education needs of refugee and immigrant children: Alejandro may be deported just days before he is scheduled to graduate; Shahina narrowly escapes an arranged marriage; and Belenge encounters gang turf wars he doesn’t understand. Equal parts heartbreaking and inspiring, Refugee High raises vital questions about the priorities and values of a public school and offers an eye-opening and captivating window into the present-day American immigration and education systems. Laura Beth Kelly is an assistant professor of Educational Studies at Rhodes College in Memphis, Tennessee. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/education
For the past five years, American public schools have enrolled more students identified as Black, Latinx, American Indian, and Asian than white. At the same time, more than half of US school children now qualify for federally subsidized meals, a marker of poverty. The makeup of schools is rapidly changing, and many districts and school boards are at a loss as to how they can effectively and equitably handle these shifts. Suddenly Diverse: How School Districts Manage Race and Inequality (U Chicago Press, 2020) is an ethnographic account of two school districts in the Midwest responding to rapidly changing demographics at their schools. It is based on observations and in-depth interviews with school board members and superintendents, as well as staff, community members, and other stakeholders in each district: one serving “Lakeside,” a predominately working class, conservative community and the other serving “Fairview,” a more affluent, liberal community. Erica O. Turner looks at district leaders’ adoption of business-inspired policy tools and the ultimate successes and failures of such responses. Turner’s findings demonstrate that, despite their intentions to promote “diversity” or eliminate “achievement gaps,” district leaders adopted policies and practices that ultimately perpetuated existing inequalities and advanced new forms of racism. While suggesting some ways forward, Suddenly Diverse shows that, without changes to these managerial policies and practices and larger transformations to the whole system, even district leaders’ best efforts will continue to undermine the promise of educational equity and the realization of more robust public schools. Joao Souto-Maior is a postdoc at the New York University’s Institute of Human Development and Social Change. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/education
Can your graduate school affect your mental health? Dr. Zoe Ayres joins us to discuss what she wishes she had known before starting graduate school, including:
What happens when you can’t access the hidden curriculum.
The myths we tell ourselves, and the systems that work against us.
How the pressures of graduate school can affect our mental health.
Why you need a to build a network of mentors outside your school.
Today’s book is: Managing Your Mental Health During Your PhD: A Survival Guide, by Dr. Zoe Ayres, which investigates why mental health issues are so common among the student population. Ayres looks honestly at the experiences of PhD students, and explores environmental factors that can impact mental health. These include the PhD student-supervisor relationship, the pressure to publish, and deep systemic problems in academia, such as racism, bullying and harassment. She provides resources students, while offering ideas for improvements that universities can make to ensure that academia is a place for all to thrive. Our guest is: Dr. Zoë Ayres, who studied for a PhD in chemistry at the University of Warwick, looking at using electrochemical boron doped diamond sensors to monitor environmental contaminants, before transitioning to industry. She worked for several years as a Senior Scientist in the water industry, before becoming Head of Research and Technology for a biotechnology start-up. She has transitioned back into academia, and is Head of Laboratory Facilities at the Open University, working with her team to manage over 180 laboratories. Zoë cares passionately about creating spaces for people to thrive in research. She is the author of Managing Your Mental Health During Your PhD: A Survival Guide, and of articles and peer-reviewed papers on improving research culture. She is co-Founder of Voices of Academia, an international blog designed to share the academic mental health experiences of academics from around the world. Our host is: Dr. Christina Gessler, who is a historian. Listeners to this episode may also be interested in:
The Field Guide to Grad School podcast
This podcast on protecting your wellbeing in graduate school
Academic Life episode on surviving the final year of your PhD program
Academic Life episode on campus mental wellness services
Academic Life podcast on Leaving Academia
Should I quit my PhD program? podcast
The podcast on dealing with rejection so you can grow your career
Academic Life episode on the benefits of learning from failure
Welcome to The Academic Life! Join us here each week to learn from today’s experts inside and outside the academy, and embrace the broad definition of what it truly means to live an academic life. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/education
America has relied on public schools for 150 years, but the system is increasingly under attack. With declining enrollment and diminished trust in public education, policies that steer tax dollars into private schools have grown rapidly. To understand how we got here, The Death of Public School: How Conservatives Won the War Over Education in America (Basic Books, 2023) argues, we must look back at the turbulent history of school choice. Cara Fitzpatrick uncovers the long journey of school choice, a story full of fascinating people and strange political alliances. She shows how school choice evolved from a segregationist tool in the South in the 1950s, to a policy embraced by advocates for educational equity in the North, to a conservative strategy for securing government funds for private schools in the twenty-first century. As a result, education is poised to become a private commodity rather than a universal good. The Death of Public School presents the compelling history of the fiercest battle in the history of American education--one that already has changed the future of public schooling. Laura Beth Kelly is an assistant professor of Educational Studies at Rhodes College in Memphis, Tennessee. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/education
In the library profession, and in the world as a whole, the experiences of trans and gender diverse people often go unnoticed, hidden, and ignored. Trans and Gender Diverse Voices in Libraries (Library Juice Press, 2021) is entirely written and edited by trans and gender diverse people involved in the field: its fifty-seven authors include workers from academic and public libraries, special collections and archives, and more; LIS students; and a few people who have left the library profession completely. Editors Kalani Adolpho, Stephen G. Krueger, and Krista McCracken share in this interview how this book is not intended to be the definitive guide to trans and gender diverse experiences in libraries, but instead to start the conversation. This project hopes to help trans and gender diverse people in libraries realize that they are not alone, and that their experiences are worth sharing. This book also demonstrates some of the reality in a field that loves to think of itself as inclusive. From physical spaces to policies to interpersonal ignorance and bigotry, the experiences recounted in this book demonstrate that the library profession continues to fail its trans and gender diverse members over and over again. You cannot read these chapters and claim that Safe Zone stickers and “libraries are for everyone” signs have done the job. You cannot assume that everything is fine in your workplace because nobody has spoken out. You can no longer pretend that trans and gender diverse people don’t exist. Find the table of contents for Trans and Gender Diverse Voices in Libraries as well as open access chapters online here. Learn about the Trans and Gender Diverse LIS network here. Jen Hoyer is Technical Services and Electronic Resources Librarian at CUNY New York City College of Technology. Jen edits for Partnership Journal and organizes with the TPS Collective. She is co-author of What Primary Sources Teach: Lessons for Every Classroom and The Social Movement Archive. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/education
Be The Change! Are you a policy maker? Parent? Teacher? Regenerative Learning: Nurturing People and Caring for the Planet (Salt Desert Media, 2022) is full of fresh ideas as well as practical solutions. Learn how we can make the whole world of education more inspiring - and more green. Education can be - and it should be - more inspiring, holistic, integrated, creative, and joyous! And that isn't a mere pipe dream. This book will help you to achieve it. Published for the 30th anniversary of Schumacher College, this collection of independently-written essays is on a subject of urgent importance for a world afflicted by climate change, inequality, mass disadvantage, and pandemics. Schumacher College is synonymous with the effort to create a model of learning that develops alumni who have the skills and passions that will make the contemporary world a better place. Contributors include: Fritjof Capra, Vandana Shiva, David Orr, Charles Eisenstein, Gunter Pauli, Anthony Seldon, Jon Alexander, Alan Boldon, Pavel Cenkl, Lauren Elizabeth Clare, Joseph Bharat Cornell, Guy Dauncey, Alan Dyer, Natalia Eernstman, Guillem Ferrer, Herbert Girardet, Donald Gray, Stephan Harding, Ina Matijevic, Helena Norberg-Hodge, Dana Littlepage Smith, Isabel Losada, Thakur S. Powdyel, and Colin Tudge. Satish Kumar is one of the editors of Regenerative Learning and is also the author of many other books, most recently Elegant Simplicity: The Art of Living Well and out this year Radical Love: From Separation to Connection with the Earth, Each Other, and Ourselves. Satish is also the founder of the Schumacher College and The Small School, as well as Editor Emeritus of Resurgence & Ecologist. Madden Gilhooly is a humanities public-school teacher and casual academic based in London, England. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/education
In Passionate Work: Endurance after the Good Life (Duke UP, 2022), Renyi Hong theorizes the notion of being "passionate about your work" as an affective project that encourages people to endure economically trying situations like unemployment, job change, repetitive and menial labor, and freelancing. Not simply a subject of aspiration, passion has been deployed as a means to build resilience and mend disappointments with our experiences of work. Tracking the rise of passion in nineteenth-century management to trends like gamification, coworking, and unemployment insurance, Hong demonstrates how passion can emerge in instances that would not typically be understood as passionate. Gamification numbs crippling boredom by keeping call center workers in an unthinking, suspensive state, pursuing even the most banal tasks in hope of career advancement. Coworking spaces marketed toward freelancers combat loneliness and disconnection at the precise moment when middle-class sureties are profoundly threatened. Ultimately, Hong argues, the ideal of passionate work sustains a condition of cruel optimism in which passion is offered as the solution for the injustices of contemporary capitalism. Hong is assistant professor in the Department of Communications and New Media at the National University of Singapore. He is interested in labor and its relationships with affect, technology and capitalism. His works can be found in Social Text, New Media & Society, European Journal of Cultural Studies, among others. Tom Discenna is Professor of Communication at Oakland University whose work examines issues of academic labor and communicative labor more broadly. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/education
Early childhood can be a time of rich discovery, a period when educators have an opportunity to harness their students’ fascination to create unique learning opportunities. Some teachers engage with their students’ ideas in ways that make learning collaborative--but not all students have access to these kinds of learning environments. In Segregation by Experience: Agency, Racism, and Learning in the Early Grades (U Chicago Press, 2021), the authors filmed and studied a a first-grade classroom led by a Black immigrant teacher who encouraged her diverse group of students to exercise their agency. When the researchers showed the film to other schools, everyone struggled. Educators admired the teacher but didn’t think her practices would work with their own Black and brown students. Parents of color—many of them immigrants—liked many of the practices, but worried that they would compromise their children. And the young children who viewed the film thought that the kids in the film were terrible, loud, and badly behaved; they told the authors that learning was supposed to be quiet, still, and obedient. In Segregation by Experience Jennifer Keys Adair and Kiyomi Sánchez-Suzuki Colegrove show us just how much our expectations of children of color affect what and how they learn at school, and they ask us to consider which children get to have sophisticated, dynamic learning experiences at school and which children are denied such experiences because of our continued racist assumptions about them. Laura Beth Kelly is an assistant professor of Educational Studies at Rhodes College in Memphis, Tennessee. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/education
In The Making of Florida's Universities: Public Higher Education at the Turn of the Twentieth Century (UP of Florida, 2023), Carl Van Ness describes the remarkable formative years of higher education in Florida, comparing the trajectory to that of other states and putting it in context within the broader history and culture of the South. Central to this story is the Buckman Act of 1905, a state law that consolidated government support to three institutions and prompted decades of conflicts over where Florida’s public colleges and universities would be located, who would head them, and who would manage their affairs. Van Ness traces the development of the schools that later became the University of Florida, Florida State University, and Florida A&M University. He describes little-known events such as the decision to move the University of Florida from its original location in Lake City, as well as a dramatic student rebellion at Florida A&M University in response to attempts to restrict Black students to vocational education and the subsequent firing of the president in 1923. The book also reflects on the debates regarding Florida’s normal schools, which provided coursework and practical training to teachers, a majority of whom were women. Utilizing rare historical records, Van Ness brings to light events in Florida’s history that have not been examined and that continue to affect higher education in the state today. Carl Van Ness is university librarian emeritus at the University of Florida George A. Smathers Libraries. Katie Coldiron is based at Florida International University. She is Outreach Program Manager for the Digital Library of the Caribbean at FIU Libraries and doctoral student in the FIU Department of History. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/education
Diversity in higher education is under attack as the Supreme Court limits the use of race-conscious admissions practices at American colleges and universities. In On the Basis of Race: How Higher Education Navigates Affirmative Action Policies (NYU Press, 2023), Lauren S. Foley sheds light on our current crisis, exploring the past, present, and future of this contentious policy. From Brown v. Board of Education in the mid-twentieth century to the current Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard and University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, Foley explores how organizations have resisted and complied with public policies regarding race. She examines how admissions officers, who have played an important role in the long fight to protect racial diversity in higher education, work around the law to maintain diversity after affirmative action is banned. Foley takes us behind the curtain of student admissions, shedding light on how multiple universities, including the University of Michigan, have creatively responded to affirmative action bans. On the Basis of Race traces the history of a controversial idea and policy, and provides insight into its uncertain future. Stephen Pimpare is a Senior Fellow at the Carsey School of Public Policy at the University of New Hampshire. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/education
The Unteachables: Disability Rights and the Invention of Black Special Education (U Minnesota Press, 2023) examines the overrepresentation of Black students in special education over the course of the twentieth century. As African American children integrated predominantly white schools, many were disproportionately labeled educable mentally retarded (EMR), learning disabled (LD), and emotionally behavioral disordered (EBD). Keith A. Mayes charts the evolution of disability categories and how these labels kept Black learners segregated in American classrooms. The civil rights and the educational disability rights movements, Mayes shows, have both collaborated and worked at cross-purposes since the beginning of school desegregation. Disability rights advocates built upon the opportunity provided by the civil rights movement to make claims about student invisibility at the level of intellectual and cognitive disabilities. Although special education ostensibly included children from all racial groups, educational disability rights advocates focused on the needs of white disabled students, while school systems used disability discourses to malign and marginalize Black students. From the 1940s to the present, social science researchers, policymakers, school administrators, and teachers have each contributed to the overrepresentation of Black students in special education. Excavating the deep-seated racism embedded in both the public school system and public policy, The Unteachables explores the discriminatory labeling of Black students, and how it indelibly contributed to special education disproportionality, to student discipline and push-out practices, and to the school-to-prison pipeline effect. Joao Souto-Maior is a postdoc at the New York University’s Institute of Human Development and Social Change. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/education
You’ve probably heard by now that there’s a hidden curriculum in academia. But it’s called hidden for a reason—only some [privileged] people are in the know about what it contains. And when you can’t find the answers you need, earning your degree is much harder than it should be. Today, higher education podcast host Dr. Ethel Tungohan of the Academic Aunties joins Dr. Christina Gessler, the producer and host of the Academic Life, to talk about why they are so passionate about bridging this knowledge gap. This episode explores:
The importance of seeing the structural barriers and gatekeepers.
Why the problem is not you, it’s them.
How being left out of important conversations harms women, first gen students, and people of color in academia.
Some advice that can help you survive and thrive in academia.
Our guest is: Dr. Ethel Tungohan, who is Associate Professor of Politics and Social Science at York University. She received her doctoral degree in Political Science and Women and Gender Studies from the University of Toronto. Her research looks at migrant labor, specifically assessing migrant activism. Her work has been published in academic journals such as the International Feminist Journal of Politics; Politics, Groups, and Identities; and Canadian Ethnic Studies. Dr. Tungohan specializes in socially engaged research and is actively involved in grassroots migrant organizations such as Gabriela-Ontario and Migrante-Canada. She is the host of the Academic Aunties. Our host is: Dr. Christina Gessler, who is a freelance book editor. She has served as content director and producer of the Academic Life podcast since she launched it in 2020. The Academic Life is proud to be an academic partner of the New Books Network. Listeners to this episode may also be interested in:
Care Activism: Migrant Domestic Workers, Movement-Building, and Communities of Care, by Ethel Tungohan
Containing Diversity: Canada and the Politics of Immigration in the 21st Century, by Yasmeen Abu-Laban, Ethel Tungohan, and Christina Gabriel
Filipinos in Canada: Disturbing Invisibility, by Roland Sintos Coloma, Bonnie McElhinny, Ethel Tungohan, John Paul Catungal and Lisa M. Davidson
The Academic Life podcast on community-building and How We Show Up, with Mia Birdsong
The Academic Life episode on the Field Guide to Grad School
The Academic Life episode on barriers to tenure for women of color
The Academic Life podcast on feminist communication strategies
The Academic Life podcast on how to stop overworking and underliving
The Academic Life podcast about quitting a PhD program
The Academic Life episode on The Grant Writing Guide
Welcome to The Academic Life! On the Academic Life channel we are inspired and informed by today’s knowledge-producers, working inside and outside the academy, and around the world. Find us on Twitter: @AcademicLifeNBN. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/education
Through the story of education and the teaching of history in Mandate Palestine, Yoni Furas reframes our understanding of the Palestinian and Zionist national movements. Educating Palestine: Teaching and Learning History Under the Mandate (Oxford UP, 2020) argues that Palestinian and Hebrew pedagogy could only be truly understood through an analysis of the conscious or unconscious dialogue between them. The conflict over Palestine, the study shows, shaped the way Arabs and Zionists thought, taught, and wrote about their past. British rule over Palestine promised the Jews a national home, but had no viable policy towards the Palestinians and established an education system that lacked a sustainable collective ethos. Nevertheless, Palestinian educators were able to produce a national pedagogy that knew how to work with the British and simultaneously promoted an ideology of progress and independence that challenged colonial rule. Roberto Mazza is currently an independent scholar. He is the host of the Jerusalem Unplugged Podcast and to discuss and propose a book for interview can be reached at robbymazza@gmail.com. Twitter and IG: @robbyref Website: www.robertomazza.org Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/education
Landon Mascareñaz and Doannie Tran propose that, even as events of this decade have exposed stress points in existing top-down, closed systems within education and other public institutions, they have also created prime opportunities to rethink and redesign those systems in ways that encourage civic participation and invigorate local democracy. In The Open System: Redesigning Education and Reigniting Democracy (Harvard Education Press, 2023), Mascareñaz and Tran argue for a critical revitalization of public education centered in openness, an organization design concept in which an entity receives, considers, and acts on input from the community it serves. As they demonstrate, open education policy improves information flow, increasing opportunity, bolstering public trust, and making room for cocreation and coproduction driven by community partnerships and family engagement. Based on their groundbreaking work with educational coalitions such as the Kentucky Coalition for Advancing Education and Colorado's Homegrown Talent Initiative, Mascareñaz and Tran introduce six key liberatory moves that can bring about open system transformation. They highlight real-life examples of the types of incremental, specific, and discrete projects that leaders can use to create openness in educational systems at the school, district, and state levels, providing a blueprint for changemaking. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/education
Embark on a journey of self-discovery and empowerment with Nurture their Nature; The Torah’s Essential Guidance for Parents and Teachers (Mosaica Press, 2021), an insightful book co-authored by Rabbi Jack Cohen and Rabbi Dr. Yosef Lynn. Drawing on wisdom from the Torah, this book guides parents and teachers in finding their own unique selves and igniting the same in their children and students. It's an essential read for those shaping the next generation. Ohad Fedida lives in Miami and is a psychology research and clinical assistant. He is pursuing a graduate degree in psychology, and is involved in a wide array of initiatives and studies from legal philosophy, Jewish programming, and psychology. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/education
The vast majority of American college students attend two thousand or so private and public institutions that might be described as the Middle—reputable educational institutions, but not considered equal to the elite and entrenched upper echelon of the Ivy League and other prestigious schools. Richard DeMillo has a warning for these colleges and universities in the Middle: If you do not change, you are heading for irrelevance and marginalization. In Abelard to Apple, DeMillo argues that these institutions, clinging precariously to a centuries-old model of higher education, are ignoring the social, historical, and economic forces at work in today's world. In the age of iTunes, open source software, and for-profit online universities, there are new rules for higher education. DeMillo, who has spent years in both academia and in industry, explains how higher education arrived at its current parlous state and offers a road map for the twenty-first century. He describes the evolving model for higher education, from European universities based on a medieval model to American land-grant colleges to Apple's iTunes U and MIT's OpenCourseWare. He offers ten rules to help colleges reinvent themselves (including “Don't romanticize your weaknesses”) and argues for a focus on teaching undergraduates. DeMillo's message—for colleges and universities, students, alumni, parents, employers, and politicians—is that any college or university can change course if it defines a compelling value proposition (one not based in “institutional envy” of Harvard and Berkeley) and imagines an institution that delivers it. Richard A. DeMillo is Distinguished Professor of Computing and Professor of Management, former John P. Imlay Dean of Computing, and Director of the Center for 21st Century Universities at Georgia Institute of Technology. Author of over 100 articles, books, and patents, he has held academic positions at Purdue University, the University of Wisconsin, and the University of Padua. He directed the Computer and Computation Research Division of the National Science Foundation and was Hewlett-Packard’s first Chief Technology Officer. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/education
An Introduction to the Blue Humanities (Routledge, 2023) is the first textbook to explore the many ways humans engage with water, utilizing literary, cultural, historical, and theoretical connections and ecologies to introduce students to the history and theory of water-centric thinking. Comprised of multinational texts and materials, each chapter will provide readers with a range of primary and secondary sources, offering a fresh look at the major oceanic regions, salt and freshwater geographies, and the physical properties of water that characterize the Blue Humanities. Each chapter engages with carefully-chosen primary texts, including frequently-taught works such as Herman Melville's Moby Dick, Samuel Taylor Coleridge's The Rime of the Ancient Mariner, Homer's The Odyssey, and Luis Vaz de Camões' The Lusiads, to provide the perfect pedagogy for students to develop an understanding of the Blue Humanities chapter by chapter. Readers will gain insight into new trends in intellectual culture and the long histories of humans thinking with water, ranging across the many coastlines of the World Ocean to Pacific clouds, Mediterranean lakes, Caribbean swamps, Arctic glaciers, Southern Ocean rainstorms, Atlantic groundwater, and Indian Ocean rivers. Providing new avenues for future thinking and investigation of the Blue Humanities, this volume will be ideal for both undergraduate and graduate courses engaging with the environmental humanities and oceanic literature. Steve Mentz is a Professor of English at St. John’s University in New York City. His academic expertise includes environmental criticism, the blue humanities, Shakespeare studies, early modern European poetry, and critical theory. He has published five single-author books, including Ocean (2020), Break Up the Anthropocene (2019), and Shipwreck Modernity (2015). He has edited or co-edited six other volumes, published many chapters and articles in scholarly journals and collections, and organized exhibitions and symposia on blue humanities topics. His research has been funded by the Rachel Carson Center in Munich, the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Folger Shakespeare Library, the John Carter Brown Library, the National Maritime Museum in London, and other institutions. He received his Ph.D. in English from Yale University in 2000. Scott T. Erich is a doctoral candidate in the Department of Anthropology at the Graduate Center, CUNY. His dissertation, "Taming the Sea: Property, Rights, and the Extractive Seascape of Southeastern Arabia," is an ethnographic and historical examination of how fishermen, local rulers, colonial officials, and private companies claim rights to oceanic “territory” and extract marine natural resources – including pearls, fish, sponges, and oil – from the Persian Gulf and Gulf of Oman. He is a recipient of the Fulbright-Hays Doctoral Dissertation Research Award and the Wenner-Gren Foundation Dissertation Fieldwork Grant. Previously, Scott was a Visiting Scholar at the American University of Sharjah, U.A.E., and a Fellow with the Institute of Current World Affairs in Muscat, Oman. He has worked at the University of Chicago, the Middle East Institute, and the Sultan Qaboos Cultural Center. Currently, he is an adjunct lecturer in the Department of Sociology & Anthropology at Baruch College, and a Community Reef Ambassador with the Billion Oyster Project. Ahmed Yaqoub AlMaazmi is a Ph.D. candidate at Princeton University, Near Eastern Studies Department. His research focuses on the intersection of law, the occult sciences, and the environment across the western Indian Ocean. He can be reached by email at almaazmi@princeton.edu or on Twitter @Ahmed_Yaqoub. Listeners’ feedback, questions, and book suggestions are most welcome. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/education
For decades, parents across America have asked their kids, “If your friends jumped off a bridge, would you?” The answer is, “Duh, yes.” Peers, as parents well know, have a tremendous impact on who their kids are and what they will become. And even while they insist otherwise, parents know that they’re largely powerless to change this. But the effect of peers is not just a story about kids; peers can also affect adult behavior—they affect what we do and who we are well into old age. Noted sociologists Syed Ali and Margaret M. Chin call this “the peer effect.” In their book, The Peer Effect: How Your Peers Shape Who You Are and Who You Will Become (NYU Press, 2023), they take readers on a tour of how our peers, and the peer cultures they create, shape our behavior in schools and the workplace. Ali and Chin begin their look at the peer effect at the high school from which they both graduated: New York City’s prestigious Stuyvesant High School, arguably the best public high school in the nation. Through a fascinating and often humorous narrative, they show how peers can influence each other—in this case, how highly motivated students can create a culture of influence to achieve success in learning and in admission to elite colleges. They also show the many other ways that peers can influence one another beyond school performance, from hookup culture to school bullying and youth suicide. Ali and Chin are also interested in the extent to which the peer effect can last. Through interviews with adult graduates of Stuyvesant, they investigate the long-lasting effects of high school peer culture. They also examine the peer effect in post–high school settings, notably around workplace misconduct, including the steroid culture in baseball and the use of excessive force by the police. The Peer Effect ultimately offers ways to understand the power of peer influence and apply this understanding to resolving issues regarding schools, college graduation rates, workplace culture, and police violence. In the tradition of big idea books like The Tipping Point, The Peer Effect will forever change the way we look at the world of human behavior. Michael O. Johnston, Ph.D. is an Assistant Professor of Sociology at William Penn University. He is the author of The Social Construction of a Cultural Spectacle: Floatzilla (Lexington Books, 2023) and Community Media Representations of Place and Identity at Tug Fest: Reconstructing the Mississippi River (Lexington, 2022). His general area of study is about the construction of place in tourist cities and about the people who reside there. He is currently conducting research for his next project on the social construction of tourist cities. To learn more about Michael O. Johnston you can go to his website, Google Scholar, Twitter @ProfessorJohnst, or by email at johnstonmo@wmpenn.edu. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/education
Awkward Archives: Ethnographic Drafts for a Modular Curriculum (Archive Books, 2022) proposes a manual for academic teaching and learning contexts. An ethnographic research approach is confronted with the demands of archival research as both disciplines challenge their inner logics and epistemologies. Through fieldwork and ethnographic tools and methods, both analogue and digital, the editors take various contemporary archival sites in Berlin as case studies to elaborate on controversial concepts in Western thought. Presenting as such a modular curriculum on archives in their awkwardness—with the tensions, discomfort and antagonisms they pose. With case studies on Haus der Kulturen der Welt, the Hahne-Niehoff Archive and the Museum für Naturkunde Berlin, among others This book is available open access
here. Adam Bobeck is a PhD candidate in Sociocultural Anthropology at the University of Leipzig. His PhD is entitled “Object-Oriented Azadari: Ontology and Ritual Theory”. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/education
When the "sharing economy" launched a decade ago, proponents claimed that it would transform the experience of work--giving earners flexibility, autonomy, and a decent income. It was touted as a cure for social isolation and rampant ecological degradation. But this novel form of work soon sprouted a dark side: exploited Uber drivers, neighborhoods ruined by Airbnb, racial discrimination, and rising carbon emissions. Several of the most prominent platforms are now faced with existential crises as they prioritize growth over fairness and long-term viability. Nevertheless, the basic model--a peer-to-peer structure augmented by digital tech--holds the potential to meet its original promises. Based on nearly a decade of pioneering research, After the Gig: How the Sharing Economy Got Hijacked and How to Win It Back (U California Press, 2021) dives into what went wrong with this contemporary reimagining of labor. The book examines multiple types of data from thirteen cases to identify the unique features and potential of sharing platforms that prior research has failed to pinpoint. Juliet B. Schor presents a compelling argument that we can engineer a reboot: through regulatory reforms and cooperative platforms owned and controlled by users, an equitable and truly shared economy is still possible. Juliet B. Schor is an American economist and Sociology Professor at Boston College. She has studied trends in working time, consumerism, the relationship between work and family, women's issues and economic inequality, and concerns about climate change in the environment. She is a New York Times bestselling author and the Chair of the Board of Directors of the Better Future Project. Tom Discenna is Professor of Communication at Oakland University whose work examines issues of academic labor and communicative labor more broadly. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/education
How do children and adolescents transition to adulthood in today’s America? How have American society’s entrenching economic inequality and increasing financial precarity profoundly shaped their coming-of-age experience? What does it mean to grow up in a diverse society interacting with peers and adults with very different racial and ethnic backgrounds? These are important questions to ask in order to understand young people’s life in the United States. In Diversity and the Transition to Adulthood in America (U California Press, 2022), sociologists Phoebe Ho, Hyunjoon Park, and Grace Kao use large-scale and nationally representative data to address these important questions. The book offers a panoramic view of young people’s life in today’s increasingly diverse America. Through identifying the patterns and trends of when and how youths of different racial and ethnic backgrounds reach their life milestones, the book maps out the varying life paths of young Americans, who will play critical roles in shaping the future of this country. In this episode, you will hear NBN host Pengfei Zhao talked with Phoebe Ho, the lead author of Diversity and the Transition to Adulthood in America. Their conversation ranges from the major findings of the book, to how these findings may inform public debates on issues related to young people, as well as how university instructors may use this book to engage students in their classrooms.
Phoebe Ho is Assistant Professor of Sociology at the University of North Texas. Her research focuses on family experiences with education and schooling in the United States, with a particular emphasis on race, ethnicity, immigrant status, and social class.
Hyunjoon Park is Korea Foundation Professor of Sociology and Director of the James Joo-Jin Kim Program in Korean Studies at the University of Pennsylvania. His research interests include social stratification, education, family, and the transition to adulthood, especially in East Asian societies.
Grace Kao is IBM Professor of Sociology and Professor of Ethnicity, Race, and Migration at Yale University. She is a past vice president of the American Sociological Association. Her research focuses on race, ethnicity, immigration, education, and youth outcomes.
Pengfei Zhao is a critical researcher and qualitative research methodologist based at the University of Florida. She is currently working on a book manuscript studying the coming-of-age experience of rural Chinese youth during and right after the Cultural Revolution. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/education
We understand very little about how elite individuals and families operate in everyday life to maintain their privileged statuses, as many of these status-maintaining activities are conducted out of the sight of the public, in private family settings, exclusive schools, and through privileged services. Yi-Lin Chiang’s new book, Study Gods: How the New Chinese Elite Prepare for Global Competition (Princeton University Press, 2022), offers a rare look into this issue in the context of contemporary China. Based on solid, long-term ethnographic research, Study Gods documents the educational journeys of elite Chinese adolescents, some of whom were named “study gods” by their peers because of their effortless abilities to achieve high academic performance. Employing vivid descriptions and sophisticated analyses, Chiang has shown how these young people achieve and maintain elite status by absorbing and complying with the rules surrounding status. In this episode, I talked with Yi-Lin Chiang about her new book, Studying Gods. You will hear not only her fascinating findings about the young generation of Chinese elite, but also behind-the-scene stories and reflections from a seasoned ethnographer, from how she interacted with these elite youths to what differs the younger generation of Chinese elites from the older ones, and why she thinks it is important to understand their elite world. Yi-Lin Chiang is assistant professor of sociology at National Chengchi University in Taiwan. Chiang’s research focuses on educational stratification and intergenerational status transmission in greater China. About the host: Pengfei Zhao is a critical researcher and qualitative research methodologist based at the University of Florida. She is currently working on a book manuscript studying the coming-of-age experience of rural Chinese youth during and right after the Cultural Revolution. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/education
Almost every student that will enroll in a college Shakespeare course can expect two things. Students will have to engage with the style and themes of texts that were composed over four hundred years old. And students will have to submit a piece of original writing that is well-organized, has a fresh argument, and cites early modern sources correctly. Rarely do these two tracks of the course inform each other. Adhaar Noor Desai’s new book, Blotted Lines: Early Modern English Literature and the Poetics of Discomposition (Cornell University Press, 2023) seeks to address this disjunction. As Desai shows, the early modern archive proposed strategies and ideas about writing that students and teachers might profitably learn—and sometimes unlearn. The innovative structure of Blotted Lines has an introduction, a coda, and five chapters that pair a topic from early modern poetics with a key writer: style (George Gascoigne), invention (Philip Sidney), revision (John Davies of Hereford), editing (Anne Southwell) and performance anxiety (William Shakespeare). After each chapter, Desai offers a brief conversational “reflection,” which offer a combination of practical teaching advice for the Shakespeare classroom and more expansive discussions about pedagogy in the twenty-first century university. Desai is Professor of English at Bard College and is one of the co-founders of the Experimental Humanities Collaborative Network, an international project that brings together practitioners working at the intersection of technology, social justice, and creative practice. His scholarship has been published in English Literary Renaissance, Philological Quarterly, Configurations, Publicity and the Early Modern Stage, and Teaching Social Justice through Shakespeare. Blotted Lines is his first monograph. John Yargo is Visiting Assistant Professor of English at Boston College. He earned a PhD in English literature from the University of Massachusetts Amherst, specializing in the environmental humanities and early modern culture. In 2023, his dissertation won the J. Leeds Barroll Prize, given by the Shakespeare Association of America. His peer-reviewed articles have been published or are forthcoming in the Journal for Early Modern Culture Studies, Early Theatre, Studies in Philology, and Shakespeare Studies. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/education
An Imperfect Leader: Leadership in (After) Action (Rowman & Littlefield, 2023) tells the story of a superintendent from his first days to the pandemic. In each chapter, he responds to a series of questions to prompt genuine reflection. This book is structured to give leaders the tools to become predictably successful leaders. Peter Stiepleman, the 2021 Missouri Superintendent of the Year, lives and works in the Pacific Northwest. He serves as an advisor to leaders and hosts a weekly podcast where he talks to leaders across the nation. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/education
Behind the lectern stands the professor, deploying course management systems, online quizzes, wireless clickers, PowerPoint slides, podcasts, and plagiarism-detection software. In the seats are the students, armed with smartphones, laptops, tablets, music players, and social networking. Although these two forces seem poised to do battle with each other, they are really both taking part in a war on learning itself. In The War on Learning, Elizabeth Losh examines current efforts to “reform” higher education by applying technological solutions to problems in teaching and learning. She finds that many of these initiatives fail because they treat education as a product rather than a process. Highly touted schemes—video games for the classroom, for example, or the distribution of iPads—let students down because they promote consumption rather than intellectual development. Losh analyzes recent trends in postsecondary education and the rhetoric around them, often drawing on first-person accounts. In an effort to identify educational technologies that might actually work, she looks at strategies including MOOCs (massive open online courses), the gamification of subject matter, remix pedagogy, video lectures (from Randy Pausch to “the Baked Professor”), and educational virtual worlds. Finally, Losh outlines six basic principles of digital learning and describes several successful university-based initiatives. Her book will be essential reading for campus decision makers—and for anyone who cares about education and technology. Elizabeth Losh directs the Culture, Art, and Technology Program at Sixth College at the University of California, San Diego. She is the author of Virtualpolitik: An Electronic History of Government Media-Making in a Time of War, Scandal, Disaster, Miscommunication, and Mistakes (MIT Press) and the coauthor of Understanding Rhetoric: A Graphic Guide to Writing. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/education
Across the U.S., state legislatures-often under the cover of darkness, and usually in spite of public opposition-are passing bills that channel public dollars to private schools. These voucher schemes promise to transfer billions from state treasuries to upper-income families. But that's just the start. Opponents of public schools want to dismantle the public education system entirely. Outrageous and unfounded attacks on the schools-about Critical Race Theory, "gender ideology," and "grooming"-are all part of a broader strategy to sow doubt and distrust. This is the end game. Education historian Jack Schneider and journalist Jennifer Berkshire trace the war on public education to its origins, offering the deep backstory necessary to understand the threat presently posed to America's schools. The book also looks forward to imagine how current policy efforts will reshape the educational landscape and remake America's future. A Wolf at the Schoolhouse Door: The Dismantling of Public Education and the Future of School (The New Press, 2023) offers readers a lively, accessible, yet scholarly view of a decades-long conservative cause: unmaking the system that serves over 90% of students in the U.S. Presenting a clear view of the ideology motivating this assault, the book also maps the future-outlining how current policy efforts will reshape the educational landscape and remake American democracy. Laura Beth Kelly is an assistant professor of Educational Studies at Rhodes College in Memphis, Tennessee. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/education
Today I talked to John L. Rudolph about his book Why We Teach Science (and Why We Should) (Oxford UP, 2023). Few people question the importance of science education in American schooling. The public readily accepts that it is the key to economic growth through innovation, develops the ability to reason more effectively, and enables us to solve the everyday problems we encounter through knowing how the world works. Good science teaching results in all these benefits and more -- or so we think. But what if all this is simply wrong? What if the benefits we assume science education produces turn out to be an illusion, nothing more than wishful thinking? John L. Rudolph is Vilas Distinguished Achievement professor in the Department of Curriculum and Instruction at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. He has affiliate appointments in the Department of Educational Policy Studies and the Robert and Jean Holtz Center for Science and Technology Studies and is the past editor-in-chief of the Wiley & Sons journal Science Education. Prior to his faculty appointment, he taught physics, chemistry, and biology in middle schools and high schools across Wisconsin.
Morteza Hajizadeh is a Ph.D. graduate in English from the University of Auckland in New Zealand. His research interests are Cultural Studies; Critical Theory; Environmental History; Medieval (Intellectual) History; Gothic Studies; 18th and 19th Century British Literature. YouTube channel. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/education
Many library project plans, from small projects to institution-wide strategic planning committees, follow a linear trajectory: create the plan, do the plan, then review the outcome. While this can be effective, it also sometimes leads to disregarding new information that emerges while executing the plan, making the outcome less effective. Planning processes can also feel forced and predetermined if stakeholder feedback is not seriously considered. When this happens too many times, people stop offering their honest opinions and new ideas because they have learned that the planners do not really want to hear them. Integrated Library Planning: A New Model for Strategic and Dynamic Planning, Management, and Assessment (ACRL, 2023) offers a different kind of approach to planning that is both strategic and dynamic: fueled by open communication, honest assessment, and astute observation. Voices at the table, near the table, and far from the table are heard and considered. Its perpetual rhythm gives space to consider new information when it emerges and freedom to make changes at a time that makes sense instead of when it is most convenient or expected. The era of fixed-length strategic plans is coming to an end. Five-year strategic plans had already given way to three-year strategic plans, and now we find ourselves needing to plan and function when nothing is certain beyond the present moment. The components of this model might look deceptively similar to the strategic planning practices used in libraries and organizations for decades; however, when implemented as a whole, with a monthly review cycle on a rolling planning horizon and space for regular analysis of information needs and behavior, it has the potential to shatter any previous notions of planning that serve only to satisfy administrators. Integrated Library Planning can help libraries effectively navigate and become agents of change. Jen Hoyer is Technical Services and Electronic Resources Librarian at CUNY New York City College of Technology. Jen edits for Partnership Journal and organizes with the TPS Collective. She is co-author of What Primary Sources Teach: Lessons for Every Classroom and The Social Movement Archive. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/education
Migrant Academics’ Narratives of Precarity and Resilience in Europe (Open Book Publishers, 2023) consists of narratives of migrant academics from the Global South within academia in the Global North. The autobiographic and autoethnographic contributions to this collection aim to decolonise the discourse around academic mobility by highlighting experiences of precarity, resilience, care and solidarity in the academic margins. The authors use precarity to analyse the state of affairs in the academy, from hiring practices to ‘culturally’ accepted division of labour, systematic forms of discrimination, racialisation, and gendered hierarchies, etc. Building on precarity as a critical concept for challenging social exclusion or forming political collectives, the authors move away from conventional academic styles, instead adopting autobiography and autoethnography as methods of intersectional scholarly analysis. This approach creatively challenges the divisions between the system and the individual, the mind and the soul, the objective and the subjective, as well as science, theory, and art. This volume will be of interest not only to scholars within the field of migration studies, but also to instructors and students of sociology, postcolonial studies, gender and race studies, and critical border studies. The volume’s interdisciplinary approach also seeks to address university diversity officers, managers, key decision-makers, and other readers directly or indirectly involved in contemporary academia. The format and style of its contributions are wide-ranging (including poetry and creative prose), thus making it accessible and readable for a general audience. The volume has been published open access and can be downloaded from here. Rituparna Patgiri, PhD is an Assistant Professor of Sociology at Indraprastha College for Women, University of Delhi. She has a PhD in Sociology from Jawaharlal Nehru University (JNU), New Delhi. Her research interests lie in the areas of food, media, gender and public. She is also one of the co-founders of Doing Sociology. Patgiri can be reached at @Rituparna37 on Twitter. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/education
A clear-eyed examination of the open access movement: past history, current conflicts, and future possibilities. Open access (OA) could one day put the sum of human knowledge at our fingertips. But the goal of allowing everyone to read everything faces fierce resistance. In Athena Unbound: Why and How Scholarly Knowledge Should Be Free for All (MIT Press, 2023), Peter Baldwin offers an up-to-date look at the ideals and history behind OA, and unpacks the controversies that arise when the dream of limitless information slams into entrenched interests in favor of the status quo. In addition to providing a clear analysis of the debates, Baldwin focuses on thorny issues such as copyright and ways to pay for “free” knowledge. He also provides a roadmap that would make OA economically viable and, as a result, advance one of humanity’s age-old ambitions. Baldwin addresses the arguments in terms of disseminating scientific research, the history of intellectual property and copyright, and the development of the university and research establishment. As he notes, the hard sciences have already created a funding model that increasingly provides open access, but at the cost of crowding out the humanities. Baldwin proposes a new system that would shift costs from consumers to producers and free scholarly knowledge from the paywalls and institutional barriers that keep it from much of the world. Rich in detail and free of jargon, Athena Unbound is an essential primer on the state of the global open access movement. Peter Baldwin is Professor of History at UCLA, and Global Distinguished Professor at NYU. Caleb Zakarin is the Assistant Editor of the New Books Network. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/education
Few people realize that raising children is the single largest industry in the United States. Yet this vital work receives little political support, and its primary workers--parents--labor in isolation. If they ask for help, they are made to feel inadequate; there is no centralized organization to represent their interests; and there is virtually nothing spent on research and development to help them achieve their goals. It's almost as if parents are set up to fail--and the result is lost opportunities that limit children's success and make us all worse off. In The Parent Trap: How to Stop Overloading Parents and Fix Our Inequality Crisis (MIT Press, 2023), Nate Hilger combines cutting-edge social science research, revealing historical case studies, and on-the-ground investigation to recast parenting as the hidden crucible of inequality. Parents are expected not only to care for their children but to help them develop the skills they will need to thrive in today's socioeconomic reality--but most parents, including even the most caring parents on the planet, are not trained in skill development and lack the resources to get help. How do we fix this? The solution, Hilger argues, is to ask less of parents, not more. America should consider child development a public investment with a monumental payoff. We need a program like Medicare--call it Familycare--to drive this investment. To make it happen, parents need to organize to wield their political power on behalf of children--who will always be the largest bloc of disenfranchised people in this country. The Parent Trap exposes the true costs of our society's unrealistic expectations around parenting and lays out a profoundly hopeful blueprint for reform. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/education
Critics of contemporary US higher education often point to the academy’s “corporatization” as one of its defining maladies. However, in The Autocratic Academy: Reenvisioning Rule Within America's Universities (Duke UP, 2023), Timothy V. Kaufman-Osborn argues that American colleges and universities have always been organized as corporations in which the power to rule is legally vested in and monopolized by antidemocratic governing boards. This institutional form, Kaufman-Osborn contends, is antithetical to the free inquiry that defines the purpose of higher education. Tracing the history of the American academy from the founding of Harvard (1636), through the Supreme Court’s Dartmouth v. Woodward ruling (1819), and into the twenty-first century, Kaufman-Osborn shows how the university’s autocratic legal constitution is now yoked to its representation on the model of private property. Explaining why appeals to the cause of shared governance cannot succeed in wresting power from the academy’s autocrats, Kaufman-Osborn argues that American universities must now be reincorporated in accordance with the principles of democratic republicanism. Only then can the academy’s members hold accountable those chosen to govern and collectively determine the disposition of higher education’s unique public goods. Timothy V. Kaufman-Osborn is Baker Ferguson Professor of Politics and Leadership Emeritus at Whitman College and author of From Noose to Needle: Capital Punishment and the Late Liberal State and Creatures of Prometheus: Gender and the Politics of Technology. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/education
The story of how Black and Brown parents, students and members of low-income communities of color organized to dismantle the school-to-prison pipeline in their local schools and built a movement that spread across the country. In Willful Defiance: The Movement to Dismantle the School-to-Prison Pipeline (Oxford UP, 2021), Mark R. Warren documents how Black and Brown parents, students, and low-income communities of color organized to dismantle the school-to-prison pipeline in their local schools and built an intersectional movement that spread across the country. Examining organizing processes in Mississippi, Los Angeles, Chicago, and other localities, he shows how relatively small groups of community members built the power to win policy changes to reduce suspensions and expulsions by combining deep local organizing with resources from the national movement. As a result, over the course of twenty years, the movement to combat the school-to-prison pipeline resulted in falling suspension rates across the country and began to make gains in reducing police presence in schools, especially in places where there have been sustained organizing and advocacy efforts. In documenting the struggle organizers waged to build national alliances led by community groups and people most impacted by injustice rather than Washington-based professional advocates, Warren offers a new model for movements that operate simultaneously at local, state and national levels, while primarily oriented to support and spread local organizing. In doing so, he argues for the need to rethink national social justice movements as interconnected local struggles whose victories are lifted and spread, In the end, the book highlights lessons from the school-to-prison pipeline movement for organizers, educators, policymakers and a broader public seeking to transform deep-seated and systemic racism in public schools and the broader society. This episode's host, Laura Kelly, is an assistant professor of Educational Studies at Rhodes College. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/education
Should we separate decisions related to love and money, approaching finance and career-related decisions solely in a rational way while relying more on our emotions in the personal domain? Perhaps it's time to start using both our heads and hearts together when making life's most significant decisions. Myra Strober is an emerita Professor at the Schools of Education and Business at Stanford University. She also sits on the board of journal Feminist Economics and is the former president of the International Association for Feminist Economics. Abby Davisson is a social innovation leader and career development expert. She is a senior leader on global retailer Gap Inc.'s Environmental, Social, & Governance (ESG) team and is President of Gap Foundation. She is also an alumni career advisor at Stanford's Graduate School of Business. Together they wrote the book Money and Love: An Intelligent Roadmap for Life's Biggest Decisions, exploring how to navigate life’s most consequential and daunting decisions. Myra, Abby, and Greg discuss the importance of incorporating decision-making into an interdisciplinary curriculum at an early stage for students to equip them with the skills to make optimal strategic choices while avoiding the need to compromise their professional or personal lives. Gregory LaBlanc is a lifelong educator with degrees in History, PPE, Business, and Law, Greg currently teaches at Berkeley, Stanford, and HEC Paris. He has taught in multiple disciplines, from Engineering to Economics, from Biology to Business, from Psychology to Philosophy. He is the host of the unSILOed podcast. unSILOed is produced by University FM. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/education
Why are girls discouraged from doing science? Why do so many promising women leave science in early and mid-career? Why do women not prosper in the scientific workforce? Not Just for the Boys: Why We Need More Women in Science (Oxford UP, 2023) looks back at how society has historically excluded women from the scientific sphere and discourse, what progress has been made, and how more is still needed. Athene Donald, herself a distinguished physicist, explores societal expectations during both childhood and working life using evidence of the systemic disadvantages women operate under, from the developing science of how our brains are―and more importantly aren't―gendered, to social science evidence around attitudes towards girls and women doing science. It also discusses how science is done in practice, in order to dispel common myths: for example, the perception that science is not creative, or that it is carried out by a lone genius in an ivory tower, myths that can be very off-putting to many sections of the population. A better appreciation of the collaborative, creative, and multi-disciplinary nature of science is likely to lead to its appeal to a far wider swathe of people, especially women. This book examines the modern way of working in scientific research, and how gender bias operates in various ways within it, drawing on the voices of leading women in science describing their feelings and experiences. It argues the moral and business case for greater diversity in modern research, the better to improve science and tackle the great challenges we face today. Athene Donald is Professor Emerita in Experimental Physics and Master of Churchill College, University of Cambridge. Other than four years postdoctoral research in the USA, she has spent her career in Cambridge, specializing in soft matter physics and physics at the interface with biology. She was the University of Cambridge's first Gender Equality Champion, and has been involved in numerous initiatives concerning women in science. She was elected Fellow of the Royal Society in 1999 and appointed DBE for services to Physics in 2010.
Morteza Hajizadeh is a Ph.D. graduate in English from the University of Auckland in New Zealand. His research interests are Cultural Studies; Critical Theory; Environmental History; Medieval (Intellectual) History; Gothic Studies; 18th and 19th Century British Literature. YouTube channel. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/education
Exploring what academic podcasting is and what it could be, Ian Cook's Scholarly Podcasting (Routledge, 2023) is the first to consider the why, what, and how academics engage with this insurgent, curious craft. Featuring interviews with 101 podcasting academics, including scholars and teachers of podcasting, this book explores the motivations of scholarly podcasters, interrogates what podcasting does to academic knowledge, and leads potential podcasters through the creation process from beginning to end. With scholarship often trapped inside expensive journals, wrapped in opaque language, and laced with a standoffish tone, this book analyses the implications of moving towards a more open and accessible form. This book will also inform, inspire, and equip scholars of any discipline, rank, or affiliation who are considering making a podcast or who make podcasts with the background knowledge and technical and conceptual skills needed to produce high-quality podcasts through a reflexive critique of current practices. Ian M. Cook is Editor in Chief at Allegra Lab. Caleb Zakarin is the Assistant Editor of the New Books Network. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/education
In What's the Use of Philosophy? (Oxford UP, 2023), Philip Kitcher here grapples with an essential philosophical question: what the point of philosophy is, and what it should and can be. Kitcher's portrait of the discipline is not a familiar defense of the importance of philosophy or the humanities writ large. Rather, he is deeply critical of philosophy as it is practiced today, a practice focused on narrow technical questions that are far removed from the concerns of human life. He provides a penetrating diagnosis of why exactly contemporary philosophy has come to suffer this crisis, showing how it suffers from various syndromes that continue to push it further into irrelevance. Then, taking up ideas from William James and John Dewey, Kitcher provides a positive roadmap for the future of philosophy: first, as a discipline that can provide clarity to other kinds of human inquiry, such as religion or science; and second, bringing order to people's notions of the world, dispelling confusion in favor of clarity, and helping us think through our biggest human questions and dilemmas. Kitcher concludes with a letter to young philosophers who wonder how they can align their aspirations with the hyper-professionalism expected of them. Philip Kitcher has taught for nearly half a century at several American Universities, most recently at Columbia University in the City of New York. His work has been honored with a number of awards, including the Rescher Medal for systematic philosophy, and the Hempel Award for lifetime achievement in the Philosophy of Science. He is a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, a Member of the American Philosophical Society, a Fellow of the British Academy, and an Honorary Fellow of Christ's College, Cambridge. Morteza Hajizadeh is a Ph.D. graduate in English from the University of Auckland in New Zealand. His research interests are Cultural Studies; Critical Theory; Environmental History; Medieval (Intellectual) History; Gothic Studies; 18th and 19th Century British Literature. YouTube channel. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/education
Games can act as invaluable tools for the teaching of the Middle Ages. The learning potential of physical and digital games is increasingly undeniable at every level of historical study. These games can provide a foundation of information through their stories and worlds. They can foster understanding of complex systems through their mechanics and rules. Their very nature requires the player to learn to progress.The educational power of games is particularly potent within the study of the Middle Ages. These games act as the first or most substantial introduction to the period for many students and can strongly influence their understanding of the era. Within the classroom, they can be deployed to introduce new and alien themes to students typically unfamiliar with the subject matter swiftly and effectively. They can foster an interest in and understanding of the medieval world through various innovative means and hence act as a key educational tool.Teaching the Middle Ages through Modern Games: Using, Modding and Creating Games for Education and Impact (de Gruyter, 2022), edited by Robert Houghton, presents a series of essays addressing the practical use of games of all varieties as teaching tools within Medieval Studies and related fields. In doing so it provides examples of the use of games at pre-university, undergraduate, and postgraduate levels of study, and considers the application of commercial games, development of bespoke historical games, use of game design as a learning process, and use of games outside the classroom. As such, Teaching the Middle Ages through Modern Games is a flexible and diverse pedagogical resource and its methods may be readily adapted to the teaching of different medieval themes or other periods of history.Rudolf Inderst is a professor of Game Design with a focus on Digital Game Studies at the IU International University of Applied Science, editor of “Game Studies Watchlist”, a weekly messenger newsletter about Game Culture and curator of @gamestudies at tiktok.Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/education
It didn't always take thirty years to pay off the cost of a bachelor's degree. In Indentured Students: How Government-Guaranteed Loans Left Generations Drowning in College Debt (Harvard UP, 2021), Elizabeth Tandy Shermer untangles the history that brought us here and discovers that the story of skyrocketing college debt is not merely one of good intentions gone wrong. In fact, the federal student loan program was never supposed to make college affordable.The earliest federal proposals for college affordability sought to replace tuition with taxpayer funding of institutions. But Southern whites feared that lower costs would undermine segregation, Catholic colleges objected to state support of secular institutions, professors worried that federal dollars would come with regulations hindering academic freedom, and elite-university presidents recoiled at the idea of mass higher education. Cold War congressional fights eventually made access more important than affordability. Rather than freeing colleges from their dependence on tuition, the government created a loan instrument that made college accessible in the short term but even costlier in the long term by charging an interest penalty only to needy students. In the mid-1960s, as bankers wavered over the prospect of uncollected debt, Congress backstopped the loans, provoking runaway inflation in college tuition and resulting in immense lender profits.Today 45 million Americans owe more than $1.5 trillion in college debt, with the burdens falling disproportionately on borrowers of color, particularly women. Reformers, meanwhile, have been frustrated by colleges and lenders too rich and powerful to contain. Indentured Students makes clear that these are not unforeseen consequences. The federal student loan system is working as designed.Elizabeth Tandy Shermer has written about labor, politics, and education for the Washington Post, HuffPost, and Dissent. Author of Sunbelt Capitalism: Phoenix and the Transformation of American Politics, she is Associate Professor of History at Loyola University Chicago.Tom Discenna is Professor of Communication at Oakland University whose work examines issues of academic labor and communicative labor more broadly.Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/education
We all know that academic integrity matters. But do we all agree on what academic integrity really is? Somewhere beyond the nuances and gray areas is blatant cheating. And that’s always wrong . . . but what if your professor asks you to cheat? This episode explores:
How well students understand academic integrity.
Why Dr. Heng Hartse designed a course that required cheating.
What he and his students learned from it.
How it feels to cheat, and why some students feel forced to do it.
A discussion of the article “What Happened When I Made My Students Cheat.”
Our guest is: Dr. Joel Heng Hartse, who teaches at Simon Fraser University. He wrote Sects, Love, and Rock and Roll (Cascade Books, 2010); Dancing About Architecture is a Reasonable Things to Do (Cascade Books, 2022); co-authored with Jiang Dong Perspectives on Teaching English at Colleges and Universities in China (TESOL Press, 2015); and is the author of the article “What Happened When I Made My Students Cheat,” published in Inside Higher Ed (November 9, 2022). Our host is: Dr. Christina Gessler, a historian of women and gender. Listeners to this episode may also be interested in:
Intellectual Appetite, by Paul Griffiths
“Dishonest Behavior in the Classroom and Clinical Setting: Perceptions and Engagement” by Emily L. McClung and Joanna Kraenzle Schneider
“Literacy Brokers and the Emotional Work of Mediation,” by Ligia Ana Mihut, in Literacy and Composition Studies, volume 2, number 1 (2014)
Jeffrey Moro’s blog article “Against Cop Shit”
The New York Times article on the aftermath of “Harvard cheating scandal”
This podcast on learning from your failed research
Welcome to The Academic Life! On the Academic Life channel we embrace a broad definition of what it means to lead an academic life. We view education as a transformative human endeavor and are inspired by today’s knowledge-producers working inside and outside the academy. Find us on Twitter: @AcademicLifeNBN. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/education
In this interview, Mel Rosenberg discusses his love for children's literature, what makes for a memorable picture book, and the company he created, Ourboox. Ourboox is a free site that allows people to create online flipbooks and picture books. Mel's collection is available here. Mel Rosenberg is a professor emeritus of microbiology (Tel Aviv University, emeritus) who fell in love with children's books as a small child and now writes his own. He is co-founder of Ourboox, a web platform with some 240,000 ebooks that allows anyone to create and share flipbooks comprising text, pictures and videos. Caleb Zakarin is the Assistant Editor of the New Books Network (Twitter: @caleb_zakarin). Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/education
The life of Betsey Stockton (ca. 1798–1865) is a remarkable story of a Black woman’s journey from slavery to emancipation, from antebellum New Jersey to the Hawai‘ian Islands, and from her own self-education to a lifetime of teaching others—all told against the backdrop of the early United States’ pervasive racism. It’s a compelling chronicle of a critical time in American history and a testament to the courage and commitment of a woman whose persistence grew into a potent form of resistance. When Betsey Stockton was a child, she was “given, as a slave” to the household of Rev. Ashbel Green, a prominent pastor and later the president of what is now Princeton University. Although she never went to school, she devoured the books in Green’s library. After being emancipated, she used that education to benefit other people of color, first in Hawai‘i as a missionary, then Philadelphia, and, for the last three decades of her life, Princeton—a college town with a genteel veneer that never fully hid its racial hostility. Betsey Stockton became a revered figure in Princeton’s sizeable Black population, a founder of religious and educational institutions, and a leader engaged in the day-to-day business of building communities. In The Education of Betsey Stockton: An Odyssey of Slavery and Freedom (U Chicago Press, 2022), Gregory Nobles illuminates both a woman and her world, following her around the globe, and showing how a determined individual could challenge her society’s racial obstacles from the ground up. It’s at once a revealing lesson on the struggles of Stockton’s times and a fresh inspiration for our own. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/education
Medical science in antebellum America was organized around a paradox: it presumed African Americans to be less than human yet still human enough to be viable as experimental subjects, as cadavers, and for use in the training of medical students. By taking a hard look at the racial ideas of both northern and southern medical schools, Christopher D. E. Willoughby reveals that racist ideas were not external to the medical profession but fundamental to medical knowledge. In this history of racial thinking and slavery in American medical schools, the founders and early faculty of these schools emerge as singularly influential proponents of white supremacist racial science. They pushed an understanding of race influenced by the theory of polygenesis—that each race was created separately and as different species—which they supported by training students to collect and measure human skulls from around the world. Medical students came to see themselves as masters of Black people's bodies through stealing Black people’s corpses, experimenting on enslaved people, and practicing distinctive therapeutics on Black patients. In documenting these practices Masters of Health: Racial Science and Slavery in US Medical Schools (UNC Press, 2022) charts the rise of racist theories in U.S. medical schools, throwing new light on the extensive legacies of slavery in modern medicine. Claire Clark is a medical educator, historian of medicine, and associate professor in the University of Kentucky’s College of Medicine. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/education
In When Race Meets Class: African Americans Coming of Age in a Small City (Routledge, 2019), Rhonda Levine provides a 15-year ethnography that follows the lives of individual, low-income African American youth from the beginning of high school into their early adult years. Levine shows how their interaction and experience with multiple institutions (family, school, community) and individuals (parents, friends, teachers, coaches, strangers) shape their hopes, fears, aspirations, and worldviews. Levine explores the volatility and constraints underlying their decision-making and behaviors. Rhonda Levine is Professor of Sociology, Emerita, at Colgate University, USA. Schneur Zalman Newfield is an Assistant Professor of Sociology at Borough of Manhattan Community College, City University of New York, and the author of Degrees of Separation: Identity Formation While Leaving Ultra-Orthodox Judaism (Temple University Press, 2020). Visit him online at ZalmanNewfield.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/education
“I’m burned out” is a familiar phrase in higher ed these days. This episode explores:
What burnout is and is not.
One scholar’s personal experience with burnout.
How higher ed’s culture and the “expectation escalation” encourage burnout.
Academic capitalism and its relationship to faculty burnout.
The missing voices from the conversation on burnout.
Imposter syndrome and how it plays out for women, especially, in the academy.
Our guest is: Dr. Laura Pope-Ruark, Director of the Office of Faculty Professional Development at the Georgia Institute of Technology. She is the author of Unraveling Faculty Burnout: Pathways to Reckoning and Renewal (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2022) and Agile Faculty: Practical Strategies for Managing Research, Service, and Teaching (The University of Chicago Press, 2017) as well as the coeditor of Redesigning Liberal Education: Innovative Design for a Twenty-First-Century Undergraduate Education (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2020). Our host is: Dr. Dana M. Malone, co-producer and co-host of The Academic Life channel. Dana is energized by facilitating meaningful conversations and educational experiences for folks across the academy and beyond. Dana is the author of From Single to Serious: Relationships, Gender, and Sexuality on American Evangelical Campuses, (Rutgers University Press). Listeners to this episode may also be interested in:
This Chronicle of Higher Education article on how to cope with Covid-19 burnout.
This Inside Higher Ed article on beating pandemic burnout.
The Maslach Burnout Inventory for Educators (MBI-ES).
This Academic Life conversation on community building and how we show up.
This Academic Life conversation on being well in academia.
This Academic Life conversation on finding your people and making meaningful connections.
Welcome to The Academic Life! You are smart and capable, but you aren’t an island, and neither are we. We reach across our mentor network to bring you podcasts on everything from how to finish that project to how to take care of your beautiful mind. Here on the Academic Life channel, we embrace a broad definition of what it means to be an academic and to lead an academic life. We view education as a transformative human endeavor and are inspired by today’s knowledge-producers working inside and outside the academy. Wish we’d bring on an expert about something? DMs us on Twitter: @AcademicLifeNBN. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/education
Who are America's creationists? What do they want? Why do they think Jesus rode around on a dinosaur? In Creationism USA: Bridging the Impasse on Teaching Evolution (Oxford UP, 2021), Adam Laats reveals that common misconceptions about creationism have led Americans into a full century of unnecessary culture-war histrionics about evolution education and creationism. In fact, America does not now and never has had deep, fundamental disagreement about evolution. Not about the actual science of evolution, that is, and not in ways that truly matter to public policy. Americans do have significant disagreements about creationism, though, and Laats offers a new way to understand those battles. By describing the history of creationism and its many variations, this book demonstrates that the real conflict about evolution is not between creationists and evolution. The true landscape of American creationism is far more complicated than headlines suggest. Your host, Ryan Shelton (@_ryanshelton) is a social historian of British and American Protestantism and a PhD researcher at Queen’s University Belfast. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/education
It is rare to see colleges and universities achieve major and rapid changes in their national rankings. Richard Freeland, the president emeritus of Northeastern University, discusses how they were able to achieve this at Northeastern during his decade leading one of the nation’s largest private universities by doubling down and improving their historic strength in co-operative education. In parallel, Northeastern was able to achieve dramatic improvements in retention and graduation rates, from just 44% to over 70%. He also shares insights from his tenure leading the Massachusetts public higher education system. David Finegold is the president of Chatham University. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/education
Sesame Street has taught generations of Americans their letters and numbers, and also how to better understand and get along with people of different races, faiths, ethnicities, and temperaments. But the show has a global reach as well, with more than thirty co-productions of Sesame Street that are viewed in over 150 countries. In recent years, the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) has provided funding to the New York-based Sesame Workshop to create international versions of Sesame Street. Many of these programs teach children to respect diversity and tolerate others, which some hope will ultimately help to build peace in conflict-affected societies. In fact, the U.S. government has funded local versions of the show in several countries enmeshed in conflict, including Afghanistan, Kosovo, Pakistan, Jordan, and Nigeria. Can Big Bird Fight Terrorism?: Children's Television and Globalized Multicultural Education (Oxford UP, 2019) takes an in-depth look at the Nigerian version, Sesame Square, which began airing in 2011. In addition to teaching preschool-level academic skills, Sesame Square seeks to promote peaceful coexistence-a daunting task in Nigeria, where escalating ethno-religious tensions and terrorism threaten to fracture the nation. After a year of interviewing Sesame creators, observing their production processes, conducting episode analysis, and talking to local educators who use the program in classrooms, Naomi Moland found that this child-focused use of soft power raised complex questions about how multicultural ideals translate into different settings. In Nigeria, where segregation, state fragility, and escalating conflict raise the stakes of peacebuilding efforts, multicultural education may be ineffective at best, and possibly even divisive. This book offers rare insights into the complexities, challenges, and dilemmas inherent in soft power attempts to teach the ideals of diversity and tolerance in countries suffering from internal conflicts. Sharonee Dasgupta is currently a graduate student in the department of anthropology at UMass Amherst. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/education
Today’s book is: Where Research Begins: Choosing a Research Project That Matters to You (and the World) (U Chicago Press, 2022) by Thomas S. Mullaney and Christopher Rea, which tackles the two challenges every researcher faces with every new project: “How do I find a compelling problem to investigate—one that truly matters to me, deeply and personally? How do I then design my research project so that the results will matter to anyone else?” This easy-to-follow workbook guides you to find research inspiration within yourself, and in the broader world of ideas. Our guest is: Dr. Thomas S. Mullaney, who is Professor of History at Stanford University and Professor of East Asian Languages and Cultures, by courtesy; the Kluge Chair in Technology and Society at the Library of Congress; and a Guggenheim Fellow. He is the author or lead editor of 7 books and the forthcoming The Chinese Computer—the first comprehensive history of Chinese-language computing. His writings have appeared in the Journal of Asian Studies, Technology & Culture, Aeon, Foreign Affairs, and Foreign Policy, and his work has been featured in the LA Times, The Atlantic, the BBC, and in invited lectures at Google, Microsoft, Adobe, and more. He holds a PhD from Columbia University. Our guest is: Dr. Christopher Rea, who is a literary and cultural historian. His research focuses on the modern Chinese-speaking world, and his most recent publications concern research methods, cinema, comedy, celebrities, swindlers, cultural entrepreneurs, and the scholar-writers Qian Zhongshu and Yang Jiang. At University of British Columbia, he is a faculty member and Associate Head, External of the Department of Asian Studies; former Director of the Centre for Chinese Research; an associate of the Hong Kong Studies Initiative; and a Faculty Fellow of St. John’s College. He co-authored with Tom Mullaney, Where Research Begins: Choosing a Research Project That Matters to You (and the World). Our host is: Dr. Christina Gessler, a historian of women and gender. Listeners to this episode may also be interested in:
The Craft of Research, by Wayne Booth et al
The Research Companion, by Petra Boynton
How to Write a Thesis, by Umberto Eco
The Art of Creative Research, by Philip Gerald
This podcast on learning from your failed research
Welcome to The Academic Life! We reach across our mentor network to bring you podcasts on everything from how to finish a project to how to take care of your beautiful mind. On the Academic Life channel we embrace a broad definition of what it means to lead an academic life. We view education as a transformative human endeavor and are inspired by today’s knowledge-producers working inside and outside the academy. DMs us on Twitter: @AcademicLifeNBN. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/education
Virginia C. Gildersleeve was the most influential dean of Barnard College, which she led from 1911 to 1947. An organizer of the Seven College Conference, or “Seven Sisters,” she defended women's intellectual abilities and the value of the liberal arts. She also amassed a strong set of foreign policy credentials and, at the peak of her prominence in 1945, served as the sole woman member of the U.S. delegation to the drafting of the United Nations Charter. But her accomplishments are undercut by other factors: she had a reputation for bias against Jewish applicants for admission to Barnard and early in the 1930s voiced an indulgent view of the Nazi regime. In this biography, historian Nancy Woloch explores Gildersleeve’s complicated career in academia and public life. At once a privileged insider, prone to elitism and insularity, and a perpetual outsider to the sexist establishment in whose ranks she sought to ascend, Gildersleeve stands out as richly contradictory. The book examines her initiatives in higher education, her savvy administration, her strategies for gaining influence in academic life, the ways that she acquired and deployed expertise, and her drive to take part in the world of foreign affairs. Woloch draws out her ambivalent stance in the women’s movement, concerned with women’s status but opposed to demands for equal rights. Tracing resonant themes of ambition, competition, and rivalry, The Insider: A Life of Virginia C. Gildersleeve (Columbia UP, 2022) masterfully weaves Gildersleeve’s life into the histories of education, international relations, and feminism. Jane Scimeca is Professor of History at Brookdale Community College. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/education
Performing Math: A History of Communication and Anxiety in the American Mathematics Classroom (Rutgers University Press, 2020) by Dr. Andrew Fiss tells the history of expectations for math communication—and the conversations about math hatred and math anxiety that occurred in response. Focusing on nineteenth-century American colleges, this book analyzes foundational tools and techniques of math communication: the textbooks that supported reading aloud, the burnings that mimicked pedagogical speech, the blackboards that accompanied oral presentations, the plays that proclaimed performers’ identities as math students, and the written tests that redefined “student performance.” Math communication and math anxiety went hand in hand as new rules for oral communication at the blackboard inspired student revolt and as frameworks for testing student performance inspired performance anxiety. With unusual primary sources from over a dozen educational archives, Performing Math argues for a new, performance-oriented history of American math education, one that can explain contemporary math attitudes and provide a way forward to reframing the problem of math anxiety. This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose doctoral work focused on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/education
We are delighted to welcome you at All for One and One for All: Public Seminar Series on Mental Health in Academia and Society. All for One and One for All talks shine the light on and discuss mental health issues in academia across all levels – from students to faculty, as well as in wider society. Speakers include academics, organisations, and health professionals whose work focuses on mental health. Live Q and A sessions will be held after each talk. For live webinar schedule please visit Lashuel lab website. Follow us on Twitter: @LashuelLab Today’s talk is hosted by Prof. Hilal Lashuel and Galina Limorenko, and we are happy to welcome Prof. Morteza Mahmoudi to discuss bullying in academia. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/education
You’re going to an academic conference—and maybe even presenting a project! Whether you are going virtually or in person, for the first time or the tenth, presenting or just attending, you want to feel prepared. Are you? This podcast episode explores:
Why we need to go to academic conferences.
Why it can be difficult to navigate them.
How can you get the most of out of it.
Our guest is: Dr. Thomas J. Tobin, who is a founding member of the Center for Teaching, Learning, and Mentoring at the University of Wisconsin at Madison. He is an internationally recognized speaker and author on quality in technology-enhanced education. His latest book is Going Alt-Ac: A Guide to Alternative Academic Careers, written with Katie Linder and Kevin Kelly, from Stylus Publishing. You can find him on Twitter @ThomasJTobin and at his website, Thomasjtobin.com. Our host is: Dr. Christina Gessler, a historian of women and gender and an introvert, who has presented in dozens of academic conference, and like many of our listeners, she is still learning how to make the most of an academic conference. Listeners to this episode may also be interested in:
The Chronicle of Higher Ed article “How to Make the Most Out of An Academic Conference”
The Chronicle of Higher Ed article “How to Make the Most of a Virtual Conference”
The Chronicle of Higher Ed article “How To Cope With Presentation Anxiety”
This article on The Introverts’ Guide to Speaking Up
Quiet: The Power of Introverts, by Susan Cain
The Craft of Research, by Wayne Booth et al
The Research Companion, by Petra Boynton
The Art of Creative Research, by Philip Gerald
Welcome to The Academic Life! We reach across our mentor network to bring you podcasts on everything from how to finish a project to how to take care of your beautiful mind. On the Academic Life channel we embrace a broad definition of what it means to lead an academic life. We view education as a transformative human endeavor and are inspired by today’s knowledge-producers working inside and outside the academy. DMs us on Twitter: @AcademicLifeNBN. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/education
Today I talked to Richard Reeves about his important new book Of Boys and Men: Why the Modern Male Is Struggling, Why It Matters, and What to Do about It (Brookings Institution, 2022). The statistics are stunning. Men have a 9% lower graduation rate from college. One in three men without a completed high school education are now out of the workforce. About 40% of births take place outside of marriage (up from 11% in 1970). And men are 50% more likely to die from Covid-19 than women after contracting the virus. The long and short of it, while also advocating for full, real opportunities for women, short shrift is often being given to the problems men face. Neither ignoring the problem (the liberal choice, often) or suggesting we turn-back-the-clock to the 1950s (the conservative choice, often) will suffice. In this episode, Richard Reeves dares to propose some real solutions regarding education reforms, workplace opportunities, and pro-childrearing roles for all dads, married or otherwise. Richard Reeves is a senior fellow in economic studies at the Brookings Institution. He’s the author of the 2017 book Dream Hoarders and is also a regular contributor to The New York Times, Washington Post, Wall Street Journal, and The Atlantic. Dan Hill, PhD, is the author of ten books and leads Sensory Logic, Inc. (https://www.sensorylogic.com). His newest book is Emotionomics 2.0: The Emotional Dynamics Underlying Key Business Goals. To check out his related “Dan Hill’s EQ Spotlight” blog, visit https://emotionswizard.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/education
Gurpinder Singh Lalli's book Schools, Space and Culinary Capital (Routledge, 2022) introduces the notion of culinary capital to investigate socialisation and school mealtime experiences in an academy school based in the UK. Drawing on interviews collated from children, teachers and staff within the school, the text sheds light on food insecurity in society and schools as being a major issue in educational policy. The book examines schools as a microcosm for society with school food space being the playground for socialisation. It shows how forms of culinary capital can be extended in the school dining hall where social space is negotiated with notions of inclusion and exclusion during mealtime. The book uses gender, class and race to understand the school dining hall as a space where culinary capital can be exchanged and learnt. Thorough research accompanied by ethnographic visuals, field notes and observations, it also explores the sensory impact of school gardens. As such the book will be of interest to students, teachers, school leaders, educators and policy makers in the fields of Education, Sociology, Social Policy and Food Studies. Rituparna Patgiri, PhD is an Assistant Professor of Sociology at Indraprastha College for Women, University of Delhi. She has a PhD in Sociology from Jawaharlal Nehru University (JNU), New Delhi. Her research interests lie in the areas of food, media, gender and public. She is also one of the co-founders of Doing Sociology. Patgiri can be reached at @Rituparna37 on Twitter. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/education
There are few thinkers who engender as much debate about their legacy as Leo Strauss (1899 –1973). His critics and biographers often don’t even agree about what scholarly discipline he practiced. Political theory or philosophy? Was he a proto-neoconservative or a middle-of-the-road Cold War defender of liberal democracy? He is often depicted as a major intellectual influence on sections of the national security state right, especially during the presidency of George W. Bush when he was portrayed as a puppeteer pulling from the grave the strings of such notable hawks as Paul Wolfowitz. But the writings of Strauss often go unexamined. That is partly because they lean towards the abstruse. Strauss was not a general-audience-friendly public intellectual in his day and much of the homage to and attacks on him at this point are to be found in the pages of academic journals and in the halls of think tanks. We are fortunate, therefore, that we can turn to the 2021 book, Leo Strauss on Democracy, Technology, and Liberal Education by Timothy W. Burns for elucidation of Strauss's thinking about how we can preserve liberal democracy in the face of apathy from moderates, classical liberals and traditional conservatives flummoxed by the rise of an aggressive left that questions whether the United States is a democracy at all and an alienated alt-right that regards liberal democracy as now practiced as a character-sapping anachronism leading to civilizational decline. We learn from Burns of Strauss's admiration for Winston Churchill and touting of him as an exemplar of greatness within democracy. In one of the most absorbing sections of the book we learn of a 1941 lecture by Strauss entitled, “German Nihilism” in which he examined the arguments of such groups as rightist German students in the 1920s that liberal democracy fostered moral mediocrity. Burns contrasts in detail the ideas of Strauss and Martin Heidegger and shows that Strauss foresaw that the other man’s emphasis on resoluteness would metastasize into Heidegger’s support for Nazism. Burns tells us that Strauss can speak to us today via his call to defend democratic constitutionalism and its spiritual and religious traditions. That call can lead to charges of elitism against Strauss because it entailed his championing of the idea of an “aristocracy within democracy,” a cadre of cultivated, well-educated leaders who would help maintain the intellectual and cultural moorings of democracies. Let’s hear now from Professor Burns about who Leo Strauss was and what he actually wrote and thought. Hope J. Leman is a grants researcher. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/education
Listen to this interview of Barbara Sarnecka, Professor of Cognitive Sciences and Associate Dean of Research and Graduate Studies for Social Sciences, University of California, Irvine. We talk about putting your mind in print. She is the author of The Writing Workshop: Write More, Write Better, Be Happier in Academia. Barbara Sarnecka : "The more quantitative a person's field of study is, the more likely they are to say that they just don't think that writing is a big requirement in their field. And they'll say, 'Well, writing isn't very important. I'm a biologist.' They imagine that writing is somehow for people in the humanities, or it's for playwrights or novelists, or something like that. But whenever anyone fails to be productive as a scientist, it's because they're not writing. It's because they're not publishing manuscripts or they're not producing funding proposals that are getting funded. It's not because they don't have enough ideas for experiments, or because they didn't collect enough data, or because they didn't learn to analyze the data properly. Those things are all kind of trivially easy, and that's why we can subcontract them to graduate students or the statistical consulting center or somebody to do them for us. You can't get somebody else to think for you, and you can't get somebody else to write for you."
Find about more about Barbara, including why she chose to self-publish, in this interview.
Read the research on Barbara's writing-shop intervention here.
Read the research on cascading mentorship here and here.
Contact Barbara's editor at michael.dylan.rogers@gmail.com
Daniel Shea is committed to helping scientists write at their best. Contact me at daniel.shea@kit.edu Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/education
The Resistance, Persistence and Resilience of Black Families Raising Children with Autism (Peter Lang, 2020) presents nuanced perspectives in the form of counternarratives of what Black families who have children with autism experience at the intersection of race, class, disability and gender. It intentionally centers the expertise of Black parents, challenging what is considered knowledge, whose knowledge counts, and how knowledge can be co-generated for learning, sharing and advocacy. The book speaks directly to Black parents on the autism journey. To right systemic racial inequities and to cultivate culturally responsive practices, it is critical for practitioners and professionals to understand what is known about Black families' experiences with autism in general and how these experiences differ because of our intersecting identities. University faculty and students in programs involving medicine, speech and language pathology, occupational therapy, nursing, political science, school psychology, teaching, special education and leadership can benefit from the wisdom offered by these parents. This text is perfect for several courses, including those in departments of anthropology, women and gender studies, health sciences, psychology, special education, teacher education and administrative leadership. In addition, given the uniquely Black perspective presented in the text, this text is relevant to other fields, including ethnic studies, cultural studies, urban studies and African American studies. It is relevant to individuals who wish to better understand how issues of race and intra-racial differences shape lived experiences with disability in American society. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/education
Ever felt uncertain about how to manage the academic mid-career stage? This episode explores:
Why the mid-career stage is so important to mid-career faculty.
Strategies for taking control of your mid-career advancement plans.
Equity issues surrounding women, academic mothers, and faculty of color.
The importance of the department chair for mid-career faculty.
Being strategic about your mentoring needs in mid-career.
Two critical considerations for mid-career faculty developing programs.
Our guest is: Dr. Vicki L Baker, author of Managing Your Academic Career: A Guide to Re-Envision Mid-Career (Routledge). Vicki is the E. Maynard Aris Endowed Professor in Economics and Management at Albion College and serves as the Faculty Director of the Albion College Community Collaborative (AC3), Co-Chair of the Economics & Management Department, and instructor for Penn State University’s World Campus. Prior to joining the academy as a faculty member, Vicki worked at Harvard Business School (Executive Education) and AK Steel Corporation. Vicki is the author of 90 peer-reviewed articles, chapters, invited works, and several books. Recognized as a “Top 100 Visionary” in Education by the Global Forum for Education and Learning (20-21), Vicki is at the forefront of innovation and strategy in faculty and leadership development; her goal is to help faculty members and colleges and universities thrive. She earned her PhD (Higher Education) and MS (Management & Organization) from Penn State University, MBA from Clarion University and BS from Indiana University of Pennsylvania. Vicki also holds a certificate in Human Resource Management from Villanova University and is a certified professional in HR from the Society for Human Resource Management. Our host is: Dr. Dana M. Malone, co-producer and co-host of The Academic Life channel. Dana is energized by facilitating meaningful conversations and educational experiences for folks across the academy and beyond. Dana is the author of From Single to Serious: Relationships, Gender, and Sexuality on American Evangelical Campuses, (Rutgers UP). Listeners to this episode may also be interested in:
New Directions in Higher Education volume, Bridging the Research-Practice Nexus: Resources, Tools, and Strategies to Navigate Mid-Career in the Academy. Edited by Vick L. Baker and Aimee LaPointe Terosky.
The Evolving Faculty Affairs Landscape - a compilation of publications from Inside HigherEd focused on faculty (several focused at mid-career).
This Academic Life channel conversation with Vicki Baker on navigating mid-career choices as a faculty member.
This Academic Life channel conversation with Laura Gail Lunsford on how to create a mentor network.
How to Chair a Department by Kevin Dettmar (Johns Hopkins).
Unraveling Faculty Burnout: Pathways to Reckoning and Renewal by Rebecca Pope-Ruark (Johns Hopkins).
Welcome to The Academic Life! You are smart and capable, but you aren’t an island, and neither are we. We reach across our mentor network to bring you podcasts on everything from how to finish that project to how to take care of your beautiful mind. Here on the Academic Life channel, we embrace a broad definition of what it means to be an academic and to lead an academic life. We view education as a transformative human endeavor and are inspired by today’s knowledge-producers working inside and outside the academy. Wish we’d bring on an expert about something? DMs us on Twitter: @AcademicLifeNBN. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/education
Nannie Helen Burroughs (1879-1961) is just one of the many African American intellectuals whose work has long been excluded from the literary canon. In her time, Burroughs was a celebrated African American (or, in her era, a race woman) female activist, educator, and intellectual. Nannie Helen Burroughs: A Documentary Portrait of an Early Civil Rights Pioneer, 1900-1959 (U Notre Dame Press, 2019) represents a landmark contribution to the African American intellectual historical project by allowing readers to experience Burroughs in her own words. This anthology of her works written between 1900 and 1959 encapsulates Burroughs's work as a theologian, philosopher, activist, educator, intellectual, and evangelist, as well as the myriad of ways that her career resisted definition. Burroughs rubbed elbows with such African American historical icons as W. E. B. DuBois, Booker T. Washington, Anna Julia Cooper, Mary Church Terrell, and Mary McLeod Bethune, and these interactions represent much of the existing, easily available literature on Burroughs's life. This book aims to spark a conversation surrounding Burroughs's life and work by making available her own tracts on God, sin, the intersections of church and society, black womanhood, education, and social justice. Moreover, the volume is an important piece of the growing movement toward excavating African American intellectual and philosophical thought and reformulating the literary canon to bring a diverse array of voices to the table. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/education
A sweeping history of the federal legislation that prohibits sex discrimination in education, published on the fiftieth anniversary of Title IX. “No person in the United States shall, on the basis of sex, be excluded from participation in, be denied the benefits of, or be subjected to discrimination under any education program or activity receiving federal financial assistance.” —Title IX’s first thirty-seven words By prohibiting sex discrimination in federally funded education, the 1972 legislation popularly known as Title IX profoundly changed the lives of women and girls in the United States, accelerating a movement for equal education in classrooms, on sports fields, and in all of campus life. Sherry Boschert's book 37 Words: Title IX and Fifty Years of Fighting Sex Discrimination (New Press, 2022) is the story of Title IX. Filled with rich characters—from Bernice Resnick Sandler, an early organizer for the law, to her trans grandchild—the story of Title IX is a legislative and legal drama with conflicts over regulations and challenges to the law. It’s also a human story about women denied opportunities, students struggling for an education free from sexual harassment, and activists defying sexist discrimination. These intersecting narratives of women seeking an education, playing sports, and wanting protection from sexual harassment and assault map gains and setbacks for feminism in the last fifty years and show how some women benefit more than others. Award-winning journalist Sherry Boschert beautifully explores the gripping history of Title IX through the gutsy people behind it. In the tradition of the acclaimed documentary She’s Beautiful When She’s Angry, 37 Words offers a crucial playbook for anyone who wants to understand how we got here and who is horrified by current attacks on women’s rights. Jane Scimeca is Professor of History at Brookdale Community College. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/education
The American Dream is built on the idea that Americans end up roughly where we deserve to be in our working lives based on our efforts and abilities; in other words, the United States is supposed to be a meritocracy. When Americans think and talk about our lives, we grapple with this idea, asking how a person got to where he or she is and whether he or she earned it. In What We Mean by the American Dream: Stories We Tell about Meritocracy (Cornell UP, 2021), Taussig tries to find out how we answer those questions. Weaving together interviews with Americans from many walks of life--as well as stories told in the US media about prominent figures from politics, sports, and business--What We Mean by the American Dream investigates how we think about whether an individual deserves an opportunity, job, termination, paycheck, or fortune. Taussig looks into the fabric of American life to explore how various people, including dairy farmers, police officers, dancers, teachers, computer technicians, students, store clerks, the unemployed, homemakers, and even drug dealers got to where they are today and whether they earned it or not. Taussig's frank assessment of the state of the US workforce and its dreams allows him to truly and meaningfully ask the question that underpins so many of our political debates and personal frustrations: Did you earn it? By doing so, he sheds new light on what we mean by--and how we can deliver on--the American Dream of today. Doron Taussig is Visiting Assistant Professor of Media and Communication Studies at Ursinus College, and a fellow with the Tow Center for Digital Journalism at Columbia University. Prior to becoming a Professor he was a journalist for ten years. Tom Discenna is Professor of Communication at Oakland University whose work examines issues of academic labor and communicative labor more broadly. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/education
What does it take to create a classroom environment in which students take the initiative in their learning and teachers can let go of the 'exhaustive hyper control' that so often leads to burnout? Miriam Plotinsky has written an engaging, honest and practical book that offers a pathway for teachers who want to make this happen. In this interview, we discuss four stages that Plotinsky identifies as crucial to increasing student autonomy: a teacher mindset shift, the development of deeper relationships, planning for meaningful engagement and choice-based, hands-off instruction. While informed by research, Hover Less, Teach More: How to Stop Micromanaging Your Secondary Classroom (Norton, 2022) draws strongly on Plotinsky's school-based experience as a teacher and instructional specialist and leaves behind academic jargon. It addresses essential questions in classroom teaching practice in a pithy way that will speak to time-poor teachers seeking fresh ideas. Miriam Plotinsky is an instructional specialist with Montgomery County Public Schools in Maryland, and the author of Teach More, Hover Less: How to Stop Micromanaging Your Secondary Classroom. Also a National Board Certified Teacher and certified administrator, she lives in Silver Spring, Maryland. On Twitter: @MirPloMCPS Alice Garner is a historian, teacher and performer with a PhD from the University of Melbourne, Australia. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/education
Raj Balkaran speaks with Jacqui Hargreaves & Ruth Westoby about SOAS’ exciting new online learning platform: Yoga Studies Online. Raj Balkaran is a scholar of Sanskrit narrative texts. He teaches at the Oxford Centre for Hindu Studies and at his own virtual School of Indian Wisdom. For information see rajbalkaran.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/education
How do metrics and quantification shape social science? In The Quantified Scholar: How Research Evaluations Transformed the British Social Sciences (Columbia UP, 2022), Juan Pablo Pardo-Guerra, an Associate Professor in sociology at the University of California, San Diego, explores this question using a case study of British academia. The book combines a rich array of quantitative and qualitative analysis, demonstrating the transformation of working conditions, institutional contexts, and research areas since the introduction of a metrics and quantification regime during the 1980s. Highlighting the complexity and ambivalences of metrics and quantification, as well as the uneven distribution of positive and negative impacts, the book offers essential reading for every academic, irrespective of the nation or institution in which they work. It also will be important for those seeing to better understand the role of metrics and markets in contemporary life. Dave O'Brien is Professor of Cultural and Creative Industries, at the University of Sheffield. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/education
Welcome to The Academic Life! In this episode you’ll hear about:
The hard work of balancing academics and sports when you attend college on an athletic scholarship.
Kyle’s original dream for his life after college, and where he is now.
Why you need someone to have your back, and who that person has been in Kyle’s life for the last five years.
How playing ball in the college off-season for the Savannah Bananas reminded him about the importance of having fun, and what he had liked about the sport as a kid.
How learning to dance taught him not to take himself too seriously.
Our guest is: Kyle Luigs, who is the pitcher for the Savannah Banana’s professional premier team. He also works as their camp instructor. Kyle attended the University of North Georgia on a baseball scholarship, and graduated in 2021 with a kinesiology degree. From 2018 to 2021, he played summer baseball for the Savannah Bananas on the CPL team. He played his last year of college baseball at Jacksonville State University, while working on a masters in Sports Management. Our host is: Dr. Christina Gessler, who is the co-producer of the Academic Life. Listeners to this episode may also be interested in:
Ballparks: A Journey Through the Fields of the Past, Present, and Future, by Eric Enders
The Savannah Bananas
University of North Georgia baseball
This discussion of How to College
This discussion about making a meaningful life
A Wonderful Life: Insights on Finding a Meaningful Existence, by Frank Martela
You are smart and capable, but you aren’t an island, and neither are we. We reach across our mentor network to bring you podcasts on everything from how to finish that project to how to take care of your beautiful mind. Here on the Academic Life channel, we embrace a broad definition of what it means to be an academic and to lead an academic life. We view education as a transformative human endeavor and are inspired by today’s knowledge-producers working inside and outside the academy. Wish we’d bring on an expert about something? DMs us on Twitter: @AcademicLifeNBN. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/education
Try This: Research Methods for Writers (CSU Open Press, 2022) explores interdisciplinary research methods employed in research in writing studies but rarely drawn upon in undergraduate courses. This shifts writing instruction from a model of knowledge delivery and solitary research to a pedagogy of knowledge-making and an acknowledgment of research writing as collective, overlapping, and distributed. Each chapter is organized around methods to approach a particular kind of primary data--texts, artifacts, places, and images. Accompanying "Try This" invention projects in each chapter invite readers to "try" the research methods. Some projects are designed to try during class time and take 5 to 15 minutes, while others are extensive and will take days to accomplish. Each research writing opportunity introduced in a "Try This" invention project is designed to scaffold a research project. Each chapter offers different genres that allow research to circulate and connect meaningfully with audiences, including digital research posters, data visualizations, and short-form presentations. This book is also available as an open access ebook through the WAC Clearinghouse. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/education
The hardest part of research isn't answering a question. It's knowing what to do before you know what your question is. Where Research Begins: Choosing a Research Project That Matters to You (and the World) (University of Chicago Press, 2022) tackles the two challenges every researcher faces with every new project: How do I find a compelling problem to investigate--one that truly matters to me, deeply and personally? How do I then design my research project so that the results will matter to anyone else? This book will help you start your new research project the right way for you with a series of simple yet ingenious exercises. Written in a conversational style and packed with real-world examples, this easy-to-follow workbook offers an engaging guide to finding research inspiration within yourself, and in the broader world of ideas. Read this book if you (or your students):
have difficulty choosing a research topic
know your topic, but are unsure how to turn it into a research project
feel intimidated by or unqualified to do research
worry that you're asking the wrong questions about your research topic
have plenty of good ideas, but aren't sure which one to commit to
feel like your research topic was imposed by someone else
want to learn new ways to think about how to do research.
Thomas S. Mullaney is professor of history at Stanford University and a Guggenheim fellow. His books include The Chinese Typewriter: A History and Your Computer is on Fire. Christopher Rea is professor of Asian studies at the University of British Columbia. His books include Chinese Film Classics, 1922-1949 and The Age of Irreverence: A New History of Laughter in China. Caleb Zakarin is the Assistant Editor of the New Books Network (Twitter: @caleb_zakarin). Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/education
Welcome to The Academic Life! In this episode you’ll hear about:
Why a humanities degree actually opens many career paths.
The importance of curiosity.
The contingency crisis in higher ed.
How we can re-evaluate “academic success.”
Advice for students and faculty.
Our guest is: Dr. Katina Rogers, the author of Putting the Humanities PhD to Work: Thriving in and beyond the Classroom (Duke University Press, 2020). In 2021, she founded Inkcap Consulting to help universities build more supportive and sustainable graduate programs. Her career has included work at The Graduate Center, CUNY, the Modern Language Association, the Scholarly Communication Institute, and the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation. She has two young kids and a deep frustration with higher education, that is inextricably bound up with hope. She holds a PhD in Comparative Literature from the University of Colorado at Boulder. Our host is: Dr. Christina Gessler, who has effectively used her humanities degrees for interesting jobs both inside and outside the academy. She is the co-producer of the Academic Life. Listeners to this episode may also be interested in:
The Mushroom at the End of the World: On the Possibility of Life in Capitalist Ruins, by Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing
Imagine PhD, created by the Graduate Career Consortium:
Next Generation Dissertations
Inkcap and its resources
Get Sorted: How to Make the Most of Your Student Experience, by Jeff Gill and Will Medd
Where Research Begins: Choosing A Research Project that Matters to You, by Thomas Mullaney and Christopher Rea
Going Alt-Ac: A Guide to Alternative Academic Careers, by Kathryn Linder, Keven Kelly, and Thomas Tobin
The Employability Journal, by Barbara Bassot
Candid Advice for New Faculty Members, by Marybeth Gasman
You are smart and capable, but you aren’t an island, and neither are we. We reach across our mentor network to bring you podcasts on everything from how to finish that project to how to take care of your beautiful mind. Here on the Academic Life channel, we embrace a broad definition of what it means to be an academic and to lead an academic life. We view education as a transformative human endeavor and are inspired by today’s knowledge-producers working inside and outside the academy. Wish we’d bring on an expert about something? DMs us on Twitter: @AcademicLifeNBN. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/education
In 1988, Sandi and Larry Zobrest sued a suburban Tucson, Arizona, school district that had denied their hearing-impaired son a taxpayer-funded interpreter in his Roman Catholic high school. The Catalina Foothills School District argued that providing a public resource for a private, religious school created an unlawful crossover between church and state. The Zobrests, however, claimed that the district had infringed on both their First Amendment right to freedom of religion and the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA). In Disability Rights and Religious Liberty in Education: The Story Behind Zobrest V. Catalina Foothills School District (U Illinois Press, 2020), Bruce J. Dierenfield and David A. Gerber use the Zobrests' story to examine the complex history and jurisprudence of disability accommodation and educational mainstreaming. They look at the family's effort to acquire educational resources for their son starting in early childhood and the choices the Zobrests made to prepare him for life in the hearing world rather than the deaf community. Dierenfield and Gerber also analyze the thorny church-state issues and legal controversies that informed the case, its journey to the U.S. Supreme Court, and the impact of the high court's ruling on the course of disability accommodation and religious liberty. David A. Gerber taught American History at the University at Buffalo (SUNY) from 1971 to his retirement in 2012. He was founding Director of the Center for Disability Studies at UB, and served in that capacity from 2009 through 2012. His interests in History have been grown over the course of years to encompass manifestations of personal and social identity in a wide variety of groups and individuals including during the course of his career: African Americans; American Jews; American Catholics; European immigrants, and people with disabilities. Bruce Dierenfield has long been interested in the history of American race relations, and has written a popular textbook on the civil rights movement and another on African-American leadership since enslavement. As Peter Canisius Distinguished Teaching Professor, Dierenfield organized the “African-American Experience,” led student trips to West Africa and the Deep South, and invited distinguished historians and many influential activists of the 1960s to speak on campus Shu Wan is currently matriculated as a doctoral student in history at the University at Buffalo. As a digital and disability historian, he serves in the editorial team of Digital Humanities Quarterly and Nursing Clio. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/education
This episode is the edited version of a live event held on June 17 2022 to celebrate the launch of Finding Your Purpose: a Higher Calling Workbook for Justice-Oriented Scholars in an Unjust World. Higher Calling is a project for everyone who decided to become a scholar because they believed in the mission of higher education, and specifically, for everyone who saw participating in and working for higher education as a way to turn the pursuit of justice into a career. It aims to help you understand how to better align a career in academia with your sense of purpose; how to recognize when your purposes are no longer served by academia; how to pursue scholarly purpose outside of an academic career; and when and how to fight back against the broken system which is higher education in the United States. At times, one may wonder if the compromises are too great, the labor conditions untenable, or the barriers to doing meaningful work too high. This project aims to help you navigate these moments alone and in community through essays, exercises, and rituals. You can download the workbook here. Speakers:
Hannah Alpert-Abrams organizes the Visionary Futures Collective, and writes about labor, technology, and higher education.
Matt Cohen is a professor of English and scholar of Early American literature at the University of Nebraska, Lincoln.
Sonya Donaldson is a professor of English and scholar of Africana studies at New Jersey City University.
Quinn Dombrowski is an academic technology specialist and digital humanist at Stanford University.
Carter Hogan is a writer and new trans folk musician based in Austin, Texas.
Image: © 2022 Saronik Bosu Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/education
Nathan Long shares insights from his career leading successful growth strategies for two small private universities. Saybrook University was formed in the 1970s by some of the leading scholars and practitioners in the field of humanist psychology and was an early pioneer in online/hybrid and residential conference education. Long discusses the many benefits to Saybrook of being part of the TCS Education System (see earlier interview with TCS founder Michael Horowitz), one of the few national, non-profit systems of higher education. David Finegold is the president of Chatham University. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/education
Welcome to The Academic Life! In this episode you’ll hear about:
Why Aaron Basko thinks we are looking at student success backwards.
How asking alums why they stayed at a school often tells us more about student needs than asking the students who are withdrawing why they leave.
What the “Big Six” for student success is.
What two things to evaluate as you decide which college or university will be the right “fit” for you.
His advice to parents and incoming students.
Our guest is: Aaron Basko, who currently serves as Associate Vice President for Enrollment Services at the University of Lynchburg, in Lynchburg Virginia. With 25 years of experience serving as an enrollment growth specialist and student success strategist for multiple institutions, Aaron has been part of the leadership team that engineered historic growth comebacks at three different colleges and universities. Aaron specializes in creating cross-functional teams for strategic enrollment planning and retention success. A thought leader and author, Aaron has written for The Chronicle of Higher Education, Inside Higher Ed, The Times Higher Education, and the State Department’s Fulbright blog. As a 2015 Fulbright International Education Administrator and capacity building specialist, Aaron also assists institutions with student mobility and international partnership initiatives. Aaron loves to create “a-ha moments” and to help institutions clarify the distinctive voice that will resonate with the right students. Our host is: Dr. Christina Gessler, who holds a PhD in American history. She is the co-producer of the Academic Life. Listeners to this episode may also be interested in:
Aaron Basko’s article in Inside Higher Ed on how to attract more liberal arts college students to campus : Liberal arts colleges need new strategies (opinion)
“Have We Gotten Student Success Completely Backwards?” and Aaron’s other articles in The Chronicle of Higher Education: Aaron Basko (chronicle.com)
This discussion about the college admissions process.
Get Real and Get In: How to Get Into the College of Your Dreams by Being Your Authentic Self, by Aviva Legatt
This conversation about navigating the ups and downs of student life:
How To Human: An Incomplete Manual for Living in a Messed-Up World, by Alice Connor
How to College: What to Know Before You Go (and When You’re There), by Andrea Malkin Brenner and Lara Hope Schwartz
This conversation about rejection-recovery and dealing with mistakes
You are smart and capable, but you aren’t an island, and neither are we. We reach across our mentor network to bring you podcasts on everything from how to finish that project to how to take care of your beautiful mind. Here on the Academic Life channel, we embrace a broad definition of what it means to be an academic and to lead an academic life. We view education as a transformative human endeavor and are inspired by today’s knowledge-producers working inside and outside the academy. Wish we’d bring on an expert about something? DMs us on Twitter: @AcademicLifeNBN. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/education
Earlier this month, U.S. President Joe Biden signed the CHIPS and Science Act, a bill purportedly meant to revive U.S. dominance in research and development. “We used to rank number one in the world in research and development; now we rank number nine,” Biden said at the signing ceremony. “China was number eight decades ago; now they are number two.” And a recent study from Japan’s science ministry reported that China now leads the world not just in quantity of scientific research, but in quality too. The success of the U.S.--and perhaps China, into the future–is due to the “research university”, an academic institution that offers professors the freedom to study and research, and students the freedom to learn, leading to high-quality academic output. Those universities are the subject of Professor William Kirby’s Empires of Ideas: Creating the Modern University from Germany to America to China (Harvard University Press, 2022). In this interview, Professor Kirby and I talk about the research university: Humboldt, Harvard, Berkeley, Tsinghua, Nanjing, and the University of Hong Kong. We also discuss what it means for China, and Chinese institutions, to play a bigger role in world academia. How might that change things? William C. Kirby is Spangler Family Professor of Business Administration and T. M. Chang Professor of China Studies at Harvard University, as well as Chair of the Harvard China Fund and Faculty Chair of the Harvard Center Shanghai. His many books include Can China Lead? Reaching the Limits of Power and Growth (Harvard Business Review Press: 2014) You can find more reviews, excerpts, interviews, and essays at The Asian Review of Books, including its review of Empires of Ideas. Follow on Facebook or on Twitter at @BookReviewsAsia. Nicholas Gordon is an associate editor for a global magazine, and a reviewer for the Asian Review of Books. He can be found on Twitter at@nickrigordon. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/education
You Are Your Own Best Teacher!: Sparking the Imagination and Intellect of Tweens (Essential Books, 2022) provides a variety of teachable antidotes to the punishing forces bearing down on youngsters from harmful marketing, the insidious grip of 'virtual reality' and the tyranny of peer groups. Apprehensive parents and burdened teachers will delight in the lessons of this book for Tweens (9-12 year olds). Tweens, who are whipsawed by relentless distractions, profit-driven manipulations and oncoming addictions, are guided toward elevating their own sense of significance, protection and realizable achievements. Claire Nader introduces the young to Benjamin Franklin, Frederick Douglass and Helen Keller to illustrate their profound awareness and discipline. Claire Nader is a social scientist and activist. Caleb Zakarin is the Assistant Editor of the New Books Network (Twitter: @caleb_zakarin). Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/education
According to A Problem of Fit: How the Complexity of College Pricing Hurts Students—and Universities (U Chicago Press, 2022) a college education doesn't come with a sticker price and perhaps, he argues, it should. Millions of Americans miss out on the economic benefits of a college education because of concerns around the costs. Financial aid systems offer limited help and produce uneven distributions. In the United States today, the systems meant to improve access to education have in fact added a new layer of deterrence. In A Problem of Fit Levine examines the role of financial aid systems in facilitating (and discouraging) access to college. If markets require prices in order to function optimally, then the American higher-education system--rife as it is with hidden and variable costs--amounts to a market failure. It's a problem of price transparency, not just affordability. Ensuring that students understand exactly what college will cost, including financial aid, could lift the lid on not only college attendance for more people, but for greater representation across demographics and institutions. As he illustrates, our conversations around affordability and free tuition miss a larger truth: that the opacity of our current college-financing systems is a primary driver of inequities in education and society. A Problem of Fit offers a bold, trenchant new argument for an educational reform that is well within rea Phillip B. Levine is the Katharine Coman and A. Barton Hepburn Professor of Economics at Wellesley College, a research associate of the National Bureau of Economic Research, and a nonresident fellow at the Brookings Institution. He is the author, coauthor, or coeditor of five books devoted to statistics, the analysis of social policy, and its effect on individual behavior. Tom Discenna is Professor of Communication at Oakland University whose work examines issues of academic labor and communicative labor more broadly. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/education
An incisive case study of changemaking in action, Stuck Improving: Racial Equity and School Leadership (Harvard Education Press, 2021) analyzes the complex process of racial equity reform within K-12 schools. Scholar Decoteau J. Irby emphasizes that racial equity is dynamic, shifting as our emerging racial consciousness evolves and as racism asserts itself anew. Those who accept the challenge of reform find themselves "stuck improving," caught in a perpetual dilemma of both making progress and finding ever more progress to be made. Rather than dismissing stuckness as failure, Irby embraces it as an inextricable part of the improvement process. Irby brings readers into a large suburban high school as school leaders strive to redress racial inequities among the school's increasingly diverse student population. Over a five-year period, he witnesses both progress and setbacks in the leaders' attempts to provide an educational environment that is intellectually, socioemotionally, and culturally affirming. Looking beyond this single school, Irby pinpoints the factors that are essential to the work of equity reform in education. He argues that lasting transformation relies most urgently on the cultivation of organizational conditions that render structural racism impossible to preserve. Irby emphasizes how schools must strengthen and leverage personal, relational, and organizational capacities in order to sustain meaningful change. Stuck Improving offers a clear-eyed accounting of school-improvement practices, including data-driven instructional approaches, teacher cultural competency, and inquiry-based leadership strategies. This timely work contributes both to the practical efforts of equity-minded school leaders and to a deeper understanding of what the work of racial equity improvement truly entails. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/education
Welcome to The Academic Life! In this episode you’ll hear about:
The Open Learning Initiative (OLIve) operating out of Central European University.
The importance of language related to students experiencing displacement.
How our guests center theory-informed practice in their work.
Three proposals for opening up the university to promote transformative experiences.
Advice to others in the field initiating programs for displaced students.
Our guests are: Dr. Ian M. Cook and Dr. Prem Kumar Rajaram, two of the three editors of Opening Up the University: Teaching and Learning with Refugees. Dr. Celine Cantat is also an editor on the volume. Ian M. Cook is Director of Studies at the Open Learning Initiative (OLIve), Budapest located at Central European University (CEU). An anthropologist by training, his work focuses on urban India, environmental justice, access to higher education, and podcasting. He strives to make scholarly practice more collaborative and multimodal. He is part of the Allegra Lab editorial collective. Dr. Prem Kumar Rajaram is Professor of Sociology and Social Anthropology at Central European University and Head of the OLIve unit at the same university. He works on issues to do with race, capitalism, and displacement in historical and contemporary perspective. Our host is: Dr. Dana M. Malone, a higher education scholar and practitioner energized by facilitating meaningful conversations and educational experiences. She specializes in college student relationships, gender, sexuality, and religious identities as well as student success and assessment planning. Listeners to this episode may also be interested in:
Our featured book: Opening Up the University: Teaching and Learning with Refugees
Refugee Education Initiatives
Higher Education Supporting Refugees in Europe
Refugees and Higher Education: Trans-national Perspectives on Access, Equity, and Internationalization
You are smart and capable, but you aren’t an island, and neither are we. We reach across our mentor network to bring you podcasts on everything from how to finish that project to how to take care of your beautiful mind. Here on the Academic Life channel, we embrace a broad definition of what it means to be an academic and to lead an academic life. We view education as a transformative human endeavor and are inspired by today’s knowledge-producers working inside and outside the academy. Wish we’d bring on an expert about something? DMs us on Twitter: @AcademicLifeNBN. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/education
Picture a typical computer geek. Likely white, male, and someone you’d say has a “natural instinct” for technology. Yet, after six years teaching technology classes to first-generation, low-income middle school students in Oakland, California, Cassidy Puckett has seen firsthand that being good with technology is not something people are born with—it’s something they learn. In Redefining Geek: Bias and the Five Hidden Habits of Tech-Savvy Teens (U Chicago Press, 2022), she overturns the stereotypes around the digitally savvy and identifies the habits that can help everyone cultivate their inner geek. Drawing on observations and interviews with a diverse group of students around the country, Puckett zeroes in on five technology learning habits that enable tech-savvy teens to learn new technologies: a willingness to try and fail, management of frustration and boredom, use of models, and the abilities to use design logic and identify efficiencies. In Redefining Geek, she shows how to measure and build these habits, and she demonstrates how many teens historically marginalized in STEM are already using these habits and would benefit from recognition for their talent, access to further learning opportunities, and support in career pathways. She argues that if we can develop, recognize, and reward these technological learning habits in all kids—especially girls and historically marginalized racial and ethnic groups—we can address many educational inequities and disparities in STEM. Revealing how being good with technology is not about natural ability but habit and persistence, Redefining Geek speaks to the ongoing conversation on equity in technology education and argues for a more inclusive technology learning experience for all students. Joao Souto-Maior is PhD Candidate in Sociology of Education at the New York University. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/education
In Community College Mathematics: Past, Present, and Future (CRC Press, 2022), Brian Cafarella addresses the key questions: How can we build a future model for community college gatekeeper math classes that is both successful and sustainable? Additionally, how can we learn from the past and the present to build such a model? From the 1970’s to the pandemic in the early 2020’s, the book uses interviews with 30 community college faculty members from seven community colleges to explore math curricula as well as trends, initiatives, teaching practices, and mandates that have impacted community college mathematics. Brian Cafarella is a professor in mathematics at Sinclair Community College in Dayton, Ohio. He has taught a variety of courses ranging from developmental math through pre-calculus. Brian is a past recipient of the Roeche Award for teaching excellence and a past recipient of the Ohio Magazine Award for excellence in education. Marc Goulet is Professor in mathematics and Associate Dean in the College of Arts and Sciences at the University of Wisconsin-Eau Claire. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/education
Welcome to The Academic Life! In this episode you’ll hear about:
How both of today’s guests became involved in higher education in prison.
Why this work is personal to them.
Funding and representation issues in higher education in prison.
The complexities of supporting students who are incarcerated without supporting the carceral system.
And a discussion of the Journal of Higher Education in Prison.
Our guest is: Dr. Erin Corbett, who earned her doctorate from the University of Pennsylvania, where her dissertation examined the relationship between educational attainment level and post-release employment outcomes for formerly incarcerated people in Connecticut. While pursuing her doctorate, Erin launched a nonprofit that provides not-for-credit, postsecondary level courses in three correctional facilities in Connecticut. She has also taught in correctional facilities in Rhode Island with College Unbound, and guest lectured to incarcerated students in the Iowa through the University of Iowa Liberal Arts Beyond Bars (UI LABB) program. Erin was the Assistant Director for Applied Research at the Institute for Higher Education Policy focusing on federal policy related to the intersection of higher education policy and policy related to educational access for justice-impacted people; and she was the Director of Policy at the Katal Center for Health, Equity, and Justice before transitioning to working with SCEA full time and consulting. Our guest is: Dr. Breea Willingham, incoming Associate Professor of Criminology at UNC Wilmington. Dr. Willingham earned her Ph.D. in American Studies from the State University of New York at Buffalo. As an interdisciplinary scholar, Dr. Willingham’s research examines the intersections of race, gender, higher education, and the injustice system. She is particularly interested in examining Black women’s pathways to incarceration, their experiences with higher education in prison, and providing a platform for Black women impacted by the injustice system to tell their stories. Influenced by her experiences as a sister and aunt of two men serving life sentences, Dr. Willingham’s research also focuses on the societal ramifications of mass incarceration, especially its impact on families. Her work on incarcerated fathers and their children, Black women’s prison narratives, teaching in women’s prisons, and Black women and police violence has been published in academic journals and edited collections. In 2020, Dr. Willingham was appointed Managing Editor of the Journal for Higher Education in Prison, a peer-reviewed journal that publishes on the topics and issues in higher education in prison. Our host is: Dr. Christina Gessler, the co-creator of the Academic Life. Listeners to this episode might also be interested in:
The Journal of Higher Education in Prison
The Alliance for Higher Education in Prison
Ear Hustle, a podcast hosted by persons who are incarcerated at San Quentin
A conversation about the Emerson Prison Initiative
Dr. Erin Corbett on Beyond Prisons
Abolition. Feminism. Now. edited by Angela Davis et al.
Punishment and Society, by Breea Willingham
Privilege and Punishment, by Matthew Clair
No Mercy Here, by Sarah Haley
You are smart and capable, but you aren’t an island and neither are we. We reach across our mentor network to bring you experts about everything from how to finish that project, to how to take care of your beautiful mind. Here on the Academic Life channel, we embrace a broad definition of what it means to be an academic and to lead an academic life. We view education as a transformative human endeavor and are inspired by today’s knowledge-producers working inside and outside the academy. Wish we’d bring on an expert about something? DMs us on Twitter: @AcademicLifeNBN. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/education
Providing your children with a good education is one of the best gifts you can give. But it’s not straightforward. Education costs and student loan debt are skyrocketing. In some cases, college costs upwards of $300,000 for four years. And calculations for financial aid and merit awards are complex and opaque. How do you find the best education options that fit your budget and are right for your child? And how do you save for your kids’ college without wrecking your own retirement, or putting your other goals completely out of reach? Ann Garcia―known as The College Financial Lady―is a CERTIFIED FINANCIAL PLANNER™ and college finance expert, and is here to help. In How to Pay for College, Ann shows you how to develop a financial plan for college that really works, including:
How to save and how much to save.
How to find good college choices that fit your budget.
How to get scholarships and tax benefits.
How to talk to your kids about the costs and benefits of going to college.
Plus invaluable information and inside tricks to help you crack the college financial challenge. Detailed explanations of the key elements in planning for college―the FAFSA’s methodology, merit awards, 529 plans, AP credits, student loans, financial aid awards, budgeting, and more―are paired with worksheets and exercises to give you a full picture of your family’s college financial position. This definitive guide gives you everything you need to give your children the best education possible, at a price you can all afford. John Emrich has worked for decades years in corporate finance, business valuation and fund management. He has a podcast about the investment space called Kick the Dogma. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/education
Listen to this interview with Jo Mackiewicz, professor of rhetoric and professional communication at Iowa State University, and with Isabelle Thompson, emerita professor of technical and professional communication and former coordinator of the English Center at Auburn University. We talk about their book Talk about Writing: The Tutoring Strategies of Experienced Writing Center Tutors (Routledge, 2018) and writing. Jo Mackiewicz : "The more I think about writing center interactions and write books about it, the more I think that the value a tutor brings to learning is this: to show students a thinking process, to show students an analysis process about writing — to show them a self-questioning of yourself as writer, and also a questioning of any sort of text, a questioning of your relationship to the text, a questioning of what you know about the subject matter, of how you evaluate your handling of that subject matter. Tutors model this process for student writers." Contact Daniel at writeyourresearch@gmail.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/education
In the late nineteenth century, medical educators intent on transforming American physicians into scientifically trained, elite professionals recognized the value of medical school design for their reform efforts. Between 1893 and 1940, nearly every medical college in the country rebuilt or substantially renovated its facility. In Building Schools, Making Doctors: Architecture and the Modern American Physician (U Pittsburgh Press, 2022), Katherine Carroll reveals how the schools constructed during this fifty-year period did more than passively house a remodeled system of medical training; they actively participated in defining and promoting an innovative pedagogy, modern science, and the new physician. Interdisciplinary and wide ranging, her study moves architecture from the periphery of medical education to the center, uncovering a network of medical educators, architects, and philanthropists who believed that the educational environment itself shaped how students learned and the type of physicians they became. Carroll offers the first comprehensive study of the science and pedagogy formulated by the buildings, the influence of the schools’ donors and architects, the impact of the structures on the urban landscape and the local community, and the facilities’ privileging of white men within the medical profession during this formative period for physicians and medical schools. Rachel Pagones is an acupuncturist, educator, and author based in Cambridge, England. Her book, Acupuncture as Revolution: Suffering, Liberation, and Love (Brevis Press) was published in 2021. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/education
Archives are much more than silent repositories of historical material. They are rich sites for teaching and learning, for collaboration and for creative and critical exploration of our past, present and future. In their new book, Teaching through the Archives: Text, Collaboration, and Activism (Southern Illinois University Press, 2022), Tarez Samra Graban and Wendy Hayden bring together 37 contributors to explore the many possible uses of archival collections in the teaching of writing and history and in generating scholarly collaboration, pedagogical experimentation and community building within and beyond the university. Section I focuses on how approaching the archive primarily as text fosters habits of mind essential for creating and using archives, for critiquing or inventing knowledge-making practices, and for being good stewards of private and public collections. Section II argues for conducting archival projects as collaboration through experiential learning and for developing a preservationist consciousness through disciplined research. Section III details praxis for revealing, critiquing, and intervening in historic racial omissions and gaps in the archives. The book’s contributors see archives as sites of activism, as places where students can develop critical skills, test and question established research methodologies while also learning to appreciate the specialist knowledge of archivists. Educators in disciplines including rhetoric and composition, literature, history and archival studies will find many inspiring ideas in this book. While the chapters offer university-based case studies, many of the ideas could also be adapted to the secondary classroom and to non-institutional educational settings. In this episode, Alice Garner interviews Tarez Graban about the genesis of the book, the important lessons and possibilities she and Wendy Hayden sought to draw out from the contributors’ research, as well as Dr Graban’s recent work in transnational and postcolonial Southern African archival research and repatriation. More on the editors: Tarez Samra Graban, associate professor in the English department at Florida State University, is the author of Women’s Irony: Rewriting Feminist Rhetorical Histories and coauthor of GenAdmin: Theorizing WPA Identities in the Twenty-First Century.
Wendy Hayden, associate professor at Hunter College, CUNY, is the author of Evolutionary Rhetoric: Sex, Science, and Free Love in Nineteenth-Century Feminism. Alice Garner is a historian, teacher and performer with a PhD from the University of Melbourne, Australia. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/education
Listen to this interview of Nicholas Rowe, researcher and educator based in Finland. We talk his book The Realities of Completing a PhD: How to Plan for Success (Routledge, 2021) and about what needs to change. Nicholas Rowe : "Writing for different purposes, for different audiences is a huge skill, because people are going to need this communication skill in their research proposal when they present their ideas to advisors, but also in their publications when they share their ideas with colleagues. Now, of courses, everybody's systems and processes are different, but the key communicative skills that you need are fairly much the same, and if you don't need them at one stage of a project, you're going to need them at another." Contact Daniel at writeyourresearch@gmail.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/education
How can a library change the world? How can an art library change the art school or the gallery? Or even an art practice? In Shelf Documents: Art Library as Practice (Royal Academy of Fine Arts in Antwerp, 2021), artists, writers, curators, teachers, and librarians reflect on how they can use the beloved library as a source of inspiration or a field of action. In thinking about diversity in collections, the publication proposes art libraries as sites of intersubjective communion. shelf documents is rooted in a collaborative book acquisition project, initiated by the artist Heide Hinrichs at the Royal Academy of Fine Arts in Antwerp, in which her group integrated over 200 new titles in art libraries as a way to fill gaps, to amplify voices, and seek out the self-initiated or the overlooked. Heide Hinrichs, Elizabeth Haines, and Jo-ey Tang speak to Pierre d’Alancaisez about working with institutions, working slowly, and working together to interfere with the permanence of libraries. Heide Hinrichs is an artist who works with found and existing materials. For the first Kathmandu Triennale, she developed the project On Some of the Birds of Nepal. In 2018, she published Silent Sisters/Stille Schwestern, an unauthorised German translation of Theresa Hak Kyng Cha’s novel Dictee. Elizabeth Haines is a historian and Vice-Chancellor’s Fellow at the University of Bristol. Her interdisciplinary interest in the materiality of knowledge productions draws on her education in fine arts. Jo-ey Tang is an artist, curator, and writer. He was previously the director of exhibitions at the Beeler Galery at Columbus College of Art & Design and is currently the director of Kadist, San Francisco. The list of books involved in the project is available at second-shelf.org. Pierre d’Alancaisez is a contemporary art curator, cultural strategist, researcher. Sometime scientist, financial services professional. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/education
A special opportunity to hear from Sara Custer, editor of The Campus (Times Higher Education), about the role of journalism and reporting in higher education. Avi and Sara cover topics ranging from the role of media in increasing cross-institution collaboration and sharing during the pandemic to how universities can do a better job supporting their junior scholars. Also, don't miss out on the opportunity to learn how you can publish in Times Higher Education yourself! Avi Staiman is the founder and CEO of Academic Language Experts. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/education
In Academic Outsider: Stories of Exclusion and Hope (Stanford University Press, 2022), sociologist Victoria Reyes combines her personal experiences with research findings to examine how academia creates conditional citizenship for its marginalized members. Reyes draws from her family background, experiences during routine university life, and academic scholarship to theorize the academic outsiders as those who "are constantly reminded that our presence in the academy is contingent and in constant flux" (10-11). She elaborates on how love and worth are assessed in the university and her experiences as a mother in the academy. The final chapter calls for academic justice and offers practical strategies to combat the academy's exclusionary practices. In this book Reyes contributes to important conversations in the university on the experiences of people of color, women, and those from marginalized backgrounds. This book will be of interest to those who experience the academy's conditional citizenship, those who want to understand how the university perpetuates inequality, and those who want to challenge these conditions. Victoria Reyes is Associate Professor in the Department of Gender & Sexuality Studies at the University of California, Riverside. She is the author of Global Borderlands (Stanford, 2019). Reighan Gillam is Associate Professor in the Department of Anthropology at the University of Southern California. She is the author of Visualizing Black Lives: Ownership and Control in Afro-Brazilian Media (Illinois, 2022). Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/education
Paul A. Djupe, Anand Edward Sokhey, and Amy Erica Smith, The Knowledge Polity: Teaching and Research in the Social Sciences (Oxford UP, 2022) explores a more holistic understanding of knowledge production in the social sciences, moving beyond the publication process often required by those in tenure/tenure-track positions to thinking about the role of community in the construction of knowledge. Political Scientists Paul A. Djupe (Denison University), Anand Edward Sokhey (University of Colorado-Boulder), and Amy Erica Smith (Iowa State University) emphasize the idea of academics as citizens in communities and institutions, endowed with certain rights and responsibilities with regard to knowledge production, exchange, and promotion. These actions go beyond simply research; knowledge production incorporates teaching, reviewing, blogging, podcasting, commenting, mentoring, and other similar actions, all of which inherently depend on collaboration and community. Djupe, Smith, and Sokhey all have first-hand experience in the “publication pipeline” process. They accurately and intricately detail aspects of community that are overlooked within the academia. The collaborative nature of The Knowledge Polity speaks to the power of co-authorship in political science and sociology. The research indicates that building relationships with peers and mentors alike provides scholars with access to people whose advice is trusted, people who they consider friends, and people who know other scholars whose advice can also be trusted and valued. Similar to co-authorship, peer review is another dimension of knowledge exchange, collaboration, and the rights and responsibilities of the knowledge polity. The review process is reciprocal, and there is an innate sense that it is a duty, especially when the authors discuss “reviewer debt” (reviewing fewer papers than one is submitting) and how it is usually “paid off” when scholars reach tenure and have more time and capacity to give back to the community. Most academics would like to do more reviews, proving there is a powerful desire to participate in this important act of knowledge production. The authors use data from an extensive Professional Activity in the Social Sciences (PASS) study, which sampled responses from 1,700 sociology and political science faculty about their publications, and experiences with regard to the process. They integrate different aspects of all of these findings in each chapter, examining for differences across disciplines, methodology, gender, race, and age, among other variables. The Knowledge Polity: Teaching and Research in the Social Sciences integrates a diversity of empirical research, qualitative inputs, and sophisticated analysis to better understand knowledge production within the social sciences. It becomes clear that the idea of the solitary scholar, alone in his/her office, creating knowledge is much more of a myth, since the reality is that knowledge production is much more of a collective undertaking and experience. Emma R. Handschke assisted in the production of this podcast. Lilly J. Goren is a professor of political science at Carroll University in Waukesha, WI. She is co-editor of the award winning book, Women and the White House: Gender, Popular Culture, and Presidential Politics (University Press of Kentucky, 2012), as well as co-editor of Mad Men and Politics: Nostalgia and the Remaking of Modern America (Bloomsbury Academic, 2015). Email her comments at lgoren@carrollu.edu or tweet to @gorenlj. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/education
The Effect: An Introduction to Research Design and Causality (Routledge, 2021) is about methods for using observational data to make causal inferences. It provides an extensive discussion of causality and the variety of both obvious and subtle challenges to inferring a causal relationship between the variables, using causal diagrams. It then goes through the major techniques that economists use to address these challenges, including regression, matching, simulation, fixed effects, event studies, differences-in-differences, instrumental variables, and regression discontinuity. The book is designed to be accessible to students or practitioners without the extensive math background that is taken for granted in typical econometrics textbooks. Instead, the emphasis is on the intuition behind the techniques and how to implement them with the widely-used programming languages R, Stata, and Python. Nick C. Huntington-Klein is an Assistant Professor at Seattle University. His research focuses on econometrics and higher education. His work has been published in the Economics of Education Review, AEA Papers and Proceedings, Economic Inquiry, Empirical Economics, and the Journal of Economic Behavior & Organization. His book can be read online for free or purchased in print, and is accompanied by a wealth of teaching materials on the same website. Nick can also be found on Youtube and on Twitter. Host Peter Lorentzen is an Associate Professor in the Department of Economics at the University of San Francisco, where he leads a new Master's program in Applied Economics focused on the digital economy. His own research focus is the political economy of governance in China. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/education
Why They Hate Us: How Racist Rhetoric Impacts Education (Teachers College Press, 2021) examines how racist political rhetoric has created damaging and dangerous conditions for Students of Color in schools and higher education institutions throughout the United States. The authors show how the election of the 45th president has resulted in a defining moment in U.S. history where racist discourses, reinforced by ideologies of white supremacy, have affected the educational experiences of our most vulnerable students. This volume situates the rhetoric of the Trump presidency within a broader historical narrative and provides recommendations for those who seek to advocate for anti-racism and social justice. As we enter the uncharted waters of a global pandemic and national racial reckoning, this will be invaluable reading for scholars, educators, and administrators who want to be part of the solution. Dr. Lindsay Pérez Huber is a professor of education at California State University-Long Beach as well as a visiting scholar at the UCLA Center for Critical Race Studies. Her research analyzes racial inequities in education, the impact on marginalized urban students of color, and how students and their communities respond to those inequities through strategies of resistance. Dr. Susana Muñoz is an associate professor of education at Colorado State University. Her research focuses on issues of access, equity, and college persistence for undocumented Latina/o students. Autumn Wilke works in higher education as an ADA coordinator and diversity officer and is also an author and doctoral candidate with research/topics related to disability and higher education. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/education
For well over one hundred years, people have been attempting to make American colleges and universities more efficient and more accountable. Indeed, Ethan Ris argues in Other People's Colleges: The Origins of American Higher Education Reform (U Chicago Press, 2022), the reform impulse is baked into American higher education, the result of generations of elite reformers who have called for sweeping changes in the sector and raised existential questions about its sustainability. When that reform is beneficial, offering major rewards for minor changes, colleges and universities know how to assimilate it. When it is hostile, attacking autonomy or values, they know how to resist it. The result is a sector that has learned to accept top-down reform as part of its existence. In the early twentieth century, the “academic engineers,” a cadre of elite, external reformers from foundations, businesses, and government, worked to reshape and reorganize the vast base of the higher education pyramid. Their reform efforts were largely directed at the lower tiers of higher education, but those efforts fell short, despite the wealth and power of their backers, leaving a legacy of successful resistance that affects every college and university in the United States. Today, another coalition of business leaders, philanthropists, and politicians is again demanding efficiency, accountability, and utility from American higher education. But, as Ris argues, top-down design is not destiny. Drawing on extensive and original archival research, Other People’s Colleges offers an account of higher education that sheds light on today’s reform agenda. Joao Souto-Maior is PhD Student in Sociology of Education at the New York University. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/education
In this episode we speak to EWP PhD graduate and EWP and ITP adjunct faculty Holly Adler from her classroom in Oakland, CA. As a teacher of underprivileged and marginalized youth, Holly discusses alternative approaches to education beyond the mythos and narratives of neoliberal normativity, which aims to help students critically engage with culturally constructed values systems based on commercial production and consumption. Holly shares her approach to an experimental pedagogy based on cultivating the classroom as a sacred space, and she considers experiences of how conscious and engaged presence in their lives can create structures of unconditional support and radical respect, an essential factor in empowering students to reconstruct themselves in their own image based on their own goals of becoming. Our discussion addresses contemporary problems of cultural disillusionment, the role of technology, and the importance of spiritual self-transcendence in overcoming hegemonic regimes of discipline and control. The podcast ends discussing how music can offer alternative models of individual and collective becoming. Connect with EWP: Website • Youtube • Facebook • EWP Podcast Website Music at the end of the episode titled The Architect, from Monsoon’s Arrival by the band Monsoon, released on Monsoon-Music Record Label Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/education
Listen to this interview of Vivian Kao, Associate Professor of Composition and Coordinator of the First-Year Writing Program, and Julia Kiernan, Assistant Professor of Communication and Coordinator of Technical and Professional Communication — both at Lawrence Technological University, Michigan. It's more than just hot air — we talk about their STEAM, and their book Writing STEAM: Composition, STEM, and a New Humanities (Routledge, 2022). Vivian Kao : "Writing is really central to the project of STEM. And I'm talking about writing very capaciously, so that is, composing in multiple modes, in multiple media — that is, learning how to communicate to many different audiences and how to utilize many different genres. Because writing is a way of thinking and a way of understanding your place in the world." Contact Daniel at writeyourresearch@gmail.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/education
Welcome to the final day of our weeklong deep dive into the politics of education. Today, we’ve got another episode of Cited for you. If you haven’t heard a Cited episode before, it’s the documentary show that came before Darts and Letters and it specialised in immersive storytelling. This piece takes us on a journey through a little-known, long-past set of debates on the nature of science in democratic society: the Science Wars. They may seem lost to time, but some scholars say the Science Wars might just explain how we got our 'post-truth' moment. Learn about the bold hoax that became a determining factor in the Science Wars and how that moment in history might have foretold the wars on science to come. Next week, we’ll be bringing you episodes on a whole new theme - activism and academia. You won’t want to miss it. And you really won’t want to miss our brand-new episodes, launching on the New Books Network from September 18th. —————————-SUPPORT THE SHOW—————————- You can support the show for free by following or subscribing on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, or whichever app you use. This is the best way to help us out and it costs nothing so we’d really appreciate you clicking that button. If you want to do a little more we would love if you chip in. You can find us on patreon.com/dartsandletters. Patrons get content early, and occasionally there’s bonus material on there too. —————————-CONTACT US————————- To stay up to date, follow us on Twitter and Facebook. If you’d like to write to us, email darts@citedmedia.ca or tweet Gordon directly. ———-CREDITS———- Today’s episode was produced by Gordon Katic, and edited by Cited's Sam Fenn. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/education
This episode of How To Be Wrong explores questions of leadership and humility with Dr. Bill Tsutsui, Chancellor and Professor of History at Ottawa University, a private comprehensive university with residential campuses in Kansas and Arizona. Dr. Tsutsui has written extensively on Godzilla, among other things Japanese, and has developed a distinguished career both as an historian and in higher education administration, having held positions as associate dean for international studies in the College of Liberal Arts & Sciences at the University of Kansas, Dean of Dedman College of Humanities and Sciences at Southern Methodist University in Dallas, and the presidency of Hendrix College. Our conversation explores questions of diversity in higher education, as well as ways in which deeply learning about other cultures can influence approaches to leadership. We also discuss some of the major issues confronting higher education. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/education
The Ivy League looks different than it used to. College presidents and deans of admission have opened their doors—and their coffers—to support a more diverse student body. But is it enough just to admit these students? In this bracing exposé, Anthony Jack shows that many students’ struggles continue long after they’ve settled in their dorms. Admission, they quickly learn, is not the same as acceptance. This powerfully argued book documents how university policies and campus culture can exacerbate preexisting inequalities and reveals why some students are harder hit than others. Joao Souto-Maior is a PhD Student in Sociology of Education at the New York University. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/education
Why is so much right-wing money being funnelled at such a furious pace into universities across the US? Libertarian-minded billionaires like the Kochs and their partners have funded scholars and think tanks across the US, and similar things go on in Canada too. The money shows us that the right spends it because they care about education, for their own ideological reasons - and universities are all too happy to sell out. For today’s episode on the politics of education, we look at how big money seeks to corrupt academic freedom and integrity - and how campus activists are fighting to un-Koch their schools. This is another instalment of our Darts and Letters summer programming here on the New Books Network. We’ll be launching brand-new episodes starting on September 18th. Until then, tune in to our favourite past episodes - each week is a new theme! ——————-FURTHER READING AND LISTENING——————
Visit UnKoch My Campus to learn about the organization and their work, including groundbreaking reports and their campaigns. Plus, read more from Jasmine Banks in The Nation, including “The Radical Capitalist Behind the Critical Race Theory Furor.”
Visit James L. Turk’s academic page at the Centre for Free Expression. And check out his edited 2014 book Academic Freedom in Conflict: The Struggle Over Free Speech Rights in the University.
Read the Canadian Association of University Teachers’ report on the relationships between Canadian universities and corporations Open for Business on What Terms? An Analysis of 12 Collaborations Between Canadian Universities and Corporations, Donors, and Governments.
Dig into related works from the episode, and more on the Koch’s and their influence, Democracy in Chains: The Deep History of the Radical Right’s Stealth Plan for America by Nancy Maclean and Jane Meyer’s Dark Money: The Hidden History of the Billionaires Behind the Rise of the Radical Right. Plus, read more of Jane’s work on dark money in the New Yorker.
—————————-SUPPORT THE SHOW—————————- You can support the show for free by following or subscribing on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, or whichever app you use. This is the best way to help us out and it costs nothing so we’d really appreciate you clicking that button. If you want to do a little more we would love if you chip in. You can find us on patreon.com/dartsandletters. Patrons get content early, and occasionally there’s bonus material on there too. —————————-CONTACT US————————- To stay up to date, follow us on Twitter and Facebook. If you’d like to write to us, email darts@citedmedia.ca or tweet Gordon directly. ———-CREDITS———- Darts and Letters is hosted and edited by Gordon Katic. Our lead producer is Jay Cockburn and our assistant producer this week was Jason Cohanim. Our managing producer is Marc Apollonio. David Moscrop is our research assistant and wrote the show notes. This episode had research and advising from Franklynn Bartol and Professor Marc Spooner. Our theme song and music was created by Mike Barber, our graphic design was created by Dakota Koop, and our marketing was done by Ian Sowden. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/education
John Waterbury's book Missions Impossible: Higher Education and Policymaking in the Arab World (American U in Cairo Press, 2020) is a rigorous examination of higher education policymaking in the Arab world. None of the momentous challenges Arab universities face is unique either in kind or degree. Other societies exhibit some of the same pathologies--insufficient resources, high drop-out rates, feeble contributions to research and development, inappropriate skill formation for existing job markets, weak research incentive structures, weak institutional autonomy, and co-optation into the political order. But, it may be that the concentration of these pathologies and their depth is what sets the Arab world apart. Missions Impossible seeks to explain the process of policymaking in higher education in the Arab world, a process that is shaped by the region's politics of autocratic rule. Higher education in the Arab world is directly linked to crises in economic growth, social inequality and, as a result, regime survival. If unsuccessful, higher education could be the catalyst to regime collapse. If successful, it could be the catalyst to sustained growth and innovation--but that, too, could unleash forces that the region's autocrats are unable to control. Leaders are risk-averse and therefore implement policies that tame the universities politically but in the process sap their capabilities for innovation and knowledge creation. The result is sub-optimal and, argues John Waterbury in this thought-provoking study, unsustainable. Skillfully integrating international debates on higher education with rich and empirically informed analysis of the governance and finance of higher education in the Arab world today, Missions Impossible explores and dissects the manifold dilemmas that lie at the heart of educational reform and examines possible paths forward. Shu Cao Mo's interests span continental philosophy, existential psychology and history of performance art. She previously served as the Asia representative for a global traveling university. She holds an Ed.M. in Arts in Education from Harvard and a B.A. in Political Philosophy and Theater from Duke. Her email address is shm785@mail.harvard.edu Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/education
From the president of Wesleyan University, a compassionate and provocative manifesto, Safe Enough Spaces (Yale UP, 2021) on the crises confronting higher education In this bracing book, Michael S. Roth stakes out a pragmatist path through the thicket of issues facing colleges today to carry out the mission of higher education. With great empathy, candor, subtlety, and insight, Roth offers a sane approach to the noisy debates surrounding affirmative action, political correctness, and free speech, urging us to envision college as a space in which students are empowered to engage with criticism and with a variety of ideas. Countering the increasing cynical dismissal--from both liberals and conservatives--of the traditional core values of higher education, this book champions the merits of different diversities, including intellectual diversity, with a timely call for universities to embrace boldness, rigor, and practical idealism. Michael S. Roth is president of Wesleyan University and a historian, curator, and teacher. His previous books include Beyond the University: Why Liberal Education Matters. Caleb Zakarin is the Assistant Editor of the New Books Network (Twitter: @caleb_zakarin). Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/education
Our society is dominated by grifters. Cheats, cons, frauds: people who don’t really believe what they tell you. They’re just what they need to do to get ahead or to sell you something. Isn’t that that really what capitalism is about? The grift! We’re new here on the network, so we’re introducing Darts and Letters with some highlights of our past episodes. Each week over the summer has a different Darts theme! It’s day two of our “politics of education” themed week, and today we’re bringing back a favourite episode of ours about a pillar of our society: grifters. Wanna hear an interview with an academic paper writer-for-hire? Ever wondered just what the “professional managerial class” is? This is the show for you. And don’t forget: we’ll have new episodes coming out on the New Books Network starting on September 18th! (We promise you it’s legit.) ——————-FURTHER READING AND LISTENING——————
Abebe, Nitsuh. “Why Are We Suddenly Surrounded by Grift?” The New York Times Magazine. Dec. 4, 2018.
Dante, Ed. “The Shadow Scholar.” The Chronicle of Higher Education. Nov. 12, 2010.
Gold, Lyta. “Presenting the 2020 ‘Griftie Awards’.” Current Affairs. Dec. 31, 2020.
Liu, Catherine. Virtue Hoarders. University of Minnesota Press, 2021.
Mishan, Logaya. “The Distinctly American Ethos of the Grifter.” The New York Times Style Magazine. Sept. 12, 2019.
—————————-SUPPORT THE SHOW—————————- You can support the show for free by following or subscribing on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, or whichever app you use. This is the best way to help us out and it costs nothing so we’d really appreciate you clicking that button. If you want to do a little more we would love if you chip in. You can find us on patreon.com/dartsandletters. Patrons get content early, and occasionally there’s bonus material on there too. —————————-CONTACT US————————- To stay up to date, follow us on Twitter and Facebook. If you’d like to write to us, email darts@citedmedia.ca or tweet Gordon directly. ———-CREDITS———- Darts and Letters’ lead producer is Jay Cockburn, and our chase producer is Marc Apollonio. With research and support from David Moscrop. Our theme song was created by Mike Barber, and our graphic design was created by Dakota Koop. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/education
The protests of summer 2020 led to long-overdue reassessments of the legacy of racism and white supremacy in both American academe and cultural life more generally. But while universities have been willing to rename some buildings and schools or grapple with their role in the slave trade, no one has yet asked the most uncomfortable question: Does academic freedom extend to racist professors? It's Not Free Speech: Race, Democracy, and the Future of Academic Freedom (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2022) considers the ideal of academic freedom in the wake of the activism inspired by outrageous police brutality, white supremacy, and the #MeToo movement. Arguing that academic freedom must be rigorously distinguished from freedom of speech, Michael Bérubé and Jennifer Ruth take aim at explicit defenses of colonialism and theories of white supremacy—theories that have no intellectual legitimacy whatsoever. Approaching this question from two angles—one, the question of when a professor's intramural or extramural speech calls into question his or her fitness to serve, and two, the question of how to manage the simmering tension between the academic freedom of faculty and the antidiscrimination initiatives of campus offices of diversity, equity, and inclusion—they argue that the democracy-destroying potential of social media makes it very difficult to uphold the traditional liberal view that the best remedy for hate speech is more speech. In recent years, those with traditional liberal ideals have had very limited effectiveness in responding to the resurgence of white supremacism in American life. It is time, Bérubé and Ruth write, to ask whether that resurgence requires us to rethink the parameters and practices of academic freedom. Touching as well on contingent faculty, whose speech is often inadequately protected, It's Not Free Speech insists that we reimagine shared governance to augment both academic freedom and antidiscrimination initiatives on campuses. Michael Bérubé (interviewed here) is Edwin Erle Sparks Professor of Literature at Pennsylvania State University; Jennifer Ruth is a professor of film at Portland State University. Both have served in various roles within the American Association of University Professors, and also coauthored The Humanities, Higher Education, and Academic Freedom: Three Necessary Arguments (2015). Catriona Gold is a PhD candidate in Geography at University College London, researching security and mobility in the 20-21st century United States. Her current work concerns the US Passport Office's role in the Cold War. She can be reached by email or on Twitter. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/education
80,000 Hours provides research and support to help students and graduates switch into careers that effectively tackle the world’s most pressing problems. Benjamin Todd is the president and co-founder of 80,000 Hours. He managed the organisation while it grew from a lecture, to a student society, to the organization it is today. He also helped to get effective altruism started in Oxford in 2011. Caleb Zakarin is the Assistant Editor of the New Books Network (Twitter: @caleb_zakarin). Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/education
For The Real World of College: What Higher Education Is and What It Can Be (MIT Press, 2022), Wendy Fischman and Howard Gardner analyzed in-depth interviews with more than 2,000 students, alumni, faculty, administrators, parents, trustees, and others, which were conducted at ten institutions ranging from highly selective liberal arts colleges to less-selective state schools. What they found challenged characterizations in the media: students are not preoccupied by political correctness, free speech, or even the cost of college. They are most concerned about their GPA and their resumes; they see jobs and earning potential as more important than learning. Many say they face mental health challenges, fear that they don't belong, and feel a deep sense of alienation. Given this daily reality for students, has higher education lost its way? Fischman and Gardner contend that US universities and colleges must focus sharply on their core educational mission. Fischman and Gardner, both recognized authorities on education and learning, argue that higher education in the United States has lost sight of its principal reason for existing: not vocational training, not the provision of campus amenities, but to increase what Fischman and Gardner call "higher education capital"--to help students think well and broadly, express themselves clearly, explore new areas, and be open to possible transformations. Fischman and Gardner offer cogent recommendations for how every college can become a community of learners who are open to change as thinkers, citizens, and human beings. Galina Limorenko is a doctoral candidate in Neuroscience with a focus on biochemistry and molecular biology of neurodegenerative diseases at EPFL in Switzerland. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/education
Labor's End: How the Promise of Automation Degraded Work (U Illinois Press, 2021) traces the discourse around automation from its origins in the factory to its wide-ranging implications in political and social life. As Jason Resnikoff shows, the term automation expressed the conviction that industrial progress meant the inevitable abolition of manual labor from industry. But the real substance of the term reflected industry's desire to hide an intensification of human work--and labor's loss of power and protection--behind magnificent machinery and a starry-eyed faith in technological revolution. The rhetorical power of the automation ideology revealed and perpetuated a belief that the idea of freedom was incompatible with the activity of work. From there, political actors ruled out the workplace as a site of politics while some of labor's staunchest allies dismissed sped-up tasks, expanded workloads, and incipient deindustrialization in the name of technological progress. A forceful intellectual history, Labor's End challenges entrenched assumptions about automation's transformation of the American workplace. Jason Resnifoff is Assistant Professor of Contemporary History at the University of Groningen (Rijksuniversiteit Groningen) in the Netherlands. Tom Discenna is Professor of Communication at Oakland University whose work examines issues of academic labor and communicative labor more broadly. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/education
Welcome to The Academic Life! In this episode you’ll hear about:
Dr. Ruby Tapia’s viral Cornell sweatshirt tweet.
How witnessing domestic violence, and the aftermath of her father’s suicide, influenced her decision to go to college far from home.
Difficulties she faced freshman year both on and off campus.
The professor who called her in to office hours, and how that changed her academic path.
The meaning she’s made of these experiences, and how they changed her.
Her hopes for future generation of college students, including her own daughters.
Our guest is: Dr. Ruby C. Tapia, who is Chair of the Department of Women's and Gender Studies, and Associate Professor of English and Women's and Gender Studies at the University of Michigan. Her work engages the intersections of photography theory, feminist and critical race theory, and critical prison studies. She is co-editor of Interrupted Life: Experiences of Incarcerated Women in the United States, co-editor of the University of California book series Reproductive Justice: New Visions for the 21st Century, and author of American Pietàs: Visions of Race, Death and the Maternal. Her current book project, The Camera in the Cage, interrogates the intersections of prison photography and carceral humanism and puts forth an argument and methodology for abolitionist aesthetics. She has facilitated creative writing workshops via the Prison Creative Arts Project at Women's Huron Valley Correctional Facility in Michigan, is a member of the Theory Group Think Tank at Macomb Correctional Facility for men and is the lead faculty member of the Critical Carceral Visualities component of the Documenting Criminalization and Confinement project at UM's Humanities Collaboratory. Our host is: Dr. Christina Gessler, the co-producer of the Academic Life. Listeners to this episode may also be interested in:
Borderlands, by Gloria Anzaldua
Academic Outsider, by Victoria Reyes
The Abortionist, by Rickie Solinger
Welfare, by Rickie Solinger
Ruby Tapia’s Avidly article “What I Was Looking For Was Green”
Ruby Tapia’s Avidly article “Never Been A Scared Bitch”
A discussion of Presumed Incompetent
You are smart and capable, but you aren’t an island, and neither are we. We reach across our mentor network to bring you podcasts on everything from how to finish that project to how to take care of your beautiful mind. Here on the Academic Life channel, we embrace a broad definition of what it means to be an academic and to lead an academic life. We view education as a transformative human endeavor and are inspired by today’s knowledge-producers working inside and outside the academy. Wish we’d bring on an expert about something? DMs us on Twitter: @AcademicLifeNBN. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/education
Educating the Enemy: Teaching Nazis and Mexicans in the Cold War Borderlands (U Chicago Press, 2022) begins with the 144 children of Nazi scientists who moved to El Paso, Texas, in 1946 as part of the military program called Operation Paperclip. These German children were bused daily from a military outpost to four El Paso public schools. Though born into a fascist enemy nation, the German children were quickly integrated into the schools and, by proxy, American society. Their rapid assimilation offered evidence that American public schools played a vital role in ensuring the victory of democracy over fascism. Jonna Perrillo not only tells this fascinating story of Cold War educational policy, but she draws an important contrast with another, much more numerous population of children in the El Paso public schools: Mexican Americans. Like everywhere else in the Southwest, Mexican American children in El Paso were segregated into "Mexican" schools, where the children received a vastly different educational experience. Not only were they penalized for speaking Spanish--the only language all but a few spoke due to segregation--they were tracked for low-wage and low-prestige careers, with limited opportunities for economic success. Educating the Enemy charts what two groups of children--one that might have been considered the enemy, the other that was treated as such--reveal about the ways political assimilation has been treated by schools as an easier, more viable project than racial or ethnic assimilation. Listen to an interview with the author here and read an interview in Time and a piece based on the book in the Boston Review. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/education
Education for Sustainable Development in the Caribbean: Pedagogy, Processes and Practices (University of the West Indies Press, 2022) offers a unique perspective on educational approaches to creating a sustainable world. Lorna Down and Therese Ferguson complement their theoretical discussions with practical, “real world” engagements. Case studies and current research ground teaching and learning for sustainability and enable diverse communities of learners, inside and outside of classrooms, to transform their societies. With its emphasis on the crucial role of education for the transformation to a peaceful, just, inclusive and environmentally sustainable world, this book is a valuable resource for students, lecturers and researchers working in education for sustainable development across disciplines. It also is a significant text for those working in community-based, non-governmental and intergovernmental fields. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/education
This episode is the latest in the series of cases we’ve profiled focusing on mergers within higher education. We speak with Bryon Grigsby, President of Moravian University and David Rowe, who served as Interim President of Lancaster Theological Seminary (LTS) who discuss how they partnered to integrate LTS into Moravian to operate alongside the existing Moravian Seminary. Moravian is the 6th oldest college in the U.S. and was the first to admit women. They describe how the vision for the merger evolved during their initial discussions from having LTS move to Moravian’s campus in Bethlehem, to enabling LTS to retain its historic campus and expanding it to serve as a branch campus for Moravian. They share the hard-earned lessons with all of the regulatory and other hurdles that need to be cleared to complete a successful merger. David Finegold is the president of Chatham University. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/education
Why does gender matter in our troubled global times? In Gender in an Era of Post-truth Populism: Pedagogies, Challenges and Strategies (Bloomsbury, 2022), the editors Penny Jane Burke, Rosalind Gill, Akane Kanai, and Julia Coffey have assembled a collection of interventions that seek to think through the relationship between the populism that seems to dominate many nation’s contemporary politics and the continuing need for feminist perspectives. The chapters range from feminist philosophical and theoretical reflections on the meaning of truth, through empirical work on digital feminism, to considerations on the role and purpose of education and the university. Across 11 chapters, with an agenda setting introduction, the book is essential reading for all in the humanities and social sciences, as well as for anyone seeking to understand the current post-truth populist crisis and how to intervene for change. Dave O'Brien is Professor of Cultural and Creative Industries, at the University of Sheffield. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/education
An indispensable manual for the most demanding position in higher education, The College President Handbook: A Sustainable and Practical Guide for Emerging Leaders (Harvard Education Press, 2022) supports campus leaders in becoming powerful and effective stewards of their institutions. This comprehensive guidebook offers clear counsel in the form of candid essays by highly regarded current and former college and university presidents from across the nation. It pairs their expert appraisals with research and data to examine the critical issues that define the role today. The book's contributors acknowledge the broad skill set that presidents, and their executive teams, must cultivate in order to achieve success. Beginning with a macro view, the contributors address the universal questions of vision that each higher education leader must consider critically and understand strategically: Why be a president? How should campus leadership engage with our board of trustees? What tone should our actions communicate to stakeholders? The book's chapters offer concrete tactical advice in a range of key leadership areas and emphasize essential career skills such as managing financial resources and strategic planning. The contributors speak to student-facing concerns as well as institutional interests, and discuss personal issues specific to the office, such as weathering controversy, attaining work–life balance, and planning for post-presidential life. Drawing on the unique expertise of peers and predecessors, this work will prove to be a core resource for anyone who is or aspires to become a president or chancellor in higher education. Shu Cao Mo's interests span continental philosophy, existential psychology and history of performance art. She previously served as the Asia representative for a global traveling university. She holds an Ed.M. in Arts in Education from Harvard and a B.A. in Political Philosophy and Theater from Duke. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/education
In this episode, Dr. Nilanjana Paul of the University of Texas, Rio Grande Valley speaks about her new monograph, Bengal Muslims and Colonial Education, 1854-1947: A Study of Curriculum, Educational Institutions and Communal Politics (Routledge, 2022). The book is a micro history of the spread of education among Muslims in Colonial Bengal. Dr. Paul discusses the role played by Muslim leaders such as Abdul Latif and Fazlul Huq in the spread of education and examines how segregation in education, supported by the British fueled Muslim anxiety and separatism. By examining the conflict of interest between Hindu elites and Muslim aristocrats over education and employment, Dr. Paul shows how discriminatory colonial education policies and pedagogy amplified religious separatism that would eventually culminate in the 1947 partition of India and Pakistan. Bekeh Ukelina is Associate Professor of History and Director of the Center of Gender and Intercultural Studies at State University of New York, Cortland. Twitter: @bekeh/ Instagram @mwalimuwakusafiri/ Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/education
Welcome to The Academic Life! In this episode you’ll hear about:
Why the AAUP was formed.
Their role in supporting academic freedom.
Why the threat to tenure is a threat to higher education.
The importance of collective bargaining, and of transparency in academic salaries.
Our guest is: Dr. Irene Mulvey, who is a Professor of Mathematics at Fairfield University where she has been teaching for 37 years. She has been fighting to protect academic freedom, to promote shared governance, and to uphold AAUP principles and standards at the campus, state and national level for over 30 years. In 2020, she was elected to a four-year term as President of the AAUP on a platform pledging progress toward making the AAUP an anti-racist organization and dismantling structural racism in all aspects of higher education. Our host is: Dr. Christina Gessler, the co-creator of the Academic Life. Listeners to this episode might also be interested in:
The AAUP
The AAUP Foundation
Chronicle of Higher Education article on the Adjunct Problem
LA Times editorial about the adjunct crisis in California and how that affects Academic Freedom
Statement on academic freedom from the American Federation of Teachers
Academic Life interview with an Adjunct Professor
NBN episode on the future of tenure
You are smart and capable, but you aren’t an island and neither are we. We reach across our mentor network to bring you experts about everything from how to finish that project, to how to take care of your beautiful mind. Here on the Academic Life channel, we embrace a broad definition of what it means to be an academic and to lead an academic life. We view education as a transformative human endeavor and are inspired by today’s knowledge-producers working inside and outside the academy. Wish we’d bring on an expert about something? DMs us on Twitter: @AcademicLifeNBN. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/education
Plantation Politics and Campus Rebellions: Power, Diversity, and the Emancipatory Struggle in Higher Education (SUNY Press, 2021) provides a multidisciplinary exploration of the contemporary university's entanglement with the history of slavery and settler colonialism in the United States. Inspired by more than a hundred student-led protests during the Movement for Black Lives, contributors examine how campus rebellions—and university responses to them—expose the racialized inequities at the core of higher education. Plantation politics are embedded in the everyday workings of universities—in not only the physical structures and spaces of academic institutions, but in its recruitment and attainment strategies, hiring practices, curriculum, and notions of sociality, safety, and community. The book is comprised of three sections that highlight how white supremacy shapes campus communities and classrooms; how current diversity and inclusion initiatives perpetuate inequality; and how students, staff, and faculty practice resistance in the face of institutional and legislative repression. Each chapter interrogates a connection between the academy and the plantation, exploring how Black people and their labor are viewed as simultaneously essential and disruptive to university cultures and economies. The volume is an indispensable read for students, faculty, student affairs professionals, and administrators invested in learning more about how power operates within education and imagining emancipatory futures. Adam McNeil is a Ph.D. Candidate in History at Rutgers, the State University of New Jersey. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/education
Amid a vast influx of rural migrants into urban areas, China has allowed cities wide latitude in providing education and other social services. While millions of people have been welcomed into the megacities as a source of cheap labor, local governments have used various tools to limit their access to full citizenship. The Urbanization of People: The Politics of Development, Labor Markets, and Schooling in the Chinese City (Columbia University Press, 2022) by Eli D. Friedman reveals how cities in China have granted public goods to the privileged while condemning poor and working-class migrants to insecurity, constant mobility, and degraded educational opportunities. Using the school as a lens on urban life, Eli Friedman investigates how the state manages flows of people into the city. He demonstrates that urban governments are providing quality public education to those who need it least: school admissions for nonlocals heavily favor families with high levels of economic and cultural capital. Those deemed not useful are left to enroll their children in precarious resource-starved private schools that sometimes are subjected to forced demolition. Over time, these populations are shunted away to smaller locales with inferior public services.
Based on extensive ethnographic research and hundreds of in-depth interviews, this interdisciplinary book details the policy framework that produces unequal outcomes as well as providing a fine-grained account of the life experiences of people drawn into the cities as workers but excluded as full citizens. Michael O. Johnston, Ph.D. is Assistant Professor of Sociology at William Penn University. His most recent research, “The Queen and Her Royal Court: A Content Analysis of Doing Gender at a Tulip Queen Pageant,” was published in Gender Issues Journal. He researches culture, social identity, placemaking, and media representations of social life at festivals and celebrations. He is currently working on a book titled Community Media Representations of Place and Identity at Tug Fest: Reconstructing the Mississippi River. You can learn more about Dr. Johnston on his website, Google Scholar, on Twitter @ProfessorJohnst, or by email at johnstonmo@wmpenn.edu. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/education
A Primer for Teaching Digital History: Ten Design Principles (Duke UP, 2022) is a guide for college and high school teachers who are teaching digital history for the first time or for experienced teachers who want to reinvigorate their pedagogy. It can also serve those who are training future teachers to prepare their own syllabi, as well as teachers who want to incorporate digital history into their history courses. Offering design principles for approaching digital history that represent the possibilities that digital research and scholarship can take, Jennifer Guiliano outlines potential strategies and methods for building syllabi and curricula. Taking readers through the process of selecting data, identifying learning outcomes, and determining which tools students will use in the classroom, Guiliano outlines popular research methods including digital source criticism, text analysis, and visualization. She also discusses digital archives, exhibits, and collections as well as audiovisual and mixed-media narratives such as short documentaries, podcasts, and multimodal storytelling. Throughout, Guiliano illuminates how digital history can enhance understandings of not just what histories are told but how they are told and who has access to them. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/education
Welcome to The Academic Life! In this episode you’ll hear about:
Our guest Eric Frans’ career path into, out of, and around higher education
Key factors that influenced his decision to pursue employment outside the academy
The transition from higher education to a different industry
How he plans to use his doctorate in the future
His advice to those inside higher ed considering switching to other industries
Our guest is: Eric Frans, a career development professional currently working as a Talent Acquisition Manager for PrimePay, a human resources software company. Eric holds a master’s degree in Higher Education Counseling/Student Affairs from West Chester University (WCU) and is pursuing a doctorate in Higher Education Policy, Planning, and Administration from WCU. Eric worked as a career development professional at SUNY Oswego and WCU before moving into his current role at PrimePay. Eric was born in Ghana and raised in Lehigh Valley Pennsylvania. As an undergraduate student, Eric studied psychology at WCU and was highly engaged in campus life; he was a member of the men’s basketball team, a resident assistant, and an orientation leader. Our host is: Dr. Dana M. Malone, a higher education scholar and practitioner energized by facilitating meaningful conversations and educational experiences. She specializes in college student relationships, gender, sexuality, and religious identities as well as student success and assessment planning. Listeners to this episode may also be interested in:
Inside Higher Ed article: 7 Steps for Discerning Whether to Leave Higher Ed by Beth Godbee
Chronicle article: Many Student Affairs Officials are Considering Leaving the Field
Jenny Blake’s Book: Pivot: The Only Move That Matters is Your Next One (Portfolio/Penguin) - https://www.pivotmethod.com/
Dawn Graham’s book: Switchers: How Smart Professionals Change Careers and Seize Success (Harper Collins Leadership)
The Academic Life episode: The Self-Care Stuff: Considering Whether to Stay or Drop Out
You are smart and capable, but you aren’t an island, and neither are we. We reach across our mentor network to bring you podcasts on everything from how to finish that project to how to take care of your beautiful mind. Here on the Academic Life channel, we embrace a broad definition of what it means to be an academic and to lead an academic life. We view education as a transformative human endeavor and are inspired by today’s knowledge-producers working inside and outside the academy. Wish we’d bring on an expert about something? DMs us on Twitter: @AcademicLifeNBN. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/education
Black or Right: Anti/Racist Campus Rhetorics (Utah State University Press, 2020) explores notions of Blackness in white institutional—particularly educational—spaces. In it, Louis M. Maraj theorizes how Black identity operates with/against ideas of difference in the age of #BlackLivesMatter. Centering Blackness in frameworks for antiracist agency through interdisciplinary Black feminist lenses, Black or Right asks how those racially signifying “diversity” in US higher education (and beyond) make meaning in the everyday. Offering four Black rhetorics as antiracist means for rhetorical reclamation—autoethnography, hashtagging, inter(con)textual reading, and reconceptualized disruption—the book uses Black feminist relationality via an African indigenous approach. Maraj examines fluid, quotidian ways Black folk engage anti/racism at historically white institutions in the United States in response to violent campus spaces, educational structures, protest movements, and policy practice. Black or Right’s experimental, creative style strives to undiscipline knowledge from academic confinement. Exercising different vantage points in each chapter—autoethnographer, digital media scholar/pedagogue, cultural rhetorician, and critical discourse analyst—Maraj challenges readers to ecologically understand shifting, multiple meanings of Blackness in knowledge-making. Black or Right’s expressive form, organization, narratives, and poetics intimately interweave with its argument that Black folk must continuously invent “otherwise” in reiterative escape from oppressive white spaces. In centering Black experiences, Black theory, and diasporic Blackness, Black or Right mobilizes generative approaches to destabilizing institutional whiteness, as opposed to reparative attempts to “fix racism,” which often paradoxically center whiteness. It will be of interest to both academic and general readers and significant for specialists in cultural rhetorics, Black studies, and critical theory. Anna E. Lindner is a doctoral candidate in the Communication Department at Wayne State University in Detroit, Michigan. On Twitter. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/education
This episode features a wide-ranging discussion with Dr. Lynn Pasquerella, the President of the American Association of Colleges & Universities (AAC&U). She shares her experience as a community college student that launched her on a successful academic career as a philosopher and medical ethicist, and how she became president of Mt. Holyoke College. We also discuss her new book, What We Value: Public Health, Social Justice, and Educating for Democracy (U Virginia Press, 2022), which summarizes many of the hot button issues on today’s college campuses and provides a robust defense of the central importance of a liberal arts education to both prepare individuals for a highly uncertain economic future and to help safeguard our democracy. David Finegold is the president of Chatham University. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/education
A detailed exploration of parents' fight for a safe environment for their kids, interrogating how race, class, and gender shape health advocacy The success of food allergy activism in highlighting the dangers of foodborne allergens shows how illness communities can effectively advocate for the needs of their members. In Food Allergy Advocacy: Parenting and the Politics of Care (U Minnesota Press, 2022), Danya Glabau follows parents and activists as they fight for allergen-free environments, accurate labeling, the fair application of disability law, and access to life-saving medications for food-allergic children in the United States. At the same time, she shows how this activism also reproduces the culturally dominant politics of personhood and responsibility, based on an idealized version of the American family, centered around white, middle-class, and heteronormative motherhood. By holding up the threat of food allergens to the white nuclear family to galvanize political and scientific action, Glabau shows, the movement excludes many, including Black women and disabled adults, whose families and health have too often been marginalized from public health and social safety net programs. Further, its strategies are founded on the assumption that market-based solutions will address issues of social exclusion and equal access to healthcare. Sharing the personal experiences of a wide spectrum of people, including parents, support group leaders, physicians, entrepreneurs, and scientists, Food Allergy Advocacy raises important questions about who controls illness activism. Using critical, intersectional feminism to interrogate how race, class, and gender shape activist priorities and platforms, it shows the way to new, justice-focused models of advocacy. Danya Glabau is a medical anthropologist and science and technology studies scholar who researches patient activism, the political economy of the global pharmaceutical industry, and feminist cybercultures. She is a faculty member at the NYU Tandon School of Engineering and the Director of the Science and Technology Studies Program. Autumn Wilke works in higher education as an ADA coordinator and diversity officer and am also an author and doctoral candidate with research/topics related to disability and higher education. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/education
Welcome to The Academic Life! In this episode you’ll hear about:
Dr. Karin Lewis’s experience pitching and winning the book bid
Karin and the editorial team’s vision for an inclusive and diverse collection
The process of working as a team to develop an idea into a book
The realities of editing a large volume with many authors
Blurring the lines of traditional scholarship with artistic and creative submissions
Her advice to other scholars considering editing an established collection
Our guest is: Dr. Karin A. Lewis, an associate professor in the Department of Teaching and Learning at the University of Texas – Rio Grande Valley. She teaches educational psychology in the areas of cognition, learning, human development, and adult learning at the undergraduate, graduate, and doctoral levels. Her scholarship explores complexities of identity and agency from a multicultural, social justice perspective via transdisciplinary discourses and collaborative, collective ethnographic methodologies. Dr. Lewis is the Lead Editor for The Kaleidoscope of Lived Curriculum: Learning Through a Confluence of Crisis, 13th Annual Curriculum and Pedagogy Group, 2021 Edited Collection, published through Information Age Publishing. Our host is: Dr. Dana M. Malone, a higher education scholar and practitioner specializing in college student relationships, gender, sexuality, and religious identities as well as student success and assessment planning. Dana first met Karin as a doctorate student at the University of Kentucky when Karin hired her as a graduate TA to teach courses offered through the university’s academic success unit. Dana has always been impressed with Karin’s dedication to students, love of teaching, and the grace with which she moves through the world. Listeners to this episode may also be interested in:
Curriculum and Pedagogy Group Edited Collections
Journal of Curriculum and Pedagogy
About the Curriculum and Pedagogy Group
The Academic Life episode on writing a book proposal
You are smart and capable, but you aren’t an island, and neither are we. We reach across our mentor network to bring you podcasts on everything from how to finish that project to how to take care of your beautiful mind. Here on the Academic Life channel, we embrace a broad definition of what it means to be an academic and to lead an academic life. We view education as a transformative human endeavor and are inspired by today’s knowledge-producers working inside and outside the academy. Wish we’d bring on an expert about something? DMs us on Twitter: @AcademicLifeNBN. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/education
Dr. Chris Jones holds a Bachelor of Arts from Oklahoma Baptist University, a Master of Theology from Garrett-Evangelical Theological Seminary, and a PhD from Univeristy of Wisconsin-Madison. He is the sole religious studies professor at Washburn University. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/education
In a world facing more shootings, suicides, substance abuse, and sexual violence than ever before, there is more that we can do as educators, as parents, and as adults committed to leaving this world better than we found it. Research shows that just one trusted adult can have a profound effect on a child’s life, influencing that young person toward positive growth, greater engagement in school and community activities, better overall health, and prevention of risky and threatening behaviors. From educators to piano teachers, camp counselors to aunts and uncles, and athletic coaches to babysitters, every adult who encounters a young person holds the privilege of shaping that child’s life—and also the significant responsibility. With news headlines dominated by stories of abuse in schools, camps, and churches, those of us who guide or mentor adolescents must understand how to build trust with young people while simultaneously establishing boundaries that keep the relationship healthy.
Packed with real-life stories and invaluable tips, One Trusted Adult: How to Build Strong Connections & Healthy Boundaries with Young People inspires all adults to build strong connections, embrace sustainable career practices, break the silence around boundary violations and abuse, be present for the young people in their lives—and, in doing so, ensure that the young people in their care are growing into their greatest potential. Brooklyn Raney is an experienced teacher, coach, and administrator who has spent the last decade working in independent schools. She is the founder and director of the Girls’ Leadership Camp, a group that hosts a one-week summer camp for middle school girls, as well as one-day boosts and leadership conferences. She is also a co-founder of Generation Change, a nonprofit that seeks to embolden youth to be empathic and compassionate change makers through cross-generational mentorship. Brooklyn is a workshop facilitator, speaker, and consultant for schools, camps, and other youth-serving organizations nationally and internationally. You can find out more about her and her programs at www.onetrustedadult.com Elizabeth Cronin, Psy.D., is a licensed clinical psychologist and mindfulness meditation teacher with offices in Brookline and Norwood, MA. You can follow her on Instagram or visit her website. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/education
Listen to this interview of Jo Mackiewicz, Professor of Rhetoric and Professional Communication at Iowa State University and editor of the Journal of Business and Technical Communication. We talk about welds that hold and about sentences that stand. Jo Mackiewicz : "Oh, I'd definitely agree that people can be motivated in what they're learning when they appreciate the art of it. I mean, for instance in welding, you need to put in a certain number of hours in order to have your mind and your body work as one in this technique — you know, you need to become the technique. And that kind of thing doesn't just happen. Your body has to do it over and over and over again for you to become an artist, or in the terms I use in the book, an expert. And those hours that you spend practising in a welding program, or in a writing program for that matter — those hours are all just building up your practice hours, building up your technique, and you keep continuing on towards true expertise." Contact Daniel at writeyourresearch@gmail.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/education
School Farms: Feeding and Educating Children (Routledge, 2021) highlights the potential of school farms to fight hunger and malnutrition by providing access to locally produced, fresh, and healthy food as well as providing young students with educational opportunities to learn, interact with nature, and develop their skills. Hunger is one of the most pressing concerns we face today and there is a clear need to provide alternative sources of food to feed a fast-growing population. School farms offer a sustainable opportunity to produce food locally in order to feed underprivileged students who rely on school meals as an integral part of their daily diet. Approaching the concept of school farms through four themes, Problem, People, Process, and Place, the book shows how they can play an essential role in providing sustainable and healthy food for students, the critical role educational institutions can play in promoting this process, and the positive impact hands-on farming can have on students' mental and physical well-being. Utilising the authors' personal hands-on experiences, and drawing on global case studies, the book provides a theoretical framework and practical guidance to help with the establishment of school farms and community-based gardening projects and an education system which promotes a sustainable and healthy approach to food, agriculture, and the environment. This book will be essential reading for students and scholars of food security, agriculture, healthy and sustainable diets, education for sustainable development, and urban studies. It will also be of great interest to practitioners and policymakers involved in food policy, developing school and community projects, global health and international development, as well as education professionals. Rituparna Patgiri, PhD is an Assistant Professor of Sociology at Indraprastha College for Women, University of Delhi. She has a PhD in Sociology from Jawaharlal Nehru University (JNU), New Delhi. Her research interests lie in the areas of food, media, gender and public. She is also one of the co-founders of Doing Sociology. Patgiri can be reached at @Rituparna37 on Twitter. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/education
In Movement Matters: How Embodied Cognition Informs Teaching and Learning (MIT, 2022), Sheila L. Macrine (Professor in Cognitive Science, UMass Dartmouth) and Jennifer M. B. Fugate (Associate Professor in Health Psychology, Kansas City University) bring together experts to translate the latest findings on embodied cognition to inform teaching and learning pedagogy. Embodied cognition represents a radical shift in conceptualizing cognitive processes, in which cognition develops through mind-body environmental interaction. If this supposition is correct, then the conventional style of instruction—in which students sit at desks, passively receiving information—needs rethinking. Movement Matters considers the educational implications of an embodied account of cognition, describing the latest research applications from neuroscience, psychology, and cognitive science and demonstrating their relevance for teaching and learning pedagogy. After a discussion of the philosophical and theoretical underpinnings of embodied cognition, contributors to the book describe its applications in language, including the areas of handwriting, vocabulary, language development, and reading comprehension; STEM areas, emphasizing finger counting and the importance of hand and body gestures in understanding physical forces; and digital learning technologies, including games and augmented reality. Finally, they explore embodied learning in the social-emotional realm, including how emotional granularity, empathy, and mindfulness benefit classroom learning. Movement Matters introduces a new model, translational learning sciences research, for interpreting and disseminating the latest empirical findings in the burgeoning field of embodied cognition. The book provides an up-to-date, inclusive, and essential resource for those involved in educational planning, design, and pedagogical approaches. Alice Garner is a historian, teacher and performer with a PhD from the University of Melbourne, Australia. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/education
In AI in Talent Development: Capitalize on the AI Revolution to Transform the Way You Work, Learn, and Live (ASTD, 2020), Margie Meacham describes the benefits, uses, and risks of AI technology and offers practical tools to strengthen and enhance learning and performance programs. In layman's terms, Meacham demonstrates how we can free time for ourselves by employing a useful robot "assistant," create a chatbot for specific tasks (such as a new manager bot, a sales coach bot, or new employee onboarding bot), and build personalized coaching tools from AI-processed big data. She concludes each of the six chapters with helpful tips and includes a resource guide with planning tools, templates, and worksheets. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/education
Elite colleges have long played a crucial role in maintaining social and class status in America while public universities have offered a major stepping-stone to new economic opportunities. However, as Charlie Eaton reveals in Bankers in the Ivory Tower: The Troubling Rise of Financiers in US Higher Education (U Chicago Press, 2022), finance has played a central role in the widening inequality in recent decades, both in American higher education and in American society at large. With federal and state funding falling short, the US higher education system has become increasingly dependent on financial markets and the financiers that mediate them. Beginning in the 1980s, the government, colleges, students, and their families took on multiple new roles as financial investors, borrowers, and brokers. The turn to finance, however, has yielded wildly unequal results. At the top, ties to Wall Street help the most elite private schools achieve the greatest endowment growth through hedge fund investments and the support of wealthy donors. At the bottom, takeovers by private equity transform for-profit colleges into predatory organizations that leave disadvantaged students with massive loan debt and few educational benefits. And in the middle, public universities are squeezed between incentives to increase tuition and pressures to maintain access and affordability. Eaton chronicles these transformations, making clear for the first time just how tight the links are between powerful financiers and America's unequal system of higher education. Charlie Eaton is an economic sociologist and Assistant Professor of Sociology at UC Merced. He studies the role of social ties, organizations, and politics in the interplay between financiers, other elites, and subordinate social groups. His work has been published in Socio-Economic Review, Politics & Society, The Review of Financial Studies, Socius, Sociology Compass, and PS: Political Science and Politics. Tom Discenna is Professor of Communication at Oakland University whose work examines issues of academic labor and communicative labor more broadly. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/education
Welcome to The Academic Life! In this episode you’ll hear about:
The science that explains our busy minds
What mindfulness is
The difference between mindfulness and meditation
How changing our habits is a small-step by small-step process
A discussion of the book Bettter Daily Mindfulness Habits: Simple Changes with Lifelong Impact
Today’s book is: Better Daily Mindfulness Habits: Simple Changes with Lifelong Impact Mindfulness by Kristen Manieri. Mindfulness is a powerful tool for staying calm, centered, and steady―but it can be challenging to remember to stay mindful. Better Daily Mindfulness Habits helps practitioners of any level. Rooted in proven habit-building methodology, the book contains 40 practices designed to orient your attention to the present. In as little as a few minutes at a time, it can become easier to practice self-compassion and connect with others, your work, and yourself more mindfully. Our guest is: Kristen Manieri, a certified habits coach as well as a certified mindfulness teacher. Kristen believes that when we actively engage in our growth and evolution, we can begin to live a more conscious, connected, and intentional life. She is the author of Bettter Daily Mindfulness Habits: Simple Changes with Lifelong Impact. Our host is: Dr. Christina Gessler, a historian of women and gender. Listeners to this episode might also be interested in:
Atomic Habits by James Clear
Tiny Habits by BJ Fogg
Create Your Own Calm: A Journal for Quieting Anxiety by Meera Lee Patel
The Mindfulness Journal by Worthy Stokes
Quick Calm: Easy Meditations to Short-Circuit Stress Using Mindfulness and Neuroscience by Jennifer Wolkin
The 60 Mindful Minutes podcasts with Kristen Manieri
This discussion of meditation
You are smart and capable, but you aren’t an island and neither are we. We reach across our mentor network to bring you experts about everything from how to finish that project, to how to take care of your beautiful mind. Wish we’d bring on an expert about something? DM us on Twitter: The Academic Life @AcademicLifeNBN. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/education
Sophie Adelman is the co-founder of Multiverse and The Garden, two companies that are innovating the way people learn and enhance their personal skills. Multiverse offers professional apprenticeships as an alternative to traditional college approaches, and The Garden is launching a platform for building and educating a diverse community of people who share a passion for learning. Sophie’s path to success began with no clear entrepreneurial role model, nor a precise idea of what she wanted to do with her professional life. After studies at Cambridge, Harvard, and Stanford Business School, she worked in a variety of positions in the corporate world, including stints in headhunting, banking, and finance. But along the way, Sophie knew one thing for certain—she wanted to change the world, and she believed that meaningful change could begin at the organisational level. Today, her innovative learning models are levelling the playing field for people and businesses that want access to top-tier educational opportunities. Tune in and find out for yourself how it works. About our guest: As co-founder of Multiverse and The Garden, Sophie Adelman is on her way to pursuing her overriding dream—which is nothing less than trying to make the world a better place for everyone. How does she plan to do it? By levelling the playing field between those who can and those who traditionally didn’t have access to equal educational opportunities. Sophie’s passion for driving change doesn’t stop there. She is also co-founder and president of WhiteHat, a tech scale-up committed to creating a whole new generation of leaders. In many ways, she is just getting started. Who knows where her passion for leadership and change will eventually lead her? About NBN: The NBN Entrepreneurship and Leadership podcast aims to educate, inform and entertain, sharing insights based on the personal stories of carefully selected guests—all in an informal atmosphere of unscripted conversations and open, personal accounts. Find links to past episodes here. About our Hosts: Kimon Fountoukidis: Kimon is the founder of both Argos Multilingual and PMR. He founded both companies in the mid-90s with zero capital, and both have gone on to become market leaders in their respective sectors. Kimon was born in New York and moved to Krakow, Poland in 1993. He is passionate about sharing his success with others and working entrepreneurs of all kinds to help them achieve their goals. Listen to his story here. Kimon's on Twitter here.
Richard Lucas: Richard is a business and social entrepreneur who has founded or invested in more than 30 businesses, including Argos Multilingual, PMR and, in 2020, the New Books Network. Richard has been a TEDx event organiser for years, supports the pro-entrepreneurship ecosystem, and leads entrepreneurship workshops at all levels. He was born in Oxford and moved to Poland in 1991, where continues to invest in promising companies and helps other entrepreneurs realise their dreams. Listen to his story in an autobiographical TEDx talk here. Richard is on Twitter here. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/education
In God, Grades, and Graduation: Religion's Surprising Impact on Academic Success (Oxford University Press, 2022), Ilana M. Horwitz offers a revealing and at times surprising account of how teenagers' religious upbringing influences their educational pathways from high school to college. Religious students orient their life around God so deeply that it alters how they see themselves and how they behave, inside and outside of church. Ilana M. Horwitz is an Assistant Professor and Fields-Rayant Chair of Contemporary Jewish Life at Tulane University. Schneur Zalman Newfield is an Assistant Professor of Sociology at Borough of Manhattan Community College, City University of New York, and the author of Degrees of Separation: Identity Formation While Leaving Ultra-Orthodox Judaism (Temple University Press, 2020). Visit him online at ZalmanNewfield.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/education
Rachel Buurma and Laura Heffernan's The Teaching Archive: A New History for Literary Study (University of Chicago Press, 2020) is an excavation of a discipline through the work of its teachers, the traces of the tremendous and varied labour that went into preparing for and practicing literary study in classrooms from the first decades of the twentieth century to the 1970s. Exploring the teaching papers of scholars and instructors at institutions private and public--prestigious and privileged universities, extension schools, and HBCUs--the authors revisit the work of some of the scholars frequently identified as "founders" of the discipline, including T.S. Eliot, I.A. Richards, Cleanth Brooks. They also show how the work of women and other scholars/teachers neglected as shapers of literary critical methods before the 1960s and 1970s was indeed essential to the development of the ideas and practices at the heart of the discipline. At once an intellectual and a labor history, the book emphasizes practices, complicating the stories literary study has told about itself about innovation, canon, and more while making a meaningful and moving contribution to urgent contemporary discussions of higher education more broadly. It is a book for anyone interested in what happens inside classrooms, how their content and form has changed over time, and how what takes place there is always already imbricated with research, with lives and contexts "outside." It is also just a wonderful read, written truly collaboratively from start to finish by two scholars and teachers deeply committed to an inclusive history of their field, to their work in the present, and to a better future for all of us. Roxanne Panchasi is an Associate Professor of History at Simon Fraser University in Vancouver, Canada who specializes in twentieth and twenty-first century France and its empire. If you have a recent title to suggest for the podcast, please send her an email (panchasi@sfu.ca). Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/education
The Prince of Wales College, Achimota School, opened in 1927 north of Accra in the Gold Coast (Ghana). Achimota was to be a ‘model’ school—but a model of what, exactly? And for whom? Shoko Yamada’s book 'Dignity of Labour' for African Leaders: The Formation of Education Policy in the British Colonial Office and Achimota School (Langaa RPCIG, 2018) delves into the multiple discourses and contested politics that resulted in Achimota. Her careful analysis pulls apart the different strands of American and British educational models that influenced Achimota, while also attending to the specificities of Gold Coast politics that shaped the school’s creation. Yamada then tracks how those influences combined, in the context of the 1920s and 1930s Gold Coast, to create an entirely new colonial institution. Elisa Prosperetti is an Assistant Professor in International History at the National Institute of Education in Singapore. Her research focuses on the connected histories of education and development in postcolonial West Africa. Contact her at here. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/education
In Academic Apartheid: Race and the Criminalization of Failure in an American Suburb (U California Press, 2022), sociologist Sean J. Drake addresses long-standing problems of educational inequality from a nuanced perspective, looking at how race and class intersect to affect modern school segregation. Drawing on more than two years of ethnographic observation and dozens of interviews at two distinct high schools in a racially diverse Southern California suburb, Drake unveils hidden institutional mechanisms that lead to the overt segregation and symbolic criminalization of Black, Latinx, and lower-income students who struggle academically. His work illuminates how institutional definitions of success contribute to school segregation, how institutional actors leverage those definitions to justify inequality, and the ways in which local immigrant groups use their ethnic resources to succeed. Academic Apartheid represents a new way forward for scholars whose work sits at the intersection of education, race and ethnicity, class, and immigration. Mickell Carter is a doctoral student in the department of history at Auburn University. She can be reached at mzc0152@auburn.edu and on twitter @MickellCarter. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/education
The Lost Promise: American Universities in the 1960s (University of Chicago Press, 2021) is a magisterial examination of the turmoil that rocked American universities in the 1960s, with a unique focus on the complex roles played by professors as well as students. The 1950s through the early 1970s are widely seen as American academia’s golden age, when universities—well funded and viewed as essential for national security, economic growth, and social mobility—embraced an egalitarian mission. Swelling in size, schools attracted new types of students and professors, including radicals who challenged their institutions’ calcified traditions. But that halcyon moment soon came to a painful and confusing end, with consequences that still afflict the halls of ivy. In The Lost Promise, Ellen Schrecker—our foremost historian of both the McCarthy era and the modern American university—delivers a far-reaching examination of how and why it happened. Schrecker illuminates how US universities’ explosive growth intersected with the turmoil of the 1960s, fomenting an unprecedented crisis where dissent over racial inequality and the Vietnam War erupted into direct action. Torn by internal power struggles and demonized by conservative voices, higher education never fully recovered, resulting in decades of underfunding and today’s woefully inequitable system. As Schrecker’s magisterial history makes blazingly clear, the complex blend of troubles that disrupted the university in that pivotal period haunts the ivory tower to this day. Ellen Schrecker is a retired professor of history at Yeshiva University and the author of numerous books, including No Ivory Tower: McCarthyism and the Universities, Many Are the Crimes: McCarthyism in America, and The Lost Soul of Higher Education: Corporatization, the Assault on Academic Freedom, and the End of the American University. Catriona Gold is a PhD candidate in Geography at University College London, researching security, subjectivity and mobility in the 20-21st century United States. Her current work concerns the US Passport Office's role in the Cold War. She can be reached by email or on Twitter. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/education
Listen to this interview of Roslyn Petelin, Honorary Associate Professor at the University of Queensland, Australia. We talk about her book How Writing Works: A Field Guide to Effective Writing (Routledge, 2021) writing well and knowing why. Roslyn Petelin : "My book caters for all kinds of writers: student writers, creative writers, technical writers, journalistic writers, corporate writers, all of whom need to be able to write well, write successfully, for either personal or corporate credibility." Contact Daniel at writeyourresearch@gmail.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/education
George Coe is a religious studies, current events, and world history teacher in Fairfax County, Virginia. He runs a popular blog with teaching resources here. This conversation talks about constitutionality of teaching about religion; how to arrange a semester of teaching high school religious studies, a wide-range of resources that he and I have used to with success in our own classrooms, and a deep dive investigation of a typical religious studies class in a typical United States high school. This is a snapshot of a hardworking teacher doing great work for teenagers in the United States. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/education
In this Pandemic Perspectives Podcast, Ideas Roadshow founder and host Howard Burton talks to renowned cognitive psychologist Stephen Kosslyn about how the COVID-19 pandemic influenced, or didn't influence, our understanding of the learning process. Ideas Roadshow's Pandemic Perspectives Project consists of three distinct, reinforcing elements: a documentary film (Pandemic Perspectives), book (Pandemic Perspectives: A filmmaker's journey in 10 essays) and a series of 24 detailed podcasts with many of the film's expert participants. Visit www.ideasroadshow.com for more details. Howard Burton is the founder of Ideas Roadshow and host of the Ideas Roadshow Podcast. He can be reached at howard@ideasroadshow.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/education
In today’s episode of How To Be Wrong we welcome Adrian Lenardic, who is a professor in the Department of Earth, Environmental and Planetary Sciences at Rice University and an avid scakteboarder. Adrian has an interesting background, having started as a visual arts major at UW Madison before switching to geophysics. He went on to get his PhD in planetary science form UCLA and did his postdoctoral work at UC Berkeley. Our conversation explores the systemic problems in higher education that work against intellectual humility and that tend to have a negative influence on how scholarship operates in the modern university. Quite a bit of our conversation explores the negative impact the business model is having on higher education and particularly on junior faculty and graduate students. John Kaag is Professor and Chair of Philosophy at UMass Lowell and External Professor at the Santa Fe Institute. John W. Traphagan, Ph.D. is Professor and Mitsubishi Heavy Industries Fellow in the Department of Religious Studies at the University of Texas at Austin, where he is also a professor in the Program in Human Dimensions of Organizations. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/education
We continue our discussion with Mark Nordenberg, who shares lessons from his successful 19 year tenure as Chancellor of the University of Pittsburgh and his subsequent career as Director of the Institute of Politics, including his recent stint chairing the Committee charged with making recommendations on Pennsylvania redistricting. David Finegold is the president of Chatham University. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/education
Targets of bullying are often the most vulnerable members of the scientific workforce-they may be low-paid graduate students or postdocs, living in a foreign country, navigating a foreign language and culture, and whose immigration status is tied directly to their employment. They may also have young families, be living paycheck-to-paycheck, and have health insurance and other benefits that depend on a contract position that can be revoked with little to no notice or cause. Finally, targets on the low end of a power differential are not likely to be supported by their institutions, particularly institutions that rely on the big grant earnings brought in by senior "bullies." A Brief Guide to Academic Bullying (Jenny Stanford Publishing, 2021) is a brief guide to the causes of academic bullying and to their solutions. Galina Limorenko is a doctoral candidate in Neuroscience with a focus on biochemistry and molecular biology of neurodegenerative diseases at EPFL in Switzerland. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/education
A Guide to Academic Podcasting is a practical guidebook introducing scholars to the multiverse of podcasting. It’s an open-source publication made by Amplify Podcast Network, written by Stacey Copeland and Hannah McGregor. In this conversation, we talked about embodied knowledge, gendered (and racialized) voices, and how new media publishing is transforming the relationships scholars have with the public(s). We entered into the territory of the vulnerable scholar, examined our discomfort with silence, and the spaces of possibilities academics may discover in podcasting. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/education
School shootings and suicides by young victims of bullying have spurred a proliferation of anti-bullying programs, yet most of the research done on school bullying has been from psychologists. The Sociology of Bullying: Power, Status and Aggression Among Adolescents edited by Christopher Donoghue and published by New York University Press in 2022 will be the first volume to present the leading ideas in sociology about bullying among adolescents that moves beyond an individualistic approach and instead offers ideas about how to address bullying as a by-product of social systems, biases, and status hierarchies. Sociologists investigate the impact of social forces on bullying among adolescents, such as inequality, heteronormativity, militarized capitalism, racism, cancel culture, power, and competition. Contributors explore a wide range of key topics, such as how homophobia and gender normativity encourage bullying; how anti-bullying curricula can ultimately lead to more bullying; and how adolescents use bullying against their friends to improve their own social standing. By advancing sociological perspectives on bullying, this important volume aims to shift the national conversation from one that focuses on villainizing bullies to one that encourages an inward look at the aspects of our culture that foster bullying behaviour among children. Rituparna Patgiri, PhD is an Assistant Professor of Sociology at Indraprastha College for Women, University of Delhi. She has a PhD in Sociology from Jawaharlal Nehru University (JNU), New Delhi. Her research interests lie in the areas of food, media, gender and public. She is also one of the co-founders of Doing Sociology. Patgiri can be reached at @Rituparna37 on Twitter. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/education
Even in the midst of a nationwide surge of bias and incidents against them, Asians from coast to coast have quietly assumed mastery of the nation's technical and intellectual machinery and become essential American workers. Yet, they've been forced to do so in the face of policy proposals―written in the name of diversity―excluding them from the upper ranks of the elite. In An Inconvenient Minority: The Attack on Asian American Excellence and the Fight for Meritocracy (Diversion Book, 2021), journalist Kenny Xu traces elite America's longstanding unease about a minority potentially upending them. Leftist agendas, such as eliminating standardized testing, doling out racial advantages to "preferred" minorities, and lumping Asians into "privileged" categories despite their deprived historical experiences have spurred Asian Americans to act. Going beyond the Students for Fair Admission (SFFA) v. Harvard case, Xu unearths the skewed logic rippling countrywide, from Mayor Bill de Blasio's attempted makeover of New York City's Specialized School programs to the battle over "diversity" quotas in Google's and Facebook's progressive epicenters, to the rise of Asian American activism in response to unfair perceptions and admission practices. Asian Americans' time is now, as they increase their direct action and amplify their voices in the face of mounting anti-Asian attacks. An Inconvenient Minority chronicles the political and economic repression and renaissance of a long ignored racial identity group―and how they are central to reversing America's cultural decline and preserving the dynamism of the free world. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/education
Millennials in the U.S. have been characterized as uninterested in religion, as defectors from religious institutions, and as agnostic about the role of religious identity in their culture. Amid the rise of so-called "nones," though, there has also been a countervailing trend: an increase in religious piety among some millennial Catholics. The Fellowship of Catholic University Students (FOCUS), which began evangelizing college students on American university campuses in 1998, hires recent college graduates to evangelize college students and promote an attractive and culturally savvy Catholicism. These millennial Catholics have personal relationships with Jesus, attend Mass daily, and know and defend papal teachings, while also being immersed in U.S. popular culture. With their skinny jeans, devotional tattoos, and large-framed glasses, FOCUS missionaries embody a hip, attractive style of Catholicism. They promote a faith that interweaves distinctly Catholic identity with outreach methods of twentieth-century evangelical Protestants and the anxieties of middle-class emerging adulthood. Though this new generation of missionaries lives according to strict gender essentialism prescribed by papal teachings-including the notions that men lead while women follow and that biology dictates gender roles-they also support stay-at-home fatherhood and women earning MBAs. Millennial Missionaries: How a Group of Young Catholics Is Trying to Make Catholicism Cool (Oxford UP, 2019) examines how these young people navigate their Catholic and American identities in the twenty-first century. Illuminating the ways missionaries are reshaping American Catholic identity, Katherine Dugan explores the contemporary U.S. religious landscape from the perspective of millennials who proudly proclaim "I am Catholic"-and devote years of their lives to convincing others to do the same. Allison Isidore is the Assistant Director for the American Catholic Historical Association and is an Instructor of Record for the Religious Studies department at the University of Alabama. Her research interest is focused on the twentieth-century American Civil Rights Movement and the Catholic Church’s response to racism and the participation of Catholic clergy, nuns, and laypeople in marches, sit-ins, and kneel-ins during the 1950s and 1960s. Allison is also a Video Editor for The Religious Studies Project, producing videos for the podcast and marketing team. She tweets from @AllisonIsidore1. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/education
Games are an established aide in pre-college mathematics education. Meanwhile, innumerable popular books have investigated the mathematics of games. In a new edited volume for the AMS/MAA Classroom Resource Materials Series, topologist and NSF educational program director Mindy Capaldi and contributors join advanced topics with innovative lesson designs in possibly the first book of game-based mathematics education for college curricula. Teaching Mathematics Through Games (MAA Press, 2020) comprises lesson material for the full breadth of coursework taken by math students involving just as diverse and often surprising a breadth of games. I've become interested in how edited collections come about, especially in mathematics, so i took some time at the start to ask Dr. Capaldi about the conception and production of this project. We then discussed a selection of six of the book's seventeen chapters that offer a sense of its scope and a taste of its value. To touch briefly on some chapters we did not discuss: Christine Latulippe use the combinatorial format of Sudoku and dates in the history of mathematics to practice converting between numeration systems; and Jacob Heidenreich adapts the game play of Battleship to hone students' understanding of properties of functions. In addition to a detailed description of game play and how it ties in to the topic, each chapter contains exercises, problems, or activities that build upon the core lesson, and an online supplement provides material to support the lessons in practice. The book is designed specifically for instructors and provides rich material for an active learning curriculum, but avid and curious gamers and math geeks will also find much to enjoy. Suggested companion works:
MAA Instructional Practices Guide
Gathering 4 Gardner
Mindy Capaldi is an Associate Professor of Mathematics and Statistics at Valparaiso University in Indiana. She completed her Ph.D. at North Carolina State University in 2010 and is currently on a leave of absence as a Program Director at the National Science Foundation. Cory Brunson is an Assistant Professor at the Laboratory for Systems Medicine at the University of Florida. His research focuses on geometric and topological approaches to the analysis of medical and healthcare data. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/education
Andrew M. Henry is a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of Religion at Boston University and founder of the educational YouTube channel, Religion for Breakfast. Andrew has produced over 50 video lectures on a variety of religious studies topics, used by educators worldwide. You can follow him on twitter @andrewmarkhenry. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/education
We are delighted to present All for One and One for All: Public Seminar Series on Mental Health in Academia and Society. All for One and One for All talks will shine the light on and discuss mental health issues in academia across all levels – from students to faculty, as well as in wider society. Seminars are held online once per month on Wednesdays at 5pm CET/ 11am EST and free for all to attend. Speakers include academics, organisations, and health professionals whose work focuses on mental health. Live Q and A sessions will be held after each talk. For live webinar schedule please visit Lashuel lab website. Follow us on Twitter: @LashuelLab Today’s talk is with Mark Henick, Dr. Hilal Lashuel and Galina Limorenko Join bestselling author and internationally recognized mental health advocate Mark Henick in a conversation on wellbeing across the lifespan. We will explore a broader understanding of mental health, including aspects of how the brain, the mind, and the social environment contribute to building a secure and healthy foundation. Practical strategies and takeaways for managing difficult emotions, and enriching positive experiences will be shared. Mark evocatively uses his personal lived experiences, as well as his years of professional advocacy, to provide clear, simple understanding in a context of supportive, curious inquiry where questions and discussion are welcome. MARK HENICK’s hit viral TEDx talk about the stranger who saved his life has been viewed and shared millions of times. Over the last two decades, he has appeared in hundreds of television, radio, print and online features about mental health. His bylines include CNN, CNBC, USA Today, The Chicago Tribune, and many others. PEOPLE Magazine called Mark “one of Canada’s most prominent mental health advocates”. He's previously served on the board of the Mental Health Commission of Canada, and as the youngest ever president of a Canadian Mental Health Association division. As host and executive producer for both the So-Called Normal and Living Well podcasts, he's had hundreds of conversations with experts, celebrities, and public figures about mental health. Today’s conversation features sensitive topics we engage with and explore. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/education
AD KAN (NO MORE) was founded in 1988 by a group of academics at Tel Aviv University. The initiative, a public pressure group, was prompted by public indifference (at best) about Israel’s 20-year occupation of the Palestinian Territories, and its forceful attempts to suppress the nascent First Intifada popular uprising in the West Bank. Whilst outward facing in their basic ambitions, the founder members of AD KAN also understood that academia’s failure to engage with the realities of the moment—through debate, protest, even applied research—could easily be taken too as acceptance of the status quo, embodying as it did the subaltern position of the Palestinian people. Can Academics Change the World? An Israeli Anthropologist’s Testimony on the Rise and Fall of a Protest Movement on Campus (Berghahn Books, 2020) by Moshe Shokeid, is a personal account of the author’s experiences as co-founder of AD KAN. An account of dissent on campus, the book is at once a memoir, a historical account, and an anthropological consideration of the academic’s responsibility as a public intellectual. Can Academics Change the World? remains relevant today, with many of the issues underpinning the formation and activities of AD KAN still live: the occupation of the West Bank; attempts to force Israel into concession and compromise, principally through the Boycott, Diversification, and Sanctions (BDS) campaign; and the continued status of the academic as public intellectual, in Israel and elsewhere—this cast against a university landscape that has reorganized itself around a different set of principles in the three decades since AD KAN ceased its activities. Professor Moshe Shokeid is Professor Emeritus of Anthropology at Tel Aviv University. His other books include Three Jewish Journeys through the Anthropologist's Lens: From Morocco to the Negev, Zion to the Big Apple, the Closet to the Bimah; A Gay Synagogue in New York; Children of Circumstances: Israeli Emigrants in New York; and The Dual Heritage: Immigrants from the Atlas Mountains in an Israeli Village. Akin Ajayi (@AkinAjayi) is a writer and editor, based in Tel Aviv. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/education
Mark Nordenberg is part of a vanishing breed within higher education – a leader who has spent almost his entire career at a single university. In the first of a two-part episode, Nordenberg shares his background and describes his journey at the University of Pittsburgh, beginning with a quick rise to full professor in the Law School, followed by successful stints as Dean, then interim Provost, and ultimately Chancellor, where he served for 19 years. He discusses the challenges Pitt was facing when he became Chancellor in 1996 and how he was able to address these, helping Pitt become one of the 5 leading research universities in the U.S. in grant dollars, and in the process help fuel the renaissance of Pittsburgh from Steel City to a focus on Eds & Meds. David Finegold is the president of Chatham University. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/education
When Communication Became a Discipline (Lexington, 2021) argues that speech and journalism professors embraced the concept of communication between 1964 and 1982. They changed the names of their scholarly societies and journals and revised their academic curricula. Five “strands” of scholarship became and remain central to this transformation. Communication is not a traditional academic discipline, but its scholars convinced their colleagues to understand and embrace it. When Communication Became a Discipline presents an argument with historical evidence that illustrates scholarly creativity at its finest. William F. Eadie is professor emeritus of journalism and media studies and director of the School of Communication at San Diego State University. William F. Eadie was former director of the School of Communication at San Diego State University, where he was responsible for leadership of a large program that encompassed all aspects of communication, media and journalism. Tom Discenna is Professor of Communication at Oakland University whose work examines issues of academic labor and communicative labor more broadly. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/education
Mid-century America had a problem talking about sex. Dr. Mary Calderone first diagnosed this condition and, in 1964, led the uphill battle to de-stigmatize sex education. Supporters hailed her as the “grandmother of modern sex education” while her detractors painted her as an “aging libertine,” but both could agree that she was quickly shaping the way sex was discussed in the classroom. Part biography, part social history, The Transformation of American Sex Education: Mary Calderone and the Fight for Sexual Health (NYU Press, 2022) for the first time situates Dr. Mary Calderone at the center of decades of political, cultural, and religious conflict in the fight for comprehensive sex education. Ellen S. More examines Americans’ attempts to come to terms with the vexed subject of sex education in schools from the late 1940s to the early twenty-first century. Using Mary Calderone’s life and career as a touchstone, she traces the origins of modern sex education in the United States from the work of a group of reformers who coalesced around Calderone to create the Sexuality Information and Education Council of the United States (SIECUS) in 1964, to the development and use of the competing approaches known as “abstinence-based” and “comprehensive” sex education from the 1980s into the twenty-first century.
A fascinating and timely read, The Transformation of American Sex Education provides a substantial contribution to the history of one of America’s most intense and protracted culture wars, and the first account of the woman who fought those battles. Jane Scimeca is Professor of History at Brookdale Community College. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/education
In this interdisciplinary study, Anthony Cerulli probes late- and postcolonial reforms in ayurvedic education, the development of the ayurvedic college, and the impacts of the college curriculum on ways that ayurvedic physicians understand and use the Sanskrit classics in their professional work today. By interrogating the politics surrounding the place of the Sanskrit classics in ayurvedic curricula, The Practice of Texts: Education and Healing in South India (U California Press, 2022) reveals a spectrum of views about the history and tradition of Ayurveda in modern India. Raj Balkaran is a scholar, online educator, and life coach. For information see rajbalkaran.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/education
Benjamin P. Marcus is the religious literacy specialist with the Religious Freedom Center of the Newseum Institute, where he examines the intersection of education, religious literacy, and identity formation in the United States. He is a contributing author in the Oxford Handbook on Religion and American Education, where he writes about the importance of religious literacy education. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/education
Race is the subject of passionate and increasingly angry debate. But amidst all the talk of unconscious bias it’s an area into which many fear to tread. In this podcast Professor McWhorter of Colombia University outlines his sometimes controversial views on these issues and explains why he wants to debate them in public. His latest book is Woke Racism: How a New Religion Has Betrayed Black America (Portfolio, 2021). Owen Bennett-Jones is a freelance journalist and writer. A former BBC correspondent and presenter he has been a resident foreign correspondent in Bucharest, Geneva, Islamabad, Hanoi and Beirut. He is recently wrote a history of the Bhutto dynasty which was published by Yale University Press. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/education
Few people realize that raising children is the single largest industry in the United States. Yet this vital work receives little political support, and its primary workers—parents—labor in isolation. If they ask for help, they are made to feel inadequate; there is no centralized organization to represent their interests; and there is virtually nothing spent on research and development to help them achieve their goals. It’s almost as if parents are set up to fail—and the result is lost opportunities that limit children’s success and make us all worse off. In The Parent Trap: How to Stop Overloading Parents and Fix Our Inequality Crisis (MIT Press, 2022), Nate Hilger combines cutting-edge social science research, revealing historical case studies, and on-the-ground investigation to recast parenting as the hidden crucible of inequality. Parents are expected not only to care for their children but to help them develop the skills they will need to thrive in today’s socioeconomic reality—but most parents, including even the most caring parents on the planet, are not trained in skill development and lack the resources to get help. How do we fix this? The solution, Hilger argues, is to ask less of parents, not more. America should consider child development a public investment with a monumental payoff. We need programs inspired by Medicare—call them Familycare—to drive this investment. To make it happen, parents need to become an interest group that can wield its political power on behalf of children—who will always be the largest bloc of disenfranchised people in this country. The Parent Trap exposes the true costs of our society’s unrealistic expectations around parenting and lays out a profoundly hopeful blueprint for reform. Nate Hilger is a Harvard and Stanford-trained economist who has worked as a professor of economics at Brown University and an economist and data scientist in Silicon Valley. While in academia he was a Research Fellow at the National Bureau of Economic Research and continues to hold an affiliation with the Population Studies and Training Center at Brown. In 2020 he served as a lead policy consultant on early childhood and non-K12 child development issues for Pete Buttigieg’s presidential campaign. His academic research on child development and inequality has been published in The Quarterly Journal of Economics and other leading peer-reviewed journals, and has been featured in The New York Times, The Washington Post, and other major media outlets. He lives with his wife and son in Redwood City, California. Peter Lorentzen is an Associate Professor in the Department of Economics at the University of San Francisco, where he leads a new Master's program in Applied Economics focused on the digital economy. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/education
Political Scientist Stacy Ulbig has a new book that dives into the political attitudes and behaviors of college students to assess how polarization and partisan antipathy in the general public have some genesis on college campuses. Angry Politics: Partisan Hatred and Political Polarization Among College Students (UP of Kansas, 2020) explores affective polarization, and elicited responses from students who have noted that they are experiencing self-censorship, across the political spectrum. The study measured levels of political animosity based on different kinds of news media consumption, with those who consumed social media as the source of their news demonstrating the most animosity towards opposition partisans. Students tend to be nervous when faced with having to deal with conflict, and this inclination also leads them to self-sort and isolate from those who hold different political views. At the same time, the research indicates that students are feeling more vocal in articulating their opinions and beliefs. Part of the experience at college is to learn how to listen to different perspectives and opinions, and to assess diverse input and information. This study is fascinating, examining the layers of student behavior around politics in an atmosphere that is characterized as fraught by a variety of news outlets. Lilly J. Goren is professor of political science at Carroll University in Waukesha, WI. She is co-editor of the award winning book, Women and the White House: Gender, Popular Culture, and Presidential Politics (University Press of Kentucky, 2012), as well as co-editor of Mad Men and Politics: Nostalgia and the Remaking of Modern America (Bloomsbury Academic, 2015). Email her comments at lgoren@carrollu.edu or tweet to @gorenlj. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/education
Listen to this interview of John Measey, Associate Professor of Biological Sciences at Stellenbosch University, South Africa, and author of How to Write a PhD in Biological Sciences: A Guide for the Uninitiated (CRC Press, 2021). We talk about how the communication of science is changing, and we talk about how you can keep up and produce the research you want to produce. John Measey : "We're in an extremely interesting time, because the potential that we have to not just publish what we've written — which is where we used to be with scholarly journals, which just had the articles and the predigested data (if you like) in the tables and figures — but now we're at a moment where we can actually put all the data out there, and we can also put out there all of the code that we wrote so that people can repeat the analysis. And really, the writing that we're doing is to communicate one team's particular understanding of the questions they've posed and of their particular interest in certain parts of the dataset. The writing is now a means of not just communicating the particular questions that we have there, but also of producing and of advertising the dataset for other people to use. So, I think we're starting to enter this very dynamic period in publishing where the actual article will be one of our many products in any study that we do." Read and use How to Write a PhD in Biological Sciences http://howtowriteaphd.org/ Read and use How to Publish in Biological Sciences http://howtopublishscience.org... Watch Daniel edit your science here. Contact Daniel at writeyourresearch@gmail.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/education
John Camardella teaches religion and social studies at Prospect High School in Mount Prospect, Illinois. This conversation touches on the organization, implementation, and day-to-day operations inside a high school course focused on world religions. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/education
In Speaking of Race: Language, Identity, and Schooling Among African American Children (Lexington Books, 2020), Jennifer Delfino explores the linguistic practices of African American children in an after school program in Washington, DC. Drawing on ethnographic research, Delfino illustrates how students’ linguistic practices are often perceived as barriers to learning and achievement and provides an in-depth look at how students challenge this perception by using language to transform the meaning of race in relation to ideas about academic success. Jennifer Delfino is assistant professor in the Department of Academic Literacy and Linguistics at Borough of Manhattan Community College, The City University of New York. Schneur Zalman Newfield is an Assistant Professor of Sociology at Borough of Manhattan Community College, City University of New York, and the author of Degrees of Separation: Identity Formation While Leaving Ultra-Orthodox Judaism (Temple University Press, 2020). Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/education
Today I talked to Corey Landon Wozniak about his Revealer article (2022) "The Buddha at the Bellagio: (Teaching) Religion in Sin City." As Wozniak points out, Las Vegas (for all that it's sin city) is full of religion, all kinds of it. He talks about how religion is done in America's Sodom and Gomorrah rolled into one. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/education
The University Network for Human Rights facilitates supervised undergraduate engagement in the practice of human rights at colleges and universities in the United States and across the globe. The University Network partners with advocacy organizations and communities affected or threatened by abusive state, corporate, or private conduct to advance human rights at home and abroad; trains undergraduate students in interdisciplinary human rights protection and advocacy; and collaborates with academics and human rights practitioners in other parts of the world to foster the creation of practical, interdisciplinary programs in human rights. James (Jim) Cavallaro is Executive Director of the University Network for Human Rights. He has taught human rights law and practice for nearly a quarter-century, most recently at Wesleyan University, Stanford Law School (2011-2019), and Harvard Law School (2002-2011). Caleb Zakarin is the Assistant Editor of the New Books Network (Twitter: @caleb_zakarin). Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/education
Today I talked to Autumn Wilke of Grinnell College about her book (co-authored with Nancy J. Evans, Ellen M. Broido, and Kirsten R. Brown) Disability in Higher Education: A Social Justice Approach (Jossey-Bass, 2017). Disability in Higher Education examines how disability is conceptualized in higher education and ways in which students, faculty, and staff with disabilities are viewed and served on college campuses. Drawing on multiple theoretical frameworks, research, and experience creating inclusive campuses, this text offers a new framework for understanding disability using a social justice lens. Many institutions focus solely on legal access and accommodation, enabling a system of exclusion and oppression. However, using principles of universal design, social justice, and other inclusive practices, campus environments can be transformed into more inclusive and equitable settings for all constituents. The authors consider the experiences of students, faculty, and staff with disabilities and offer strategies for addressing ableism within a variety of settings, including classrooms, residence halls, admissions and orientation, student organizations, career development, and counseling. They also expand traditional student affairs understandings of disability issues by including chapters on technology, law, theory, and disability services. Using social justice principles, the discussion spans the entire college experience of individuals with disabilities, and avoids any single-issue focus such as physical accessibility or classroom accommodations. The book will help readers:
Consider issues in addition to access and accommodation
Use principles of universal design to benefit students and employees in academic, cocurricular, and employment settings
Understand how disability interacts with multiple aspects of identity and experience.
Despite their best intentions, college personnel frequently approach disability from the singular perspective of access to the exclusion of other important issues. This book provides strategies for addressing ableism in the assumptions, policies and practices, organizational structures, attitudes, and physical structures of higher education. Marshall Poe is the founder and editor of the New Books Network. He can be reached at marshallpoe@newbooksnetwork.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/education
Most economists would argue that policies and business strategies are most likely to succeed if they are evidence-based, with their efficacy demonstrated empirically by randomized controlled trials before they are implemented at scale. John List spearheaded the introduction of field experiments in economics, publishing a raft of influential studies with this approach, and using his research insights to help shape both government policy and business strategy. He has learned a thing or two along the way. In The Voltage Effect: How to Make Good Ideas Great and Great Ideas Scale (Currency, 2022), he draws upon his own experiences and his research to show all the ways in which an idea that “works” in a field experiment can fall flat when rolled out at a larger scale. This book provides tremendous insight into both the value of field experiments and the careful attention to detail needed to ensure that they teach us the right lessons. John List is a professor of economics at the University of Chicago. He has also served as Chief Economist at tech economy pioneers Uber and Lyft, and recently agreed to take on the same role at an established linchpin of the middle-American retail, Walmart. Host Peter Lorentzen is an Associate Professor in the Department of Economics at the University of San Francisco, where he leads a new Master's program in Applied Economics focused on the digital economy. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/education
The Sentences That Create Us: Crafting a Writer’s Life in Prison (Haymarket Books, 2022) is an expansive resource for incarcerated writers. With over 50 contributors like Reginald Dwayne Betts, Randall Horton, and Nicole Shawan Junior, this resource provides the foundations for crafting a vibrant literary life with the carceral state. The guide offers advice including editing, publishing works, and developing prison writing groups while weaving first-person narratives. The Sentences That Create Us will show incarcerated people and allies how to release their stories that prisons caged. N'Kosi Oates is a Ph.D. candidate in Africana Studies at Brown University. Find him on Twitter at NKosiOates. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/education
At a time when a growing number of universities are moving away from tenure and hiring a higher percentage of faculty on non tenure-track appointments, Chatham University in Pittsburgh, PA recently made the decision to reinstate tenure more than two decades after phasing it out. I discuss the factors that originally led Chatham to replace tenure with a capstone system and what convinced the Board to restore tenure with VPAA Dr. Jenna Templeton and Dr. Joe MacNeil, who chaired the faculty committee that conducted the review of the system for reviewing and promoting faculty. One of the distinctive elements of Chatham’s new tenure system is that it includes professors of practice and clinical professors through a broadened definition of scholarship. We conclude by examining the lessons for other institutions as they prepare for the challenges higher education will be facing in the coming decade. David Finegold is the president of Chatham University. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/education
Listen to this interview of Joseph Cheatle, Director of the Writing & Media Center at Iowa State University. We talk about how communication will change your life. Joseph Cheatle : "One of the typical traits of writing center tutors is that they are just really great. I don't know how else to describe it other than that they are often the best of the best at an institution in terms of their leadership, their vision, their work ethic, their desire for professional development. I mean, people who are writing center tutors, when they go out for job interviews, they often get asked about their writing center work, because people know that those are going to be good employees. So, there's a lot to be said for the students who come in and work at writing centers. Really these are just some of the best students at the institution: hard-working, ethical, interesting, and dedicated." Visit the Writing & Media Center. Watch Daniel edit your science here. Contact Daniel at writeyourresearch@gmail.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/education
In Childhood, Religion, and School Injustice (Cork University Press, 2020), Dr. Karl Kitching examines how debates about religion and education internationally often presume the neutrality of secular education governance as an irrefutable public good. However, understandings of secular freedom, rights and neutrality in schooling are continuously contested, and social movements have disrupted the notion that there is a uniform public to be educated. Simultaneously, unjust, neoliberal and majoritarian education policies constantly undermine collective notions of what is good and just. Dr. Kitching presents original empirical research on how religious and secular schools are positioned as competitors for parents’ attention, and shows how inequalities shape parents’ interest in, and access to, both secular and religious schools. Kitching particularly explores how children in urban and rural settings negotiate the joys, pleasures, paradoxes and injustices of schooling and childhood. He outlines ways in which children’s social positions, relationships and encounters with religious and consumer objects inform who they can become, and who and what they value. Drawing on the above research, Childhood, Religion and School Injustice demonstrates the need to engage with each child’s plurality, and to recognise multiple inequalities experienced by families across schools. Given that the mass privatisation and deregulation of schooling favours majority and advantaged social groups, Kitching argues for the becoming public of school systems and localities. In such a process, majoritarian, narrow self-interest is challenged, unchosen obligations to others are recognised, and collective imaginings of what a ‘good’ childhood is, are publicly engaged. Dr. Karl Kitching joined the School of Education, University of Birmingham in June 2020 as a Reader in Education Policy. Previously he was a Senior Lecturer in Education, and Director of Equality, Diversity and Inclusion at University College Cork, Ireland. Carrie Lynn Evans is a PhD student at Université Laval in Quebec City. carrie-lynn.evans@lit.ulaval.ca Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/education
Kendall Square in Cambridge, Massachusetts, has been called “the most innovative square mile on the planet.” It's a life science hub, hosting Biogen, Moderna, Pfizer, Takeda, and others. It's a major tech center, with Google, Microsoft, IBM, Amazon, Facebook, and Apple all occupying big chunks of pricey office space. Kendall Square also boasts a dense concentration of startups, with leading venture capital firms conveniently located nearby. And of course, MIT is just down the block. In Where Futures Converge: Kendall Square and the Making of a Global Innovation Hub (MIT Press, 2022), Robert Buderi offers the first detailed account of the unique ecosystem that is Kendall Square, chronicling the endless cycles of change and reinvention that have driven its evolution. Buderi, who himself has worked in Kendall Square for the past twenty years, tells fascinating stories of great innovators and their innovations that stretch back two centuries. Before biotech and artificial intelligence, there was railroad car innovation, the first long-distance telephone call, the Polaroid camera, MIT's once secret, now famous Radiation Laboratory, and much more. Buderi takes readers on a walking tour of the square and talks to dozens of innovators, entrepreneurs, urban planners, historians, and others. He considers Kendall Square's limitations—it's “gentrification gone rogue,” by one description, with little affordable housing, no pharmacy, and a scarce middle class—and its strengths: the “human collisions” that spur innovation. What's next for Kendall Square? Buderi speculates about the next big innovative enterprises and outlines lessons for aspiring innovation districts. More important, he asks how Kendall Square can be both an innovation hub and a diversity, equity, and inclusion hub. There's a lot of work still to do. Galina Limorenko is a doctoral candidate in Neuroscience with a focus on biochemistry and molecular biology of neurodegenerative diseases at EPFL in Switzerland. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/education
Listen to this interview of Joe Esposito, Senior Partner of Clarke & Esposito. We talk about the space between academic research and consumer markets, and we travel in space to the metaverse! Joe Esposito : "The thing that's at issue when a field of study begins publishing more in journals and less in books is another aspect of the audience. If you're a scientist, you write short articles because this is what gets you tenure, this is what gets you a promotion, this is what allows you to go to grants-making bodies and get money to hire postdoctoral students and to build out your laboratory. So the aspect of audience I'm talking about here is broader than just your fellow experts in your field — it's broader than just the readers of your communications, because it includes, too, the business model that these communications are placed into. There is money in articles in the sciences. There is very little money in books in the sciences. But switch over to history, anthropology, literary criticism, and the whole situation gets turned on its head. There the tenure promotion committees are looking for books, preferably published with a university press. So, when we talk about questions like where the book is going, where text is going, or whether digital or print, we can't escape the fact that all these things live within an environment of people pursuing their own personal interests, which itself has a economic basis as well." Clarke & Esposito have an excellent newsletter on scholarly communication and publishing. You can read and subscribe here. Joe is also a regular contributor to The Scholarly Kitchen, which you can read and subscribe to here. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/education
This is an age of crisis. That much we can agree on. But a crisis of what? And how do we get out of it? Many on the right call for tax cuts and deregulation. Others on the left rage against the top 1 percent and demand wholesale economic change. Voices on both sides line up against globalization: restrict trade to protect jobs. In The Wolf at the Door: The Menace of Economic Insecurity and How to Fight It (Harvard UP, 2020), two leading political analysts argue that these views are badly mistaken. Michael Graetz and Ian Shapiro focus on what really worries people: not what the rich are making but rather their own insecurity and that of people close to them. Americans are concerned about losing what they have, whether jobs, status, or safe communities. They fear the wolf at the door. The solution is not protectionism or class warfare but a return to the hard work of building coalitions around realistic goals and pursuing them doggedly through the political system. This, Graetz and Shapiro explain, is how earlier reformers achieved meaningful changes, from the abolition of the slave trade to civil rights legislation. The authors make substantial recommendations for increasing jobs, improving wages, protecting families suffering from unemployment, and providing better health insurance and child care, and they guide us through the strategies needed to enact change. These are achievable reforms that would make Americans more secure. The Wolf at the Door is one of those rare books that not only diagnose our problems but also show us how we can address them. Tom Discenna is Professor of Communication at Oakland University whose work examines issues of academic labor and communicative labor more broadly. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/education
A veteran journalist, essayist, and award-winning education writer, Linda K. Wertheimer is the author of Faith Ed: Teaching about Religion in an Age of Intolerance. The book focuses on public schools’ ups and downs as they teach about world religions. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/education
We are delighted to present All for One and One for All: Public Seminar Series on Mental Health in Academia and Society. All for One and One for All talks will shine the light on and discuss mental health issues in academia across all levels – from students to faculty, as well as in wider society. Seminars are held online once per month on Wednesdays at 5pm CET/ 11am EST and free for all to attend. Speakers include academics, organisations, and health professionals whose work focuses on mental health. Live Q and A sessions will be held after each talk. For live webinar schedule please visit Lashuel lab website. Follow us on Twitter: @LashuelLab Today’s talk is with Dr. Wendy Suzuki, Dr. Hilal Lashuel and Galina Limorenko Collectively, we are living through a time of unprecedented uncertainty including what feels like an endless series of real and existential threats to our health and well-being. These unique times have led to some of the highest levels of anxiety that have been reported in the general population. Prof. Suzuki will describe a novel, practical, and science-based approach to transform "bad" anxiety to good. This shift from bad to good anxiety can help you accelerate focus and productivity, boost performance and even foster more creativity. You will leave this presentation with a set of concrete tools that will allow you to harness the brain activation underlying your anxiety and make it work for you. Dr. Wendy Suzuki is an award-winning Professor of Neural Science and Psychology at New York University where she studies the effects of physical activity and meditation on the brain. She is a best-selling author of the book Healthy Brain Happy Life that was also made into a PBS special. Her TED talk on the brain-changing benefits of exercise has more than 55 million views. Her second book Good Anxiety: Harnessing the Power of the Most Misunderstood Emotion was published in Fall of 2021. Suzuki is a passionate thought leader, spreading the understanding of how we can use the principles of brain plasticity to maximize our brain’s performance and transform our lives for the better. Galina Limorenko is a doctoral candidate in Neuroscience with a focus on biochemistry and molecular biology of neurodegenerative diseases at EPFL in Switzerland. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/education
During the nineteenth century, nearly ten thousand Americans traveled to Germany to study in universities renowned for their research and teaching. By the mid-twentieth century, American institutions led the world. How did America become the center of excellence in higher education? And what does that story reveal about who will lead in the twenty-first century? In Allies and Rivals: German-American Exchange and the Rise of the Modern Research University (University of Chicago Press, 2021), Dr. Emily Levine presents the first history of the ascent of American higher education seen through the lens of German-American exchange. “This book treats transatlantic culture exchange and competition as its topic, methodology, and causal historical mechanism. It uncovers the origins of the research university by pulling apart the strands of parallel, comparative, and intertwined stories that unfolded on both sides of the Atlantic. Chapters pair individuals and institutions from Germany and America to reveal side-by-side stories about how idealists made compromises to create universities they hoped would bring tangible benefits to their respective communities.” In a series of compelling portraits of such leaders as Wilhelm von Humboldt, Martha Carey Thomas, and W. E. B. Du Bois, Dr. Levine shows how academic innovators on both sides of the Atlantic competed and collaborated to shape the research university. Even as nations sought world dominance through scholarship, universities retained values apart from politics and economics. Open borders enabled Americans to unite the English college and German PhD to create the modern research university, a hybrid now replicated the world over. Dr. Levine argues that “the university did not emerge in isolation nor was it ever a finished project. Rather, the compromises were constantly renegotiated by these innovators and other social actors amid changing contexts. As the society that the university served evolved, the university coevolved into such forms as the central state university in Berlin, the land grant in California, and the privately funded urban university in Baltimore, and each time the academic social contract was reconstituted.” In a captivating narrative spanning one hundred years, Dr. Levine upends notions of the university as a timeless ideal, restoring the contemporary university to its rightful place in history. In so doing she reveals that innovation in the twentieth century was rooted in international cooperation—a crucial lesson that bears remembering today. This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose doctoral work focused on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/education
Welcome to The Academic Life! In this episode you’ll hear:
Why it is so important to have the conversation about “Equity in Higher Education” and why now is the time to do so
What equity means; for whom, and what equity entails in thought and action
What it means to perform equity as a routine practice in higher education
What makes individuals equity minded
Today’s book is: From Equity Talk to Equity Walk: Expanding Practitioner Knowledge for Racial Justice in Higher Education, draws from campus-based research projects sponsored by the AAC&U and the Center for Urban Education at the University of Southern California. The book is a practical guide on the design and application of campus change strategies for achieving equitable outcomes. The authors offer advice on how to build an equity-minded campus culture aligning strategic priorities and institutional missions to advance equity. Our guest is: Dr. Tia Brown McNair, is the Vice President in the Office of Diversity, Equity, and Student Success and Executive Director for the Truth, Racial Healing, and Transformation (TRHT) Campus Centers at the Association of American Colleges and Universities (AAC&U) in Washington, DC. She oversees both funded projects and AAC&U’s continuing programs on equity, inclusive excellence, high-impact practices, and student success. McNair also directs AAC&U’s Summer Institutes on High-Impact Practices and Student Success, and Truth, Racial Healing, & Transformation Campus Centers. McNair currently serves as the project director for several AAC&U initiatives: "Truth, Racial Healing and Transformation Campus Centers," "Strengthening Guided Pathways and Career Success by Ensuring Students Are Learning," and “Purposeful Pathways: Faculty Planning and Curricular Coherence.” Our host is: Dr. Zebulun R. Davenport, Vice President for Student Affairs, West Chester University. Listeners to this episode might also be interested in:
AAC&U’s Committing to Equity and Inclusive Excellence: Campus Guide for Self-Study and Planning.
AAC&U’s Step Up and Lead for Equity: What Higher Education Can Do to Reverse Our Deepening Divides.
Five principles for enacting equity by design by E.M. Bensimon, A.C. Dowd, and K. Witham in Diversity & Democracy 19 (1)
Engaging the “Race Question”: Accountability and Equity in U.S. Higher Education, Multicultural Education Series by A.C. Dowd and E.M. Bensimon. (Teachers College Press).
Heutsche, A.M. and Hicks, K. (2018). Embedding equity through the practice of real talk. In: A Vision for Equity: Results from AAC&U’s Project: Committing to Equity and Inclusive Excellence: Campus-Based Strategies for Student Success. Washington, DC: Association of American Colleges.
You are smart and capable, but you aren’t an island, and neither are we. We reach across our mentor network to bring you experts about everything from how to finish that project, to how to take care of your beautiful mind. Wish we’d bring on an expert about something? DM us on Twitter: The Academic Life @AcademicLifeNBN. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/education
How can new faculty find success in academia and what can universities do to support them? In The Empowered Professor: Breaking the Unspoken Codes of Inequity in Academia (Teachers College Press, 2021), the author demonstrates how a coaching-focused stance toward faculty development can improve equitable conditions within the university and contribute to faculty retention and well-being. For faculty and graduate students, this book emphasizes the skills needed to be a successful academic with a focus on lifespan learning. For universities, this book articulates how institutions can implement an equity-driven plan for faculty development. In the first section, Mitra investigates the structures that can contribute to inequities, spotlighting the unspoken assumptions and lack of clarity of institutional processes. In the second section, she interweaves the building blocks needed for faculty success (agency, belonging, and competence) with the traditional academic expectations of research, teaching, and service. With engaging vignettes and extended examples of faculty experiences, The Empowered Professor centers on the space in which individuals can find success within academic settings while maintaining their integrity. Dana Mitra is a professor of education policy studies at the Pennsylvania State University. Her books include Civic Education in the Elementary Grades: Promoting Student Engagement in an Era of Accountability. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/education
Anyone interested in how education policy is made and unmade, in school funding models, their historical and contemporary development and their effects on equity, will find this book fascinating. The ‘Gonski’ review of Australian education funding, commissioned in 2010 by a Labor federal government, sent an expert panel of educators from different sectors on a listening tour of the nation. Submissions from thousands of schools revealed that existing policies were not serving those students most in need of support. The panel sought ways to respond to the troubling and growing gap between the educational outcomes of disadvantaged children and their more privileged peers. Their report proposed a model that provided targeted funding to disadvantaged students based on need, a solution that promised to close the gaps and improve overall achievement. Optimism gave way to intense politicking from lobby groups and many of the Gonski recommendations fell by the wayside or were twisted in ways that reinforced existing inequities. Over a decade later, the problems have only worsened. Educational outcomes for Australian schoolchildren continue to decline, and there is a growing correlation between social disadvantage and educational under-achievement. Commonwealth funding continues to be skewed towards wealthier private schools and Australia’s PISA results are moving in the wrong direction. So, the authors ask: why hasn’t Gonski worked, and what should we do now? Written by experienced educators with a keen interest in policy, Tom Greenwell and Chris Bonnor, Waiting for Gonski examines in detail how and why Australia has failed its schools and proposes solutions for the future. UNSW Press webpage for Waiting for Gonski. Tom Greenwell on Twitter: @TBGreenwell. Chris Bonnor articles for The Guardian. Alice Garner is a historian, teacher and performer with a PhD from the University of Melbourne, Australia. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/education
We speak with Richard Detweiler about his new book The Evidence Liberal Arts Needs: Lives of Consequence, Inquiry and Accomplishment (MIT Press, 2021). This multi-year project, which entailed interviews with a national sample of over 1,000 college graduates aged 25-64, provides convincing evidence of the benefits the liberal arts in enabling individuals to lead more fulfilling lives and successful careers. He uses an innovative definition of the liberal arts which focuses on the distinctive: 1) purpose, 2) context, and 3) content of a liberal arts education, measuring the frequency and intensity of these elements across different higher education institutions. He also shares insights from his tenure as President of Hartwick College and the head of the Great Lakes College Association. David Finegold is the president of Chatham University. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/education
What is education? Most of the time, we have little patience for this question because we take the answer to be obvious: we identify education with school learning. This book focuses on education outside of the school context as a basis for criticizing and improving school learning. Following the examples of Jean-Jacques Rousseau and John Dewey, Arcilla seeks to harmonize schooling with a more pervasive education we are all naturally undergoing. He develops a philosophical theory of education that stresses the experience of being led out —a theory latent in the Latin term, “educere”— by examining the road movies of Wim Wenders. Wim Wenders's Road Movie Philosophy: Education Without Learning (Bloomsbury, 2020) contributes both to our understanding of another crucial kind of education our schooling could better serve, and to our appreciation of what unifies and distinguishes Wenders's achievements in cinema. René V. Arcilla is Professor of Philosophy of Education in the Steinhardt School of Education, at New York University Gustavo E. Gutiérrez Suárez is PhD candidate in Social Anthropology, and BA in Social Communication. His areas of interest include Andean and Amazonian Anthropology, Film theory and aesthetics. You can follow him on Twitter vía @GustavoEGSuarez Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/education
Today I talked to Tamara Beauboeuf-Lafontant about her book To Live More Abundantly: Black Collegiate Women, Howard University, and the Audacity of Dean Lucy Diggs Slowe (University of Georgia Press, 2022). How have Black women fostered belonging in higher education institutions that have persisted in marginalizing them? Focusing on the career of Lucy Diggs Slowe, the first trained African American student affairs professional in the United States, this book examines how her philosophy of "living more abundantly" envisioned educational access and institutionalized campus thriving for Black college women. Born in 1883, Slowe was orphaned at a young age, raised by a paternal aunt, and earned a scholarship to attend Howard University in 1904. As an undergraduate, she helped found Alpha Kappa Alpha, the first African American sorority in the United States, and served as its first president. After graduating valedictorian of her 1908 class, she excelled as a secondary school teacher and administrator and became a national tennis champion. In 1922, she returned to her alma mater as its first full-time dean of women. Over her fifteen-year tenure at Howard University, Slowe empowered early twentieth-century Black college women to invest in their individual growth, engage in community building, and pursue leadership opportunities. To foster Black women's higher education success, Slowe organized both the National Association of College Women and the National Association of Women's Deans and Advisers of Colored Schools. As she established long-standing traditions and affirming practices to encourage Black women's involvement in the extracurricular life of their campuses, Slowe's deaning philosophy of "living more abundantly" represents an important Black feminist approach to inclusion in higher education. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/education
The humanities, considered by many as irrelevant for modern careers and hopelessly devoid of funding, seem to be in a perpetual state of crisis, at the mercy of modernizing and technological forces that are driving universities towards academic pursuits that pull in grant money and direct students to lucrative careers. But as Paul Reitter and Chad Wellmon show in Permanent Crisis: The Humanities in a Disenchanted Age (U Chicago Press, 2021), this crisis isn’t new—in fact, it’s as old as the humanities themselves. Today’s humanities scholars experience and react to basic pressures in ways that are strikingly similar to their nineteenth-century German counterparts. The humanities came into their own as scholars framed their work as a unique resource for resolving crises of meaning and value that threatened other cultural or social goods. The self-understanding of the modern humanities didn’t merely take shape in response to a perceived crisis; it also made crisis a core part of its project. Through this critical, historical perspective, Permanent Crisis can take scholars and anyone who cares about the humanities beyond the usual scolding, exhorting, and hand-wringing into clearer, more effective thinking about the fate of the humanities. Building on ideas from Max Weber and Friedrich Nietzsche to Helen Small and Danielle Allen, Reitter and Wellmon dig into the very idea of the humanities as a way to find meaning and coherence in the world. Paul Reitter is professor of Germanic languages and literatures at the Ohio State University. He is the author and editor of many books, including The Anti-Journalist: Karl Kraus and Jewish Self-Fashioning in Fin-de-Siecle Europe. Chad Wellmon is professor of German studies and history at the University of Virginia. He is the author and editor of many books, The Rise of the Research University: A Sourcebook and Organizing Enlightenment: Information Overload and the Invention of the Modern Research University. Alexandra Ortolja-Baird is Lecturer in Digital History and Culture at the University of Portsmouth. She tweets at @timetravelallie. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/education
In 1960, University of Illinois professor Leo Koch wrote a public letter condoning premarital sex. He was fired. Four years later, a professor named Revilo Oliver made white supremacist remarks and claimed there was a massive communist conspiracy. He kept his job. Matthew Ehrlich revisits the Koch and Oliver cases to look at free speech, the legacy of the 1960s, and debates over sex and politics on campus. The different treatment of the two men marked a fundamental shift in the understanding of academic freedom. Their cases also embodied the stark divide over beliefs and values--a divide that remains today. Ehrlich delves into the issues behind these academic controversies and places the events in the context of a time rarely associated with dissent but in fact a harbinger of the social and political upheavals to come. An enlightening and entertaining history, Dangerous Ideas on Campus: Sex, Conspiracy, and Academic Freedom in the Age of JFK (University of Illinois Press) illuminates how the university became a battleground for debating America's hot-button issues. Matthew C. Ehrlich is a professor emeritus of journalism at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. His books include Kansas City vs. Oakland: The Bitter Sports Rivalry That Defined an Era and Radio Utopia: Postwar Audio Documentary in the Public Interest, winner of the James W. Tankard Book Award. Tom Discenna is Professor of Communication at Oakland University whose work examines issues of academic labor and communicative labor more broadly. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/education
Many have experienced moments where algorithms have made us uncomfortable or suspicious. In Algorithms and Autonomy: The Ethics of Automated Decision Systems (Cambridge University Press, 2021), Rubel, Phan, and Castro outline the stories of teachers and citizens subject to the criminal justice system who face serious consequences at the hands of algorithms. With a focus on locating the a philosophical touchstone to these harms, the authors look at how ideas of autonomy and freedom are affected by algorithms. When algorithms afford those subject to their decisions no transparency to endorse its use or worse hide responsibility for their decision in a network of actors laundering their own agency, citizens are harmed and democracy is harmed. This book mount a forceful lens of what exactly algorithms in criminal justice, education, housing, elections and beyond can do to autonomy, freedom, and democracy. This title is also available as Open Access on Cambridge Core. Dr. Alan Rubel is Professor and Director of the Information School at University of Wisconsin Madison. Austin Clyde is a Ph.D. candidate at the University of Chicago Department of Computer Science. He researches artificial intelligence and high-performance computing for developing new scientific methods. He is also a visiting research fellow at the Harvard Kennedy School's Science, Technology, and Society program, where my research addresses the intersection of artificial intelligence, human rights, and democracy. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/education
John and new Brandeis host Jerome Tharaud (author of Apocalyptic Geographies) learn exactly how the growth of America's public universities relied on shameful seizures of Native American land. Working with Tristan Athone --editor of Grist and a member of the Kiowa Tribe--historian Robert Lee wrote a stunning series of pieces that reveal how many public land-grant universities were fundamentally financed and sustained by a long-lasting settle-colonial "land grab." Their meticulous work paints an unusually detailed picture of how most highly praised institutions of higher education in America (Cornell, MIT, UC Berkeley and virtually all of the great Midwestern public universities) were initially launched and sometimes later sustained by a flood of cash deriving directly or indirectly from that stolen and seized land. Jerome and John discuss with Lee issues that are covered in the initial article in High Country News, a dedicated website with a better version of this fantastic map, a follow-up article tracing land that was never sold, and a scholarly forum that followed from their findings. The Morrill Act (1862, right in the middle of the Civil War, and that is no coincidence). Its author Justin Morrill, a Vermont Senator, argued the land-grants were a payback for the East's investment in opening the West. The West was "a plundered province" wrote Bernard de Voto (Harpers, August 1934). Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/education
We are delighted to present All for One and One for All: Public Seminar Series on Mental Health in Academia and Society. All for One and One for All talks will shine the light on and discuss mental health issues in academia across all levels – from students to faculty, as well as in wider society. Seminars are held online once per month on Wednesdays at 5pm CET/ 11am EST and free for all to attend. Speakers include academics, organisations, and health professionals whose work focuses on mental health. Live Q and A sessions will be held after each talk. For live webinar schedule please visit this website. Follow us on Twitter: @LashuelLab Today’s talk is with Dr. Stuart Farrimond, Dr. Hilal Lashuel and Galina Limorenko Dr Stuart Farrimond is a medical doctor turned science communicator and food scientist and is author of the DK bestsellers The Science of Cooking (2017) and Science of Spice (2018), and the Sunday Times bestseller The Science of Living (2021) (Sold as Live Your Best Life in North America). He is a science and medical writer, presenter, and educator. He makes regular appearances on TV, radio, and at public events, and his writing appears in national and international publications, including The Independent, The Daily Mail, and New Scientist. Since 2017, Dr Stu has been the food scientist for BBC's much-loved show Inside the Factory, hosted by Gregg Wallace and Cherry Healey. An avid blogger, Stuart is also the founder and editor of online lifestyle-science magazine Guru, which is supported by the Wellcome Trust, the world’s largest medical research charity. A word of caution: some viewers may find topics on mental health discussed in QnA sensitive Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/education
Whether you like it or not, the pandemic has pushed us to make many changes in our life, from working from home to following all the mitigation measures. In the previous episodes in New Books in Education, we talked with book authors about how the pandemic has impacted their field, or the particular groups of students and families with whom they work. We look at the new expansion of the use of educational technology, the challenges that students who are learning English as their second language have encountered, and experiences of undocumented immigrant families. In today’s episode, we shift our focus to doing educational research using digital tools. This topic is not new, but during the pandemic, a lot of educational researchers have found a new sense of urgency and relevance to look into it. Our guests for today’s episode are Trena Paulus, Professor in the Research Division of Family Medicine at East Tennessee State University, and Jessica Lester, Professor of Inquiry Methodology at Indiana University. They recently published a book, Doing Qualitative Research in a Digital World, to systematically investigate this topic. Published by Sage Press in 2021, Doing Qualitative Research in a Digital World is a timely contribution to the field of social research methodology in a period when almost all the social research activities were moved to online. Even though we have gradually resumed our in-person activities, some researchers predict that many of the qualitative research activities will remain in the digital space. What does this mean to research communities and to the wider public? How are researchers going to do research differently? What has the new advancement of technology afforded to the current research practice? Doing Qualitative Research in a Digital World takes a deep dive into these questions. Both novice and seasoned researchers will benefit from the book’s comprehensive and in-depth discussion on digital tools and research methodology, which blends in together theories of technology, methodological theories, practical advice, and empirical cases. Trena M. Paulus, Ph.D. is a professor in the Research Division of Family Medicine, Quillen College of Medicine, East Tennessee State University. Jessica Nina Lester, Ph.D. is an Associate Professor of Inquiry Methodology (Qualitative Research) in the School of Education at Indiana University, Bloomington. Pengfei Zhao is a critical researcher and qualitative research methodologist based at the University of Florida. She is currently working on a book manuscript studying the coming of age experience of rural Chinese youth during and right after the Cultural Revolution. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/education
Welcome to The Academic Life! In this episode you’ll hear about:
How rejection is normal and even inevitable
Skills to help you learn from and move through rejections toward your goals
Why you need to develop your capacity for patience
How asking people about their own rejections can help normalize yours
A discussion of the book Win or Learn
Today’s book is: Win or Learn: The Naked Truth About Turning Every Rejection into Your Ultimate Success, by rejection expert and New York Times bestselling author Harlan Cohen. Cohen lays the framework for identifying your wants, taking the risks necessary to pursue them, and finding success no matter the outcome. This step-by-step risk-taking experiment will guide you on a journey to understand your worth and fight for your goals—because rejection is a universal truth but not a final destination. Our guest is: Harlan Cohen, bestselling author of seven books, a journalist, and a speaker who has visited over 500 college campuses. He loves helping people find support, happiness, hope, love, and light. He is the author of WIN or LEARN: The Naked Truth About Turning Every Rejection Into Your Ultimate Success. Our host is: Dr. Christina Gessler, the co-creator and co-producer of the Academic Life. She is a historian of women and gender. Listeners to this episode might also be interested in:
The Naked Roommate, by Harlan Cohen
Harlan’s TedX talk (watch TEDx talk here).
Mindset: The New Psychology of Success by Carol Dweck
The Rejection that Changed My Life by Jessica Bacal
How to Fail podcast by Elizabeth Day
The Museum of Failure website
You are smart and capable, but you aren’t an island and neither are we. We reach across our mentor network to bring you experts about everything from how to finish that project, to how to take care of your beautiful mind. Wish we’d bring on an expert about something? DM us on Twitter: The Academic Life @AcademicLifeNBN. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/education
Dr. Andrea Flores’ most recent book, The Succeeders: How Immigrant Youth Are Transforming What It Means to Belong in America (University of California Press, 2021), is a detailed account of how immigrant youth in Nashville, Tennessee negotiated the stakes of academic achievement by reproducing terms of belonging while at the same time recasting what it means to belong in the United States. By focusing on a nonprofit college access program for Latino youth from which the title of the book is derived, Flores argues that Succeeders’ educational achievements were viewed “as positive moral proof against deficit constructions of Latinos while also maintaining a link to educación’s [emphasis in original] personal, cultural, and familial value” (16). The hybridity of assigning moral value to book learning while also hinging their striving to familial networks is what Flores believes to be critical to the Succeeders’ perception of self. By offering a radically different route to belonging through the vehicle of family and care, the Succeeders hoped to earn not just their own national membership, but also the membership of those near and dear. Flores conducted ethnographic research for twelve months while also serving as a volunteer for the Succeeders program of southern Nashville across four campuses for the academic year 2012 - 2013. She observed effective communication skits, field trips, organizational meetings, community service activities, musical performances, athletic games, scholarship selection committees, and graduation ceremonies to best understand the lived experiences of Succeeders within and outside of their educational institutions. Flores also conducted thirty-one semistructured interviews with Succeeders whose families were primarily from Mexican and Central America. Further, half of the interviews included undocumented youth, and students from all levels of academic achievement were selected. Strategic selecting of Succeeders allowed Flores to examine how students across a variety of academic preparations and immigrant backgrounds perceived themselves within larger conceptions of Latindidad and educational achievement. Interviews with the program’s leaders, teachers, and admissions officers revealed the internal dialogues of those most tasked with the Succeeders’ success. A robust textual archive in the form of college admissions handouts, college entrance essays, and Succeeders curricular materials were collected by the author. These mixed methods allowed Flores to provide detailed and rich accounts of how Latino youth navigated the college application process, the end of high school, and their personal lives. Jonathan Cortez is currently the 2021-2023 César Chávez Postdoctoral Fellow in the Department of Latin American, Latino, and Caribbean Studies at Dartmouth College. You can follow Jonathan on Twitter @joncortz Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/education
Universal design for learning (UDL) has been hailed for over a decade as a revolutionary lens that allows campuses to shift their efforts to create inclusive environments. In recent years, UDL has gone beyond the field of disability and been explored with regards to international and indigenous students. There is now a sizable body of literature that details the benefits of implementing UDL in higher education, as well as a number of emerging studies examining the strategic challenges of developing UDL across institutions. There is, however, still a relative paucity of research discussing the transformation of instruction or assessment in concrete terms. Therefore, there is a necessity for research and information on UDL that has already been implemented in classrooms and the practical examples of what this process of transformation looks like. The Handbook of Research on Applying Universal Design for Learning Across Disciplines: Concepts, Case Studies, and Practical Implementation (IGI Global, 2021) offers practical examples of UDL having successfully been embedded in courses within various disciplines and classroom formats, as well as across the undergraduate and graduate sectors. The chapters provide case studies and concrete examples of what the UDL reflection on practice might look like in specific faculties and departments. While highlighting UDL in areas such as educational technology, student engagement, assignment design, and inclusive education, this book is ideally intended for inservice and preservice teachers, administrators, teacher educators, higher education professors and leaders, practitioners, researchers, academicians, and students interested in the integration of UDL into strategic academic plans. Christina Anderson Bosch is faculty at the California State University, Fresno. She is curious about + committed to public, inclusive education in pluralistic societies where critical perspectives on questions of social and ecological justice are valued enough to enact material dignity and metaphysical wellbeing on massive scales. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/education
In the late 1960s and on into the next decade, the American pastor and bestselling author Francis Schaeffer regularly received requests from evangelicals across North America seeking his help to replicate his innovative learning community, L'Abri, within their own contexts. At the same time, an innovative school called Regent College had started up in Vancouver, British Columbia, led by James Houston and offering serious theological education for laypeople. Before long, numerous admirers and attendees of L'Abri and of Regent had launched Christian "study centers" of their own—often based on or near university campuses—from Berkeley to Maryland. For evangelical baby boomers coming of age in the midst of unprecedented educational opportunity and cultural upheaval, these multifaceted communities inspired a generation to study, pray, and engage culture more faithfully—in the words of James M. Houston, "to think Christianly." In To Think Christianly: A History of L'Abri, Regent College, and the Christian Study Center Movement (IVP Academic 2021), Charles Cotherman traces the stories of notable study centers and networks, as well as their influence on a generation that would reshape twentieth-century Christianity. Beginning with the innovations of L'Abri and Regent College, Cotherman elucidates the histories of several key institutions and individuals that gave rise to these study centers across North America. Each of these projects owed something to Schaeffer's and Houston's approaches, which combined intellectual and cultural awareness with compelling spirituality, open-handed hospitality, relational networks, and a deep commitment to the gospel's significance for all fields of study—and all of life. Cotherman argues that the centers' mission of lay theological education blazed a new path for evangelicals to fully engage the life of the mind and culture. Built on a rich foundation of original interviews, archival documents, and contemporary sources, To Think Christianly sheds new light on this set of defining figures and places in evangelicalism's life of the mind. Charles E. Cotherman (PhD, University of Virginia) is pastor of Oil City Vineyard Church in Oil City, Pennsylvania. He is the program director of the Project on Rural Ministry at Grove City College and has taught church history at Fuller Seminary and Pittsburgh Theological Seminary. Justin McGeary is the Director of Christian Studies at John Witherspoon College and a graduate student at Union School of Theology. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/education
In the 1920s, Mexico established rural normales—boarding schools that trained teachers in a new nation-building project. Drawn from campesino ranks and meant to cultivate state allegiance, their graduates would facilitate land distribution, organize civic festivals, and promote hygiene campaigns. In Unintended Lessons of Revolution: Student Teachers and Political Radicalism in Twentieth-Century Mexico (Duke University Press, 2021), Tanalís Padilla traces the history of the rural normales, showing how they became sites of radical politics. As Padilla demonstrates, the popular longings that drove the Mexican Revolution permeated these schools. By the 1930s, ideas about land reform, education for the poor, community leadership, and socialism shaped their institutional logic. Over the coming decades, the tensions between state consolidation and revolutionary justice produced a telling contradiction: the very schools meant to constitute a loyal citizenry became hubs of radicalization against a government that increasingly abandoned its commitment to social justice. Crafting a story of struggle and state repression, Padilla illuminates education's radical possibilities and the nature of political consciousness for youths whose changing identity—from campesinos, to students, to teachers—speaks to Mexico’s twentieth-century transformations. Brad Wright is an historian of Latin America specializing in postrevolutionary Mexico. I teach world history at Kennesaw State University currently. PhD in Public History with specialization in oral history. My research interests include post-1968 Mexico, the urban popular movement, Christian base communities, popular education, cities in Latin America, popular culture, class formation, Latin American social movements, rural migration, and place. Book manuscript tentatively titled “Counternarratives of Doña Lucha: Class, Power, and Women’s Leadership in Mexico’s Urban Popular Movement” Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/education
Welcome to The Academic Life! In this episode you’ll hear about:
A process focused approach to completing a dissertation and other academic writing
The function of a dissertation and how it’s often misunderstood
The importance of the research question
The shift from student to scholar
How delaying writing saves time
The differences between fast writing, editing, and proof-reading
Our guests are: Dr. Sonja K. Foss and Dr. William Waters. Sonja and William are the coauthors of Destination Dissertation: A Traveler’s Guide to a Done Dissertation (Rowman & Littlefield). They offer writing retreats and present workshops at universities throughout the country on topics such as completing dissertations, publishing, and advisor advising and do individual coaching of scholars working on dissertations, articles, and books. Sonja K. Foss is a professor emeritus in the Department of Communication at the University of Colorado Denver. Her research and teaching interests are in contemporary rhetorical theory and criticism, feminist perspectives on communication, the incorporation of marginalized voices into rhetorical theory and practice, and visual rhetoric. She is the author or coauthor of the books Feminism in Practice, Gender Stories, Rhetorical Criticism, Contemporary Perspectives on Rhetoric, Inviting Transformation, Feminist Rhetorical Theories, and Women Speak. Dr. Foss earned her Ph.D. in communication studies from Northwestern University and previously taught at Ohio State University, the University of Oregon, the University of Denver, Virginia Tech, and Norfolk State University. William Waters is an associate professor in the Department of English at the University of Houston Downtown. His research and teaching interests are in writing theory and practice, the history of the English language, linguistics, and modern grammar. He was the managing editor of the book La Puerta: A Doorway into the Academy and has published several poems in national journals. Dr. Waters earned his Ph.D. in language and linguistics from the University of New Mexico and previously taught at Northwest Missouri State University; the University of Maine; University College in Galway, Ireland; and Cheongbuk National University in Korea. Our host is: Dr. Dana Malone, a scholar and practitioner energized by facilitating meaningful learning experiences for students and educators alike. She benefited from Destination Dissertation as a doctoral student and is excited to share it with The Academic Life audience. Listeners to this episode might also be interested in:
Dissertations and Project Reports: A Step by Step Guide by Stella Cottrell (Bloomsbury)
On Revision: The Only Writing that Counts by William Germano (Chicago UP)
Your PhD Survival Guide: Planning, Writing, and Succeeding in Your Final Year by Katherine Firth, Liam Connell, and Peta Freestone (Routledge)
How to Write a Better Thesis (3rd ed) by David Evans, Paul Gruba, and Justin Zobel (Springer)
You are smart and capable, but you aren’t an island, and neither are we. We reach across our mentor network to bring you experts on everything from how to finish that project, to how to take care of your beautiful mind. Wish we’d bring on an expert about something? DM us on Twitter: The Academic Life @AcademicLifeNBN. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/education
Homeschooling has skyrocketed in popularity in the United States: in 2019, a record-breaking 2.5 million children were being homeschooled, within an increasingly diverse subset of American families. In The Homeschool Choice: Parents and the Privatization of Education (NYU Press, 2021), sociologist Kate Henley Averett examines the reasons why parents homeschool and how homeschooling, as a growing practice, has changed the roles that families, schools, and the state play in children’s lives. Drawing on in-depth interviews, surveys and close ethnographic observation of homeschooling conferences, Averett paints a rich picture of parental decision-making in a period dominated by a neoliberal discourse of school ‘choice’. This book is essential reading not only for those interested in homeschooling, but for anyone concerned about the current state and the future of public education. Kate Henley Averett is Assistant Professor in the Department of Sociology, and an affiliate of the Department of Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies, at the University at Albany, SUNY. -- Dr Alice Garner, educator and historian, Melbourne Graduate School of Education, University of Melbourne, Australia. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/education
Samuel Totten's Teaching about Genocide (Rowman and Littlefield, 2020) presents the insights, advice and suggestions of secondary level teachers and professors in relation to teaching about various facets of genocide. The contributions are extremely eclectic, ranging from the basic concerns when teaching about genocide to a discussion as to why it is critical to teach students about more general human rights violations during a course on genocide, and from a focus on specific cases of genocide to various pedagogical strategies ideal for teaching about genocide. Kelly McFall is Professor of History and Director of the Honors Program at Newman University. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/education
Welcome to All for One and One for All: Public Seminar Series on Mental Health in Academia and Society. All for One and One for All talks shine the light on and discuss mental health issues in academia across all levels – from students to faculty, as well as in wider society. Speakers include academics, organisations, and health professionals whose work focuses on mental health. Live Q and A sessions will be held after each talk. For live webinar schedule please visit: https://www.epfl.ch/labs/lashu... Follow us on Twitter: @LashuelLab Our conversation is between Dr. Julia Dratva and Dr. Hilal Lashuel, and Galina Limorenko. The Corona pandemic is impacting all age groups and areas of society, irrespective of the risk of exposure or disease severity. University students were confronted with abrupt changes by the COVID-19 lock-down both in their personal and academic lives. The “Health in Students during the Corona pandemic” study (HES-C) investigated the impact on mental health and general and COVID-19 related health behaviors, concerns and views from the April 2020 to June 2021. Prof. Dr. med. Julia Dratva, MPH is a specialist in prevention and public health (FMH) and professor of public health at the Zurich University of Applied Sciences. There, she heads the research area Health Sciences at the Department of Health. She is also an associated professor at the Medical Faculty of the University of Basel, President of the Swiss Society of Public Health Physicians (FMH) and Vice President of the EUPHA Child and Adolescent Public Health Section. In addition to her research focus on "Children and Adolescent Public Health", she has a profound expertise in health monitoring and observational cohort studies. Galina Limorenko is a doctoral candidate in Neuroscience with a focus on biochemistry and molecular biology of neurodegenerative diseases at EPFL in Switzerland. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/education
Hear from Catherine Cocks, assistant director and editor-in-chief at Michigan State University Press talk about her attempt to replicate the success of the Scholarly Kitchen blog in the humanities with the 'Feeding the Elephant' forum, her work to make university publishers more accessible to authors through ASK UP and publishing on the Great Lakes at Michigan State! Avi Staiman is the founder and CEO of Academic Language Experts Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/education
Welcome to The Academic Life! In this episode you’ll hear about:
The Emerson College Prison Initiative
The Bard Prison Initiative
How students apply to, enroll in, and attend college while in prison
Challenges faced by incarcerated students
Engaging effectively with incarcerated students
Our guest is: Dr. Mneesha Gellman, an Associate Professor of Political Science in the Institute for Liberal Arts and Interdisciplinary Studies at Emerson College, in Boston, MA, USA. her primary research interests include comparative democratization, cultural resilience, memory politics, and social movements in the Global South and the United States. She is the founder and Director of the Emerson Prison Initiative, which seeks to bring high quality liberal arts education to incarcerated students at Massachusetts Correctional Institute (MCI) at Concord, a men’s medium security prison. EPI follows the model of college-in-prison work led by the Bard Prison Initiative. Prior to joining the faculty at Emerson College, she was a Postdoctoral Fellow at the Centre for Global Cooperation Research in Duisburg, Germany. She holds a PhD in Political Science from Northwestern University, USA, and an MA in International Studies/Peace and Conflict Resolution from the University of Queensland, Australia. Our host is: Dr. Christina Gessler, a historian of women and gender, and the co-founder of the Academic Life on NBN. She is the daughter of a public defender. Listeners to this episode might also be interested in:
Education Behind the Wall: Why and How We Teach in Prison [Brandeis University Press, 2022], by Mneesha
The Alliance for Higher Education in Prison
The Prison Policy Initiative
This report from the ACLU
The Sentencing Project
Equal Justice Initiative
The Emerson Prison Initiative (EPI) Emerson Prison Initiative (EPI)
The Bard Prison Initiative Consortium for the Liberal Arts in Prison
Democratization and Memories of Violence: Ethnic Minority Social Movements in Mexico, Turkey, and El Salvador by Dr. Mneesha Gellman
The Skillful Teacher: On Technique, Trust, and Responsiveness in the Classroom by Stephen Brookfield
You are smart and capable, but you aren’t an island and neither are we. We reach across our network to bring you experts about everything from how to finish that project, to how to take care of your beautiful mind. Wish we’d bring on an expert about something? DM us on Twitter: The Academic Life @AcademicLifeNBN. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/education
Rebecca S. Natow's book Reexamining the Federal Role in Higher Education: Politics and Policymaking in the Postsecondary Sector (Teachers College Press, 2022) provides a comprehensive description of the federal government's relationship with higher education and how that relationship became so expansive and indispensable over time. Drawing from constitutional law, social science research, federal policy documents, and original interviews with key policy insiders, the author explores the U.S. government's role in regulating, financing, and otherwise influencing higher education. Natow analyzes how the government's role has evolved over time, the activities of specific governmental branches and agencies that affect higher education, the nature of the government's role in higher education today, and prospects for the future of federal involvement in higher education. Chapters examine the politics and practices that shape policies affecting nondiscrimination and civil rights, student financial aid, educational quality and student success, campus crime, research and development, intellectual property, student privacy, and more. Stephen Pimpare is director of the Public Service & Nonprofit Leadership program and Faculty Fellow at the Carsey School of Public Policy at the University of New Hampshire. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/education
John Katzman is one of the U.S.’s most innovative thinkers and successful educational entrepreneurs. He founded Princeton Review right after graduating from Princeton, and grew it into a public company. He then created 2U, that grew to be the leading firm in the Online Program Management (OPM) space by partnering with many of the nation’s leading universities to build online degrees, and now serves as CEO of Noodle, which has taken over from 2U as the leading OPM. In this episode, Katzman shares his perspective on 3 key issues in higher education today: 1) strategies that small private and regional public institutions can use to thrive in the coming “birth dearth”; 2) ways to address college affordability and rethink pricing; and 3) a new non-profit start-up he is forming to disrupt the college admissions process. David Finegold is the president of Chatham University. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/education
One in four American workers says their workplace is a "dictatorship." Yet that number almost certainly would be higher if we recognized employers for what they are-private governments with sweeping authoritarian power over our lives. Many employers minutely regulate workers' speech, clothing, and manners on the job, and employers often extend their authority to the off-duty lives of workers, who can be fired for their political speech, recreational activities, diet, and almost anything else employers care to govern. In Private Government: How Employers Rule Our Lives (and Why We Don't Talk about It) (Princeton UP, 2019), Elizabeth Anderson examines why, despite all this, we continue to talk as if free markets make workers free, and she proposes a better way to think about the workplace, opening up space for discovering how workers can enjoy real freedom. Elizabeth Anderson is Arthur F. Thurnau Professor and John Dewey Distinguished University Professor of Philosophy and Women's Studies at the University of Michigan and specializes in political philosophy, ethics, and feminist philosophy. She is the author of The Imperative of Integration, and Value in Ethics and Economics. Tom Discenna is Professor of Communication at Oakland University whose work examines issues of academic labor and communicative labor more broadly. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/education
Listen to this interview of Pascal Patrick Matzler, Associate Professor at Pontifical Catholic University of Valparaíso, Chile. We talk about his book Mentoring and Co-Writing for Research Publication Purposes: Interaction and Text Development in Doctoral Supervision (Routledge, 2021), mentorship in STEM — we talk about writing in STEM. Pascal Matzler : "For me, perhaps the most beautiful aspect of the years that I spent with these three supervisors and three doctoral students was just seeing how scientific knowledge is gained, how it is reproduced, and how new scientists are born — so, just seeing how these students became scientists who are capable of reasoning and arguing as members of their fields, and also seeing how they even developed this notion, because that's maybe the one key point of my book: that the student walks into a meeting with a graph or a chart, and the student is convinced that this graph or chart contains the truth, and so all they need to do is send that graph or that chart to a journal and there will be a round of applause for the new knowledge. And the supervisor, slowly and carefully, over many months, will explain to the student, 'No, that's not how it works. First you have to verbalize this chart, verbalize what you see on it. Then you have to verbalize what you think it means, whatever you're seeing on the chart, and also why you think it means this. And then you have to convince your readers that it actually means this. And this process is going to be terribly challenging, because your readers are going to disagree with that. And some people's careers might be ruined by your interpretation. So we're going to have to do this very slowly and very carefully — and, we might even be wrong! We have to deal with that, as well.' So there's this slow and gradual awakening of the rhetorical persona in the doctoral student over the course of writing a first research article." Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/education
America’s community colleges are facing a completion crisis. The college-going experience of too many students is interrupted, lengthening their time to completing a degree―or worse, causing many to drop out altogether. In The Costs of Completion: Student Success in Community College (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2021), Robin Isserles contextualizes this crisis by placing blame on the neoliberal policies that have shaped public community colleges over the past thirty years. The Costs of Completion offers a deeper, more complex understanding of who community college students are, why and how they enroll, and what higher education institutions can do to better support them and help them flourish. Robin Isserles is a professor of sociology at the Borough of Manhattan Community College of the City University of New York. Schneur Zalman Newfield is an Assistant Professor of Sociology at Borough of Manhattan Community College, City University of New York, and the author of Degrees of Separation: Identity Formation While Leaving Ultra-Orthodox Judaism (Temple University Press, 2020). Visit him online at ZalmanNewfield.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/education
What does it take to become a digitally agile scholar? This manual explains how academics can comfortably navigate the digital world of today and tomorrow. It foregrounds three key domains of digital agility: getting involved in research, education and (community) service, mobilising (digital) skills on various levels, and acting in multiple roles, both individually and interlinked with others. After an introduction that outlines the foundations of the three-dimensional framework, the chapters focus on different roles and skills associated with evolving as a digital scholar. There is the author, who writes highly specialised texts for expert peers; the storyteller, who crafts accessible narratives to a broader audience in the form of blogs or podcasts; the creator, who uses graphics, audio, and video to motivate audiences to delve deeper into the material; the integrator, who develops and curates multimedia artefacts, disseminating them through channels such as websites, webinars, and open source repositories; and finally the networker, who actively triggers interaction via social media applications and online learning communities. Additionally, the final chapters offer a blueprint for the future digital scholar as a professional learner and as a change agent who is open to and actively pursues innovation. Informed by the authors' broad and diverse personal experience, Evolving as a Digital Scholar: Teaching and Researching in a Digital World (Leuven UP, 2021) offers insight, inspiration, and practical advice. It equips a broad readership with the skills and the mindset to harness new digital developments and navigate the ever-evolving digital age. It will inspire academic teachers and researchers with different backgrounds and levels of knowledge that wish to enhance their digital academic profile. Free ebook available at OAPEN Library, JSTOR and Project Muse. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/education
Students' success in mathematics at community colleges has been the subject of thorough quantitative research, which has reported poor overall results and described a range of explanations for them. Even as policies, course formats, and the composition of the student population have changed, success rates have remained dishearteningly low. The challenges confronted by community college students in developmental and higher-level math classes are historical, financial, social, and personal. Brian Cafarella's new book, which examines these challenges through the perspectives of the students themselves, is a welcome contribution to the topic. Breaking Barriers: Student Success in Community College Mathematics (CRC Press, 2021) is a qualitative study of the barriers faced, and the paths blazed through them, by more than 20 community college students who required developmental math at the starts of their programs and successfully completed college-level courses. From his interviews and exchanges with these students, Dr. Cafarella synthesizes several key themes, from the demoralizing impact of high school experiences to the urgent effects of family and work pressures, and indeed students' own attitudes, behaviors, and lifestyles. I was especially struck by the students' diverse responses to the diverse class modalities their colleges offered, and by the extent of personal support these institutions mustered to see the students through bleak periods. The book concludes with several core lessons distilled from the study, most of which came through in some form during our discussion but provide an excellent point of reference for decision-makers—including present and prospective students. I hope that teachers, administrators, and especially policymakers will also be able to put these lessons to good use, and that they will help drive a continuing effort to understand and chart pathways through the barriers students face. Suggested companion works: journal articles on community college mathematics by
Zachary Beamer
Julie Phelps
Peter Barr
Paul Nolting
Brian Cafarella is a mathematics professor at Sinclair Community College in Dayton, Ohio. He has taught a variety of courses ranging from developmental math through pre-calculus, and he has published articles in several peer-reviewed journals on implementing best practices in developmental math and various math pathways for community college students. Brian is a past recipient of the Roueche Award for teaching excellence, the Ohio Magazine Award for excellence in education, and the Article of the Year Award from the Journal of Developmental Education. Cory Brunson is an Assistant Professor at the Laboratory for Systems Medicine at the University of Florida. His research focuses on geometric and topological approaches to the analysis of medical and healthcare data. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/education
Can libraries be radical positive change agents in their communities? R. David Lenkes offers a guide for librarians who see their profession as a chance to make a positive difference in their communities —librarians who recognize that it is no longer enough to stand behind a desk waiting to serve. Lankes reminds libraries and librarians of their mission: to improve society by facilitating knowledge creation in their communities. In this book, he provides tools, arguments, resources, and ideas for fulfilling this mission. Librarians will be prepared to become radical positive change agents in their communities, and other readers will learn to understand libraries in a new way. The libraries of Ferguson, Missouri, famously became positive change agents in August 2014 when they opened their doors when schools were closed because of civil unrest after the shooting of an unarmed teen by police. Working with other local organizations, they provided children and their parents a space for learning, lunch, and peace. But other libraries serve other communities—students, faculty, scholars, law firms—in other ways. All libraries are about community. In The New Librarianship Field Guide (MIT Press, 2016), Lankes addresses the mission of libraries and explains what constitutes a library. He offers practical advice for librarian training; provides teaching notes for each chapter; and answers “Frequently Argued Questions” about the new librarianship. Renee Garfinkel, Ph.D. is a psychologist, writer, Middle East television commentator and host of The New Books Network’s Van Leer Jerusalem Series on Ideas. Write her at reneeg@vanleer.org.il Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/education
Hear Dr. Rosina Lippi-Green talk about some of her shocking findings on language discrimination and bias on campus. Lippi-Green and Avi discuss her book English with an Accent: Language, Ideology and Discrimination in the US (Routledge, 2011) and what the academic community can do to be more inclusive of scholars with different levels of English. We also discuss Rosina's transition from researcher to popular novelist. Avi Staiman is the founder and CEO of Academic Language Experts. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/education
Welcome to The Academic Life! In this episode you’ll hear about:
The hidden curriculum of the final year of the PhD program
Writing your dissertation when you still have so much left to read about
Why the final year of grad school is uniquely challenging
How to determine if you should stay in your program or leave
Why finishing your degree causes both relief and grief
A discussion of the book Your PhD Survival Guide:Planning, Writing, and Succeeding in Your Final Year
Our book is: Your PhD Survival Guide: Planning, Writing, and Succeeding in Your Final Year (Routledge, 2020). by Katherine Firth, Liam Connell, and Peta Freestone. Part of the 'Insider Guides to Success in Academia' series from Routledge, this book offers practical and realistic guidance to students. Written in short chapters, this book is designed as an accessible toolkit for final year doctoral students. Drawing on an understanding of the intellectual, professional, practical and personal elements of the doctorate to help readers gain insight into what it means to finish a PhD and how to get there, this book covers the common challenges and ways to resolve them. Written for students in all disciplines, and relevant to university systems around the world, this book expertly guides students through the final 6–12 months of the thesis. Our guest is: Dr. Katherine Firth, who manages the academic programs of a residential college at the University of Melbourne, Australia and founded the Research Insiders Blog which has been running since 2013. Our guest is: Dr. Liam Connell, who has worked in research training and education since the late 2000s. He works in research development at La Trobe University, Australia. Our host is: Dr. Christina Gessler, a historian of women and gender. Listeners to this episode might also be interested in:
How to Fix your Academic Writing Trouble (Open University Press) by Inger Mewburn, Katherine Firth and Shaun Lehmann
Being Well in Academia: Ways to Feel Stronger, Safe and More Connected by Petra Boynton
A Field Guide to Grad School by Jessica Calarco
Level Up Your Essays by Katherine Firth
Katherine Firth, ‘Should a PhD be hard?’, Research Degree Insiders
Peta Freestone, ‘Valuing your writing: making a time budget’
You are smart and capable, but you aren’t an island and neither are we. We reach across our mentor network to bring you experts about everything from how to finish that project, to how to take care of your beautiful mind. Wish we’d bring on an expert about something? DM us on Twitter: The Academic Life @AcademicLifeNBN. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/education
If maximizing utility leads to the greatest happiness of the greatest number of people, as utilitarianism has always proposed, then why is it that as many of us currently maximize our utility--by working endlessly, undertaking further education and training, relentlessly marketing and selling ourselves--we are met with the steady worsening of collective social and economic conditions? In Futilitarianism: Neoliberalism and the Production of Uselessness (MIT Press, 2021), social and political theorist Neil Vallelly eloquently tells the story of how neoliberalism transformed the relationship between utility maximization and the common good. Drawing on a vast array of contemporary examples, from self-help literature and marketing jargon to political speeches and governmental responses to the COVID-19 pandemic, Vallelly coins several terms--including the futilitarian condition, homo futilitus, and semio-futility--to demonstrate that in the neoliberal decades, the practice of utility maximization traps us in useless and repetitive behaviors that foreclose the possibility of collective happiness. This urgent and provocative book chimes with the mood of the time by at once mapping the historical relationship between utilitarianism and capitalism, developing an original framework for understanding neoliberalism, and recounting the lived experience of uselessness in the early twenty-first century. At a time of epoch-defining disasters, from climate emergencies to deadly pandemics, countering the futility of neoliberal existence is essential to building an egalitarian, sustainable, and hopeful future. Neil Vallelly is a political and social theorist based at the University of Otago, New Zealand. His research has appeared in journals such as Rethinking Marxism, Angelaki, and Poetics Today, and magazines, including New Internationalist and ROAR. In 2022, he will take up a two-year Rutherford Foundation Postdoctoral Fellowship at Otago, working on a history of capitalism and migrant detention. An Italian translation of Futilitarianism will be published in March 2022. Tom Discenna is Professor of Communication at Oakland University whose work examines issues of academic labor and communicative labor more broadly. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/education
Listen to this interview of Nigel Caplan, Associate Professor at the English Language Institute, University of Delaware. We talk generically. Nigel Caplan : "And this sort of brings us to an important point about knowledge and expertise in a discipline. The great genre scholar Doreen Starke-Meyerring said that academic writing tends to be transparent to experts in the discipline, and they forget how opaque it is to novices. So, if you study engineering, biology, philosophy, whatever it is, and you're immersed in that world all the time, it's very easy to believe that that is the only way of writing, because that's the only type of writing you have done for decades. And it quickly becomes, 'Well, that's obviously good writing.' And the idea is, 'Anything else is bad writing.' But experts don't realize what we see as English teachers, especially as teachers in English for Academic Purposes, where we work with students across the disciplines — what we see is that each discipline does have its own way of creating knowledge and communicating that knowledge. But that can be very opaque to a novice. And I think what novices need are the tools to crack open that opacity, and what experts need is a little reminder now and then that good writing is actually not transparent. It is highly contextual, it is something that needs to be learned, it is not natural in any sense. It is not automatically good writing just because you like it and it works in your field." Visit the Michigan Series in English for Academic and Professional Purposes here. Visit and join the Consortium on Graduate Communication here. Watch Daniel edit your science here. Contact Daniel at writeyourresearch@gmail.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/education
Welcome to The Academic Life! In this episode you’ll hear about:
What the two-body problem is
Dr. Kelly Baker’s experience on the academic job market as a wife and mother
How gender bias can play out in academic job searches
Why the three-body problem is a more accurate framing of this issue
How Kelly reimagined herself and her skill set for jobs outside the professoriate
Kelly and Chris’s advice to other dual-career academic couples
Our guests are: Dr. Kelly J. Baker and Dr. Chris Baker. Kelly is a religious studies Ph.D. and writer. She's the author of five books, including Sexism Ed: Essays on Gender and Labor in Academia, and the co-editor of Succeeding Outside the Academy with Joseph Fruscione. Her chapter, “What Would Your Poor Husband Do? Living with the Two-Body Problem” is the basis of this episode. Currently, she's the editor of Women in Higher Education and The National Teaching and Learning Forum. Chris has been a researcher and software developer in academia, industry, and government for over 20 years. Previously a scientist for the US Department of Energy, he developed software for the world’s largest supercomputers and published research in leading international journals. At ServiceMesh, and later CSC, Chris worked to streamline development and IT operations for numerous Fortune 1000 companies. After developing and leading the Nomad ecosystem team at HashiCorp, Chris joined Amazon Web Services as a Principal Engineer in the Core Container Technology group. Chris holds a Ph.D. in Computational Science from Florida State University. Our host is: Dr. Dana M. Malone, a higher education scholar and practitioner. She specializes in college student relationships, gender, sexuality, and religious identities as well as assessment planning. Dana enjoys engaging conversations, delicious food, practicing yoga, and wandering the Jersey shore. Listeners to this episode may also be interested in:
The Freelance Academic by Katie Pryal
Sexism Ed: Essays on Gender and Labor in Academia by Kelly J. Baker
From PhD to Life
Women in Higher Education
Succeeding Outside the Academy: Career Paths beyond the Humanities, Social Sciences, and STEM, edited by Joseph Fruscione and Kelly J. Baker, The University Press of Kansas
Dr. Frank Martela episode: Stop Chasing Happiness and Make a Meaningful Life
You are smart and capable, but you aren’t an island, and neither are we. We reach across our mentor network to bring you podcasts on everything from how to finish that project, to how to take care of your beautiful mind. Wish we’d bring on an expert about something? DM us on Twitter: The Academic Life @AcademicLifeNBN. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/education
Bijal Shah shares story of the meteoric rise of Guild Education, the Denver-based ed tech firm that has quickly emerged as the leading marketplace for corporate education. True to its B-Corporation status, Guild focuses on building shared success for its corporate partners, adult learners and education and training providers. As a new start-up, Guild was able to sign up the U.S.'s largest private employer, Wal-Mart to provide tuition-free learning opportunities to its more than 2 million employees. This helped attract other leading employers, like Target, Chipotle, Macy's and Waste Management, and has enabled Guild to grow from 75 to more than 1300 employees in the last 4 years. Shah discusses the keys to Guild's success and whether every college and university needs a Chief Experience Officer. David Finegold is the president of Chatham University. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/education
This interview was recorded and first published in early 2020 when the NBN had about a million downloads a month. Since then the downloads have increased more than four-fold to just below 5 million monthly downloads at the end of 2021 and the number of hosts has increased greatly as well. On the New Books Network authors to talk about their books with a specialist host. Founded in 2007 by Marshall Poe, formerly a Russian history professor from the US. The NBN has grown to be the most downloaded podcast of its type in the world.
New Books Network website
NBN on Stitcher
NBN on Apple Podcasts
NBN on Spotify
Marshal Poe on Wikipedia
About your host Richard Lucas Richard is a business and social entrepreneur who founded, led and/or invested in more than 30 businesses, Richard has been a TEDx event organiser, supports the pro-entrepreneurship ecosystem, and leads entrepreneurship workshops at all levels: from pre-schools to leading business schools. Richard was born in Oxford and moved to Poland in 1991. Read more here. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/education
Welcome to The Academic Life! In this episode you’ll hear about:
The hidden curriculum of transforming yourself from student to teacher
Accepting and embracing your nerdy/geeky/introverted self
Challenges faced by introverted teachers
Prep [for yourself, your syllabus, and your course]
Engaging effectively with students
A discussion of the book Geeky Pedagogy: A Guide for Intellectuals, Introverts, and Nerds Who Want to Be Effective Teachers
Todays’ book is: Geeky Pedagogy: A Guide for Intellectuals, Introverts, and Nerds Who Want to Be Effective Teachers, a funny and pragmatic guide to the process of learning and relearning how to be an effective college teacher. It is the first college teaching guide that encourages faculty to embrace their inner nerd. Neuhaus eschews formulaic depictions of idealized exemplar teaching, instead inviting readers to join her in an engaging, critically reflective conversation about the vicissitudes of teaching and learning in higher education as a geek, introvert, or nerd. Written for the wonks and eggheads who want to translate their vast scholarly expertise into authentic student learning, Geeky Pedagogy is packed with practical advice and encouragement for increasing readers’ pedagogical knowledge. Our guest is: Dr. Jessamyn Neuhaus, a professor of popular culture, historian of gender, and scholar of teaching and learning, and a recipient of the SUNY Chancellor’s Award for Excellence in Teaching. As an educational developer, she advocates for introverts in the college classroom. She is the author of Geeky Pedagogy: A Guide for Intellectuals, Introverts, and Nerds Who Want to Be Effective Teachers. You can learn more about her work and publications here https://geekypedagogy.com/about-jessamyn-neuhaus Our host is: Dr. Christina Gessler, an introvert who is probably geeky or nerdy or both. She is a historian of women and gender, and the co-founder of the Academic Life on NBN. Listeners to this episode might also be interested in:
“The Damaging Myth of the Natural Teacher” by Beth McMurtrie in The Chronicle of Higher Education, vol 68, number 5, p. 13-21
Ungrading by Susan D. Blum
The Skillful Teacher: On Technique, Trust, and Responsiveness in the Classroom by Stephen Brookfield
Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World that Can’t Stop Talking by Susan Cain
This discussion of effective teaching strategies
Geeky Bonus Materials: A Bibliographic Essay from Dr. Neuhaus
You are smart and capable, but you aren’t an island and neither are we. We reach across our mentor network to bring you experts about everything from how to finish that project, to how to take care of your beautiful mind. Wish we’d bring on an expert about something? DM us on Twitter: The Academic Life @AcademicLifeNBN. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/education
Political Scientists Daniel Mallinson (Pennsylvania State University-Harrisburg), Julia Marin Hellwege (University of South Dakota), and Eric Loepp (University of Wisconsin-Whitewater) have assembled more than thirty chapters that examine how to think about and teach political science research. Reading The Palgrave Handbook of Political Research Pedagogy (Palgrave Macmillan, 2021) is almost like attending a teaching and learning conference focused on how to teach the research process to students. The book is divided into four sections: information literacy, research design, research methods, and research writing. Each section includes numerous chapters written by a diversity of authors. These authors include not only political scientists, but also graduate students and librarians. The broad array of authors come from a wide cross section of kinds of institutions, they represent a variety of ranks and positions, and they also provide representative diversity in terms of gender, race, and ethnicity. One of the common themes throughout the chapters is the integration of personal experience in teaching aspects of the research process—thus, the chapters provide the audience with stories of successes and failures, reconceptualizing the learning objectives in research, particularly research methods, classes, and many “how to” guides to integrating different approaches into the classroom. As we discuss in the conversation, The Handbook was originally conceptualized as two volumes: one volume on teaching students how to consume political science research, learning how to interpret and digest research; the other volume directed at how to produce political science research, so how to teach students about research methods and writing up their work. Ultimately, both approaches were integrated into a singular, very accessible volume that has guidance for so many of us who teach any number of aspects of the research process. The many authors pay attention to how much knowledge students have as they enter the political science classroom, and thus where we, as educators, need to meet them. Being aware of this starting point also helps to guide the pedagogical approaches that we take in teaching students about the research process, the skills and capacities that are needed to master an understanding of political science, and how to help students to learn these skills and abilities. This is a very valuable handbook for anyone who is teaching political science, regardless of substantive area within the discipline or years of experience—and it is engaging and accessible. Lilly J. Goren is professor of political science at Carroll University in Waukesha, WI. She is co-editor of the award winning book, Women and the White House: Gender, Popular Culture, and Presidential Politics (University Press of Kentucky, 2012), as well as co-editor of Mad Men and Politics: Nostalgia and the Remaking of Modern America (Bloomsbury Academic, 2015). Email her comments at lgoren@carrollu.edu or tweet to @gorenlj. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/education
If one were to devise a motto for the art school of today, the choice between 'you too are an artist' and 'abandon all hope you who enter here' would be difficult. Despite significant changes in mainstream art education in recent decades, many anglophone art schools have not abandoned the principal tools of the masterclass or the crit that stem from some stubborn 18th-century ideas and the belief that creativity is the preserve of the artistic genius. Considering these histories can shed light on the role of the art school in the 21st century. Research on art schools has been largely occupied with the facts of particular schools and teachers. Michael Newall's A Philosophy of the Art School (Routledge, 2021) presents a philosophical account of the underlying practices and ideas that have come to shape contemporary art school teaching in the UK, US and Europe. It analyses two models that, hidden beneath the diversity of contemporary artist training, have come to dominate art schools. The book draws on first-hand accounts of art school teaching and is deeply informed by disciplines ranging from art history and art theory to the philosophy of art, education and creativity. Michael Newall speaks to Pierre d'Alancaisez about the masterclass and the crit, the pervasive idea of the Romantic genius, creative disagreements with Kant, and the lessons for the future that a historical perspective may offer. Michael Newall is a programme leader in art and philosophy at the University of Kent. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/education
Welcome to The Academic Life! In this episode you’ll hear about:
The other hidden curriculum: the support and care strategies necessary for being well in academia
Systemic and structural barriers
Undiagnosed academic challenges, and personal traumas guest and host have faced
Why we all need support
How to support someone in tough times and why “help” needs to be customized
the book Being Well in Academia: Ways to Fell Stronger, Safer and More Connected
Our book is: Being Well in Academia: Ways to Fell Stronger, Safer and More Connected by Dr. Petra Boynton. Part of the 'Insider Guides to Success in Academia' series from Routledge, this book offers practical and realistic guidance to students and early-career researchers on wellbeing topics that really matter, but which often get overlooked. Being Well addresses many of the personal challenges of trying to remain in academia when you are in need of support [perhaps you’re finding your work, study or personal life challenging or overwhelming; are experiencing bullying, harassment or abuse; or your progress is being blocked by unfair, exploitative or precarious systems; or you want to support a friend or colleague who’s struggling]. Being Well in Academia provides resources and workable solutions to help you feel stronger, safer and more connected in what has become an increasingly competitive and stressful environment. Our guest is: Dr. Petra Boynton, a social psychologist and Agony Aunt who teaches and researches in International Healthcare. She specializes in addressing the safety and wellbeing of students and staff in academic settings. Our host is: Dr. Christina Gessler, a historian specializing in under-represented voices. As referenced in this episode, between December 2017 and early 2020 she survived a wildfire, a mudslide, lost five loved ones on by one, and then the pandemic hit. She coped by joining a poetry writing group for reluctant grief experts, asking friends to take her to a lot of movies, and spending time in nature. She believes everyone deserves support [inside and outside academia]. It was out of this belief this that she co-founded the Academic Life channel on NBN with Dr. Dana Malone in 2020; she and Dr. Malone serve as the co-producers and hosts. Listeners to this episode might also be interested in:
The Unrecovery Star, referenced in this episode, found on page 78 and the Kvetching Circle and The Ring Theory, found on page 79 of Being Well in Academia
Your PhD Survival Guide by Katherine Firth, Liam Connell, and Peta Freestone
A Field Guide to Grad School by Jessica Calarco
These videos and resources from Dr. Pooky Knightsmith.
A discussion about natural disasters and poetry writing by Dr. Christina Gessler and her friend and neighbor, poet Jen Strube.
You are smart and capable, but you aren’t an island and neither are we. We reach across our mentor network to bring you experts about everything from how to finish that project, to how to take care of your beautiful mind. Wish we’d bring on an expert about something? DM us on Twitter: The Academic Life @AcademicLifeNBN. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/education
Founded in 1676 during a cosmopolitan early modern period, Mindröling monastery became a key site for Buddhist education and a Tibetan civilizational center. Its founders sought to systematize and institutionalize a worldview rooted in Buddhist philosophy, engaging with contemporaries from across Tibetan Buddhist schools while crystallizing what it meant to be part of their own Nyingma school. At the monastery, ritual performance, meditation, renunciation, and training in the skills of a bureaucrat or member of the literati went hand in hand. Studying at Mindröling entailed training the senses and cultivating the objects of the senses through poetry, ritual music, monastic dance, visual arts, and incense production, as well as medicine and astrology. Dominique Townsend investigates the ritual, artistic, and cultural practices inculcated at Mindröling to demonstrate how early modern Tibetans integrated Buddhist and worldly activities through training in aesthetics. Considering laypeople as well as monastics and women as well as men, A Buddhist Sensibility: Aesthetic Education at Tibet's Mindröling Monastery (Columbia UP, 2021) sheds new light on the forms of knowledge valued in early modern Tibetan societies, especially among the ruling classes. Townsend traces how tastes, values, and sensibilities were cultivated and spread, showing what it meant for a person, lay or monastic, to be deemed well educated. Combining historical and literary analysis with fieldwork in Tibetan Buddhist communities, this book reveals how monastic institutions work as centers of cultural production beyond the boundaries of what is conventionally deemed Buddhist. Jue Liang is scholar of Buddhism in general, and Tibetan Buddhism in particular. My research examines women in Tibetan Buddhist communities past and present using a combination of textual and ethnographical studies. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/education
Kenkoku University and the Experience of Pan-Asianism: Education in the Japanese Empire (Bloomsbury, 2019) by Yuka Kiruma Kishida makes a fresh contribution to the recent effort to re-examine the Japanese wartime ideology of Pan-Asianism by focusing on the experiences of students at Kenkoku University or “Nation-Building University,” abbreviated as Kendai (1938-1945). Located in the northeastern provinces of China commonly designated Manchuria, the university proclaimed to realize the goal of minzoku kyōwa (“ethnic harmony”). It recruited students of Japanese, Chinese, Korean, Taiwanese, Mongolian and Russian backgrounds and aimed to foster a generation of leaders for the state of Manchukuo. Distinguishing itself from other colonial schools within the Japanese Empire, Kendai promised ethnic equality to its diverse student body, while at the same time imposing Japanese customs and beliefs on all students. In this book, Yuka Hiruma Kishida examines not only the theory and rhetoric of Pan-Asianism as an ideal in the service of the Japanese Empire, but more importantly its implementation in the curriculum and the daily lives of students and faculty whose socioeconomic backgrounds were broadly representative of their respective societies. She draws on archival material which reveals dynamic exchanges of ideas about the meaning of Asian unity among the campus community, and documents convergences as well as clashes of competing articulations of Pan-Asianism. Kishida argues that an idealistic and egalitarian conception of Pan-Asianism exercised considerable appeal late into the Second World War, even as mobilization for total war intensified contradictions between ideal and practice. More than an institutional history, this book makes an important intervention into the historiography on Pan-Asianism and Japanese imperialism. Yuka Hiruma Kishida is an associate professor of history at Bridgewater College in Virginia, specializing in modern East Asian history. Shatrunjay Mall is a PhD candidate at the Department of History at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. He works on transnational Asian history, and his dissertation explores intellectual, political, and cultural intersections and affinities that emerged between Indian anti-colonialism and imperial Japan in the twentieth century. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/education
Listen to this interview of Ayelet Baram-Tsabari. We talk about the accessibility of science using Google to scholars and students in languages beyond English and how scholars can de-jargonize their research to ensure increase their reach. Avi Staiman is the founder and CEO of Academic Language Experts Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/education
This episode of the New Books in Education features English Learners at Home and at School: Stories and Strategies (Harvard Education Press, 2021), by Joyce Nutta. Published in 2021 by the Harvard Education Press, English Learners at Home and at School sheds light on the lived experience of English Learners and their families through presenting six research-based and carefully crafted non-fictional stories. Each of the stories centers on an English learner’s immigration and educational journey. Nutta’s inspiring writing offers rich and detailed portraits of these immigrant children and youths, who walked diverse life paths and strived to become proficient English speakers while adapting to their new life in the United States. The book highlights factors in families, schools and communities that contribute to the success of minoritized English Learner students. It also examines and suggests educational strategies that can scaffold English learners’ academic success, such as including establishing dual-language classrooms, adapting instruction, and inviting parent participation. English Learners at Home and at School helps teachers and policy makers develop a more comprehensive understanding of their English Learner students. It is also a compelling and highly readable text for parents, families, and the general public who are interested in this topic. Joyce W. Nutta is professor of World Languages Education and the ESOL Endorsement, Dual Language Education Graduate Certificate, and TESOL PhD Track Coordinator at the University of Central Florida. She is devoted to educating teachers of all subjects and grade levels about English learners and to equipping teachers with tools and techniques that support English learners’ academic achievement and language development. Pengfei Zhao is a critical researcher and qualitative research methodologist based at the University of Florida. She is currently working on a book manuscript studying the coming of age experience of rural Chinese youth during and right after the Cultural Revolution. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/education
Much has been reported and discussed about the hotly debated issue of immigration enforcement, yet a question is still to be explored: What is the impact of the immigration enforcement on schools and our educational system? In Schools Under Siege: The Impact of Immigration Enforcement on Educational Equity (Harvard Education Press, 2021), Patricia Gándara and Jongyeon Ee addressed this question using rich and comprehensive data from their survey and interview studies. More than 6 million school aged children and youths live in a household in which at least one of their close family members is undocumented. Schools Under Siege sheds light on what the immigration enforcement by US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) means to these children. The book also explores the multi-faceted consequences, both direct and indirect, for their classmates, educators, schools, and communities. Schools Under Siege found that fear, stress, and trauma invoked by the threat of ICE detention and deportation contribute to increased absenteeism, decreased student achievement, and parent disengagement. Bullying becomes more widespread, and a multitude of other effects impact school climate and student health and well-being. Amplifying the burden, these effects are experienced disproportionately in poorly funded districts and Title I schools and are felt more acutely among vulnerable populations such as immigrant students, English language learners, and Latinx students. In this episode, you will hear their findings, with vivid examples, about the challenges that these children encountered living under the fear of being separated from their family members. Many children are American citizens and they faced the challenges of absenteeism, trauma, bully, among other things. Patricia and Jongyeon also discussed various innovative ways that educators come up with to support these students, including the idea of sanctuary schooling. They offer informative suggestions to educators and policy makers and engage the public in understanding the profound challenges schools and educators are facing today in supporting disadvanted and minoritized studenets. Patricia Gándara is research professor and codirector of the Civil Rights Project at UCLA. She is also director of education for the University of California–Mexico Initiative. Jongyeon Ee is an assistant professor at the School of Education, Loyola Marymount University (LMU). Pengfei Zhao is a critical researcher and qualitative research methodologist based at the University of Florida. She is currently working on a book manuscript studying the coming of age experience of rural Chinese youth during and right after the Cultural Revolution. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/education
In Intersectionality in the Muslim South Asian-American Middle Class: Lifestyle Consumption beyond Halal and Hijab (Lexington Books, 2021), wherein Ternikar theorizes the everyday consumption of South Asian Muslim American women through case studies of their food, clothing, and social media presence. Through feminist, intersectional, and sociology of consumption theories, she provides excellent insights into the nuanced ways that these women negotiate their gendered, classed, racial, and religious identities. Far from being simply a book about the clothing styles, dietary habits and preferences, and social media presence of Muslim American women of South Asian backgrounds, it is an excellent exploration of the ways that this group of American women maintain, form, and re-invent new identities through consumption while maintaining and re-negotiating inherited ethno-religious traditions. Farha Bano Ternikar is an associate professor of Sociology and director of Gender and Women’s Studies at Le Moyne College. She has an MA in Religious Studies and a PhD in Sociology. Her publications include “Feeding the Muslim South Asian Immigrant Family" in Feminist Food Studies (2019), “Constructing the Halal Kitchen in the American Diaspora” (2020), and “Hijab and the Abrahamic Traditions” in Sociology Compass (2010). Her publications “Ethical consumption and Modest fashion” is forthcoming in Fashion Studies Journal (Spring 2022), and “The Changing Face of Arranged Marriage irl and online in the Muslim Diaspora” in the Politics of Tradition, Resistance and Change (summer 2022). In our interview today, we discuss the main contributions and findings of her book Intersectionality in the Muslim South Asian-American Middle Class: Lifestyle Consumption beyond Halal and Hijab, her choice to focus on upper-middle class South Asian American women, her respondents’ complex ideas of hijab, modesty, and halal consumption of food, and their presence on and consumption of social media. Shehnaz Haqqani is an Assistant Professor of Religion at Mercer University. She earned her PhD in Islamic Studies with a focus on gender from the University of Texas at Austin in 2018. Her dissertation research explored questions of change and tradition, specifically in the context of gender and sexuality, in Islam. She can be reached at haqqani_s@mercer.edu. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/education
Gill has been s a volunteer librarian at Claremont Primary School in Cape Town South Africa since 2010. Through her initiative she has been able to give several hundred children aged 6-14 from largely disadvantaged backgrounds access to books and advice about reading. She believes that this has been life changing for a significant number of her readers – as well as giving her life profound value. Gill is a great example of a social entrepreneur. Richard nominated her to speak at TEDxCapeTown, Watch her talk here For the love of books | Gill Grose | TEDxCapeTown
Claremont Primary School
Couchsurfing
mikengill@gmail.com <-- Gill will be glad to answer e-mails from those wanting more information
About your host Richard Lucas Richard is a business and social entrepreneur who founded, led and/or invested in more than 30 businesses, Richard has been a TEDx event organiser, supports the pro-entrepreneurship ecosystem, and leads entrepreneurship workshops at all levels: from pre-schools to leading business schools. Richard was born in Oxford and moved to Poland in 1991. Read more here. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/education
Wasif Rizvi is the founding president of Habib University, the first liberal arts institution in Pakistan. Planning for the University began in 2010, with the first calls of students accepted in 2014. Thanks to the largest gift in the history of higher education in Pakistan, $50M from the Habib Corporation, the University was able to quickly build a new campus. Rizvi shares insights on all the elements that went into creating a successful new institution that has greatly expanded access to higher education for talented, low-income students in Pakistan. David Finegold is the president of Chatham University. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/education
The Economy Studies project emerged from the worldwide movement to modernise economics education, spurred on by the global financial crisis of 2008, the climate crisis, and the COVID-19 pandemic. It envisions a wide variety of economics graduates and specialists, equipped with a broad toolkit, enabling them to collectively understand and help tackle the issues the world faces today. Economy Studies: A Guide to Rethinking Economics Education (Amsterdam University Press, 2021) is a practical guide for (re-)designing economics courses and programs. Based on a clear conceptual framework and ten flexible building blocks, this book offers refreshing ideas and practical suggestions to stimulate student engagement and critical thinking across a wide range of courses. Sam de Muijnck is chief economist at the Dutch independent think tank Our New Economy. Earlier, he was the chair of the Future Generations Think Tank, as well as that of the Dutch branch of the international student movement, ‘Rethinking Economics’. He completed his undergraduate economics degree at the Radboud University in Nijmegen, and then pursued an interdisciplinary research master’s at the University of Amsterdam. Joris Tieleman completed his PhD from the Institute for Housing and Urban Development Studies, Erasmus University Rotterdam. He previously worked as a staff research journalist for the Volkskrant (a Dutch daily), and co-founded the Dutch branch of Rethinking Economics. Utsav Saksena is a Research Fellow at the National Institute of Public Finance and Policy (NIPFP), an autonomous institute under the Ministry of Finance, Government of India. He can be reached at utsavsaksena95@hotmail.com. Note: opinions expressed in this podcast are purely personal and do not reflect the official position of NIPFP or the Ministry of Finance, Government of India. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/education
Ethnographer and sociologist Joanne Golann spent 18 months observing the day-to-day life of students and teachers in a “no-excuses” charter school. In her book Scripting the Moves, she explores the school’s use of behavioural scripts, including SLANT. Golann investigates the reasoning behind the use of these scripts, their implementation and their impacts on the school community, and questions whether the micro-management shaping every school day serves its stated purpose, namely, to prepare students for college in the future. Exploring ideas about cultural capital, authority, socialisation, leadership and autonomy in the charter school setting, Golann’s study provides a rare glimpse into the internal workings of an educational institution that should be required reading for anyone interested in school reform. Joanne Golann is an Assistant Professor of Public Policy and Education and an Assistant Professor of Sociology (secondary) at Vanderbilt University. Twitter: @jwgolann, Alice Garner is historian, teacher and performer with a PhD from the University of Melbourne, Australia. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/education
Today I had the pleasure of talking to George Drake, historian, professor emeritus and president emeritus of Grinnell College. George has written a memoir: Seventy Years in Academe. George brought a wealth of experience to the interview. We talked about a lot of things: why he elected to go to Grinnell, his experience as a Rhodes Scholar, how he got his first academic job, how he became president of Grinnell, the challenges he faced as president, and his rich life after he stepped down as president in 1991. George was president when I was at Grinnell, so it was an absolute joy for me to talk to him. Enjoy! Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/education
Traditions of Eloquence: The Jesuits and Modern Rhetorical Studies (Fordham UP, 2016) explores the important ways Jesuits have employed rhetoric, the ancient art of persuasion and the current art of communications, from the sixteenth century to the present. Much of the history of how Jesuit traditions contributed to the development of rhetorical theory and pedagogy has been lost, effaced, or dispersed. As a result, those interested in Jesuit education and higher education in the United States, as well as scholars and teachers of rhetoric, are often unaware of this living 450-year-old tradition. Written by highly regarded scholars of rhetoric, composition, education, philosophy, and history, many based at Jesuit colleges and universities, the essays in this volume explore the tradition of Jesuit rhetorical education-that is, constructing "a more usable past" and a viable future for eloquentia perfecta, the Jesuits' chief aim for the liberal arts. Intended to foster eloquence across the curriculum and into the world beyond, Jesuit rhetoric integrates intellectual rigor, broad knowledge, civic action, and spiritual discernment as the chief goals of the educational experience. Consummate scholars and rhetors, the early Jesuits employed all the intellectual and language arts as "contemplatives in action," preaching and undertaking missionary, educational, and charitable works in the world. The study, pedagogy, and practice of classical grammar and rhetoric, adapted to Christian humanism, naturally provided a central focus of this powerful educational system as part of the Jesuit commitment to the Ministries of the Word. This book traces the development of Jesuit rhetoric in Renaissance Europe, follows its expansion to the United States, and documents its reemergence on campuses and in scholarly discussions across America in the twenty-first century. Traditions of Eloquence provides a wellspring of insight into the past, present, and future of Jesuit rhetorical traditions. In a period of ongoing reformulations and applications of Jesuit educational mission and identity, this collection of compelling essays helps provide historical context, a sense of continuity in current practice, and a platform for creating future curricula and pedagogy. Moreover it is a valuable resource for anyone interested in understanding a core aspect of the Jesuit educational heritage.
Cinthia Gannett is Professor Emerita of English at Fairfield University where she directs the Core Writing Program. She is the author of a variety of articles in composition and has previously directed writing programs, writing centers, and Writing Across the Curriculum programs at the University of New Hampshire and Loyola University in Maryland. John C. Brereton is Professor Emeritus of English at the University of Massachusetts at Boston and the Editor of The Origins of Composition Studies in the American College, 1875-1925. Tom Discenna is Professor of Communication at Oakland University whose work examines issues of academic labor and communicative labor more broadly. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/education
In the Shadow of the Ivory Tower: How Universities are Plundering our Cities (Bold Type Books, 2021) by Dr. Davarian Baldwin examines the political economy of the American university over the twentieth and twentieth-first centuries. He brings a Black Studies lens to interrogate the ways that universities hide behind the notion of administering public goods to protect their tax-exempt status while generating astronomical profits off of the backs of working-class people, graduate student teachers and researchers, and underpaid and contingent faculty. We discuss the securitization and development implications of growing university wealth and how it engenders forms of radicalized plunder, racist policing, gentrification, and exploitation by the 1%. With a focus on this and more, we talk about what it means to live in the shadow of ivory tower. Amanda Joyce Hall is a Ph.D. Candidate in History and African American Studies at Yale University. She is writing an international history on the global movement against South African apartheid during the 1970s and 1980s. She tweets from @amandajoycehall. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/education
In Humanist Reason: A History, an Argument, a Plan (Columbia UP, 2021), Eric Hayot develops the concept of “humanist reason” to understand the nature and purpose of humanist intellectual work and lays out a serious of principles that undergird this core idea. Rather than appealing to familiar ethical or moral rationales for the importance of the humanities, Humanist Reason lays out a new vision that moves beyond traditional disciplines to demonstrate what the humanities can tell us about our world. Eric Hayot is Distinguished Professor of Comparative Literature and Asian Studies at Penn State University, where he is also Director of the Center for Humanities and Information. His books include Chinese Dreams: Pound, Brecht, Tel quell (U of Michigan P), The Hypothetical Mandarin: Sympathy, Modernity, and Chinese Pain (Oxford UP), On Literary Worlds (Oxford UP), The Elements of Academic Style: Writing for the Humanities (Columbia UP), and, most recently, Humanist Reason (Columbia UP), published in 2021. He edited and co-edited numerous books and in 2018 he published with Lea Pao a translation of Peter Janich’s What is Information? (U of Minnesota P). Bryant Scott is a professor in the Liberal Arts department at Texas A & M University at Qatar. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/education
We are delighted to present All for One and One for All: Public Seminar Series on Mental Health in Academia and Society. All for One and One for All talks will shine the light on and discuss mental health issues in academia across all levels – from students to faculty, as well as in wider society. Seminars are held online once per month on Wednesdays at 5pm CEST/ 11am EST and free for all to attend. Speakers include academics, organisations, and health professionals whose work focuses on mental health. Live Q and A sessions will be held after each talk. For live webinar schedule please visit this website. Follow us on Twitter: @LashuelLab The first conversation is between Dr. Roy Richard Grinker and Dr. Hilal Lashuel, with support from Galina Limorenko. Mental health experts and advocates tell us that "stigma" is the major barrier to mental health care throughout the world. But where did stigma come from? And how can we begin to eradicate it? Dr. Grinker, a cultural anthropologist, specializing in psychological anthropology will discuss his new book, Nobody's Normal. Drawing on research in sub-Saharan Africa, the U.S., and South Korea, as well as his own history as the son, grandson, and great-grandson of psychiatrists, Dr. Grinker writes that we are on the cusp of ending the marginalization of people with mental illnesses and developmental disorders. Galina Limorenko is a doctoral candidate in Neuroscience with a focus on biochemistry and molecular biology of neurodegenerative diseases at EPFL in Switzerland. To discuss and propose the book for an interview you can reach her at galina.limorenko@epfl.ch. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/education
Amid a string of fall 2021 news reports about past-due exonerations and (white) self-defense that document the limits of racial justice within the U.S. legal system, Pain and Shock in America: Politics, Advocacy, and the Controversial Treatment of People with Disabilities (Brandeis University Press, 2021) becomes an even more relevant and timely book. Dr. Jan Nisbet, who authored the book with contributions from Nancy Weiss, introduces it succinctly: “The story is long, complicated, and filled with questions about society and its ability to care about, protect, and support the most vulnerable citizens. It is a story that calls into question the degree to which people who do not have disabilities can separate themselves from those who do, allowing painful interventions that they themselves would not likely tolerate” (2021, p. 8). If justice is central to evaluations of the social policies and public institutions charged with administering it, disability–as core issue theorized in philosophies of justice–must be centered as well (Putnam et al., 2019). To this end, Pain and Shock in America “intentionally highlights the hard-fought battles of disabled survivors like Jennifer Msumba and disabled-led advocacy organizations like the Autistic Self-Advocacy Network,” as “disabled self-advocates (who also happen to be lawyers)” (Nisbet 2021, p. vii-viii) Shain M. Neumeier and Lydia X.Z. Brown write in the Foreword––themselves appearing in the book as leaders with critical roles. The volume chronicles a nearly half-century saga involving the law, education, psychology, and medical fields as they converge in methods and culture of The Judge Rotenberg Center, a privately-run facility in Massachusetts which, despite six student deaths and consistent frequent citations for abuse and neglect, has been funded by taxpayers from about a dozen states and our nation’s capital as a placement for students with disabilities. Though its use of a self-made electric shock device makes the Judge Rotenberg Center unique in the country and perhaps the world, its institutional history provides a broader if extreme “lens through which we can understand the societal issues facing people with disabilities and their families” (Nisbet 2021, p. 10) Jan Nisbet is professor emeritus at the University of New Hampshire, where she served for ten years as the senior vice provost for research. Before assuming that position, she was the founding director of the Institute on Disability and professor in the Department of Education. She has been principal investigator on many state- and nationally-funded projects related to children and adults with disabilities. Nancy R. Weiss is a faculty member and the Director of the National Leadership Consortium on Developmental Disabilities at the University of Delaware. She is the former Executive Director of TASH, an international advocacy association committed to the full inclusion of people with disabilities. She has more than forty years of experience in the field of intellectual and developmental disabilities and has worked extensively providing community living and positive behavioral supports. Christina A. Bosch is an assistant professor of special education in the Literacy, Early, Bilingual and Special Education Department of the Kremen School of Education and Human Development at California State University Fresno; on Twitter as @DocCABosch Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/education
We speak with Elizabeth Kiss about the design and launch of the very successful SUMMIT initiative that led Agnes Scott College to be recognized as “the most innovative liberal arts college” in the U.S. SUMMIT features four distinctive elements that are a part of every Agnes Scott undergrad’s education: a global immersive experience, leadership, a personal Board of Advisors, and a digital portfolio. The initiative has played a crucial role in growing enrollment and stabilizing the finances of the College. Kiss left Agnes Scott in 2018 to become the head of the Rhodes Trust. She describes the exciting ways in which the Rhodes Trust has been transformed since she was a scholar herself in the 1980s. David Finegold is the president of Chatham University. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/education
Jeff Guhin joins us today to talk about his book Agents of God: Boundaries and Authority in Muslim and Christian Schools (Oxford University Press, 2020). Jeff, an Assistant Professor of Sociology at UCLA, shares with us how his experiences with religious schooling shaped his interests in education, culture and religion. Agents of God is the culmination of Jeff’s dissertation work while he was a doctoral student in Sociology at Yale University, a thoughtful comparative ethnography of Muslim and Conservative Protestant high schools. In today’s conversation we explore the nuances of religious education, how people negotiate boundaries and the agentification of institutions. We also discuss the politics of national identity and the role of schools in this nationalization. Jeff also touches on his experiences with mental health and how he works to navigate those within academia and in the process of writing this book. This book provides a compelling lens for how to understand the forces of Science, Scripture and Prayer as “external authorities” that shape individual and national behavior. Nafeesa Andrabi is a 4th year Sociology PhD student at UNC-Chapel Hill, a Biosocial Fellow at Carolina Population Center and a National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellow. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/education
We are delighted to present All for One and One for All: Public Seminar Series on Mental Health in Academia and Society. All for One and One for All talks will shine the light on and discuss mental health issues in academia across all levels – from students to faculty, as well as in wider society. Seminars are held online once per month on Wednesdays at 5pm CEST/ 11am EST and free for all to attend. Speakers include academics, organisations, and health professionals whose work focuses on mental health. Live Q and A sessions will be held after each talk. For live webinar schedule please visit this website. Follow us on Twitter: @LashuelLab The first conversation is between Dr. Roy Richard Grinker and Dr. Hilal Lashuel, with support from Galina Limorenko. Mental health experts and advocates tell us that "stigma" is the major barrier to mental health care throughout the world. But where did stigma come from? And how can we begin to eradicate it? Dr. Grinker, a cultural anthropologist, specializing in psychological anthropology will discuss his new book, Nobody's Normal. Drawing on research in sub-Saharan Africa, the U.S., and South Korea, as well as his own history as the son, grandson, and great-grandson of psychiatrists, Dr. Grinker writes that we are on the cusp of ending the marginalization of people with mental illnesses and developmental disorders. Galina Limorenko is a doctoral candidate in Neuroscience with a focus on biochemistry and molecular biology of neurodegenerative diseases at EPFL in Switzerland. To discuss and propose the book for an interview you can reach her at galina.limorenko@epfl.ch. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/education
Comedian Robin Ince quickly abandoned science at school, bored by a fog of dull lessons and intimidated by the barrage of equations. But, twenty years later, he fell in love and he now presents one of the world's most popular science podcasts. Every year he meets hundreds of the world's greatest thinkers. In this erudite and witty book, Robin reveals why scientific wonder isn't just for the professionals. Filled with interviews featuring astronauts, comedians, teachers, quantum physicists, neuroscientists and more - as well as charting Robin's own journey with science - The Importance of Being Interested: Adventures in Scientific Curiosity (Atlantic Books, 2021) explores why many wrongly think of the discipline as distant and difficult. From the glorious appeal of the stars above to why scientific curiosity can encourage much needed intellectual humility, this optimistic and profound book will leave you filled with a thirst for intellectual adventure. John Weston teaches academic communication at Tampere University, Finland. His work focuses on the sociolinguistics of knowledge, and creative writing and wellbeing. Twitter: @johnwphd. Email: john.weston.media@gmail.com Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/education
Under Bill Carroll’s leadership, Benedictine University, in Lisle Illinois became the fastest growing university in the U.S. from 2000-12. Carroll describes how Benedictine was able to expand from 1400 to over 10,000 students and become one of the most diverse universities in the US by “adding multiple legs to the table”, with each leg being a new type of student served through a new program. These innovative initiatives include: 5 j.v. campuses in China and 3 in Vietnam, branch US campuses in Mesa, AZ and Springfield, IL, online and senior learning programs, outreach to different ethnic and religious groups, and free educational offerings and partnerships for first responders and displaced workers. He also shares his insights on the future of higher education from his unique perspective leading Hunter Global Education, that is working to foster educational partnerships between US and Asian colleges and universities. David Finegold is the president of Chatham University. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/education
Of the dozens of juicy questions for future inquiry that Dr. Michelle Nario-Redmond provides at the end of Ableism: The Causes and Consequences of Disability Prejudice (Published by Wiley in 2021), the following stands out the most to me, in my various group-membership roles: How do we build common ground between disadvantaged groups for effective cross-impairment coalitions? Though it seemed impossible for this question to feel any more urgent after over a year and a half of COVID-19 and the parallel prominence of social movements to make Black Lives Matter, a recent article by my latest author crush unpacking a profoundly intersectional moment in the meme culture of what we should be calling (thanks to Neal Stephenson’s 30-year old book) Metaverse 1.0 – AKA social media, especially those platforms now owned by the maybe-monopoly formerly known as Facebook – reminded me again of the immense possibilities of disability as a political identity (see Annamma & Morrison, 2018, particularly the footnotes for more background on this). Nicole Froio’s article-that-should-become-a-book extrapolates from a celebrity’s (whack!) Instagram post as an exemplification of what the writer dubs the masculine “performativity of doing the least,” in which the “‘model’ heterosexual family consists of an all-sacrificing mother, a paternalistic father, and children free from disability.” The timing of Froio’s deft analysis and the 34,000 likes it has garnered–compared to the upwards of 2 million bestowed upon the post in question—remind me of beloved if nuclear boomer Bill Maher’s synchronous editorial segment comparing “model citizen” Greta Thunburg (who is autistic), with 13 million followers, to the “model” (capitalist straight femme normate) Kylie Jenner, with 279 million. Christina Anderson Bosch is an assistant professor of special education at the California State University, Fresno, also on Twitter @DocCABosch. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/education
Listen to this interview of Mike Palmquist, Professor of English (with a focus on rhetoric and composition) and also University Distinguished Teaching Scholar. We have a conversation. Mike Palmquist : "We tend to think, 'Oh, writing. Just learn how to put your sentences together. Learn how to develop a nice paragraph. Learn the rules of grammar.' And somehow that's supposed to transfer magically into another discipline. But in fact, the kinds of debate and discourse and discussion and reporting and inquiry that go on in a particular discipline are highly conditioned by the knowledge they share, by the things they think are important — by the conversations, in a sense, that are going on in that discipline. You really have to learn it. Otherwise, you'll just be writing about stuff but won't quite know how to connect it to what everybody else is researching and publishing on." Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/education
Father Steve Katsouros, founder and CEO of the Come To Believe Network, shares the inspirational story of the founding of Arrupe College at Loyola University Chicago which has been recognized as a national model for increasing the college graduation rates for low-income students of color. Arrupe operates as a two-year, liberal arts college within the University that has been able to quadruple the national graduation rate for high-need students to obtain an associate’s degree by integrating a set of best practices: a year-round cohort, intensive faculty advising, wraparound support services and building a strong sense of community. Fr. Katsouros left Arrupe last year to found the Come to Believe Network that is now seeking to replicate the Arrupe model nationally with partner universities. He is also the author of Come to Believe: How Jesuits Are Reinventing Education (Again) (Orbis, 2017). David Finegold is the president of Chatham University. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/education
"How To Be Wrong" is a podcast series hosted by John J. Kaag, Professor and Chair of Philosophy at the University of Massachusetts Lowell and John W. Traphagan, Professor of Religious Studies and in the Program in Human Dimensions of Organizations at the University of Texas at Austin. The series explores mistakes, errors, and the importance of embracing intellectual humility in a world that seems increasingly dominated by dualistic an uncritically oppositional thinking, argument, and debate. We talk with scholars, artists, authors, and others about their ideas and stories related to things that have gone wrong and ask them to discuss the ways this has influenced their lives and work and influenced their ideas about certainty and humility. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/education
At the New Books Network, we love university presses. So we're happy to tell you about University Press Week, the annual celebration of UPs and their important work. Today I talked to Lisa Bayer, the director of the University of Georgia Press and the president of the Association of University Presses. We discuss a lot of things--open access, business models, libraries, peer review, careers in UP publishing--all knit together by a theme, that being how UPs keep up with everything that is going on, scholarly-communications-wise. Enjoy. Marshall Poe is the founder and editor of the New Books Network. He can be reached at marshallpoe@newbooksnetwork.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/education
Students and their families face a consequential choice in whether to pursue a degree, and in what area. For those considering mathematics programs, the choice may be particularly fraught: A gulf separates the exploratory and experimental mathematics done by professionals from the computational training of most secondary schools, and this can obscure the meanings of program options. Meanwhile, cultural anxieties and stereotypes can dissuade students who would flourish in mathematical careers. This despite mathematical professionals being among the most satisfied and well-compensated in their careers. In Why Study Mathematics? (2020), Vicky Neale provides a compact guide to this juncture, which i expect students and their families and teachers will find hugely valuable. As part of the London Publishing Partnership's "Why Study" series, her book in Part I explores in detail the substance and varieties of math degrees, how students can shape them to their needs and interests, and what those who complete them go on to do after. For Part II, Neale gives the reader a deeper view into a selection of subfields and the work their practitioners do, including the technologically vital study of data compression and the (for now) more humanistic study of abstract networks known as Ramsey theory. Dr. Neale has exceptional experience and skill as a mentor that comes through as she addresses questions that, in my experience, often aren't: Are mathematics degrees mostly for mathematically adept students? Once in a program, whom should i get to know? Where are all the job postings for "mathematician"? It was a treat to hear her expound further on the book, and i would suggest that anyone at the beginning of their professional life, with interest, aptitude, or just curiosity about mathematics, seek out this resource (or recommend it to their mentors and guidance offices!) as they weigh their options. Suggested companion works:
Maths Careers (UK)
Numberphile YouTube channel
Plus magazine
Chalkdust magazine
Vicky Neale is the Whitehead Lecturer at the Mathematical Institute, University of Oxford, and a Supernumerary Fellow at Balliol College. She teaches pure mathematics to undergraduates, and combines this with work on public engagement with mathematics: she gives public lectures, leads workshops with school students, and has appeared on numerous BBC radio and television programmes. One of her current interests is in using knitting and crochet to explore mathematical ideas. She is the author of Closing the Gap: The Quest to Understand Prime Numbers (Oxford University Press, 2017)—listen to her interview with Jim Stein about that book here. Cory Brunson is an Assistant Professor at the Laboratory for Systems Medicine at the University of Florida. His research focuses on geometric and topological approaches to the analysis of medical and healthcare data. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/education
Learning and Memory is based on an in-depth filmed conversation between Howard Burton and Alcino Silva, Distinguished Professor of Neurobiology, Psychiatry and Psychology at the David Geffen School of Medicine and Director of the Integrated Center for Learning and Memory at UCLA. Alcino Silva runs a learning and memory lab at UCLA that is focused on a vast number of topics, from schizophrenia and autism to learning and memory. This fascinating conversation explores how he and his colleagues focus on understanding the specific molecular mechanisms of neurobiology with the goal of being able to intervene and repair these mechanisms when they go awry. Further topics include plasticity of the brain, implanting memories, how cognitive deficits associated with developmental disorders can be reversed, the importance of “research maps” for the field and inspired optimism for the future. Howard Burton is the founder of the Ideas Roadshow, Ideas on Film and host of the Ideas Roadshow Podcast. He can be reached at howard@ideasroadshow.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/education
There is an epidemic of bad thinking in the world today. An alarming number of people are embracing crazy, even dangerous ideas. They believe that vaccinations cause autism. They reject the scientific consensus on climate change as a “hoax.” And they blame the spread of COVID-19 on the 5G network or a Chinese cabal. Worse, bad thinking drives bad acting—it even inspired a mob to storm the U.S. Capitol. In this book, Steven Nadler and Lawrence Shapiro argue that the best antidote for bad thinking is the wisdom, insights, and practical skills of philosophy. When Bad Thinking Happens to Good People: How Philosophy Can Save Us from Ourselves (Princeton UP, 2021) provides an engaging tour through the basic principles of logic, argument, evidence, and probability that can make all of us more reasonable and responsible citizens. When Bad Thinking Happens to Good People shows how we can more readily spot and avoid flawed arguments and unreliable information; determine whether evidence supports or contradicts an idea; distinguish between merely believing something and knowing it; and much more. In doing so, the book reveals how epistemology, which addresses the nature of belief and knowledge, and ethics, the study of moral principles that should govern our behavior, can reduce bad thinking. Moreover, the book shows why philosophy’s millennia-old advice about how to lead a good, rational, and examined life is essential for escaping our current predicament. In a world in which irrationality has exploded to deadly effect, When Bad Thinking Happens to Good People is a timely and essential guide for a return to reason. Marshall Poe is the founder and editor of the New Books Network. He can be reached at marshallpoe@newbooksnetwork.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/education
In Becoming Gods: Medical Training in Mexican Hospitals (Rutgers University Press, 2021), Vania Smith-Oka follows a cohort of interns throughout their year of medical training in hospitals to understand how medical students become medical doctors. She ethnographically tracks their engagements with one another, interactions with patients, experiences with doctors, and presentations of cases to show how medical students undergo a nuanced process of accumulating knowledge and practical experience in shaping their medical selves. Smith-Oka illuminates the gendered aspects of this process, whereby the medical interns’ gender informs the kind of treatment they receive from other doctors and the kinds of possibilities they imagine for their careers and areas of medical practice. She documents the lives of the interns during which time they develop their medical selves and come to understand the tacit values of medical practice. The book is full of descriptive vignettes and ethnographic details that make it accessible to undergraduate students. It would be of interest to those in medical anthropology, hospital ethnography, medical education as well as people interested in how expertise is acquired and developed. The book examines medical interns’ transformations through ordinary and extraordinary moments, through active and passive learning where they not only acquire new knowledge but also new ways of being. Vania Smith-Oka is an associate professor in the Department of Anthropology at the University of Notre Dame in Indiana. She is the Director of the Health, Humanities, and Society Program at the John J. Reilly Center. Reighan Gillam is an assistant professor in the Department of Anthropology at the University of Southern California. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/education
In Re-Union: How Bold Labor Reforms Can Repair, Revitalize, and Reunite the United States (Cornell UP, 2021), David Madland explores how labor unions are essential to all workers. Yet, union systems are badly flawed and in need of rapid changes for reform. Madland's multilayered analysis presents a solution--a model to replace the existing firm-based collective bargaining with a larger, industry-scale bargaining method coupled with powerful incentives for union membership. These changes would represent a remarkable shift from the norm, but would be based on lessons from other countries, US history and current policy in several cities and states. In outlining the shift, Madland details how these proposals might mend the broken economic and political systems in the United States. He also uses three examples from Britain, Canada, and Australia to explore what there is yet to learn about this new system in other developed nations. Madland's practical advice in Re-Union extends to a proposal for how to implement the changes necessary to shift the current paradigm. This powerful call to action speaks directly to the workers affected by these policies--the very people seeking to have their voices recognized in a system that attempts to silence them.
David Madland is Senior Fellow and Strategic Director of the American Worker Project at the Center for American Progress. He is author of Hollowed Out: Why the Economy Doesn’t work without a strong middle class. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/education
In Part II of this interview, TCS Education Founder Michael Horowitz discusses the evolution of the TCS system from its origins in Chicago to a national system that now includes students from all 50 states pursuing a wide range of undergraduate and professional degrees. He provides multiple examples of the benefits of TCS’s model of “radical cooperation”, while also discussing why there have been so few imitators despite their openness about sharing the model. David Finegold is the president of Chatham University. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/education
Following the Treaty of Versailles, European nation-states were faced with the challenge of instilling national loyalty in their new borderlands, in which fellow citizens often differed dramatically from one another along religious, linguistic, cultural, or ethnic lines. Peripheries at the Centre: Borderland Schooling in Interwar Europe (Berghahn Books, 2021) compares the experiences of schooling in Upper Silesia in Poland and Eupen, Sankt Vith, and Malmedy in Belgium — border regions detached from the German Empire after the First World War. It demonstrates how newly configured countries envisioned borderland schools and language learning as tools for realizing the imagined peaceful Europe that underscored the political geography of the interwar period. Jill Massino is a scholar of modern Eastern Europe with a focus on Romania, gender, and everyday life. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/education
Digital games for learning are now commonplace, used in settings that range from K–12 education to advanced medical training. In Making Games for Impact (MIT Press, 2021), Kurt Squire examines the ways that games make an impact on learning, investigating how designers and developers incorporate authentic social impact goals, build a team, and work with experts in order to make games that are effective and marketable. Because there is no one design process for making games for impact—specific processes arise in response to local needs and conditions—Squire presents a series of case studies that range from a small, playable game created by a few programmers and an artist to a multimillion-dollar project with funders, outside experts, and external constraints. These cases, drawn from the Games + Learning + Society Center at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, show designers tackling such key issues as choosing platforms, using data analytics to guide development, and designing for new markets. Although not a how-to guide, the book offers developers, researchers, and students real-world lessons in greenlighting a project, scaling up design teams, game-based assessment, and more. The final chapter examines the commercial development of an impact game in detail, describing the creation of an astronomy game, At Play in the Cosmos, that ships with an introductory college textbook. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/education
This episode feature an interview with Michael Alexander, one of the most innovative small university presidents in the U.S. He discusses a number of the innovations during his 15-year tenure at Lasell University located in the suburbs of Boston, MA: Lasell Village, a very successful retirement community where residents sign up to be full-time students for the rest of their lives, Lasell Works and a new program that lowers the costs of obtaining a degree for students who agree to spend their whole sophomore year learning online while working off campus. Alexander is also one of the co-founders of the Low-Cost Models Consortium that is fostering collaboration among private colleges and industry to find ways to significantly reduce the debt for students to complete their degrees. David Finegold is the president of Chatham University. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/education
Jean Hopman’s book Surviving Emotional Work for Teachers: Improving Wellbeing and Professional Learning Through Reflexive Practice (Routledge, 2020), is a guide to improving teachers' wellbeing and practice through support of their emotional workload. The book argues that teachers should be given a formal opportunity to debrief on challenging events, allowing them to reflect on and reframe these experiences in a way that informs future practice to prevent the emotional fatigue that can lead teachers to leave the field altogether. Each chapter opens with a teacher's story, acknowledging the emotional layers present in the scenario and what learnings can be drawn from it. This is valuable reading for teachers at all stages of their career, whether preparing for the complex work ahead or making sense of past and current experiences. This book offers a reflexive process that teachers and schools can implement to facilitate the useful exploration of their emotion, a process vital for the overall wellbeing of any school. Dr Jean Hopman works in Initial Teacher Education at Victoria University in Melbourne, Australia. Her doctoral work explored the emotional aspects of teaching by exploring the underlying layers of a teacher's role. She initially completed a Bachelor of Primary and Secondary Education and a Graduate Diploma in Child Psychotherapy Studies. Since 2000 she has taught and counselled in diverse educational settings, including government schools, private schools, international schools, alternative education settings and universities. Discount for listeners: Save 30% on Surviving Emotional Work for Teachers when you purchase here by entering PBC30at the checkout. Offer valid until the 31 October, 2021. Alice Garner is historian, teacher and performer with a PhD from the University of Melbourne, Australia. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/education
Welcome to The Academic Life! In this episode you’ll hear about:
Dr. Liz Faber’s long road from completed PhD to dream job
Why academia said she was a failure
The financial reasons she worked two academic jobs at once
The importance of speaking out about pay-scale and departmental inequities
Putting kindness in the classroom
Why you have to define your own success
Our guest is: Dr. Liz W Faber, an Assistant Professor of English & Communication at Dean College. Her teaching and research interests include multimodal communication, science communication, representations of AI in science fiction, computer history, and gender/sexuality studies. She is the author of The Computer's Voice: From Star Trek to Siri (U. Minnesota Press, 2020) and the guest editor for the Popular Culture Studies Journal special issue on robots and labor. She can be found on Twitter (@lizwfab) or at her website (lizwfaber.com). Our host is: Dr. Christina Gessler, the co-producer of the Academic Life podcasts. Listeners to this episode might be interested in:
"Faculty Talk about Teaching at a Community College" by Dianne Finley and Sherry Kinslow
Academic Ableism by Jay Dolmage (U Michigan Press, 2017)
More than Machines? by Laura Voss (Columbia U Press, 2021)
Carleigh Brower’s work
The Computer's Voice: From Star Trek to Siri by Liz Faber (U. Minnesota Press, 2020)
Articles on robots and labor, ed by Dr. Liz Faber Popular Culture Studies Journal https://mpcaaca.org/the-
NEA article on the need for change
Inside Higher Ed examines contingent faculty wages
The Daily Beast finds making coffee pays more than being an adjunct
You are smart and capable, but you aren’t an island and neither are we. We reach across our mentor network to bring you podcasts. Wish we’d bring on a particular expert? DM on Twitter @AcademicLifeNBN. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/education
Book workshops produce great books, but too few scholars have access to the resources needed to organize and execute one, especially scholars at Historically Black Colleges and Universities, Hispanic Serving Institutions, Asian American and Pacific Islander Serving Institutions, and Tribal Colleges and Universities. The 2021 American Political Science Association Annual Meeting in Seattle, launched a new initiative, The Minority-Serving Institution Virtual Book Workshop Project, to provide book workshops for scholars (tenured, untenured, VAP, term appointments) at Minority-Serving Institutions. In the podcast, the co-directors of the Project discuss the importance of supporting MSI faculty, how to successfully apply, and what other authors, editors, and administrators can do to make this project a success. Niambi M. Carter, Associate Professor of Political Science at Howard University, published American While Black: African Americans, Immigration, and the Limits of Citizenship (Oxford 2019) and listeners may remember her New Books in Political Science podcast. Heath Brown, Associate Professor of Public Policy at John Jay College of Criminal Justice City University of New York (and former host of New Books Political Science), published Homeschooling the Right: How Conservative Education Activism Erodes the State (Columbia 2021) and Lilly Goren interviewed him for NBPS. Minority-Serving Institution Virtual Book Workshop | Deadline: January 14, 2022 | Apply Now! Susan Liebell is Dirk Warren '50 Professor of Political Science at Saint Joseph’s University in Philadelphia. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/education
Listen to this interview of Elena Cotos, Director of the Center for Communication Excellence at the Graduate College (Iowa State University) and also Associate Professor in the English Department (Iowa State University). We talk about the needs of both students and faculty for training in scholarly communication, and we talk about one excellent way that those needs are being met, the Center for Communication Excellence. Elena Cotos : "When I'd begun, as a student, to write academic texts, you know, initially I'd thought it was my English that was to blame, but then I discovered I just didn't know the genre. Because, when I started, I wasn't really thinking about how a genre has certain conventions that are accepted by the disciplinary community and that are expected by the readership in a field—and not only in just a field, but across fields, because conventions are also cross-disciplinary. And this is what I discovered through my research. This is what I uncovered when I looked at multiple disciplines and saw that really they do share communicative goals, and that really they do use very similar sets of rhetorical strategies when they build their scientific arguments. So, I was a bit mistaken to think that the problem was my English, because it's really more about genre knowledge than about English-language proficiency." Danie Sheal hosts Scholarly Communication, the podcast about how knowledge gets known. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/education
Michael Horowitz discusses the origins and evolution of The Cooperative Solution (TCS) Education System, which was created in 2009 as a spinout from The Chicago School of Professional Psychology. TCS is one of the only private, non-profit systems of separately accredited schools and colleges in the U.S., with each of the 6 members focusing on different educational niches, while benefitting from centralized shared services. As the higher ed sector faces growing competitive pressure in the coming decades, TCS may offer a model that allows institutions to focus on their benefit, while saving costs, gaining economies of scale, and providing strong supports for online learners. David Finegold is the president of Chatham University. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/education
In Complaint! (Duke UP, 2021), Sara Ahmed examines what we can learn about power from those who complain about abuses of power. Drawing on oral and written testimonies from academics and students who have made complaints about harassment, bullying, and unequal working conditions at universities, Ahmed explores the gap between what is supposed to happen when complaints are made and what actually happens. To make complaints within institutions is to learn how they work and for whom they work: complaint as feminist pedagogy. Ahmed explores how complaints are made behind closed doors and how doors are often closed on those who complain. To open these doors---to get complaints through, keep them going, or keep them alive---Ahmed emphasizes, requires forming new kinds of collectives. This book offers a systematic analysis of the methods used to stop complaints and a powerful and poetic meditation on what complaints can be used to do. Following a long lineage of Black feminist and feminist of color critiques of the university, Ahmed delivers a timely consideration of how institutional change becomes possible and why it is necessary. Shraddha Chatterjee is a doctoral candidate at York University, Toronto, and author of Queer Politics in India: Towards Sexual Subaltern Subjects (Routledge, 2018). Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/education
Welcome to The Academic Life! In this episode you’ll hear about:
Why White professors need to teach about race and racism in their courses
The gap between “inside” and “outside” knowledge
How to effectively provide data in an atmosphere of strong emotions
Why having debates and discussing misinformation won’t work
The reasons students resist learning about race and racism
How to meet students where they are and help them cross the learning threshold
Today’s book is: Teaching About Race and Racism in the College Classroom: Notes from a White Professor (U West Virginia Press, 2019). Teaching about race and racism can be difficult. Students and instructors alike often struggle with strong emotions, and many have preexisting beliefs about race. It is important for students to learn how we got here and how racism is more than just individual acts of meanness. Students also need to understand that colorblindness is not an effective anti-racism strategy. Dr. Kernahan argues that you can be honest and unflinching in your teaching about racism while also providing a compassionate learning environment that allows for mistakes, and avoids shaming students. She provides practical teaching strategies to help instructors feel more confident, and differentiates between how white students and students of color are likely to experience the classroom, helping instructors provide a more effective learning experience for all students. Our guest is: Dr. Cyndi Kernahan, professor of psychology at the University of Wisconsin–River Falls. She is also the assistant dean for teaching and learning in the College of Arts and Sciences. Her research and writing are focused primarily on teaching and learning, including the teaching of race, inclusive pedagogy, and student success. She is the author of Teaching About Race and Racism in the College Classroom. Our host is: Dr. Christina Gessler, co-producer of the Academic Life. She is a historian of women and gender. Listeners to this episode might be interested in:
White Trash: The 400-Year Untold History of Class in America, by Nancy Isenberg
The Making of Asian America: A History, by Erika Lee
Teaching Black History to White People, by Leonard N. Moore
The Other Slavery: The Uncovered Story of Indian Enslavement in America, by Andres Resendez
Critical Race Theory: An Introduction, by Richard Delgado and Jean Stefancic
Why Are All The Black Kids Sitting Together in the Cafeteria, by B.D. Tatum
You are smart and capable, but you aren’t an island and neither are we. We reach across our mentor network to bring you podcasts on everything from how to finish that project, to how to take care of your beautiful mind. Wish we’d bring on an expert about something? DM us on Twitter: The Academic Life @AcademicLifeNBN. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/education
Judy McLaughlin has helped prepare over 1000 college and university presidents to take on the varied responsibilities of their role since founding the Harvard Seminar for New Presidents in 1990. The Seminar was based on over a decade of research she and her colleagues conducted on the presidential search process, and the need they identified to provide a safe, confidential space for these leaders to discuss the issues and challenges they faced with experts and peers. She shares insights on how the role of college president has evolved over the last 3 decades and the key issues they are likely to face in the coming decade. David Finegold is the president of Chatham University. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/education
Do we really need universities and colleges anymore? Have they become too politicized? Many conservatives have started to write off American academia. They contend that it is so irremediably, irretrievably woke that the best that those on the right can hope for is to try to advance their ideas and live according to their principles outside it. Other conservatives still in academe just keep their heads down and try to maintain some kind of conservative presence within it, get their work done and do their best for their students. What does the increasing dominance of the left/liberal worldview in academe have on the intellectual development of college students and what are the consequences for conservative academics and for American society at large? Or are things really that bad for academics who do not swear fealty to left-liberal values? Is there still a healthy respect on college campuses for fundamentals such as the cultivation of reason and respect for the notion of “reasonableness?” Is “reasonableness” even something worth salvaging? In his 2021 book Let's Be Reasonable: A Conservative Case for Liberal Education (Princeton UP, 2021), Jonathan Marks examines the deleterious effects of the left-leaning sociocultural homogenization of American higher education. He calls upon college instructors to renew their commitment to inculcating in their students the ability to reason for themselves and to reason with others. He argues that a healthy democracy requires a strong base of liberally-educated people given that reason is the best way to solve economic and political problems and simply to lead fulfilling lives. Marks identifies as a conservative and yet he takes issue with conservatives and populists who are giving up on American higher education as nothing more than a vast leftist indoctrination mill. He disputes this despairing, defeatist position of the right when it comes to academia while presenting a clear-eyed view of how the left does indeed frequently politicize scholarship. Marks provides a case study of this trend in the shape of the Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions (BDS) movement against the state of Israel. Jonathan Marks makes a passionate case for the value of liberal education—and lays out clearly what that consists of and its importance for those who consider themselves liberal and those who very much don’t. This book should be read by academics, college students, parents about to send their children off to college and anyone who cares about where society-shaping new ideas are developed and timeless ones are passed along to new generations. And for millions of Americans, colleges are still where much of this occurs. Give a listen. Hope J. Leman is a grants researcher. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/education
Academia has a big problem. For many parents—especially mothers—the idea of "work-life balance" is a work-life myth. Parents and caregivers work harder than ever to grow and thrive in their careers while juggling the additional responsibilities that accompany parenthood. Sudden disruptions and daily constraints such as breastfeeding, sick days that keep children home from school, and the sleep deprivation that plagues the early years of parenting threaten to derail careers. Some experience bias and harassment related to pregnancy or parental leave. The result is an academic Chutes and Ladders, where career advancement is nearly impossible for parents who lack access to formal or informal support systems. In The PhD Parenthood Trap: Gender, Bias, and the Elusive Work-Family Balance in Academia (Georgetown UP, 2021), Kerry F. Crawford and Leah C. Windsor reveal the realities of raising kids, on or off the tenure track, and suggest reforms to help support parents throughout their careers. Insights from their original survey data and poignant vignettes from scholars across disciplines make it clear that universities lack understanding, uniform policies, and flexibility for family formation, hurting the career development of parent-scholars. Each chapter includes recommendations for best practices and policy changes that will help make academia an exemplar of progressive family-leave policies. Topics covered include pregnancy, adoption, miscarriage and infant loss, postpartum depression, family leave, breastfeeding, daily parenting challenges, the tenure clock, and more. The book concludes with advice to new or soon-to-be parents to help them better navigate parenthood in academia. The PhD Parenthood Trap provides scholars, academic mentors, and university administrators with empirical evidence and steps to break down personal and structural barriers between parenthood and scholarly careers. Galina Limorenko is a doctoral candidate in Neuroscience with a focus on biochemistry and molecular biology of neurodegenerative diseases at EPFL in Switzerland. To discuss and propose the book for an interview you can reach her at galina.limorenko@epfl.ch. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/education
Welcome to The Academic Life! In this episode you’ll hear about:
the importance of normalizing failure in college
the emotional work involved with coming back from a failure
the role institutions have in resilience work
the power of reflection for student success
Our guest is: Dr. Anna Sharpe, Associate Dean for Student Success at Berry College. Dr. Sharpe has spent the last six years reimagining academic success and support programming at Berry College. She has the privilege of leading an incredible team of five professional staff and over a hundred student employees working in the areas of academic success, first-year experience, accessibility, and retention. Holding a PhD in Geography from University of Kentucky, Dr. Sharpe also researches the interplay of race, politics, law, and land use, focusing on the southeastern coast, where she was born and raised. When she is not on Berry’s beautiful campus, you can find her with her husband and son--cooking, hiking, and making frequent trips to the coast. Our host is: Dr. Dana M. Malone, the co-producer of the Academic Life podcasts. She is a higher education scholar and practitioner. Dana met Anna at the University of Kentucky, where they worked together with students in academic jeopardy and assisted them in reimagining and refocusing their college trajectories. Listeners to this episode might be interested in:
The Stanford Resilience Project: Stanford Resilience Project videos
Carol Dweck’s work: Carol Dweck’s TED Talk on the Power of Believing You Can Improve
Mindset: The New Psychology of Success by Carol Dweck
Grit: The Power of Passion and Perseverance by Angela Duckworth
From the National Resource Center for the First-Year Experience and Students in Transition, Promoting Belonging, Growth Mindset, and Resilience to Foster Student Success (Baldwin, A., et al.)
NBN Podcasts with Lisa Nunn on College Belonging
NBN Podcast with Lisa Nunn on Teaching First-Year and First-Generation Students:
Wish we’d bring on an expert about something? DM us on Twitter: The Academic Life @AcademicLifeNBN. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/education
This is a book about the American Dream: how to understand this central principle of American public philosophy, the ways in which it is threatened by a number of winner-take-all economic trends, and how to make it a reality for workers and their families in the 21st century. Integrating political philosophy and the history of political thought with recent work in economics, political science, and sociology, Joshua Preiss' book Just Work for All: The American Dream in the 21st Century (Taylor & Francis, 2020) calls for renewed political and policy commitment to "just work." Such a commitment is essential to combat the negative moral externalities of an economy where the fruits of growth are increasingly claimed by a relatively small portion of the population: slower growth, rising inequality, declining absolute mobility, dying communities, the erosion of social solidarity, lack of faith in political leaders and institutions, exploding debt, ethnic and nationalist backlash, widespread hopelessness, and the rapid rise in what economists Angus Deaton and Anne Case call deaths of despair. Covid-19 threatens to pour gasoline on these winner-take-all fires, further concentrating economic and political power in the hands of those best suited to withstand (and even profit from) the pandemic-driven economic crisis. In this book, the author provides a model for understanding the American Dream and making it a reality in a post-Covid-19 economy. A tour de force, this book is essential reading for scholars and researchers of political philosophy, political economy, political theory, and economics, as well as for the layperson trying to make sense of the post-pandemic world. Tom Discenna is Professor of Communication at Oakland University whose work examines issues of academic labor and communicative labor more broadly. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/education
Listen to this interview of Jonathan Zimmerman, Professor of History of Education at the University of Pennsylvania Graduate School of Education and author of The Amateur Hour: A History of College Teaching in America (Johns Hopkins UP, 2020). We talk about yesterday today. Jonathan Zimmerman : "Look, I don't think anyone questions that some of the best teaching they do is in their responses to student drafts and student papers. And, I think this restates the obvious, but: That is highly individuated, right? I mean, unlike a collective exercise, this is targeted directly at the student, and at what she or he has to say, and at different strengths or weaknesses in the way they're presenting what they have to say. But look, here's the important context, teaching through writing takes a great deal of time and effort. There's no way to do it on the cheap. And the bigger the university gets, the more costly everything becomes and the less likely it is that we're going to engage in the practices I'm describing—they're too expensive—they're too labor-intensive. You've probably heard the name Richard Arum. Well, he wrote, together with Josipa Roksa, the book Academically Adrift, the first sociological study of how much people are learning at college, and what they found, unsurprisingly, is that a lot of people are not learning very much. Now, there are many reasons for that, but one of them actually has to do exactly with this point of teaching through writing. One of the reasons is how little writing is actually assigned or evaluated. So again, what does this tell you? I think it tells you how little we value a process such as learning through writing. Would it cost more to teach like this? Of course it would! Things of value exert costs. And if you're not willing to pay the costs, you don't value it." Daniel hosts Scholarly Communication, the podcast about how knowledge gets known. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/education
What is the purpose of education? Folks outside the field are likely to think of a relatively clear or concrete answer—learning, citizenship, preparation for life, which for the vast majority encompasses work and skills. Upon probing, however, most are likely to realize that these explanations are deceptively simple. Learning what, how, and according to which or whose values? Citizenship within what communities, through which policies and enacted with how much equity, not to mention care? Why are we preparing certain kids for certain kinds of work, especially if laboring in certain ways will not necessarily earn material dignity or social capital? Consensus on the purpose of education has perhaps always been elusive, and maybe it is now most of all. So I appreciate when authors in the education space disclose their perspectives on this perennial and critical question. In Breaking Barriers: How P-TECH Schools Create a Pathway from High School to College to Career, Stanley S. Litow and Tina Kelley are quite forthright on this matter: “Public education is the lifeblood of our democracy. If our schools fail, our economy fails. Our students’ achievement is eventually connected to every issue of consequence our country will face, including racial justice, public health, closing the digital divide, income inequality, and economic empowerment” (p. 170). The authors position P-TECH schools as more than a scalable model working towards “fairer” public schools; they argue for P-TECH as a reform movement that centers students within a coalition of education stakeholders. Ultimately, they show that “education stakeholders” is a category encompassing literally everyone. Christina Anderson Bosch is faculty at the California State University, Fresno. She is curious about + committed to public, inclusive education in pluralistic societies where critical perspectives on questions of social and ecological justice are valued enough to enact material dignity and metaphysical wellbeing on massive scales. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/education
Welcome to The Academic Life! In this episode you’ll hear about:
Aviva Legatt’s journey into and through college
Why she became an Ivy League college admissions officer
What that job taught her about common application missteps
How to determine which school is right for you and show them you’re right for it
Month-by-month application checklist for high school seniors.
Our guest is: Dr. Aviva Legatt, who has been in the higher education field for over fifteen years. She is a faculty member in Organizational Dynamics at the University of Pennsylvania and at The Wharton School, teaching in-person and online through Coursera. She has a column in Forbes about issues affecting higher education, and is the author of Get Real and Get In: How to Get Into the College of Your Dreams by Being Your Authentic Self (St. Martin's Griffin, 2021). Our host is: Dr. Christina Gessler, co-producer of the Academic Life, who attended college on a writing scholarship. She chose the school for its pet policy, relationship with the natural environment, and faculty-student ratio. She is a historian of women and gender. Listeners to this episode might be interested in:
The Enlightened College Applicant: A New Approach to the Search and Admissions Process by Andrew Belasco and Dave Bergman
Fiske Guide to Colleges
College Admission Essentials: A Step-by-Step Guide to Showing Colleges Who You Are and What Matters to You by Ethan Sawyer
How To College :What To Know Before You Go (and When You’re There) by Andrea Malkin Brenner and Laura Hope Schwartz
Show Them You're Good: A Portrait of Boys in the City of Angels the Year Before College by Jeff Hobbs
The Merit Myth: How our Colleges Favor the Rich and Divide America by Anthony Carnevale, Peter Schmidt, and Jeff Strohl
A Discussion of the book How To College: What To Know Before You Go (and When You’re There)
A Discussion of the book Show Them You’re Good
You are smart and capable, but you aren’t an island and neither are we. We reach across our mentor network to bring you podcasts on everything from how to finish that project, to how to take care of your beautiful mind. Wish we’d bring on an expert about something? DM us on Twitter: The Academic Life @AcademicLifeNBN. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/education
In Part II of our discussion with Ben Nelson, he shares information on the outcomes for the first Minerva graduates and how Minerva has diversified its business model with new partners for its platform and an extension to high school. He also provides his perspective on the changes likely to unfold in higher education over the coming decade and lessons for other entrepreneurs contemplating the launch of a higher ed start-up. David Finegold is the president of Chatham University. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/education
In the first of two parts, we meet Ben Nelson, the charismatic founder of the Minerva Project and Minerva University. Ben shares the fascinating story of how he was able to convince one of the leading venture capital firms in Silicon Valley to back him as a young entrepreneur with no background in education to take on the Ivy League and create the world’s most selective university. Minerva attracts some of the most talented students from around the world who spend their 4 undergraduate years in 7 different leading global cities. Years before the higher education world was forced to move to Zoom by the pandemic, Minerva had figured out how to deliver high quality, live video classes globally delivering a radically different curriculum and educational experience than most colleges. David Finegold is the president of Chatham University. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/education
Saving the World at Business School (Part 2) is based on an in-depth filmed conversation between Howard Burton and Andy Hoffman, Holcim Professor of Sustainable Enterprise at the University of Michigan’s Ross School of Business and School of Environment and Sustainability. This extensive conversation starts with inspiring insights into how Andy Hoffman became interested in environmental issues when he declined acceptances from graduate school at Harvard and Berkeley and instead worked as a carpenter for several years in Nantucket. Topics include the notions of ‘environmental sustainability’ and ‘big business’ which sometimes seem as incompatible as oil and water and ways to make a synthesis a reality by seriously reconsidering the way we currently conduct public policy and even some deep aspects of our current societal values. Howard Burton is the founder of the Ideas Roadshow, Ideas on Film and host of the Ideas Roadshow Podcast. He can be reached at howard@ideasroadshow.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/education
Saving the World at Business School (Part 1) is based on an in-depth filmed conversation between Howard Burton and Andy Hoffman, Holcim Professor of Sustainable Enterprise at the University of Michigan’s Ross School of Business and School of Environment and Sustainability. This extensive conversation starts with inspiring insights into how Andy Hoffman became interested in environmental issues when he declined acceptances from graduate school at Harvard and Berkeley and instead worked as a carpenter for several years in Nantucket. Topics include the notions of ‘environmental sustainability’ and ‘big business’ which sometimes seem as incompatible as oil and water and ways to make a synthesis a reality by seriously reconsidering the way we currently conduct public policy and even some deep aspects of our current societal values. Howard Burton is the founder of the Ideas Roadshow, Ideas on Film and host of the Ideas Roadshow Podcast. He can be reached at howard@ideasroadshow.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/education
In Learning a Foreign Language: Understanding the Fundamentals of Linguistics (Rowman and Littlefield, 2020), Alex Poole, professor of English at Western Kentucky University helps potential learners to negotiate the vagaries of learning a new language. In each chapter he details issues inherent in the learning process such as motivation, strategic decisions, and error analysis. How does language learning become enjoyable and not just a chore which one has to daily practice is the question he poses to himself and the readers. He emphasizes the need to have realistic expectations and analyses age and the acquisition of a new language. The text focuses on first time learners and its amenable style makes it ideal for high school and college students as well as independent learners. Minni Sawhney is a professor of Hispanic Studies at the University of Delhi. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/education
Political Scientist Ursula Hackett’s new book, America's Voucher Politics: How Elites Learned to Hide the State (Cambridge UP, 2020), is the winner of the APSA 2021 Education Policy and Politics Section Best Book Award. America’s Voucher Politics examines the way that the approach to vouchers, as a policy design and as a point of advocacy, has evolved over the past decades, and, in the process, this policy area has shifted strategic losses into strategic and growing wins. School vouchers, essentially the central case study in Hackett’s book, are a perfect example of what Hackett describes as “attenuated governance.” Attenuated governance is the form that a particular policy design and often the associated rhetoric with that policy take in an effort to disconnect the policy itself from the state, so as to avoid or elide constitutional conflicts that may strike down the policy that was passed by state or national legislative bodies. Attenuated governance is the umbrella concept that includes both the attenuated delivery of the goods or services and the rhetoric to accompany the policy design and delivery. As Hackett notes, school vouchers are the perfect lens for this exploration of American political development and examining the shifting approaches that courts and judges have taken to how the policies work within public and private institutions. As the subtitle of the book indicates, the story of school vouchers is the tale of hiding the role of the state in shifting funds from public schools to private and parochial schools and doing so in such a way so that the courts would decide in favor of the constitutionality of these new policy designs. Many of the initial attempts at this form of attenuated governance were unsuccessfully made in the 1950s and 1960s in response to the Brown v. Board of Education decision and other moves to desegregate schools, and other public entities and spaces. But these early failures in court provided the blueprint for subsequent successes, not just in designing policy that would be more attenuated or disconnected from the state itself, but also in the way that these policies were publicly discussed and argued. America’s Voucher Politics is a fascinating study not only of this particular policy area as it developed over the past 70 years, but also of this concept of attenuated governance, which builds on America’s foundational identity struggles around religion, race and racism, and civic institutions. Lilly J. Goren is professor of political science at Carroll University in Waukesha, WI. She is co-editor of the award winning book, Women and the White House: Gender, Popular Culture, and Presidential Politics (University Press of Kentucky, 2012), as well as co-editor of Mad Men and Politics: Nostalgia and the Remaking of Modern America (Bloomsbury Academic, 2015). Email her comments at lgoren@carrollu.edu or tweet to @gorenlj. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/education
The third episode in our series on the Keck Graduate Institute (KGI) of Applied Life Sciences, the 7th of the Claremont Colleges founded in 1998, features a discussion with Sheldon “Shelly” Schuster, KGI’s 2nd President, and Jim Sterling, a founding faculty member who has held many leadership roles at KGI, including PhD Program Director. They describe the dramatic evolution and growth of the Institute, from a single program, the Master of Business and Science, with 45 students, to today when the have a wide and growing range of graduate degrees in the life sciences. Many of the initial expansions were natural outgrowths of the MBS, including a Master’s in BioProcessing, a post-grad certificate for pre-meds, and one to prepare bioscience post docs to enter industry. More recently they have been adding highly regulated health science programs – i.e. PharmD, Occupational Therapy, Physician Assistant – but giving each an innovative KGI twist. They also discuss their innovative partnerships with Biocon Academy in India and serving as the host institution for Minerva Schools, the global undergraduate degree program that will be the subject of our next podcast. David Finegold is the president of Chatham University. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/education
Contrary to the claims of many of today’s advocates of computerized instruction and online learning, efforts to use technology to improve the education process are hardly new. In Teaching Machines: The History of Personalized Learning (MIT Press, 2021), Audrey Watters recounts the attempts over the past century to use technology to improve educational procedures. These began over a century ago with psychologist Sidney Pressy’s effort to invent an “automatic teacher” that would eliminate drudgery by automating test scoring. While such efforts gained momentum in the 1930s, the attempts by manufacturers to profit from such technology often complicated their introduction and adoption. In the 1950s B. F. Skinner gave new life to these endeavors by developing devices and processes that applied his theories of behavioral psychology to the learning process. Though the idea of “push-button education” seized the public’s imagination and stimulated efforts to introduce his teaching machines to the classroom, by the end of the 1960s the growing backlash against Skinner’s ideas and regimentation in education ensured the demise of his vision of the automated classroom. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/education
Until the recent political shift pushed workers back into the media spotlight, the mainstream media had largely ignored this significant part of American society in favor of the moneyed upscale consumer for more than four decades. Christopher R. Martin now reveals why and how the media lost sight of the American working class and the effects of it doing so. The damning indictment of the mainstream media that flows through No Longer Newsworthy: How the Mainstream Media Abandoned the Working Class (Cornell UP, 2019) is a wakeup call about the critical role of the media in telling news stories about labor unions, workers, and working-class readers. As Martin charts the decline of labor reporting from the late 1960s onwards, he reveals the shift in news coverage as the mainstream media abandoned labor in favor of consumer and business interests. When newspapers, especially, wrote off working-class readers as useless for their business model, the American worker became invisible. In No Longer Newsworthy, Martin covers this shift in focus, the loss of political voice for the working class, and the emergence of a more conservative media in the form of Christian television, talk radio, Fox News, and conservative websites. Now, with our fractured society and news media, Martin offers the mainstream media recommendations for how to push back against right-wing media and once again embrace the working class as critical to its audience and its democratic function. Tom Discenna is Professor of Communication at Oakland University whose work examines issues of academic labor and communicative labor more broadly. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/education
Each summer, tens of thousands of American Jews attend residential camps, where they may see Hebrew signs, sing and dance to Hebrew songs, and hear a camp-specific hybrid language register called Camp Hebraized English, as in: “Let’s hear some ruach (spirit) in this chadar ochel (dining hall)!” Using historical and sociolinguistic methods, Hebrew Infusion: Language and Community at American Jewish Summer Camps, by Sarah Bunin Benor, Jonathan Krasner, and Sharon Avni (Rutgers University Press, 2020), explains how camp directors and staff came to infuse Hebrew in creative ways and how their rationales and practices have evolved from the early 20th century to today. Some Jewish leaders worry that Camp Hebraized English impedes Hebrew acquisition, while others recognize its power to strengthen campers’ bonds with Israel, Judaism, and the Jewish people. Hebrew Infusion explores these conflicting ideologies, showing how hybrid language can serve a formative role in fostering religious, diasporic communities. The insightful analysis and engaging descriptions of camp life will appeal to anyone interested in language, education, or American Jewish culture. Interviewees: Sarah Bunin Benor is Professor of Contemporary Jewish Studies at Hebrew Union College and courtesy Professor of Linguistics at the University of Southern California. Jonathan Krasner is the Jack, Joseph and Morton Mandel Associate Professor of Jewish Education Research at Brandeis University. Sharon Avni is Professor of Literacy and Linguistics at Borough of Manhattan Community College, City University of New York, and a Research Associate at the Research Institute for the Study of Language in Urban Society at the CUNY Graduate Center. Host: Schneur Zalman Newfield is an Assistant Professor of Sociology at Borough of Manhattan Community College, City University of New York, and the author of Degrees of Separation: Identity Formation While Leaving Ultra-Orthodox Judaism (Temple University Press, 2020). Visit him online at ZalmanNewfield.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/education
Gordon Gee was named the Top University President in the U.S. by Time Magazine, and is the only higher education leader to have been a president 7 times, including return stints at both The Ohio State University and WVU. He shares lessons and insights from his more than 4 decades of experience as a university president, including how he has boiled down all the information he needs to run WVU onto a card he can carry in his wallet. He discusses the vital role of our flagship public universities that he describes in detail in Land-Grant Universities for the Future: Higher Education for the Public Good (Johns Hopkins University Press), and that will appear in a new book with the same publisher. David Finegold is the president of Chatham University. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/education
Every year millions of high school seniors in China take the gaokao, China’s standardized college entrance exam. Students, parents, and head teachers all devote years, sweat, and tears to this consequential and chancy exam — even though the ideal of the gaokao as a fair, objective, and scientific measure of individual merit is known to be something of a myth. Why examinees and their families continue to believe in the relative fairness of the gaokao is what Zachary Howlett’s book, Meritocracy and Its Discontents: Anxiety and the National College Entrance Exam in China (Cornell University Press, 2021), seeks to explore. Based on fieldwork conducted in China’s Fujian province, this rich and engaging book looks at what it means for individuals and communities to believe in both the gaokao and the myth of meritocracy that it engenders. Accessible to both experts and those entirely unfamiliar with the gaokao, this book offers a fresh perspective on the role of examinations in the lives of individuals and in their communities, as well as a useful comparative tool, that of ‘fateful rites of passage,’ for future work. It is also filled with stories of examination candidates, their hopes, dreams, and the lengths that they (and their teachers and parents) go to in order to succeed, all of which should be of interest to anyone who has ever experienced a fateful right of passage of their own. Sarah Bramao-Ramos is a PhD candidate in History and East Asian Languages at Harvard. She works on Manchu language books and is interested in anything with a kesike. She can be reached at sbramaoramos@g.harvard.edu Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/education
Scott Miller, who has been recognized as one of the most innovative and influential college presidents in the U.S., shares insights from his over 3 decades of experience leading four private, independent colleges: Lincoln Memorial University, Wesley College, Bethany College, and Virginia Wesleyan University. Scott, who became the youngest college president in the U.S. when he took the helm at Lincoln Memorial at the age of 31, shares some of the secrets of his success, including how he has adapted with the times to master social media. He has been generous in sharing these through a number of publications he edits with his long-time professional partner, Mary Louise “Weezie” Fennell, including a series of essays on all aspects of presidential leadership and President to President. David Finegold is the president of Chatham University. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/education
Math Renaissance: Growing Math Circles, Changing Classrooms, and Creating Sustainable Math Education (Natural Math, 2018) couples two educational memoirs: Student Rachel Steinig brings her experience from diverse schooling models, surveys of teachers and fellow students, and selections of peer-reviewed scholarship to an examination of math instruction in the United States. Her chapters seek to locate root causes, transcend conventional advice, and inspire readers to imagine radical alternatives. Teacher Rodi Steinig invites readers into the role of leading math circles with detailed play-by-plays from her own experience. These chapters evince the importance (and interplay) in this role of background knowledge, preparation, compassion, and improvisation—and, perhaps most saliently for beginning teachers, of resisting the urge to rescue. Taken together, the book critiques the existing systems that provide children's math education and drills down on an alternative model whose popularity continues to grow. Among my favorite parts of the book were Rodi's self-reflective thought bubbles on her performance facilitating math circles and Rachel's chapter on math instruction from a human rights perspective. The book is intended for teachers and parents of school-age children, though i think middle and high school students and even casual readers would find value in this forthright, thorough, and readable work. It was an absolute delight to discuss the book with both its authors! Rodi Steinig is an educator, author, and teacher trainer who has educated K-12 students in an inquiry-based approach for over twenty years. She received a B.S.in Economics from the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania and her M.S.Ed. from Cabrini University. While Rodi finds joy in almost everything, she finds exceptional joy in pedagogy, communication about mathematics and pedagogy, and mathematics (current favorite math topic: isomorphic problems). Rodi has a great passion for sitting on the floor with a group of students in a collaborative spirit of inquiry. Rachel Steinig (she/her) is an educator, advocate, author, and future human rights lawyer. She recently graduated Phi Beta Kappa and Summa Cum Laude from the University of Pennsylvania with a B.A. in Political Science, a concentration in International Relations, and triple minors in Hispanic Studies, Modern Middle Eastern Studies, and Latin American and Latinx Studies. She is passionate about human rights, education access, making math fun, gender equity, and conflict resolution. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/education
Welcome to The Academic Life. You are smart and capable, but you aren’t an island and neither are we. So, we reached across our mentor network to bring you podcasts on everything from how to finish that project, to how to take care of your beautiful mind. Wish we’d bring on an expert about something? DM us your suggestion on Twitter: The Academic Life @AcademicLifeNBN. In this episode you’ll hear: mentoring across academic careers from graduate students to seasoned faculty, optimal conditions for mentor-mentee relationships, mentoring scholars through the publishing process, and gender and power dynamics within academic mentoring. Our guest is: Dr. Claire M. Renzetti, Professor and Chair of Sociology and the Judi Conway Patton Endowed Chair for Studies of Violence Against Women at the University of Kentucky. She received a Ph.D. in Sociology from the University of Delaware, with specialties in criminology and the sociology of gender. For more than 40 years, Dr. Renzetti’s research has focused on the violent victimization experiences of socially and economically marginalized women and girls. She founded in 1995, and continues to edit, the peer-reviewed, international and interdisciplinary journal Violence Against Women, through Sage Publications. Dr. Renzetti is also the editor of the Gender and Justice book series for University of California Press; co-editor of the Interpersonal Violence book series for Oxford University Press, and editor of the Family and Gender-based Violence book series for Cognella. She has written or edited 26 books as well as numerous book chapters and journal articles based on her own research. She also studies the problem of domestic sex trafficking. Additionally, she conducts research on the effects of religiosity and religious self-regulation on intimate partner violence perpetration and victimization. She has held elected offices in several national and regional professional associations, including the American Sociological Association, the American Society of Criminology, the Society for the Study of Social Problems, and the Eastern Sociological Society. Her research and community service has been recognized with awards from the American Sociological Association, the American Society of Criminology, the Society for the Study of Social Problems, the University of Delaware, Artemis Center (Dayton, OH), and the YWCA of Dayton (OH). Your host is: Dr. Dana Malone, a higher education scholar and practitioner. Dana met Claire as a PhD student at the University of Kentucky, when one of Dana’s academic mentors introduced them. Listeners to this episode might be interested in:
Positive Academic Leadership: How to Stop Putting Out Fires and Start Making a Difference by Jeffrey L. Buller
Presumed Incompetent II: Race, Class, Power, and Resistance of Women in Academia edited by: Yolanda Flores Niemann, Gabriella Gutiérrez y Muhs, and Carmen G. González
NBN Podcast on Presumed Incompetent II
NBN Podcast on How to Create a Mentor Network
Claire Renzetti’s video series on academic publishing for the American Sociological Association (ASA).*Please note access requires an ASA membership
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This is the last episode of a four-part series featuring the winners and honorable mentions of the 2021 Book Awards for the Association of Asian American Studies (AAAS). This episode focuses on the winner of the award in Humanities and Cultural Studies in Media, Performance, and Visual Studies: Kandice Chuh’s The Difference Aesthetics Makes: On the Humanities “After Man.” This insightful and critical book challenges our divisions of aesthetics and politics, while showing how liberal humanism has persisted within the ways we organize in institutions, the ways we teach, and the ways that we think of ourselves. Kandice Chuh is a professor of English, American studies, and Critical Social Psychology at the CUNY Graduate Center. She’s currently working on The Disinterested Teacher, a collection of essays on pedagogies and praxis, and When/Where/How ‘Asia’, a project on Asian racialization in the contemporary era. Christopher B. Patterson is an Assistant Professor in the Social Justice Institute at the University of British Columbia. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/education
When we think about the process of European unification, our conversations inevitably ponder questions of economic cooperation and international politics. Salvatore Pappalardo offers a new and engaging perspective, arguing that the idea of European unity is also the product of a modern literary imagination. This book examines the idea of Europe in the modernist literature of primarily Robert Musil, Italo Svevo, and James Joyce (but also of Theodor Däubler and Srecko Kosovel), all authors who had a deep connection with the port city of Trieste. Writing after World War I, when the contested city joined Italy, these authors resisted the easy nostalgia of the postwar period, radically reimagining the origins of Europe in the Mediterranean culture of the Phoenicians, contrasting a 19th-century nationalist discourse that saw Europe as the heir of a Greek and Roman legacy. These writers saw the Adriatic city, a cosmopolitan bazaar under the Habsburg Empire, as a social laboratory of European integration. Salvatore Pappalardo's book Modernism in Trieste: The Habsburg Mediterranean and the Literary Invention of Europe, 1870-1945 (Bloomsbury, 2021) seeks to fill a critical gap in the extant scholarship, securing the literary history of Trieste within the context of current research on Habsburg and Austrian literature. Lea Greenberg is a scholar of German studies with a particular focus on German Jewish and Yiddish literature and culture; critical gender studies; multilingualism; and literature of the post-Yugoslav diaspora. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/education
Upward mobility through the path of higher education has been an article of faith for generations of working-class, low-income, and immigrant college students. While we know this path usually entails financial sacrifices and hard work, very little attention has been paid to the deep personal compromises such students have to make as they enter worlds vastly different from their own. Measuring the true cost of higher education for those from disadvantaged backgrounds, Moving Up Without Losing Your Way: The Ethical Costs of Upward Mobility (Princeton UP. 2021) looks at the ethical dilemmas of upward mobility—the broken ties with family and friends, the severed connections with former communities, and the loss of identity—faced by students as they strive to earn a successful place in society. Drawing upon philosophy, social science, personal stories, and interviews, Jennifer Morton reframes the college experience, factoring in not just educational and career opportunities but also essential relationships with family, friends, and community. Finding that student strivers tend to give up the latter for the former, negating their sense of self, Morton seeks to reverse this course. She urges educators to empower students with a new narrative of upward mobility—one that honestly situates ethical costs in historical, social, and economic contexts and that allows students to make informed decisions for themselves. A powerful work with practical implications, Moving Up without Losing Your Way paves a hopeful road so that students might achieve social mobility while retaining their best selves. Marshall Poe is the founder and editor of the New Books Network. He can be reached at marshallpoe@newbooksnetwork.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/education
Rewriting Our Stories: Education, Empowerment, and Well-Being (Atrium, 2020) harnesses the therapeutic power of storytelling to convert feelings of fear and powerlessness into affirmative life narratives. Rather than seeing fear as an outcome, we can view it as a feeling in the moment largely governed by narratives. Many of our fears are stories we tell ourselves, even if they are largely fictional and rooted in sociocultural belief systems. The result is that we often feel helpless in the face of those fears. This transformational book considers a potent antidote: by recognising our recurring negative stories, we can rewrite and transform them to achieve greater empowerment and well-being in our lives. Throughout human existence, no matter where our place of origin or when in history, storytelling shapes our societies, influencing personal, sociocultural, educational, and public discourses that impact how we live. Creating and communicating the language of stories - to ourselves and others - enhances our innate voices and can empower us to engage in greater empathy, compassion, and possibility. Intended for educators, leaders, therapists, mental health professionals, and youth organisations, as well as the general public, Derek Gladwin offers practical and positive tools for everyone to re-author their lives. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/education
The All India Institute of Medical Sciences (AIIMS) is iconic in the landscape of Indian healthcare. Established in the early years of independence, this enormous public teaching hospital rapidly gained fame for the high-quality treatment it offered at a nominal cost; at present, an average of ten thousand patients pass through the outpatient department each day. With its notorious medical program acceptance rate of less than 0.01%, AIIMS also sits at the apex of Indian medical education. To be trained as a doctor here is to be considered the best. In what way does this enduring reputation of excellence shape the institution's ethos? How does elite medical education sustain India's social hierarchies and the health inequalities entrenched within? In Special Treatment: Student Doctors at the All India Institute of Medical Sciences (Stanford UP, 2021), Anna Ruddock considers prestige as a byproduct of norms attached to ambition, aspiration, caste, and class in modern India, and illustrates how the institution's reputation affects its students' present experiences and future career choices. Ruddock untangles the threads of intellectual exceptionalism, social and power stratification, and health inequality that are woven into the health care taught and provided at AIIMS, asking what is lost when medicine is used not as a social equalizer but as a means to cultivate and maintain prestige. Anna Ruddock is a medical anthropologist, writer, and disability activist. Sneha Annavarapu is a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Chicago. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/education
Sean Creighton, the President of New American Colleges & Universities, discusses the origins and evolution of this Association that serves 24 institutions that each combine an undergraduate liberal arts core with a range of professional programs. He describes the distinctive role that NACU members play within the US higher ed system and the different services that the Association provides for its members. In Part II, Sean interviews David Finegold for the NACU podcast, discussing his recent visit to Chatham, one of the newest NACU members. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/education
Helen Sword, writing champion, brings us into the word gym. Or maybe kitchen. Either way, The Writer's Diet: A Guide to Fit Prose (U Chicago Press, 2016) is a short, sharp introduction to great writing based around 5 principles: --use active verbs whenever possible; --favour concrete language over vague abstractions; --avoid long strings of prepositional phrases; --employ adjectives and adverbs only when they contribute something new to the meaning of a sentence; --reduce your dependence on four pernicious “waste words”: it, this, that, and there.
There are examples of the good - William Shakespeare, Emily Dickinson, Martin Luther King Jr., John McPhee, A. S. Byatt, Richard Dawkins, Alison Gopnik, and well, the bad. But you can fix the bad - really Dr Sword's point. Dr Helen Sword received her doctorate in comparative literature from Princeton University and has lived since 2001 in New Zealand, where she is a Professor of Humanities at the University of Auckland and runs a private writing consultancy, WriteSpace Limited. Bede Haines is a solicitor, specialising in litigation and a partner at Holding Redlich, an Australian commercial law firm. He lives in Sydney, Australia. Known to read books, ride bikes and eat cereal (often). bede.haines@holdingredlich.com Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/education
Welcome to The Academic Life. You are smart and capable, but you aren’t an island, and neither are we. So we reached across our mentor network to bring you podcasts on everything from how to finish that project, to how to take care of your beautiful mind. Wish we’d bring in an expert about something? DM us your suggestion on Twitter: The Academic Life @AcademicLifeNBN. In this episode you’ll hear about: Dr. Piña’s path through higher education, the importance of mentors and coaches in achieving personal and professional success, how he found his current job, some of the concerns of first gen and of working class students, student grief, the complexity of using campus resources in a pandemic, and what he’s hopeful about. Our guest is: Dr. Ulices Piña, an Assistant Professor of History at California State University, Long Beach. A native of Long Beach and a product of the California public school system, his teaching and research interests include Mexico, Modern Latin America, revolutions and social movements, and social activism. He is currently writing a book tentatively titled Rebellious Citizens: Democracy and the Search for Dignity in Revolutionary Mexico. The book places the roles of ordinary people in the country’s long fight for democracy, front and center, to tell the story of how they actively shaped the political process and struggled for equality and dignity in the decades following the Mexican Revolution of 1910. He also has a forthcoming article in the Journal of Social History titled “Rebellion at the Fringe: Conspiracy, Surveillance, and State-Making in 1920s Mexico. Our host is: Dr. Christina Gessler, a historian of women and gender. She heard Dr. Piña’s presentation about pandemic pedagogy lessons at the recent WAWH conference, and invited him to share this on the Academic Life. Listeners to this episode might be interested in:
H-LatAm
The History Teacher
Zapata and the Mexican Revolution by John Womack
Pedro Páramo by Juan Rulfo
The TV Series: Ted Lasso
The History Department at California State University Long Beach
The Latino Studies Channel on NBN
There’s a Revolution Outside, My Love: Letters from a Crisis edited by Tracy K. Smith and John Freeman
Resources for College Students Dealing With Grief
Resource List for First Gen Students
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Listen to this interview of Peter Kaufman, Program Manager in Strategic Initiatives and Resource Development at MIT Open Learning and author of The New Enlightenment and the Fight to Free Knowledge (Seven Stories Press, 2021). We talk about us. All of us. Peter Kaufman : "Well, I'd say this about how to bring about the change my book calls for. Take a broad look at our knowledge institutions. Define them as broadly as we can, so obviously the universities, but there are museums, there are libraries, there are archives, there are public broadcasting institutions, there are historical societies–––and just figure out ways for all of these institutions, which have so many stakeholders, so many members, so many funders, so many visitors and readers and people who absorb things emanating from these institutions–––figure out ways for all these institutions to publish more, to publish more on to the Web, because (as someone put it) 'The truth is paywalled but the lies are free.' And you know, if these knowledge institutions can band together, can commit in principle and practice to publishing more, to linking to each others' content, to citing and sourcing each others' work, then we'll be a much stronger world, we'll be a much stronger society, and we'll be a little bit better equipped the next time that the gladiators from the Monsterverse manage to gain access to the most powerful offices in the land." Daniel heads Scholarly Communication, the podcast about how knowledge gets known. Daniel's YouTube Channel is called Write Your Research. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/education
In The Teacher Insurgency: A Strategic and Organizing Perspective (Harvard Education Press, 2020), Leo Casey addresses how the unexpected wave of recent teacher strikes has had a dramatic impact on American public education, teacher unions, and the larger labor movement. Casey explains how this uprising was not only born out of opposition to government policies that underfunded public schools and deprofessionalized teaching, but was also rooted in deep-seated changes in the economic climate, social movements, and, most importantly, educational politics. With an eye to maintaining the momentum of the insurgency, the author examines four key strategic questions that have arisen from the strikes: the relationship of mobilization to organizing; the relationship between protests and direct action; the conditions under which teacher strikes are most likely to be successful; and the importance of "bargaining for the common good." More broadly, Casey examines how to organize teachers for collective action, focusing on four discourses of teaching: teaching as nurturance; as professionalism; as labor and craft; and as a vocation of democratic intellectual work. Leo Casey is the Executive Director of the Albert Shanker Institute, a strategic think tank affiliated with the American Federation of Teachers. He taught and worked in New York City public high schools for twenty-eight years. During this time, he was a union activist and leader, serving for six years as a Vice President of New York City's United Federation of Teachers. In that role, he led the union's organizing in charter schools. Casey has won a number of awards for his teaching and was named the 1992 Social Studies Teacher of the Year for the American Teacher Awards. For ten years, his students--all of color, and predominantly immigrants and girls--won city and state championships in the "We the People" civics competition, twice placing fourth in the nation. Casey has worked with teachers in Tanzania and Russia on the development of civics education, and with teachers in China on promoting critical pedagogical methods. He has written extensively on civics, education, unionism and politics, in both print and on-line publications. Casey holds a PhD in political science from the University of Toronto. Tom Discenna is Professor of Communication at Oakland University whose work examines issues of academic labor and communicative labor more broadly. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/education
David Chard, the President of Wheelock College in Boston, MA, discusses the process of merging Wheelock successfully into Boston University to become the BU Wheelock College of Education and Human Development. His book, When Colleges Close: Leading in a Time of Crisis (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2020), written with Wheelock’s VPAA Mary Churchill, provides the most detailed guide available on each step involved in merging a struggling small college into a large university in a way that preserve and amplified its mission and impact. Chard shares what led them to write the book so soon after completing this painful process, and many additional insights about what goes into a successful merger. David Finegold is the president of Chatham University. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/education
Building on work in feminist studies, queer studies and critical race theory, this volume challenges the universality of propositions about human nature, by questioning the boundaries between predominant neurotypes and 'others', including dyslexics, autistics and ADHDers. Neurodiversity Studies: A New Critical Paradigm (Routledge, 2020) is the first work of its kind to bring cutting-edge research across disciplines to the concept of neurodiversity. It offers in-depth explorations of the themes of cure/prevention/eugenics; neurodivergent wellbeing; cross-neurotype communication; neurodiversity at work; and challenging brain-bound cognition. It analyses the role of neuro-normativity in theorising agency, and a proposal for a new alliance between the Hearing Voices Movement and neurodiversity. In doing so, we contribute to a cultural imperative to redefine what it means to be human. To this end, we propose a new field of enquiry that finds ways to support the inclusion of neurodivergent perspectives in knowledge production, and which questions the theoretical and mythological assumptions that produce the idea of the neurotypical. Working at the crossroads between sociology, critical psychology, medical humanities, critical disability studies, and critical autism studies, and sharing theoretical ground with critical race studies and critical queer studies, the proposed new field - neurodiversity studies - will be of interest to people working in all these areas. Christina Anderson Bosch is faculty at the California State University, Fresno. She is curious about + committed to public, inclusive education in pluralistic societies where critical perspectives on questions of social and ecological justice are valued enough to enact material dignity and metaphysical wellbeing on massive scales. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/education
Listen to this interview of Terry McGlynn, author of The Chicago Guide to College Science Teaching (U Chicago Press, 2020). McGlynn is also a professor of biology at California State University Dominguez Hills and research associate in the Department of Entomology in the Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County. We talk about learning, actually. Terry McGlynn : “If you’re giving students a writing assignment, like an experimental protocol, and they’re supposed to write about what they did in the lab or in the field, and it’s a cookbook project, you know, where the students don’t design the methods themselves and they're just doing what they were told to do and they're writing that down–––well, then the students are just jumping through a hoop and there's no ownership. That just gets you following through the prescribed steps, and in each of those steps, you just need to know, 'Oh, I just need to write a sentence where I've said This is where I did this,' and you write that sentence. And so, I think you can get through the whole assignment without thinking about the grand reason why you're doing it, right? Because the grand reason why you're doing it is because you need to turn it in and get your grade. And so all the little decisions you're making when you're doing the writing assignment–––all those decisions are all based on a micro level of, 'Okay, this next sentence, and that next sentence,' rather than if you had more control over what you're writing or if you had a bigger set of questions–––basically, if you knew why you're doing this assignment, you know like, what is the purpose of the assignment other than to turn it in and to get a grade–––because then that would be the purpose which is behind all those other small decisions, the purpose that guides you toward some destination." McGlynn's blog is here. Daniel Shea heads Scholarly Communication, the podcast about how knowledge gets known. Daniel is Director of the Writing Program at Heidelberg University, Germany. Daniel's YouTube Channel is called Write Your Research. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/education
For a change of pace this week, David Finegold is the interviewee, speaking with Brad Johnson, the host of the Plexuss podcast, about a range of current issues in higher education. Plexuss is an educational technology company that helps high school students identify the best college for them. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/education
In 1961, it was famously declared that the “fight for education is too important to be left solely to the educators.” Enter the OECD. In The OECD’s Historical Rise in Education: The Formation of a Global Governing Complex (Palgrave Macmillan, 2019), Christian Ydesen offers a well-edited volume that illuminates how the OECD normalized its influence over global education policy from its Cold War origins until today. Ydesen argues for an interpretation of the OECD as a “global governing complex” that roots its power in comparative data and the production of educational norms. How did the OECD, initially an outgrowth of Marshall Plan funds, become a dominant player in global education policy? Listen in to find out. Elisa Prosperetti is a Visiting Assistant Professor in African history at Mount Holyoke College. Her research focuses on the connected histories of education and development in postcolonial West Africa. Contact her at: www.elisaprosperetti.net. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/education
Recent protests around the world (such as the Arab Spring uprisings and Occupy Wall Street movements) have drawn renewed interest to the study of social change and, especially, to the manner in which words, images, events, and ideas associated with protestors can "move the social." What Democracy Looks Like: The Rhetoric of Social Movements and Counterpublics (U Alabama Press, 2017) is an attempt to foster a more coherent understanding of social change among scholars of rhetoric and communication studies by juxtaposing the ideas of social movements and counterpublics--historically two key factors significant in the study of social change. Foust, Pason, and Zittlow Rogness's volume compiles the voices of leading and new scholars who are contributing to the history, application, and new directions of these two concepts, all in conversation with a number of acts of resistance or social change. The theories of social movements and counterpublics are related, but distinct. Social movement theories tend to be concerned with enacting policy and legislative changes. Scholars flying this flag have concentrated on the organization and language (for example, rallies and speeches) that are meant to enact social change. Counterpublic theory, on the other hand, focuses less on policy changes and more on the unequal distribution of power and resources among different protest groups, which is sometimes synonymous with subordinated identity groups such as race, gender, sexuality, and class. Nonetheless, contributors argue that in recent years the distinctions between these two methods have become less evident. By putting the literatures of the two theories in conversation with one another, these scholars seek to promote and imagine social change outside the typical binaries.
Christina Foust is an Associate Professor of Communication Studies at Metropolitan State University of Denver. Amy Pason is an Associate Professor of Communication Studies at the University of Nevada, Reno, and currently spends most of her time as Faculty Senate Chair and most recently, been elected to represent all Faculty Senate Chairs for the Nevada System of Higher Education. Kate Zittlow Rogness, Ph.D., is a faculty member in the Department of Communication at Minneapolis College. Tom Discenna is Professor of Communication at Oakland University whose work examines issues of academic labor and communicative labor more broadly. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/education
Welcome to The Academic Life. You are smart and capable, but you aren’t an island, and neither are we. So we reached across our mentor network to bring you podcasts on everything from how to finish that project, to how to take care of your beautiful mind. Wish we’d bring in an expert about something? Email us at dr.danamalone@gmail.com or cgessler05@gmail.com. Find us on Twitter: The Academic Life @AcademicLifeNBN. In this episode you’ll hear about: distinguishing between student abilities and academic skill sets, why the goal should not be making first-generation students more like continuing generation students, how to introduce yourself in a way that promotes student success, the mini-midterm, and other strategies to promote student success. Our guest is: Lisa M. Nunn, Ph.D., author of 33 Simple Strategies for Faculty: A Week-by-Week Resource for Teaching First-Year and First-Generation Students (Rutgers University Press, 2018) and Professor of Sociology at the University of San Diego. She is the Director of her campus' Center for Educational Excellence. She is also the author of College Belonging: How First-Year and First-Generation Students Navigate Campus Life as well as a book on high school students, Defining Student Success: The Role of School and Culture. She didn't grow up knowing that she would become a sociologist and she graduated college as a literature and theater major, still not knowing that she would become a sociologist. It was during her years with the Peace Corps in Limbaži, Latvia in her early twenties when she started to recognize how fascinating cultural ideas and social structures are. How they shape who we are, who we want to become, and how they also constrain the paths available to us to get there. She hasn't stopped thinking about or talking about these dynamics since. Your host is: Dr. Dana Malone, a higher education scholar and practitioner. She specializes in college student relationships, gender, sexuality, and religious identities as well as assessment planning. Dana enjoys engaging conversations, delicious food, practicing yoga, and wandering the Jersey shore. Listeners to this episode might be interested in:
College Belonging: How First-Year and First-Generation Students Navigate Campus Life by Lisa M. Nunn
Interview with Lisa Nunn on her book College Belonging.
Defining Student Success: The Role of School and Culture by Lisa Nunn
The Skillful Teacher: On Technique, Trust, and Responsiveness in the Classroom by Stephen Brookfield
Small Teaching Online: Applying Learning Science in Online Classes by Flower Darby and James Lang
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Nicholas Harrison's Our Civilizing Mission: The Lessons of Colonial Education (Liverpool UP, 2019) is a fascinating examination of colonial education not just as a facet of colonialism, but as an "example" of education in a broader sense, albeit an "extreme" one. At once a historical study, a series of close readings of texts, ideas, and authors, and a set of intellectual, professional, and political biographies, the book explores and interrogates approaches to the teaching of languages, literatures, and histories within and beyond colonial contexts. Centering as educators writers and thinkers essential to our critical understanding of colonialism and postcolonialism literature, the book has implications for how we think about the project of education as a whole, particularly in the Humanities, and especially right now. In chapters that pursue the educational, intellectual, and teaching stories of figures like Edward Said, Mouloud Ferraoun, Assia Djebar, and Albert Memmi, Our Civilizing Mission takes up issues of power and resistance in the definition and interpretation of "canon," pedagogic philosophies and approaches within and beyond classrooms, and the complex relationships between teaching, scholarship, and politics. Reading this book and speaking with Nick, I was surprised by how much these chapters held for me, not just as a historian and scholar of France and empire, but as a teacher of these things who regularly asks myself questions about my own choices, goals, and approaches to working with students. It is a book I would recommend enthusiastically to anyone interested in the figures mentioned above, in the role that education has played in colonialisms past and present, and in the project of education on a much wider scale. What we do as teachers, why and how we do it, is interrogated here in ways that might surprise, and will certainly enlighten. I hope listeners will enjoy our conversation! Roxanne Panchasi is an Associate Professor of History at Simon Fraser University in Vancouver, Canada who specializes in twentieth and twenty-first century France and its empire. If you have a recent title to suggest for the podcast, please send her an email (panchasi@sfu.ca). Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/education
Ryan Ruby is a writer and translator from Los Angeles, California. His fiction and criticism have appeared in The New York Review of Books, The Paris Review Daily, Conjunctions, n+1, The Baffler, and elsewhere. The piece we are discussing here is Child’s Play. What can Wittgenstein teach us about raising kids published in June 2021 in The Believer. His debut novel The Zero and the One was published in March 2017 by Twelve Books. It has subsequently appeared in the UK, Australia, New Zealand, and France. He is the author of a book-length poem, Context Collapse, which was a Finalist for the 2020 National Poetry Series and a Semi-Finalist for the 2020 Tomaž Šalamun Prize. He has translated Roger Caillois and Grégoire Bouillier from the French for Readux Books. A graduate of Columbia University and the University of Chicago, he lives in Berlin, where he is on the faculty of the Berlin Writers' Workshop and an Affiliate Fellow of the Institute for Cultural Inquiry. Agata Popeda is a Polish-American journalist. Interested in everything, with a particular weakness for literature and foreign relations. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/education
Bob Fisher earned the moniker “Bob the Builder” by spearheading over $1 billion in new construction during his 21-year tenure at Belmont University. Accompanying and enabling the physical transformation of the campus was a dramatic expansion of the University’s programs, including the addition of medical, law and pharmacy schools, the acquisition of two colleges of art & design, that enabled Belmont to grow from fewer than 3,000 students to over 8,000 during his tenure. A core part of growth strategy was becoming “Nashville’s University”, including the largest Music Business program in the U.S. and a new performing arts center that serves as home for the Nashville Opera. Bob share how he was able to leverage his economics and business training to create one of the most remarkable financial success stories in higher education – with the University generating an $82 million annual surplus on a budget of $350 million, while drawing under 2% of the endowment and offering annual faculty salary increases averaging 5%/year. David Finegold is the president of Chatham University. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/education
What should the relationship between school and society be? Obstinate Education: Reconnecting School and Society (Brill, 2019) argues that education is not just there to give individuals, groups and societies what they want from it, but that education has a duty to resist. Education needs to be obstinate, not for the sake of being difficult, but in order to make sure that it can contribute to emancipation and democratisation. This requires that education always brings in the question whether what is desired from it is going to help with living life well, individually and collectively, on a planet that has a limited capacity for giving everything that is desired from it. This text makes a strong case for the connection between education and democracy, both in the context of schools, colleges and universities and in the work of public pedagogy. Kai Wortman is a PhD candidate at the Institute of Education, University of Tübingen, interested in philosophy of education. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/education
In post-World War II Canada, black women’s positions within the teaching profession served as sites of struggle and conflict as the nation worked to address the needs of its diversifying population. From their entry into teachers’ college through their careers in the classroom and administration, black women educators encountered systemic racism and gender barriers at every step. So they worked to change the system. Using oral narratives to tell the story of black access and education in Ontario between the 1940s and the 1980s, Schooling the System provides textured insight into how issues of race, gender, class, geographic origin, and training shaped women’s distinct experiences within the profession. In Schooling the System: A History of Black Women Teachers (McGill-Queen's UP, 2021), Funké Aladejebi illustrates that black women, as a diverse group, made vital contributions to the creation and development of anti-racist education in Canada. As cultural mediators within Ontario school systems, these women circumvented subtle and overt forms of racial and social exclusion to create resistive teaching methods that centred black knowledges and traditions. Within their wider communities and activist circles, they fought to change entrenched ideas about what Canadian citizenship should look like. As schools continue to grapple with creating diverse educational programs for all Canadians, Schooling the System is a timely excavation of the meaningful contributions of black women educators who helped create equitable policies and practices in schools and communities. Pamela Fuentes is an Assistant Professor in the Women’s and Gender Studies Department at Pace University-NYC campus Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/education
Listen to this interview of Rachel Sagner Buurma (associate professor of English literature at Swarthmore College) and Laura Heffernan (associate professor of English at the University of North Florida). We talk about there book The Teaching Archive: A New History for Literary Study (University of Chicago Press, 2020) and the great figures of English Studies--the professors and the students. Laura Heffernan : "There is this real sense right now that the ability to read carefully, to learn how to think critically, to learn how to write well, and to conceive of those things as part of a larger life is under threat for the majority of American students. And one of the things our book really tries to do is to recover just how many of those students have participated in the making of English Studies, a discipline which is now being taking away from students, essentially. And so, our intellectual histories need really now to incorporate the institutions where such majors in the humanities are under threat and show, in really material ways as we do, that those students at those schools helped to make some of the core concepts and methods in the humanities." Daniel Shea heads Scholarly Communication, the podcast about how knowledge gets known. Daniel is Director of the Writing Program at Heidelberg University, Germany. Daniel's YouTube Channel is called Write Your Research. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/education
Thomas O’Reilly tells the inspiring story of Pine Manor College, which serves more students of color (90%) and first-generation college students (85%) than almost any small private college in the U.S. He shares how he was able to quickly turnaround the College that was in crisis – 6 presidents in 10 years and decades of structural deficits that had depleted the endowment. By developing a range of strategic partnerships and auxiliary revenue streams (that quickly grew to more than 50% of college revenues) he was able to balance the budget and gain national attention for the College’s mission. When the COVID pandemic hit cutting off all this auxiliary revenue overnight, the College was thrown back into crisis. Tom quickly pivoted to Plan B, engineering a strategic partnership with nearby Boston College in record time (under 2 weeks), that included a $50 million investment in a new Pine Manor Institute at BC to carry on the College’s mission of serving high-need students. He shares the lessons from this experience for other colleges and universities considering strategic partnerships. David Finegold is the president of Chatham University. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/education
When Paul LeBlanc arrived at Southern New Hampshire University in 2003 it had just attained university-status and begun a few online degrees to supplement its small on-campus population in Manchester, NH. Today it is one of the world’s few “mega-universities”, with 170,000 students, all but 4,000 of which are in online degree programs. LeBlanc describes how he applied the teachings of his friend and board member, the late Harvard Business School Professor Clayton Christensen, to take on the University of Phoenix and other for-profits that were dominating online education in the early 2000s, and then to disrupt SNHU’s own successful online degrees by launching low-cost, self-paced or competency-based education. He discuss the trends that are further destabilizing today’s higher education market and how SNHU is positioning itself to benefit from them. David Finegold is the president of Chatham University. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/education
Welcome to The Academic Life. You are smart and capable, but you aren’t an island, and neither are we. So we reached across our mentor network to bring you podcasts on everything from how to finish that project, to how to take care of your beautiful mind. Wish we’d bring in an expert about something? DM us your suggestion on Twitter: The Academic Life @AcademicLifeNBN. In this episode you’ll hear about: Ros Pyne’s path through higher education, how she found her way to her current job, her role at Bloomsbury Publishers, what Open Access [OA] is and is not, how OA can democratize knowledge, and what she’s hopeful about. Our guest is: Ros Pyne, who is the Global Director of Research and Open Access at Bloomsbury Publishers. She has worked in academic publishing since 2007, initially as an editor, and for the last eight years in roles focusing on open access. She has a particular interest in bringing open access to long-form scholarship and to the humanities, and is the co-author of several reports on open access books. She holds a degree in English from the University of Cambridge, and an MA in early modern English literature from King’s College London. Our host is: Dr. Christina Gessler, a historian of women and gender. Listeners to this episode might be interested in:
Open access at Bloomsbury
Directory of Open Access Books
OAPEN OA Books Toolkit (for anyone interested in learning more about what open access books are and how they work)
Open Access Books Network (a free online network for people working on open access books or interested in getting involved)
Open Access and the Humanities (a 2014 book by an open access expert Martin Paul Eve that’s still an excellent primer on this topic)
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Spanning a historical period that begins with women’s exclusion from university debates and continues through their participation in coeducational intercollegiate competitions, Debating Women: Gender Education, and Spaces for Argument, 1835-1945 (Michigan State University Press, 2018) highlights the crucial role that debating organizations played as women sought to access the fruits of higher education in the United States and United Kingdom. Despite various obstacles, Carly S. Woods shows how women transformed forests, parlors, dining rooms, ocean liners, classrooms, auditoriums, and prisons into vibrant spaces for ritual argument. There, they not only learned to speak eloquently and argue persuasively but also used debate to establish a legacy, explore difference, engage in intercultural encounter, and articulate themselves as citizens. These debaters engaged with the issues of the day, often performing, questioning, and occasionally refining norms of gender, race, class, and nation. In tracing their involvement in an activity at the heart of civic culture, Woods demonstrates that debating women have much to teach us about the ongoing potential for debate to move arguments, ideas, and people to new spaces. Carly S. Woods (she/her) is Associate Professor in the Department of Communication and affiliate faculty in the Department of Women's Studies at the University of Maryland. Connect on Twitter @debatingwomen. Resources in this episode here and here. Lee M. Pierce (they & she) is Assistant Professor in the Department of Communication at the State University of New York College at Geneseo. Connect on Twitter @rhetoriclee. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/education
Is it possible to integrate scholarly study with contemplative practice? What are the benefits and potential pitfalls of doing so? Join us as we speak to Dr. Ben William about Naropa University’s vision of Contemplative Education along with their brand-new Masters in Yoga Studies program. Raj Balkaran is a scholar, educator, consultant, and life coach. For information see rajbalkaran.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/education
Welcome to The Academic Life. You are smart and capable, but you aren’t an island, and neither are we. So we reached across our mentor network to bring you podcasts on everything from how to finish that project, to how to take care of your beautiful mind. Wish we’d bring in an expert about something? Email us at cgessler05[at]gmail.com or dr.danamalone[at]gmail.com Find us on Twitter: The Academic Life @AcademicLifeNBN. In this episode you’ll hear about: a student’s goal to study abroad during college, how she dealt with unexpected restrictions on becoming an international student during a pandemic, her transatlantic travels, living in a “bubble” in her new dorm, and what she’s hopeful about for her return to her American campus for her senior year. Our guest is: Emma Halfin, who is a junior at Case Western Reserve University (CWRU) majoring in Political Science and History and minoring in French. She is currently a visiting student at the University of Oxford in the UK studying history and politics and is looking forward to returning to CWRU in the fall for her senior year. Our host is: Dr. Christina Gessler, a historian of women, gender, and sexuality. Listeners to this episode might be interested in:
Woollacott, Angela, ‘“Khaki Fever” and its Control: Gender, Class, Age and Sexual Morality on the British Home Front in the First World War’, Journal of Contemporary History, 29/2 (1994), pp. 325-347
Giorgio Agamben, State of Exception (2003)
Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism (1951)
Jeanne Boydston, “Gender as a Question of Historical Analysis”, Gender and History 20/3 (2008)
The Visiting Student Program at the University of Oxford
American students studying abroad during the pandemic
International Students studying in America during the pandemic
The College of Arts and Sciences at Case Western Reserve University
Visa concerns for students studying abroad during the pandemic
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Listen to this interview of William Tierney, University Professor Emeritus and Founding Director of the Pullias Center for Higher Education at the University of Southern California. We talk about his book Get Real: 49 Challenges Confronting Higher Education (SUNY, 2020), about what people really believe when it comes to higher education, and also about what people need to do when it comes to higher education. William Tierney : "Oftentimes the board and the administration and the faculty are in cahoots with one another, in the sense that the marker is only how to improve in the rankings. And you can see this when a teaching college becomes a state university, and then it will try to move away from teaching and move towards research. And a board member will feel good about that: 'Boy, I came in, and my institution was ranked 250th, and now it's a 100. We the board are doing a great job.' And what the administration will say is: 'I transformed the institution. We were 250, and now we're 100.' And the faculty will say, 'Yup, the students are better.' And all this impacts on writing centers like this: Writing centers are often seen as problems–––you know, that kids go to the writing center because they have a problem. Well, then, if we don't have writing centers, then we don't have students who have problems–––which is, of course, the exact wrong way to think about an essential skill that we need for the twenty-first century." Daniel Shea heads Scholarly Communication, the podcast about how knowledge gets known. Daniel is Director of the Writing Program at Heidelberg University, Germany. Daniel's YouTube Channel is called Write Your Research. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/education
In Campus Carry: Confronting a Loaded Issue in Higher Education (Harvard Education Press, 2020), editors Patricia Somers and Matt Valentine lead an examination of the unintended consequences of campus gun policy and showcase voices from the college community who are grappling with the questions, issues, and consequences that have emerged at their respective institutions. While making the case that campus carry legislation is harmful, the book gathers some of the very best thinking around enacting such policies and offers valuable recommendations for mitigating its effects and preserving university values. The implementation of campus carry is complex and has provoked many questions: How does concealed carry on campus affect the free expression of ideas in the classroom or the safety of faculty holding unpopular or even controversial views? Should students who misplace or leave their weapons unattended be disciplined? How are communities of color impacted by campus carry? Along with the book's contributors, Somers and Valentine provide higher education leaders, administrators, and faculty with a valuable resource that will guide them toward considerations that might otherwise be overlooked, help them avoid pitfalls that have been encountered elsewhere, and protect institutional priorities. The book features reflection pieces from students, alumni, and faculty to illustrate the complexity and controversy of the campus carry policy. Given that the legal possession of guns in the classroom is now a reality for American educators and students in much of the country, Campus Carry concludes with a passionate call for more university-based original research on gun violence. Pat Somers is an Associate Professor in the Program of Higher Education Leadership in the Educational Leadership and Policy Department at the University of Texas at Austin. Matt Valentine teaches writing at the University of Texas at Austin, where he is a fellow of the Trice Professorship in the Plan II Honors Program. Tom Discenna is Professor of Communication at Oakland University whose work examines issues of academic labor and communicative labor more broadly. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/education
Welcome to The Academic Life. You are smart and capable, but you aren’t an island, and neither are we. So we reached across our mentor network to bring you podcasts on everything from how to finish that project, to how to take care of your beautiful mind. Wish we’d bring in an expert about something? Email us at cgessler05@gmail.com or dr.danamalone@gmail.com. Find us on Twitter: The Academic Life @AcademicLifeNBN. In this episode you’ll hear about: how Clair adapted to changes in her academic timeline, re-planned her wedding, and postponed taking the Bar exam due to the pandemic. Our guest is: Clair Wright Sumerfield, a fourth-year, dual-degree graduate student at the University of Denver. She is earning both a JD from Sturm College of Law and an MA is Art History & Museum Studies from the School of Art and Art History. She expects to graduate from both programs by fall 2021 and hopes to find a job that combines both fields. Originally from Illinois, Clair currently lives in Denver, Colorado with her husband and two cats and enjoys exploring Colorado’s beautiful scenery in her free time. Our host is: Dr. Christina Gessler, a historian of women, gender, and sexuality. Listeners to this episode might be interested in:
Center for Art Law
“Understanding Grief in the Age of the Covid-19 Pandemic”
Textile & Fashion Collection at the Denver Art Museum
“Alexander McQueen: Savage Beauty”
Alexander McQueen Savage Beauty (video)
Experimental Fashion: Performance Art, Carnival and the Grotesque Body by Francesca Granata
The Grotesque in Western Art and Culture: The Image at Play by Frances S. Connelly
Supporting Graduate Students in Times of Stress
Reflections on the downsides of remote work
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In Putting the Humanities PhD to Work: Thriving in and Beyond the Classroom (Duke University Press, 2020), Katina L. Rogers tackles three major issues in academia – post-PhD careers, academic labor practices, and inclusivity and equity. Rogers demonstrates how scholarly reward practices hide the realities of faculty work, value normative rather than innovative outcomes, drive admissions practices for graduate programs, and narrow the definition of post-PhD success. Yet Rogers does not accept that the university of the past – or even the present – must be the university of the future. Rogers begins from the basis that higher education, humanities graduate study and scholarly research are public goods. She calls for a more expansive view of humanities graduate training that is generative rather than replicative. Rogers argues against reducing humanities PhD cohorts and programs, instead laying out a framework for faculty and advisors to initiate institutional change. She provides graduate students with context and analysis to inform the ways they discern their own graduate training. Perhaps most importantly, she highlights that multiple careers pathways can offer engaging, fulfilling, and even unexpected pathways for students who seek them out. Amanda Jeanne Swain, PhD. Historian. Humanities Center executive director. Navigating academic systems with faculty and grad students. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/education
I've had 18 years of formal education - why is writing so hard? Today's guests Dr Katherine Firth explains the disease's cure. The book Level Up Your Essays guides the reader through university essay writing, running through stages including essay plans, developing research strategies, writing with distinction, finishing strongly with editing, and getting your referencing right. Katherine Firth manages learning programs for undergraduates and graduates in university settings, and has been developing students as writers for more than a decade. She runs writing workshops for doctoral students and currently runs the academic program at International House, a college of the University of Melbourne. She is co-author of Your PhD Survival Guide and gives writing advice on her blog Research Degree Insiders. Bede Haines is a solicitor, specialising in litigation and a partner at Holding Redlich, an Australian commercial law firm. He lives in Sydney, Australia. Known to read books, ride bikes and eat cereal (often). bede.haines@holdingredlich.com Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/education
“Every bit of SEL”—or Social Emotional Learning, writes Jeffrey Benson—“you can integrate into your planning will not only begin to heal the wounds of passivity, racism, and inequity, but also give students an experience today, in your classroom, of that better world.” (157) The book, Improve Every Lesson Plan with SEL (ASCD, 2021), speaks to big ideas of the teacher’s role in expanding (and “saving”) democracy, while suggesting concrete tools that teacher can use tomorrow morning when the bell rings. Since “emotions and intellect operate in partnership” (7), we know our students must be engaged in order to enjoy meaningful learning. Benson proposes activities and techniques to draw students in, to help them become full participants and co-owners of their learning. He offers ways for us to get our students to share and give feedback that immediately improve their learning experience, while reducing the amount of work a teacher needs to do. For such a short and readable book, Improve Every Lesson with SEL, is a hefty and indispensable toolbox of good ideas. Jeffrey Benson has been a teacher for over 40 years, also a school director, mentor, author, and leader in education, working in school reform, teacher training, curricular development, and conflict resolution. His books include Hanging In: Strategies for Working with the Students Who Challenge Us Most, ... 10 Steps for Managing Change in Schools, ... and Teaching the Whole Teen: Everyday Practices That Promote Success and Resilience in School and Life. He is also the author of many articles and is a member of the faculty at the ASCD, the Association of Supervision and Curriculum Development. To learn more about Jeffrey Benson’s work or to contact him, go to https://jeffreybenson.org/. Krzysztof (Chris) Odyniec is a teacher and historian who has worked in secondary and post-secondary education for fifteen years. He currently teaches social studies at John Swett High School in Crockett, California: https://www.jsusd.org/Domain/167. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/education
In an age characterized by rampant anti-intellectualism, Kathleen Fitzpatrick in her 'Generous Thinking: A Radical Approach to Saving the University' (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2021) charges the academy with thinking constructively rather than competitively, building new ideas rather than tearing old ones down. She urges us to rethink how we teach the humanities and to refocus our attention on the very human ends that the humanities can best serve. One key aspect of that transformation involves fostering generous thinking, a mode of engagement that emphasizes listening over speaking, community over individualism, and collaboration over competition. Kai Wortman is a PhD candidate at the Institute of Education, University of Tübingen, interested in philosophy of education. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/education
David Galas describes his unusual journey from Air Force brat to theoretical physicist to Systems Biologist in charge of the Human Genome Project for the U.S. Department of Energy. He then became a bioscience entrepreneur creating both a string of start-up companies and co-founding, along with Hank Riggs, the Keck Graduate Institute of Applied Life Science, the 7th and newest of the Claremont Colleges. He describes their unusual partnership and what led Hank to create KGI after his successful tenures as President of Harvey Mudd College and leading the first billion-dollar campaign in higher education for Stanford University. Together with the founding faculty they created the first higher education institution with the mission of bridging the gap between scientists and business to develop leaders who could help commercialize the exciting breakthroughs coming from the life science revolution. David Finegold is the president of Chatham University. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/education
In 2014 and 2015, students at dozens of colleges and universities held protests demanding increased representation of Black and Latino students and calling for a campus climate that was less hostile to students of color. Their activism recalled an earlier era: in the 1960s and 1970s, widespread campus protest by Black and Latino students contributed to the development of affirmative action and open admissions policies. Yet in the decades since, affirmative action has become a magnet for conservative backlash and in many cases has been completely dismantled. In To Fulfill These Rights: Political Struggle Over Affirmative Action and Open Admissions (Columbia University Press, 2019), Amaka Okechukwu offers a historically informed sociological account of the struggles over affirmative action and open admissions in higher education. Through case studies of policy retrenchment at public universities, she documents the protracted―but not always successful―rollback of inclusive policies in the context of shifting race and class politics. To Fulfill These Rights provides a new analysis of the politics of higher education, centering the changing understandings and practices of race and class in the United States. Amaka Okechukwu is an Assistant Professor of sociology at George Mason University. Schneur Zalman Newfield is an Assistant Professor of Sociology at Borough of Manhattan Community College, City University of New York, and the author of Degrees of Separation: Identity Formation While Leaving Ultra-Orthodox Judaism (Temple University Press, 2020). Visit him online at ZalmanNewfield.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/education
One year to the day after George Flloyd’s murder, Dr. Jamila Lyiscott discusses her book on racial justice in education: Black Appetite. White Food. Issues of Race, Voice, and Justice Within and Beyond the Classroom (Routledge, 2019) A community-engaged scholar-activist, nationally renowned speaker and spoken word artist, Assistant Professor of Social Justice Education at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, and founding co-director of its new Center for Racial Justice and Youth Engaged Research, Lyiscott—who may also invite you to call her Dr. J, if you’re cool—offers educators support for thinking and acting on issues of race, language, and the colonial logics that maintain white supremacy at the expense of Black wholeness through the lens of what she calls “Vision-Driven Justice.” Personal stories, scholarly citations, original poetry, choice excerpts of literature, and theoretical as well as applied analyses are written in the author’s flow of American Standard English, American Black English, and Carribbean Creolized English to manifest Black Appetite. White Food. The result is a material yet breathing example of what Lyiscott (and others) call fugitive literacies: a book that evades replicating multiple facets of the white supremacy enmeshed in education systems and products. The book invites readers to reflect thoroughly and continuously, but also expects us to move beyond those realms and into action. As Lyiscott writes, “The authority to author new, more equitable social realities belongs to each of us.” Christina Bosch is an assistant professor of special education at California State University at Fresno. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/education
Welcome to The Academic Life. You are smart and capable, but you aren’t an island, and neither are we. So we reached across our mentor network to bring you podcasts on everything from how to finish that project, to how to take care of your beautiful mind. Wish we’d bring in an expert about something? Email us at cgessler05@gmail.com or dr.danamalone@gmail.com. Find us on Twitter: The Academic Life @AcademicLifeNBN. In this episode you’ll hear about: Karin Fischer’s job as a contributing writer for the Chronicle of Higher Education, how she researches stories about international students, what the pandemic means for her work and for the students she writes about, and what she’s hopeful about. Our guest is: Karin Fischer, a higher-education journalist with a focus on international education, American colleges’ activities overseas, the globalization of the college experience, and study abroad. Her work has appeared in the Chronicle of Higher Education, the New York Times, EdSource, the Washington Monthly, and University World News. Ms. Fischer is also a research associate at the Center for Studies in Higher Education at the University of California at Berkeley and an international education leadership fellow at the University at Albany. She is a recipient of the East-West Center’s Jefferson Fellowship for reporting in Asia and the International Reporting Project fellowship. Her work has been honored by the Education Writers Association, the National Press Foundation, and the Poynter Institute. Our host is: Dr. Christina Gessler, a historian of women, gender, and sexuality. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/education
To what extent should scholarship foreground the beliefs and experiences of the scholar producing it? Where does the scholar-practitioners fit at the academy today? Join us as we explore such issues in conversation with Dr. Francis Clooney, Jesuit Priest and Harvard Professor of Comparative Theology, specializing in Catholic and Hindu traditions. Raj Balkaran is a scholar, educator, consultant, and life coach. For information see rajbalkaran.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/education
Michael Crow describes his 19-year tenure leading ASU’s transformation from a regional, “party school” to what has been recognized as the U.S.’s most innovative research universities for six years in a row. He outlines the model of “The New American University” that represents “The Fifth Wave” in the Evolution of American Universities”, described in his books with these titles by William DeBars, to create an institution that defines its success by how many students it can serve, rather than how selective it has become, and pushing forward transdisciplinary research that has a positive real-world impact on Arizona and the planet. He sees his role as a design-architect, creating an environment that fosters the development of new schools, colleges and institutes bringing together experts from different fields to seek solutions to important problems. David Finegold is the president of Chatham University. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/education
Welcome to The Academic Life. You are smart and capable, but you aren’t an island, and neither are we. So we reached across our mentor network to bring you podcasts on everything from how to finish that project, to how to take care of your beautiful mind. Wish we’d bring in an expert about something? Email us at dr.danamalone@gmail.com or cgessler05@gmail.com. Find us on Twitter: The Academic Life @AcademicLifeNBN. In this episode you’ll hear about: how mentoring differs from friendship, common (mis)perceptions of how mentoring happens across the academy, what makes a great mentor, steps to take when connecting with a potential mentor, and how to construct your optimal “board of advisors.” Dr. Laura Gail Lunsford, author, scholar, speaker, consultant, and southerner. Dr. Lunsford is an expert in mentoring and leadership. She has written over 40 peer-reviewed articles, case studies and chapters on leadership and mentoring. She wrote the Handbook for Managing Mentoring Programs, co-edited the Sage Handbook of Mentoring, and co-authored Faculty Development in Liberal Arts Colleges. Funny and engaging, she consults with organizations on effective mentoring and coaching. Presently, she professes psychology at Campbell University, a beautiful liberal arts college in rural NC. Laura enjoys her Japanese Zen Garden, cycling, kayaking, and karate (and holds a black belt in Shoto kan) in addition to eating her husband’s cooking. A Rotarian, she also volunteers with the American Red Cross. Dr. Dana Malone, a higher education scholar and practitioner. She specializes in college student relationships, gender, sexuality, and religious identities as well as assessment planning. Dana enjoys delicious, healthy food, practicing yoga, and wandering the Jersey shore. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/education
A Collective Pursuit: Teachers' Unions and Education Reform (Temple UP, 2020) focuses on the idea that individuals, in this case, teachers, are multifaceted and multidimensional actors who pursue goals for a variety of reasons and those reasons are connected to their capacity to do their jobs, to the best of their abilities, as well as their interests as citizens and community members. According to Lesley Lavery’s research, the data indicate that teachers are the most important in-school predictors of student success. This suggests that in thinking about educational structure and reform, the focus should always include the individual teacher in a classroom and their capacity to do their job well. Thus, Lavery’s analysis in A Collective Pursuit is both to understand the capacity and role of the individual teacher in the classroom and in the American educational system, and to understand the role that organized labor has played in working on behalf of teachers but within a changing educational landscape. This landscape, in recent decades, has seen the advent and expansion of the charter school movement, and various teachers’ strikes in expected places (Chicago public schools) and in unexpected places (West Virginia, Oklahoma, Kentucky, and elsewhere). Lavery peels apart the various dimensions of these dynamics, examining the establishment of the two largest teachers’ unions in the United States (the AFT and the NEA) and how their origins impact both the way they approach their missions and how they work on behalf of educators. Into this dynamic, of public schools, teachers’ unions, state regulations of funding streams and the perpetual reform of education, we see the advent of charter schools, which are also public schools, but are allowed to operate a bit differently, in a number of states, from the traditional public-school model. Lavery’s analysis examines how charter schools have been integrated into the public-school arena, and now, how the teachers at some of these schools are moving towards unionization efforts and why they are inclined to do so. Lavery explores the important connection between organized labor, the individual teacher, and educational reform efforts. These connections are complex, but they are also at the heart of the American educational system and they need to be considered in context of reform, new approaches, and, as so many have experienced in the midst of the COVID pandemic, home schooling efforts and parent involvement in their children’s education. Lilly J. Goren is professor of political science at Carroll University in Waukesha, WI. She is co-editor of the award winning book, Women and the White House: Gender, Popular Culture, and Presidential Politics (University Press of Kentucky, 2012), as well as co-editor of Mad Men and Politics: Nostalgia and the Remaking of Modern America (Bloomsbury Academic, 2015). Email her comments at lgoren@carrollu.edu or tweet to @gorenlj. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/education
Listen to this interview of Martin Paul Eve (Birkbeck, University of London), Cameron Neylon (Curtin University), Daniel Paul O'Donnell (University of Lethbridge), Samuel Moore (Coventry University), Robert Gadie (University of the Arts London), Victoria Odeniyi (University College London), and Shahina Parvin (University of Lethbridge) about their book Reading Peer Review: PLOS One and Institutional Change in Academia, published this year by Cambridge University Press. The book is part of Cambridge UP's "Elements" series. It's also open access. We talk about excellence in higher education and about excellence in scientific research, and we talk about all the trouble that can bring. Martin Paul Eve : "Yeah, I think that's right that in scholarly communication, we're dealing less with language and more with discourse. And the most frustrating defenses of the humanities disciplines try to claim some exclusivity around language and expression and so on. And really, when you're dealing with extremely complicated scientific concepts, the way you express them does matter, and if there isn't clarity in your expression, it leads to poor communication. I mean, part of the challenge here is that the evolution of the research article in the sciences means that you're only ever really getting a description of what has been done. And so making the description as perspicacious as possible is a core part of that. Now the questions is: Since we have practices like open data, like replication studies that attempt to give more of an insight into the process, into what's going on–––Do they obviate that need for such careful language usage, given that you're exposing more of the process itself or does it remain as important as ever. I think it's probably the latter. But it's interesting to me that this need for precision has evolved, that it does play a role, and that reviewers nearly always comment upon it when they think it's lacking." Daniel Shea heads Scholarly Communication, the podcast about how knowledge gets known. Daniel is Director of the Writing Program at Heidelberg University, Germany. Daniel's YouTube Channel is called Write Your Research. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/education
Jeanne Simons devoted her career as a social worker and educator to the study, treatment, and care of children with autism. In 1955, she established the Linwood Children's Center in Ellicott City, Maryland, one of the first schools dedicated to children with autism. Her Linwood Model, developed there, was widely adopted and still forms the basis for a variety of autism intervention techniques. Incredibly—although unknown at the time—Jeanne was herself autistic. Behind the Mirror: The Story of a Pioneer in Autism Treatment and Her Work with Children on the Spectrum (Johns Hopkins UP, 2021) reveals the remarkable tale of Simons. In this interview I speak with Dr. Sabine Oishi, who co-author this book with Simons and also the book, the hidden child. Sabine Oishi, PhD, was educated first as a teacher and then as a child psychologist at the University of Geneva. She earned her PhD in child development and family therapy from the University of Maryland. She has worked as a teacher, researcher, and therapist both in Switzerland and the United States. With Jeanne Simons, she was the coauthor of The Hidden Child. Dr. Yakir Englander is the National Director of Leadership programs at the Israeli-American Council. He also teaches at the AJR. He can be reached at: Yakir1212englander@gmail.com Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/education
Shai Reshef shares the remarkable story of the creation of the University of the People, which has grown from an initial small class of students in 2008 to over 55,000 low-income students all over the world today. Reshef founded University of the People after a successful career as an educational technology entrepreneur, setting out to leverage these technologies to launch the world’s first free US-accredited asynchronous online university with a goal of serving the 100 million+ talented young people who lack access to a quality education. The University of the People has been able to make remarkable progress toward this ambitious goal by adopting a peer learning model overseen by a huge volunteer faculty workforce. It offers undergraduate and Master’s degrees in the high-demand areas of Business, Nursing, and Computer Science; courses are free, but students who want college credit pay for the final proctored assessment, with the cost of a full degree about $4800 and scholarships to support those who can’t afford that. David Finegold is the president of Chatham University. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/education
To many mathematicians and math enthusiasts, the word "innumeracy" brings to mind popular writing like that of John Allen Paulos. But inequities in our quantitative reasoning skills have received considerable interest and attention from researchers lately, including in psychology, development, education, and public health. Innumeracy in the Wild: Misunderstanding and Misusing Numbers (Oxford University Press, 2020) is a unified treatment of these broad-ranging studies, from the ways more and less numerate people differ in our perceptions of risk and our number-based decisions to the roots of our numeric faculties and how we can make the best of them. Dr. Ellen Peters has made significant contributions to the subject and brings her expertise and an exceptional clarity to its presentation. Precious little of the research surveyed in her book could fit into this interview! We discussed the three components of numeric ability—objective numeracy, subjective numeracy, and the innate number sense—and how they vary within and across populations. We talked through some key lessons from this literature, such as the importance of calibrating our self-efficacy to our real ability and an awareness of how our cultural allegiances can drive even our mathematical reasoning. And we identified some of the essential personal habits and policy levers (early childhood education!!) available to us in our efforts to improve our individual numeracy and our collective numeric decision-making. For a firm grounding in the state of knowledge and urgent open questions, there may be no better resource for many years to come. Suggested companion works: Contributions from the labs of Isaac Lipkus, Angela Fagerlin, John Opfer, Edward Cokely, Rocio Garcia-Retamero, Jakub Traczyk, Agata Sobków, Wändi Bruine de Bruin, Keith Stanovich, and Valerie Reyna. Ellen Peters, Ph.D., is the Philip H. Knight Chair, and Director of the Center for Science Communication Research, in the University of Oregon’s School of Journalism and Communication. As a decision psychologist, she studies the basic building blocks of human judgment and decision making and their links with effective communication techniques and has published more than 150 peer-reviewed papers on these topics. She is former President of the Society for Judgment and Decision Making and a fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, Association for Psychological Science, the American Psychological Association, and the Society for Experimental Social Psychology. She also works with federal agencies to advance decision and communication sciences in health and health policy, including having been Chair of FDA’s Risk Communication Advisory Committee and member of the NAS’s Science of Science Communication committee. She has been awarded the Jane Beattie Scientific Recognition Award and an NIH Group Merit Award. Finally, she has received extensive funding from the National Science Foundation and National Institutes of Health. Cory Brunson is a Research Assistant Professor at the Laboratory for Systems Medicine at the University of Florida. His research focuses on geometric and topological approaches to the analysis of medical and healthcare data. He welcomes book suggestions, listener feedback, and transparent supply chains. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/education
Listen to this interview of Martin Paul Eve and Jonathan Gray, editors of Reassembling Scholarly Communications: Histories, Infrastructures, and Global Politics of Open Access (published open access by MIT in 2020). We talk about a lot, and all of it, really, falls under the head "Ethics of Scholarly Communication." interviewer : "How did you conceive of a project of this diversity on the subject of open access and publishing?" Martin Paul Eve : "What's really interesting to me is that most academics think they know about scholarly publishing because they have all published. This is a bit like me saying that I'm an expert in how car engines work because I can drive. It doesn't equate to the same thing. And so what we really wanted to do was to put together a volume that did not really attempt forcibly to synthesize all of the propositions made under its roof, but rather to give a space for a debate to develop, a space for argument and conversation to flourish about the difficulties surrounding open access."
interviewer : "The book just tells all it has to tell from every perspective, and these disagreements, and agreements, make for the feel of a real discussion. I wonder what your basic view of scholarly communication was throughout the, surely, long editing process." Jonathan Gray : "Well, we thought of it like this: so if you look at work on the sociology of art––rather than looking at the artwork, you look at everything around that artwork which is required for it to be seen and appreciated as an artwork. You look at the supply chains involved in producing print and canvas, you look at the gallery workers, you look at ticket sales and so on. And I guess we were keen to kind of do a similar thing with this book, to perform a kind of inversion around scholarly communication and open access, and really situate it and re-world it in relation to all sorts of issues, communities, forms of labor, and infrastructures." Daniel Shea heads Scholarly Communication, the podcast about how knowledge gets known. Daniel is Director of the Writing Program at Heidelberg University, Germany. Daniel's YouTube Channel is called Write Your Research. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/education
James Fredal is Associate Professor in the Department of English at The Ohio State University. The recipient of multiple awards for his work in rhetorical theory and history, Fredal is the author in 2006 of Rhetorical Action in Ancient Athens: Persuasive Artistry from Solon to Demosthenes and now The Enthymeme: Syllogism, Reasoning and Narrative in Ancient Greek Rhetoric (Penn State UP, 2020). Central to rhetorical theory, the enthymeme is most often defined as a truncated syllogism. Suppressing a premise that the audience already knows, this rhetorical device relies on the audience to fill in the missing information, thereby making the argument more persuasive. James Fredal argues that this view of the enthymeme is wrong. Presenting a new exegesis of Aristotle and classic texts of Attic oratory, Fredal shows that the standard reading of Aristotle's enthymeme is inaccurate--and that Aristotle himself distorts what enthymemes are and how they work. From close analysis of the Rhetoric, Topics, and Analytics, Fredal finds that Aristotle's enthymeme is, in fact, not syllogistic and is different from the enthymeme as it was used by Attic orators such as Lysias and Isaeus. Fredal argues that the enthymeme, as it was originally understood and used, is a technique of storytelling, primarily forensic storytelling, aimed at eliciting from the audience an inference about a narrative. According to Fredal, narrative rather than formal logic is the seedbed of the enthymeme and of rhetoric more broadly. The Enthymeme reassesses a fundamental doctrine of rhetorical instruction, clarifies the viewpoints of the tradition, and presents a new form of rhetoric for further study and use. This groundbreaking book will be welcomed by scholars and students of classical rhetoric, the history of rhetoric, and rhetorical theory as well as communications studies, classical studies, and classical philosophy. Tom Discenna is Professor of Communication at Oakland University whose work examines issues of academic labor and communicative labor more broadly. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/education
In a global context of widespread fears over Islamic radicalization and militancy, poor Muslim youth, especially those socialized in religious seminaries, have attracted overwhelmingly negative attention. In northern Nigeria, male Qur'anic students have garnered a reputation of resorting to violence in order to claim their share of highly unequally distributed resources. Drawing on material from long-term ethnographic and participatory fieldwork among Qur'anic students and their communities, Quranic Schools in Northern Nigeria: Everyday Experiences of Youth, Faith, and Poverty (Cambridge University Press, 2018) offers an alternative perspective on youth, faith, and poverty. Mobilizing insights from scholarship on education, poverty research and childhood and youth studies, Hannah Hoechner, lecturer at the School of International Development, University of East Anglia, describes how religious discourses can moderate feelings of inadequacy triggered by experiences of exclusion, and how Qur'anic school enrollment offers a way forward in constrained circumstances, even though it likely reproduces poverty in the long run. In our conversation we discuss the rural economy of Northern Nigeria, educational options for young boys, the activities of the Qur’anic school, how boys support themselves through domestic service, youth masculinity, poverty and economic instability, politics of respectability, the “prayer economy” and spiritual services, and participatory research and video production. Kristian Petersen is an Assistant Professor of Philosophy & Religious Studies at Old Dominion University. You can find out more about his work on his website, follow him on Twitter @BabaKristian, or email him at kpeterse@odu.edu. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/education
In The Path to Free College: In Pursuit of Access, Equity, and Prosperity (Harvard Education Press, 2021), Michelle Miller-Adams argues that tuition-free college, if pursued strategically and in alignment with other sectors, can be a powerful agent of change. She makes the case that broadly accessible and affordable higher education is in the public interest, yielding dividends not just for individuals but also for the communities, states, and nation in which they reside. Miller-Adams offers a comprehensive analysis of the College Promise movement--its history, impacts, and unintended consequences--and its relationship to access, affordability, and workforce readiness. These factors are explored through data, analysis, and case studies of existing place-based scholarship programs. She also examines historical precursors of the free-college movement and evaluates the possibility of national action. The Path to Free College outlines how the design of free-college programs should relate to programmatic goals and explores the suitability of different approaches. In addition, the book describes both the need for and the challenges of implementing a nationwide free-college program, as well as the variety of models and research-based evidence. Given the raging national debate about tuition-free college, the moment is right for a book that assesses state and local efforts and offers policy leaders and practitioners guidance going forward. The Path to Free College asserts that the promise of private and public gains warrants public investment in tuition-free college. Stephen Pimpare is director of the Public Service & Nonprofit Leadership program and Faculty Fellow at the Carsey School of Public Policy at the University of New Hampshire. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/education
Welcome to The Academic Life. You are smart and capable, but you aren’t an island, and neither are we. So we reached across our mentor network to bring you podcasts on everything from how to finish that project, to how to take care of your beautiful mind. Wish we’d bring in an expert about something? Email us at cgessler05@gmail.com or dr.danamalone@gmail.com. Find us on Twitter: The Academic Life @AcademicLifeNBN. In this episode you’ll hear about: Maurice Wilson’s journey from the military to higher education, how he has pursued his dual interests in aviation and creative writing, and a discussion of his chapter in Learning from the Lived Experiences of Graduate Student Writers. Our guest is: Maurice Wilson, who considers himself the “Robin Hood” of academic literacy. Maurice develops and implements a comprehensive training program curriculum for writing center consultants at a large urban university. He is the administrator for a developmental writing program, and provides training and support for instructors and other writing groups. A career US Army aviator, Maurice taught basic and advanced composition and literature at the U.S. Military Academy at West Point, and retired from military service following his stint as a graduate teaching fellow before moving into writing center administration. Maurice also teaches professional writing for Ed.D. students. His research interests include the diverse student voices in writing centers, the writing of military veterans, and HBCU writing programs. Our host is: Dr. Christina Gessler, a historian of women and gender. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/education
How can we feel at home in this world? Pragmatic Humanism Revisited: An Essay on Making the World a Home (Palgrave, 2019) offers a humanist re-reading of philosophical pragmatism and explores its potentials for a worldview that relies only on human resources. Thinking along with authors like William James and F.C.S. Schiller, it highlights a humanist strand of pragmatism aimed at fostering human creativity and transformative action. It is grounded in everyday experience and underlines our responsibility to strive for the better. Ana Honnacker traces perspectives on science, religion, and ethics in the light of a pragmatic understanding of humanism. Furthermore, she suggests how to address the existential challenges we face today. Thus, pragmatic humanism is explored as "a philosophy for real human beings". Kai Wortman is a PhD candidate at the Institute of Education, University of Tübingen, interested in philosophy of education. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/education
“Allying with a Hamas cell (on a Palestinian university campus) is not the same as joining the College Republicans at the University of Kansas...in the West Bank and Gaza, we are not in Kansas anymore” - Cary Nelson Why is there no academic freedom on university campuses in the Palestinian territories? In Not in Kansas Anymore: Academic Freedom in Palestinian Universities (AEN, 2021), Cary Nelson examines this question in the first empirical study of campus life under the Palestinian Authority and Hamas governance. For years, anti-Zionist activists have accused Israel of undermining academic freedom and campus free speech in both Gaza and the West Bank. Not in Kansas Anymore demonstrates conclusively that the major threats to academic freedom come from Palestinians themselves, including from both the Palestinian Authority and from paramilitary and terrorist groups, Hamas most prominent among them. Renee Garfinkel, Ph.D. is a psychologist, writer, Middle East television commentator and host of The New Books Network’s Van Leer Jerusalem Series on Ideas. Write her at r.garfinkel@yahoo.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/education
Sarah Drummond provides a master class for any higher education leader contemplating a strategic alliance or merger with another institution. She describes and draws lessons from the many earlier failed partnership efforts of Andover Newton Seminary as it sought ways to continue its mission and become financially viable. And then describes in detail the carefully crafted, three-stage process which ANS negotiated with Yale Divinity School to move the Seminary to New Haven. This is the first of three episodes with presidents who’ve led the successful integration of their institutions into larger universities. David Finegold is the president of Chatham University. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/education
In his highly influential book, Demographics and the Demand for Higher Education, Carleton College Professor of Economics, Nathan Grawe, alerted college and university leaders to the challenges they would be facing with the accelerating decline in the number of U.S. high school graduates that will come in the middle of this decade. In his new book, The Agile College: How Institutions Successfully Navigate Demographic Changes (Johns Hopkins UP, 2021), he updates the demographic trends through the mid-2030s and describes the variety of strategies different institutions are adopting to respond to the decline in their traditional student population. He shares what led him to become an economist and the rigorous training he received at the University of Chicago. We have an engaging discussion of the implications of his work for both university leaders and policymakers as they debate reforms for funding college students. He also shares some insights from his new project looking at the publishing and career paths of economists working in liberal arts colleges. David Finegold is the president of Chatham University. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/education
Listen to this interview of Ken Hyland, Professor of Applied Linguistics in Education at the University of East Anglia, UK. We talked about his book Second Language Writing (Cambridge UP, 2019), the importance of reflection to teaching, and about the importance of teaching to research, and about the importance of research to reflection. Interviewer : "I wonder whether second language writing isn't sometimes identifying itself too closely with language learning, and not–––well, it should be writing in a second language, shouldn't it? You know, put something up front which is what this is really about." Ken Hyland : "Yeah, I think that one thing that an emphasis on second language writing has given us is the recognition that writing is important. I don't think that there is a university anywhere now that doesn't have a writing center or at least an office where students can go and get consultation about their texts. Writing has been recognized as important, and also in native-English-speaking contexts as well, and in UK universities. And in fact, when we look at writing at advanced levels, like PhDs and writing for publication, language doesn't really come into it anymore. It's a rhetorical issue. And this crude native/nonnative polarization I think breaks down entirely. You know, it's counterproductive, because it demoralizes second-language writers who are trying to get their PhD or publish in journals, and it ignores the very real writing problems experienced by native English speakers, by L1s, you know. So, the L1s get ignored, in favor of the L2s, who get the courses, but everyone's unhappy because it's seen as a language issue rather than as a writing issue." Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/education
Marc Brackett is a professor in Yale University's Child Study Center and founding director of the Yale Center for Emotional Intelligence. In his 25 years as an emotion scientist, he has developed a remarkably effective plan to improve the lives of children and adults - a blueprint for understanding our emotions and using them wisely so that they help, rather than hinder, our success and well-being. The core of his approach is a legacy from his childhood, from an astute uncle who gave him permission to feel. He was the first adult who managed to see Marc, listen to him, and recognize the suffering, bullying, and abuse he'd endured. And that was the beginning of Marc's awareness that what he was going through was temporary. He wasn't alone, he wasn't stuck on a timeline, and he wasn't "wrong" to feel scared, isolated, and angry. Now, best of all, he could do something about it. In the decades since, Marc has led large research teams and raised tens of millions of dollars to investigate the roots of emotional well-being. His prescription for healthy children (and their parents, teachers, and schools) is a system called RULER, a high-impact and fast-effect approach to understanding and mastering emotions that has already transformed the thousands of schools that have adopted it. RULER has been proven to reduce stress and burnout, improve school climate, and enhance academic achievement. This book is the culmination of Marc's development of RULER and his way to share the strategies and skills with readers around the world. It is tested, and it works. Permission to Feel: Unlocking the Power of Emotions to Help Our Kids, Ourselves, and Our Society Thrive (Celadon, 2019) combines rigor, science, passion and inspiration in equal parts. Too many children and adults are suffering; they are ashamed of their feelings and emotionally unskilled, but they don't have to be. Marc Brackett's life mission is to reverse this course, and this book can show you how. Debbie Sorenson is a psychologist in Denver and the host of the excellent podcast Psychologists Off the Clock. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/education
Welcome to The Academic Life. You are smart and capable, but you aren’t an island, and neither are we. So we reached across our mentor network to bring you podcasts on everything from how to finish that project, to how to take care of your beautiful mind. Wish we’d bring in an expert about something? Email us at cgessler@gmail.com or dr.danamalone@gmail.com. Find us on Twitter: The Academic Life @AcademicLifeNBN. In this episode you’ll hear about: how Sarah dealt with loneliness, worked as a teaching assistant from a tent her own backyard, and what the pandemic means for her dissertation, her timeline, and her funding. Our guest is: Sarah Paschal Gerenday is a PhD student in Earth Science at University of California Santa Barbara researching the use of recycled water for groundwater replenishment. She lives with a few friends and a dog in Santa Barbara. Our host is: Dr. Christina Gessler, a historian of women, gender, and sexuality. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/education
Welcome to The Academic Life. You are smart and capable, but you aren’t an island, and neither are we. So we reached across our mentor network to bring you podcasts on everything from how to finish that project, to how to take care of your beautiful mind. Wish we’d bring in an expert about something? Email us at dr.danamalone@gmail.com or cgessler@gmail.com. Find us on Twitter: The Academic Life @AcademicLifeNBN. In this episode you’ll hear about: the three realms of college belonging, why “finding your place” is bad advice for first-gen students, how financial aid packages affect students’ experiences of belonging, “nice” and “not-so-nice” diversity, and the hypocrisy of white niceness on college campuses. Our guest is: Lisa M. Nunn, Ph.D., author of College Belonging: How First-Year and First-Generation Students Navigate Campus Life and Professor of Sociology at the University of San Diego. She is the Director of her campus' Center for Educational Excellence. She is also the author of 33 Simple Strategies for Faculty: A Week-by-Week Resource for Teaching First-Year and First-Generation Students as well as a book on high school students, Defining Student Success: The Role of School and Culture. She didn't grow up knowing that she would become a sociologist and she graduated college as a literature and theater major, still not knowing that she would become a sociologist. It was during her years with the Peace Corps in Limbaži, Latvia in her early twenties when she started to recognize how fascinating cultural ideas and social structures are. How they shape who we are, who we want to become, and how they also constrain the paths available to us to get there. She hasn't stopped thinking about or talking about these dynamics since. Your host is: Dr. Dana Malone, a higher education scholar and practitioner. She specializes in college student relationships, gender, sexuality, and religious identities as well as assessment planning. Dana enjoys engaging conversations, delicious food, practicing yoga, and wandering the Jersey shore. Listeners to this episode might be interested in:
33 Simple Strategies for Faculty: A Week-by-Week Resource for Teaching First-Year and First-Generation Students by Lisa M. Nunn
Defining Student Success: The Role of School and Culture by Lisa Nunn
The Cost of Inclusion: How Student Conformity Leads to Inequality on College Campuses by Blake R. Silver
The Privileged Poor: How Elite Colleges Are Failing Disadvantaged Students by Anthony Abraham Jack
Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/education
In Becoming Rwandan: Education, Reconciliation and the Making of a Post-Genocide Citizen (Rutgers UP, 2020), S. Garnett Russell argues that although the Rwandan government makes use of global discourses in national policy documents, the way in which teachers and students engage with these global models distorts the curricular intentions of the government, resulting in unintended consequences and an undermining of sustainable peace. She is assistant professor of international and comparative education and the director of the George Clement Bond Center for African Education at Teacher’s College, Columbia University. Susan Thomson is an Associate Professor of Peace and Conflict Studies at Colgate University. I like to interview pretenure scholars about their research. I am particularly keen on their method and methodology, as well as the process of producing academic knowledge about African places and people. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/education
Mary Marcy discusses her influential new book, The Small College Imperative: Models for Sustainable Futures (Stylus, 2020) which lays out five different models that small colleges and universities can use to succeed in today’s highly competitive marketplace. This begins with the “Traditional” liberal arts model that is increasingly limited to the most highly selective and well-endowed colleges. Most tuition-dependent institutions have made the move toward a more “Integrated” Model that retains a liberal arts core, but has added pre-professional and graduate programs. This model is perhaps best exemplified by the 25 members of the New American Colleges & Universities (NACU). “The Distinctive Model” adopted by institutions like Agnes Scott and Furman, and implemented with great success by Marcy at Dominican University, builds off the literature on High-Impact Practices to create a common set of experiences for all undergraduates. The models that entail the greatest transformation are “Growth” and “Distributed” that entail substantial expansion beyond the liberal arts core to include satellite campuses and online offerings. In the Distributed model, exemplified by institutions like Southern New Hampshire University, the original campus is no longer central to the strategy. David Finegold is the president of Chatham University. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/education
Whether and how to reform, indeed to transform graduate education has been a matter for debate, discussion and experimentation over the past 30 years – at least. In The New PhD: How to Build a Better Graduate Education (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2021), Leonard Cassuto and Robert Weisbuch look back at the many attempts, successes and failures to do so since the 1990s. They argue that graduate school has been preparing PhD students for jobs that don’t exist and encouraging students to want those jobs to the detriment of their career success and personal wellbeing. Cassuto and Weisbuch propose what they call a more humane and socially dynamic PhD experience that reconceives of graduate education as a public good. In The New PhD, Cassuto and Weisbuch provide recommendations from admissions to advising to curriculum to the dissertation, as well as suggestions for how to begin conversations at the departmental and graduate school level to make changes. Leonard Cassuto is a professor of English and American Studies at Fordham University. He is the author of The Graduate Adviser column for The Chronicle of Higher Education, which inspired his book The Graduate School Mess: What Caused It and How We Can Fix It. Robert Weisbuch, formerly a professor of English, department chair, and dean at the University of Michigan, served as the president of the Woodrow Wilson National Fellowship Foundation, and the eleventh president of Drew University. Amanda Jeanne Swain is executive director of the Humanities Center at the University of California, Irvine. She holds a PhD in Russian & East European European History from the University of Washington. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/education
The origins of American public schools can help shed light on continued contemporary discussions around religion and education in American discourse. In The Common School Awakening: Religion and the Transatlantic Roots of American Public Education (Oxford UP, 2020), historian David Komline explores the rise of educational models that introduced professional teaching and systematic educational standards alongside a period of interdenominational Protestant cooperation. Some of the origins of American public education were linked to religious revivals in the early nineteenth century, though many of the educational innovations would outlive their religious movement that catalyzed them. Komline's study brings attention to the under-explored religious dimension of the rise of American public education, and provides much-needed insight into the origins some of the perennial tensions of public education in a pluralistic society. Ryan David Shelton (@ryoldfashioned) is a social historian of British and American Protestantism and a PhD researcher at Queen’s University Belfast. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/education
Welcome to The Academic Life. You are smart and capable, but you aren’t an island, and neither are we. So we reached across our mentor network to bring you podcasts on everything from how to finish that project, to how to take care of your beautiful mind. Wish we’d bring in an expert about something? Email us at cgessler@gmail.com or dr.danamalone@gmail.com. Find us on Twitter: The Academic Life @AcademicLifeNBN. In this episode you’ll hear about: Dr. Bradley Shreve’s decision to leave academia after he became a parent; his job as the editor of Tribal College: Journal of American Indian Higher Education; what the American Indian Higher Education Consortium (AIHEC) does; and his work as a podcaster interviewing tribal elders. Our guest is: Dr. Bradley Shreve, the editor of Tribal College: Journal of American Indian Higher Education, the quarterly publication of the American Indian Higher Education Consortium (AIHEC). Previously, he taught history and chaired the Division of Social and Behavioral Sciences at Diné College, America’s first tribal college, which is located in the Navajo Nation. Bradley is the author of numerous articles, essays, and the book Red Power Rising: The National Indian Youth Council and the Origins of Native Activism (University of Oklahoma Press, 2011). Our host is: Dr. Christina Gessler, a historian of women and gender.
Listeners to this episode might be interested in:
TCJ
Tribal College Press
TCJ student magazine
Meditation on Ceremonies of Beginnings: The Tribal College and World Indigenous Nations Higher Education Consortium Poems, by Thomas Davis
The Pathfinders: Women Leaders in the Tribal College Movement
Remembering Diné College: Origin Stories of America’s First Tribal College
Red Power Rising: The National Indian Youth Council and the Origins of Native Activism by Bradley Shreve
A Conversation with Verna Fowler [Audio Podcast].
Native American Studies channel on NBN
Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/education
Political Scientist Heath Brown’s new book, Homeschooling the Right: How Conservative Education Activism Erodes the State (Columbia UP, 2021) is an excellent overview of the homeschooling movement in the United States, but it is much more than an exploration of that movement, since it centers on the way that this movement developed into a parallel political structure within states and localities with substantial capacity to influence policy and politics. Brown notes that initially the homeschool movement was ideologically diverse, but that over the past forty years it has become much more directly connected to conservative politics and the Religious Right. As parents chose to opt out of public education and provide education for their children at home, an entire industry grew up around this undertaking, providing, in the pre-internet days, support, content, approaches, and the means to help parents negotiate this at home. Along the way, as this movement continued to grow and expand, even though it was composed of only a fraction of school-age children, it also became a politically vocal movement, with lobbyists who worked on behalf of homeschoolers to keep government intrusion and regulation at bay. These threads came together and helped to mobilize the members of the homeschool movement. Brown argues that the ideology and the political dimensions of the homeschool movement ultimately migrated over to the Tea Party Movement that takes root in the first decade of the 21st century, since the homeschool ideas are pulling together conservative libertarianism in the anti-government, anti-regulatory vein, and the reintegration of Christian beliefs within academic settings. As we discussed the book, Brown noted that every Republican presidential candidate over the past two decades has paid attention to the homeschool movement, and that President George W. Bush made a point of thanking the homeschool parents and children who had worked so diligently on his campaign and with the GOP Get Out The Vote efforts, since the homeschool students were able to fold these experiences into their curriculum and assignments. The Home School Legal Defense Association (HSLDA), which developed to provide legal support for home school advocates across the states, had initially become a key player in conservative politics, but has now refocused much more narrowly, specifically on homeschool policy. Homeschooling the Right also gets at the complicated position of the homeschool movement within a democracy, since the movement itself is a way of removing the individual or the family from the public sphere. What is ironic, and important to understand, as Brown notes, is that this political movement has a louder, heightened political voice because of the capacity to mobilize many of its adherents, thus it is both actively inside and outside the political sphere. This is a wonderfully written book and so accessible to readers—and it will be of interest to many across a broad spectrum of disciplines. Lilly J. Goren is professor of political science at Carroll University in Waukesha, WI. She is co-editor of the award winning book, Women and the White House: Gender, Popular Culture, and Presidential Politics (University Press of Kentucky, 2012), as well as co-editor of Mad Men and Politics: Nostalgia and the Remaking of Modern America (Bloomsbury Academic, 2015). Email her comments at lgoren@carrollu.edu or tweet to @gorenlj. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/education
In Losing Hearts and Minds: American Iranian Relations and International Education During the Cold War (Cornell UP, 2017), Matthew K. Shannon, an associate professor of history at Emory & Henry College, shows the complex role that Iranian student migration to the United States played in shaping the relations between the two countries. For U.S. policymakers, Iranian student migration to the United States was as a useful way to provide Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi with the training and technical expertise necessary for his modernization program. But as Shannon shows, Iranian students quickly became immersed in the progressive student movements of the 1960, eventually turning their critical energies to the shah’s own authoritarian regime and contributing to his overthrow in the 1979 Iranian Revolution. This fascinating monograph is full of many unexpected twists and turns and will be of interest to historians of the U.S. in the world, US-Iran Relations, scholars of higher education, and anyone interested in this important era of U.S. foreign relations. Steven P. Rodriguez is a PhD Candidate in history at Vanderbilt University. You can reach him at steven.p.rodriguez@vanderbilt.edu and follow his twitter at @SPatrickRod. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/education
This features our first tag team on the podcast, with an engaging discussion with Jared “Jerry” Cohon, who served as President of CMU from 1997-2013, and Dr. Mark Kamlet, who was his provost. The two describe the key initiatives they led that built on the successful momentum of their predecessors, Richard Cyert and Robert Mehrabian, that enabled CMU to advance quickly from a regional technical school with a strong arts program to one of the world’s leading research universities. This begins with a discussion of the merger that formed CMU in 1967 between Carnegie Institute of Technology and the Mellon Institute. They share how with limited resources they were able to transform CMU from a predominantly Pittsburgh-based institution with some small satellite degree programs in the U.S. into one of the world’s most global universities, with campuses in Rwanda, Portugal, Qatar, Australia, and Silicon Valley. At the same time, they partnered with the University of Pittsburgh to help bring about the resurgence of their home city, transforming it from a reliance on heavy industry to an innovation hub focused on Eds & Meds, with CMU’s tech transfer office serving as the engine of growth for Pittsburgh’s emergence as a leader in Robotics, AI, driverless vehicles, and Computer Science. Cohon concludes: “My hope is when education scholars look back in 2050 to understand how CMU, with a fraction of Harvard’s endowment, was able to pass it as the world’s leading research university, it will be because we made the decision to bring CMU to students around the world, while Harvard decided they must continue to come to Cambridge, MA.” David Finegold is the president of Chatham University. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/education
Welcome to The Academic Life. You are smart and capable, but you aren’t an island, and neither are we. So we reached across our mentor network to bring you podcasts on everything from how to finish that project, to how to take care of your beautiful mind. Wish we’d bring in an expert about something? Email us at cgessler@gmail.com or dr.danamalone@gmail.com. Find us on Twitter: The Academic Life @AcademicLifeNBN. In this episode you’ll hear about: the challenges Kaylah Marcello, a STEM graduate student at UC Davis, suddenly faced when she was having coffee with a friend in mid-March 2020 and her phone rang telling her that her son’s elementary school was closing down. She quickly realized she couldn’t work in the lab she was assigned to while homeschooling her son. Kaylah shares openly about her personal history, her mental health struggles, and why taking care of herself was crucial to taking care of her family and her own educational goals. Our guest is: Kaylah Marcello, a Microbiology PhD student at the University of California, Davis. Kaylah is researching cold tolerance genes that support photosynthesis in Antarctic cyanobacteria with Dr. Dawn Sumner. She has been a teaching assistant for in-person microbiology lab courses during the pandemic. Prior to pursuing a graduate education, she was a transfer student from the California Community College system to the UC system. She is passionate about science communication, educational outreach, mental health awareness and making academia more accessible to people who would otherwise not pursue it. She is a mother and an all-around science enthusiast, taking life one minute at a time. Our host is: Dr. Christina Gessler, a historian of women and gender. Listeners to this episode might be interested in:
Postpartum depression resources
California community colleges
Dr. Dawn Sumner Lab https://dysumner.faculty.ucdavis.edu/
Dr. Miriam Martin’s interview about her own graduate school experiences
Antarctic Cyanobacteria
UC Davis COVID testing initiative
Creating a support system in grad school
Discussions about the Mind and Mindfulness
Dr. Christina Gessler is a historian of women, gender, and sexuality. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/education
Join Raj Balkaran as he talks with Dr. Kate Hartmann, Assistant Professor of Buddhist Studies at the University of Wyoming and Director of Buddhist Studies Online, a new educational platform providing coursework on the history, philosophy, and practices of Buddhism. Founded in 2021 by Seth Powell as a sister institute to Yogic Studies, Buddhist Studies Online provides accessible, affordable, and high-quality courses for the broader community interested in learning more about Buddhism in a non-sectarian way. It aims to bridge the gap between widespread interest in meditation and other aspects of Buddhist traditions and the all-too-often inaccessible research of the academy. Raj and Kate discuss the mission of BSO, the surprising role the NBN podcast played in BSO's origin story, and growing landscape of public-facing teaching and scholarship. How should scholars think about how to address multiple publics? How can they make their research and teaching available and meaningful to popular audiences while still being academically grounded and responsible? How do platforms like BSO fit into the larger landscape of lineage-based Buddhist teachers, mindfulness coaches, and orientalizing discourses about Asian religions? Kate and Raj draw on their respective experiences with BSO and the School of Indian Wisdom in this wide-ranging conversation about what it means to be a scholar in this exciting new era of the humanities. Plus, learn about Buddhist Studies Online's first course, BSO 101 | Intro to Buddhism: History, Philosophy, and Practice, which runs from May 3 to June 11, and get a sneak peek about future courses with Jay Garfield, Daniel Stuart, and Sonam Kachru!" Raj Balkaran is a scholar, educator, consultant, and life coach. For information see rajbalkaran.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/education
Teach for America (TFA) continues to be the single largest preparation program for teachers in the United States. As that program grew in the US (attracting attention, support, and controversy in the process), it also expanded overseas with TFA-like programs (starting with TeachFirst in the UK) currently on the ground in over 50 countries. How has the internationalization of TFA gone in countries with different cultures and different educational systems than the American one in which the program originated? And what might “going global” mean as TFA transforms from a national to an international phenomenon? Three scholars who have been tracking TFA/TFAll trajectory join us today at New Books Network to discuss Examining Teach for All: International Perspectives on a Growing Global Network (Routledge, 2021) which brings together the work of over a dozen researchers examining TFAll programs around the world from a range of perspectives. You can learn more about the editors of Examining Teach for All at: Matthew A.M. Thomas, Emilee Rauschenberger, Katherine Crawford-Garrett Jonathan Haber is an educational researcher and consultant working at the intersection of pedagogy, technology, and educational policy. His books include MOOCS and Critical Thinking from MIT Press and his LogicCheck project analyzes the reasoning behind the news of the day. You can read more about Jonathan’s work at http://www.jonathanhaber.org. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/education
Growing Up America: Youth and Politics Since 1945 (U Georgia Press, 2019) is a fascinating book that weaves together the burgeoning field of Childhood History, the post-World War II history of the United States, and the familiar concepts of political advocacy by younger citizens. Eckelmann Berghel, Fieldston, and Renfro, all historians, have brought together a rigorous and engaging work by other historians, legal scholars, and ethnic and indigenous studies experts, to which they have also contributed their own expertise. This book brings in the actual voices of children in the United States in the postwar period, highlighting their roles as political actors in their own right, and examining so many aspects of politics and culture as seen through the eyes of young people. The contributing authors of Growing Up America are knitting together, in their respective chapters of the book, children as agents, as actively engaged members of the society, and children as symbols, used in a whole host of different ways by different political actors and organizations. The book is divided into three sections that follow the chronological direction of recent American history, but that also focus on conceptual frameworks for each era under examination. The first part of the book is focused on the Cold War period and how children were integrated into both the symbolic and the political constructions of life during the Cold War. This section integrates the book’s first discussion of young people and science, as well as exploring the role that groups like the Boy Scouts played in building America’s Cold War empire. There is also research about the ways in which American girls and women, in particular, were supposed to look and act and how they were taught these qualities in school and how they were to shape the projected image of Americans. The second part of Growing Up America follows the arc of history through the Rights revolution that comes to dominate the political and cultural landscape in the U.S. (and elsewhere) in the 1960s and 1970s. This part of the book examines expected areas of youth involvement, but perhaps in unexpected ways, such as the many pre-adolescents who wrote to President Lyndon Johnson supporting the U.S. involvement in Vietnam. The final section of the book examines the late 20th century political turn towards conservativism in American politics, and how this shift impacted and was experienced by children. Growing Up America brings in another chapter focusing on young people and science in this section, with a chapter on young women and STEM. The final chapter in this section evaluates the real and perceived vulnerability of childhood, especially in the racially segregated symbolism that was the milk carton campaign for missing children in the mid-1980s. Growing up America will be of great interest to scholars and students across a range of disciplines and areas of expertise, especially in the ways it draws on different arenas of politics and culture to explore youth engagement in the United States since 1945. Lilly J. Goren is professor of political science at Carroll University in Waukesha, WI. She is co-editor of the award winning book, Women and the White House: Gender, Popular Culture, and Presidential Politics (University Press of Kentucky, 2012), as well as co-editor of Mad Men and Politics: Nostalgia and the Remaking of Modern America (Bloomsbury Academic, 2015). Email her comments at lgoren@carrollu.edu or tweet to @gorenlj. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/education
Today I talked to Helen Sword about Air & Light & Time & Space: How Successful Academics Write (Harvard UP, 2017). We talk about what not enough people talk about when the subject is writing. interviewer : "You offer the advice of forming a writing group, because writing groups are, well, just all-around terrific for helping people write as they want to." Helen Sword : "Exactly, and well, so I try not to be didactic about just about anything having to do with writing––I'm much more about, 'Here's a range of possibilities. Make a considered decision here,' rather than, 'I'm going to tell you what to do.' But if I were to give one piece of advice concerning the social dimensions of writing, I would say, 'Really, really strongly consider belonging to some kind of writing group.' And I define a writing group as being two or more people who meet more than once to talk about any aspect of writing. So, if you have somebody you meet with for coffee once a month, one other person, and all you do is you sit there and complain about your supervisor and how you wish that they were more sympathetic to your writing––That's already a writing group. So, it doesn't have to be some big kind of formal thing. It's opening yourself up to the social dimensions of writing and particularly to the idea of having supporters in your corner, having some cheerleaders, having some people you can talk to about writing who are not there to criticize you––who are there to help you." Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/education
Welcome to The Academic Life. You are smart and capable, but you aren’t an island, and neither are we. So we reached across our mentor network to bring you podcasts on everything from how to finish that project, to how to take care of your beautiful mind. Wish we’d bring in an expert about something? Email us at cgessler@gmail.com or dr.danamalone@gmail.com. Find us on Twitter: The Academic Life @AcademicLifeNBN. In this episode you’ll hear about: mental wellness services on campus, asking for help, embracing who you are, and why you need support to succeed at your life. Our guest is: Elisabeth Gonella, a Licensed Marriage and Family Therapist who has worked in the mental health and spiritual counseling fields for over 25 years. The early years of her career were spent working primarily with adolescents in various institutional settings where she facilitated therapeutic wilderness programs, Gestalt based group therapy, expressive arts, and daily activities as a vehicle for self-reflection. She has received training in working with substance abuse and dually diagnosed clients in both in-patient and out-patient settings. Currently, Elisabeth is seeing clients in private practice and in a College Counseling and Psychological Services Department. Elisabeth develops curriculum for The Therapist Development Center assisting hundreds of interns to pass the MFT exams (both California and National). Since 2012, Elisabeth has served as an adjunct faculty member at Pacifica Graduate Institute. Elisabeth is a clinical member of both the American Association of Marriage and Family Therapists and the California Association of Marriage and Family Therapists. She is also a graduate of Community Choir Leadership Training and facilitates Community Singing in Santa Barbara, California to promote well-being through music. Our host is: Dr. Christina Gessler, a historian of women and gender. Listeners to this episode might be interested in:
Elisabeth’s website
Care of the Soul by Thomas Moore
The Gift of Therapy by Irvin Yalom, MD
The documentary film Finding Joe
Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi
Flow, the Ted Talk:
The Hero's Journey: Joseph Campbell on His Life and Work by Joseph Campbell
Acacia Counseling and Wellness
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President Jeff Docking shares insights from his book, Crisis in Higher Education: A Plan to Save Liberal Arts Colleges in America (Michigan State University Press, 2015), and how he implemented the Admissions Growth Model to transform the fortunes of Adrian College in Michigan. By focusing on building first-class extra and co-curricular programs that offer the +1 element to attract and retain students, he shows how Adrian has been able to grow from fewer than 900 students when he arrived, with a structural budget deficit and large deferred maintenance, to a thriving and revitalized campus of over 2,000 students that has been a vital driver of job and economic growth for the surrounding community. Today this includes 50 DIII and club sports teams – ranging from lacrosse and six ice hockey teams to bass fishing – along with a marching band, orchestra and other thriving clubs and student organizations. He also shares the genesis and growth of a second transformation to help improve the long-term prospects of liberal arts colleges – the Low-Cost Models Consortium. David Finegold is the president of Chatham University. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/education
Math circles defy simple narratives. The model was introduced a century ago, and is taking off in the present day thanks in part to its congruence with cutting-edge research in mathematics education. It is a modern approach to teaching—or facilitation—that resonates and finds mutual reinforcement with traditional practices and cultural preservation efforts. A wide range of math circle resources have become available for interested instructors, including the MSRI Math Circles Library, now in its 14th year of publication by the AMS. I was excited to talk with three editors and contributors to a recent volume in the series, Inspiring Mathematics: Lessons from the Navajo Nation Math Circles (American Mathematical, 2019). Drs. Dave Auckly, Amanda Serenevy, and Henry Fowler have been instrumental to the Navajo Nation Math Circles Project, along with co-editors Tatiana Shubin and Bob Klein and a broader contact and support network. Their book showcases scripts developed and facilitated in Navajo Nation, including an introduction to modular arithmetic through bean bag tossing, prefix sorting in the guise of pancake flipping, and a tactile use of limiting behavior to folding a necktie. We discussed the origin and expansion of math circles, their potential to indigenous mathematics educators and students, and the content of and stories behind a selection of the scripts. Dr. Fowler's foreword and the editors' introduction situate the math circles movement and the Navajo Nation Math Circles Project in history, geography, and culture. Each script begins with a (minimal!) list of the necessary materials and a student handout that invites explorations with them. A short survey of connections to deeper mathematics precedes each handout, and each is followed by an extensive teacher's guide with (illustrative) solutions and presentation suggestions. The scripts vary in complexity and are suitable for student- and teacher-focused math circles. I hope the text becomes widely adopted for science-based and culturally conscious mathematics education and helps introduce others like myself to the greater math circles project. Suggested companion works: -James Tanton -The Julia Robinson Mathematics Festival -Gordon Hamilton and Lora Saarnio, MathPickle -Robert Kaplan and Ellen Kaplan, Out of the Labyrinth: Setting Mathematics Free -Rachel and Rodi Steinig, Math Renaissance Dave Auckly is a research mathematician at Kansas State University and Co-founder and Director of the Navajo Nation Math Circles Project. Amanda Serenevy is Co-founder and Director of the Riverbend Community Math Center. Henry Fowler is Associate Professor of Mathematics at Navajo Technical University and Co-director of the Navajo Nation Math Circles Project. Cory Brunson is a Research Assistant Professor at the Laboratory for Systems Medicine at the University of Florida. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/education
Itay Snir's book Education and Thinking in Continental Philosophy (Springer, 2020) draws on five philosophers from the continental tradition – Theodor Adorno, Hannah Arendt, Gilles Deleuze, Jacques Derrida, and Jacques Rancière – in order to “think about thinking” and offer new and surprising answers to the question: How can we educate students to think creatively and critically? Despite their differences, all of these philosophers challenge the modern understanding of thinking, and offer original, radical perspectives on it. In very different ways, each rejects the modern approach to thinking, as well as the reduction of proper thought to rationality, situating thinking in sociohistorical reality and relating it to political action. Thinking, they argue, is not a natural, automatic activity, and the need to think has become all the more important as political reality seems to exhibit less thinking, or to even celebrate thoughtlessness. Bringing these continental conceptions of thinking to bear on the urgent need to educate young people to think against the current, this book makes a significant contribution to educational theory and political philosophy, one that is particularly relevant in today’s anti-intellectual climate. (The podcast focuses especially on Adorno's thoughts about thinking.) Kai Wortman is a PhD candidate at the Institute of Education, University of Tübingen, interested in philosophy of education. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/education
Listen to this interview of Gerd Bräuer, Head of the Schreibzentrum, the writing center, at Freiburg University of Education. We talk about the place of the internet in writing development, we talk about views on writing in German higher education and more widely in German society and culture, and we talk about Bert Brecht's journals. Tnterviewer: "What part does a person's biography play in their writing? And I mean the academic writing students do, or also, the academic writing we publish, and not just literature and memoir." Gerd Bräuer: "Well, in the writing process, there's something we call writer-based prose. And here the writer would really get the chance, from the institution and from the instructor, to pay attention to this first phase within the writing process, where the writer struggles with his or her own thoughts and ideas and also reconnects to what he or she has learned through the writing––or however else they've learned it––and the writer gets the chance to be always trying to figure out what to explore and how to explore it, before he or she starts to think about how to say it to a certain audience within a certain text genre. This writer-based prose is focused on immediate work with knowledge, with creating new knowledge. Peter Elbow, an American writing researcher that I admire greatly––he speaks about cooking, about letting your ideas boil and simmer, and then tasting to find out whether you like it and what to change. And all this I see as part of biographical work. You work on your biography as a learner, and that phenomenon, learning, is lifelong and includes everyone. So, with every single new writing assignment you get a learning chance. But of course, the institution or whoever assigns the writing would also have to provide the framework to make this learning happen." Daniel Shea, heads Scholarly Communications, a Special Series on the New Books Network. Daniel is Director of the Heidelberg Writing Program, a division of the Language Center at Heidelberg University, Germany. Just write Daniel.Shea@zsl.uni-heidelberg.de Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/education
Welcome to The Academic Life. You are smart and capable, but you aren’t an island, and neither are we. So we reached across our mentor network to bring you podcasts on everything from how to finish that project, to how to take care of your beautiful mind. Wish we’d bring in an expert about something? Email us at dr.danamalone@gmail.com or cgessler@gmail.com. Find us on Twitter: The Academic Life @AcademicLifeNBN. In this episode you’ll hear: the realities of completing a master’s program, initiating a job search, and transitioning into a new professional role during a pandemic; losses and silver linings around key milestones and traditions, the significance of physical spaces; lessons learned; and advice to other graduate students. Our guest is: Alex Schmied, M.S., an academic coordinator for Spectrum Scholars, a comprehensive college-to-career program for University of Delaware undergraduates on the autism spectrum. She supports students in obtaining their personal and academic success by providing holistic coaching sessions focused on executive functioning, academics, self-care, self-advocacy, social engagement, career exploration and interdependent living skills. Alex holds an M.S. in Higher Education Policy and Student Affairs from West Chester University and a B.S. in Public Health from Temple University, merging her two interests she loves identifying ways to support the whole student and focuses on wellbeing. She lives in Philadelphia, PA, a city she loves to explore. She prizes the time she spends with her friends, partner, family, and dogs. Your host is: Dr. Dana Malone, a higher education scholar and practitioner, with a background in student affairs. She specializes in college student relationships, gender, sexuality, and religious identities as well as assessment planning. Dana enjoys making (and, of course, eating) delicious, healthy food, practicing yoga, and wandering the Jersey shore. Listeners to this episode might be interested in:
Stacey Flower’s TEDx talk entitled, “The 5 People You Need to be Happy” Alex uses this when choosing “her circle” of people. The 5 People You Need To Be Happy | Stacey Flowers
Drew Dudley’s TEDx Talk on “Everyday Leadership” A reminder to celebrate the little moments! Everyday Leadership | Drew Dudley
“The Opposite of Loneliness” by Marina Keegan. Alex read this her senior year of undergrad when everything feels so uncertain. The author was the same age as Alex when she died in a car crash after graduating from Yale. The Opposite of Loneliness | Marina Keegan
The Opposite of Loneliness: Essays and Stories by Marina Keegan
NPR News Now Podcast and Inside Higher Ed. Alex uses these to stay informed as a new professional. NPR News Now Podcast & Inside Higher Ed
NASPA New Professionals and Graduate Students Knowledge Community and ACPA Graduate Students and New Professionals Community of Practice. It’s also important to get involved in your field. NASPA New Professionals & Graduate Students Knowledge Community & ACPA Graduate Students and New Professionals Community of Practice
Pedagogy of the Oppressed by Paulo Freire. This was a classic grad school read that really opened Alex’s eyes. Pedagogy of the Oppressed | Paulo Freire
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Two very thoughtful oddfellows--a labor economist and a Russian literature scholar--take on the world's problems in their newest collaboration, Minds Wide Shut How the New Fundamentalisms Divide Us (Princeton University Press, 2021). Gary Saul Morson and Morton Schapiro bring to bear the remarkably powerful tool of great 19th century Realist literature (and other parts of the Western canon) to define and counter the all-or-nothing fundamentalisms that have come to divide us in recent years. They touch upon politics, religion and economics, as well as great literature itself, and advocate bridging the divides with assertion and dialogue rather than the crude dismissal of opponents based upon absolute, unyielding assumptions. Daniel Peris is Senior Vice President at Federated Hermes in Pittsburgh. He can be reached at DanielxPeris@gmail.com or via Twitter @HistoryInvestor. His History and Investing blog and Keep Calm & Carry On Investing podcast are at https://strategicdividendinvestor.com/ Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/education
Welcome to New Books in African American Studies, a channel on the New Books Network. I am your host, Adam McNeil. On today’s podcast, I am interviewing Dr. Jarvis R. Givens, Assistant Professor at the Harvard Graduate School of Education and the Suzanne Young Murray Assistant Professor at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard University. Dr. Givens joins us to discuss Fugitive Pedagogy: Carter G. Woodson and the Art of Black Teaching, published by our friends at Harvard University Press in 2021. In our discussion we chopped it up about Carter G. Woodson, Black educational history, the origin story behind "fugitive pedagogy" as a term, his journey from grad school at Berkeley, to his post at Harvard, and much much more. Enjoy the conversation family! Adam McNeil is a third year Ph.D. in History student at Rutgers, the State University of New Jersey. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/education
Esther Barazzone describes the latter part of the transformation she led at Chatham University in Pittsburgh, PA. In a whirlwind of activity in 2007-08, Chatham changed its status from a college to a university, to reflect the fact that a majority of its students were in graduate programs, and then made two major acquisitions – an $18 million investment in a 300,000+ sq. ft old manufacturing building in a struggling neighborhood 1-mile from its Shadyside Campus that became home to its graduate health science and interior architecture programs and the gift of 388-acre Eden Hall Farm, that was transformed over the next 8 years into the world’s greenest campus and the home for the Falk School of Sustainability and Environment. The final chapter in Barazzone’s transformation of Chatham came in 2014-15, with the difficult decision that the only way to save the undergraduate college was for it go all-gender. Barazzone describes the careful planning that went into the successful co-ed transition and offers her lessons from her 24-year career for new college presidents. David Finegold is the president of Chatham University. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/education
For many young adults, the college years are an exciting period of self-discovery full of new relationships, new independence, and new experiences. Yet college can also be a time of personal testing and intense questioning— especially for Christian students confronted with various challenges to Christianity and the Bible for the first time. In Surviving Religion 101: Letters to a Christian Student on Keeping the Faith in College (Crossway, 2021), Michael Kruger addresses common objections to the Christian faith—the exclusivity of Christianity, Christian intolerance, homosexuality, hell, the problem of evil, science, miracles, and the reliability of the Bible. If you’re a student dealing with doubt or wrestling with objections to Christianity from fellow students and professors alike, this book will equip you to engage secular challenges with intellectual honesty, compassion, and confidence—and ultimately graduate college with your faith intact. Zach McCulley (@zamccull) is a historian of religion and literary cultures in early modern England and PhD candidate in History at Queen's University Belfast. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/education
When Esther Barazzone took over Chatham College in 1992, it was in danger of closing – selling off property each year surrounding its beautiful in Pittsburgh, PA campus to cover its budget shortfall. In this episode, she describes the first stages of her remarkable 24-year tenure that transformed Chatham from a small, all women’s liberal arts college of fewer than 600 students into a thriving 2200+ university with three campuses and innovative online doctoral degree programs. She discusses the educational and career experiences that gave her the capabilities needed to save Chatham and some of the difficult decisions to make this possible – including cutting 20% of faculty and staff in her first year to free the resources needed to launch graduate programs and the first NCAA women’s ice hockey program in Pennsylvania, and phasing out tenure to replace it with long-term, renewable contracts. David Finegold is the president of Chatham University. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/education
The COVID19 pandemic has profoundly changed the landscape of K-12 education in our society. Last March, many states closed their brick-and-mortar schools and shifted to remote education. The massive shift is historic and unprecedented. Until now, while we see the light at the end of the tunnel in our battle against the coronavirus, millions and millions of students are still learning at home via online platforms. It is also because of this shift that digital learning all of a sudden has drawn attention from not only educators but also the general public from families to policy makers. Over the past months we have seen concerted efforts to invest in digital learning and improve the required infrastructure. In spite of this unexpected yet much welcomed attention from the society at large, digital teaching and learning a field has existed for a long time. Experts in the field have been documenting and exploring the best practice of digital teaching and learning. Today I am going to talk with three researchers who have been working in this field for a long time, Carolyn Heinrich from Vanderbilt University, Jennifer Darling-Aduana from Georgia State University and Annalee G. Good from the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Last year, they published their new book with Harvard Education Press, titled Equity and Quality in Digital Learning: Realizing the Promise in K-12 Education (2020). It systematically studies the implementation and best practice of using digital tools to reduce inequities in educational opportunities and improve student outcomes. Although the book was out right before the start of the pandemic, the lessons, best practice and insights they highlighted in their book have so much to offer for educators, policy makers and families to navigate a teaching-and-learning landscape during and after this pandemic. Carolyn J. Heinrich is the Patricia and Rodes Hart Professor of Public Policy and Education and Chair of the Department of Leadership, Policy, and Organizations, and an affiliated Professor of Economics at Vanderbilt University. Jennifer Darling-Aduana is an Assistant Professor of Learning Technologies in the Department of Learning Sciences, College of Education and Human Development, at Georgia State University. Annalee G. Good is co-director of the Wisconsin Evaluation Collaborative and Director of the Clinical Program at the Wisconsin Center for Education Research at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Pengfei Zhao is a critical researcher and qualitative research methodologist based at the University of Florida. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/education
In the concluding episode, Richard K. Miller, Olin College of Engineering President Emeritus, discusses how Olin has shared the key learnings from this innovative higher ed start-up, hosting over 800 groups from around the world who’ve come to observe what makes Olin so successful, and his current focus on translating these lessons about the value of hands-on, project-based learning to other top engineering institutions (UICU and MIT) and other academic disciplines. David Finegold is the president of Chatham University. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/education
Bearing with Strangers: Arendt, Education and the Politics of Inclusion (Routledge, 2018) looks at inclusion in education in a new way. By introducing the notion of the instrumental fallacy, it shows how this is not only an inherent feature of inclusive education policies, but also omnipresent in modern educational policy. It engages with schooling through an Arendtian framework, namely as a practice with the aim of mediating between generations. It outlines a didactic and pedagogical theory that presents inclusion not as an aim for education, but as a constitutive feature of the activity of schooling. Drawing on the work of Hannah Arendt, the book offers a novel and critical perspective on inclusive education, as well as a contribution to a growing literature re-engaging didactic and pedagogical conceptions of teaching and the role of the teacher. Schooling is understood as a process of opening the world to the young and of opening the world to the renewal that the new generations offer. The activity of schooling offers the possibility of becoming attentive towards what is common while learning to bear with that which is strange and those who are strangers. The book points to valuable metaphors and ideas - referred to in the book as 'pearls' - that speak to the heart of what schooling and teaching concerns, such as exemplarity, judgement, and enlarged thought. Kai Wortman is a PhD candidate at the Institute of Education, University of Tübingen, interested in philosophy of education. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/education
In part two of the interview with Rick Miller, the founding President of Olin College of Engineering, he describes the key elements of the Olin model that have helped this bold start-up become one of the most highly-rated and innovative models of undergraduate engineering education. David Finegold is the president of Chatham University. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/education
This is the first of three episodes featuring Richard K. Miller, the Founding President of Olin College of Engineering, in Needham, MA. Olin was created in 1997, by at the time, the largest gift in higher education history, when the Olin Foundation decided to give its entire $460 million endowment to create a new college that could serve as a model for reinventing undergraduate engineering education. Miller, who served as Olin’s President from 1999 to 2020, describes his career before Olin and his decision to defy the advice of his colleagues and mentors to give up a secure, leadership position at the University of Iowa to join a start-up. David Finegold is the president of Chatham University. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/education
Welcome to The Academic Life. You are smart and capable, but you aren’t an island, and neither are we. So we reached across our mentor network to bring you podcasts on everything from how to finish that project, to how to take care of your beautiful mind. Wish we’d bring in an expert about something? Email us at cgessler@gmail.com or dr.danamalone@gmail.com. Find us on Twitter: The Academic Life @AcademicLifeNBN. In this episode you’ll hear about: social justice, chronic illness, the importance of self-advocacy and a support network, and what it’s like graduating from college and then applying to graduate school during a pandemic. Our guest is Amy Sumerfield, who describes herself like this: I am a 23 year old cisgendered woman living in Loveland, Colorado. I was born in South Korea and lived with a foster family there until I was five months old. I was eventually adopted by my current family where I then grew up in Boulder, Colorado. I am more than privileged to have the upbringing that I did and I would not be here today if it wasn't for their constant support. Growing up as an adoptee was certainly hard to process, and especially as I grew older, I began to struggle greatly with my multi intersectionality. Not only was I confused about my identity at the time, but I was also learning to live with an autoimmune disease - Lupus. I was diagnosed with Lupus when I was 11 years old, and having to limit my activity in an extremely active town was difficult and only added to my idea that I didn't fit in. It took a lot of ups and mostly downs for me to learn how to cope, but I eventually came out on a better end. I received my degrees in Social Work and Sociology from Colorado State University in Fort Collins, Colorado in August 2020 and am currently applying for my Masters in School Counseling. My goals are to take not only my educational background, but my personal experiences as well, to help advocate and support children and families in need. Although I had a very positive environment growing up, I had my own struggles and everyone does. Especially as children, they are extremely vulnerable and impressionable and I believe this is the most important time of their lives as it sets the foundation for their future and beyond. Our host is: Dr. Christina Gessler, a historian of women and gender. She is Amy’s first cousin. Christina co-created the Academic Life channel with Dr. Dana Malone during the pandemic. Listeners to this episode might be interested in:
National Counsel for Adoption
Family Resources
Healthy Place: Mental Health Resources
The Lupus Initiative
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Emile Bojesen's book Forms of Education: Rethinking Educational Experience Against and Outside the Humanist Legacy (Routledge, 2019) analyses the tenets of the humanist legacy in terms of its educational ethos, examining its contradictions and its limits, as well as the extent of its capture of educational thought. It develops a broader conception of educational experience, which challenges and exceeds the limits of the humanist educational legacy. The book defines education, openly and non-restrictively, as the (de)formation of non-stable subjects, arguing that education does not require specific formations, nor the formation of specific forms, only that form does not cease being formed in the experience of the non-stable subject. Exploding and pluralising what amounts to 'education', this book rethinks what might still be called 'educational experience' against and outside the humanist legacy that confines its meaning. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/education
We conclude the discussion with NYU President Emeritus John Sexton by discussing key points from his book, “Standing for Reason: Universities in a Dogmatic Age,” where he describes the pivotal role of universities in creating a “Second Axial Age.” He also reflects on the leadership lessons from his successful tenure as NYU Law School Dean and President, and how he was able to teach a full course load on top of the demands of these positions. And he describes what may be the longest planned transition out of a University presidency that occurred between 2009 and 2016, as well as the wonderful life he’s built since he returned full-time to the NYU Law School faculty. David Finegold is the president of Chatham University. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/education
Welcome to The Academic Life. You are smart and capable, but you aren’t an island, and neither are we. So we reached across our mentor network to bring you podcasts on everything from how to finish that project, to how to take care of your beautiful mind. Wish we’d bring in an expert about something? Email us at cgessler@gmail.com or dr.danamalone@gmail.com. Find us on Twitter: The Academic Life @AcademicLifeNBN. In this episode you’ll hear: things you really need to know to navigate graduate school, why there’s a hidden curriculum, and a discussion of the book A Field Guide to Grad School. Our guest is: Dr. Jessica McCrory Calarco, an Associate Professor of Sociology at Indiana University in Bloomington. She is the author of A Field Guide to Grad School: Uncovering the Hidden Curriculum (Princeton, 2020), and Negotiating Opportunities: How the Middle Class Secures Advantages in Schools (Oxford 2018). Her research examines inequalities in education and family life, which she has written about for The New York Times, The Atlantic, Inside Higher Ed, and The Conversation. Our host is: Dr. Christina Gessler, a historian of women, gender, and sexuality. She sincerely wished she had had a guide to graduate school; the lack of one coupled with the ongoing mysteries of the hidden curriculum of her PhD program led her to create a mentorship program while still a student. She later co-created the Academic Life channel for NBN with Dr. Dana Malone. Listeners to this episode might be interested in:
A Field Guide to Grad School: Uncovering the Hidden Curriculum by Jessica McCrory Calarco
The Merit Myth by Anthony Carnevale, Peter Schmidt and Jeff Strohl
The Hidden Curriculum by Rachel Gable
Degrees of Difference: Reflections of Women of Color on Graduate School by Kimberly McKee and Denise Delgado, eds.
The Academic Life channel on New Books Network
Dr. Calarco’s graduate school advice here.
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NYU President Emeritus John Sexton provides a detailed history of the evolution of NYU into the world’s first, global network university. This began with the recognition that New York itself was home to immigrants and neighborhoods representing most of the world’s cultures. Version 2.0 involved foreign-language focused study away sites in Generalisimo Franco’s Madrid and Paris. Under Version 3.0 NYU added a large number of study abroad sites, each taking advantage of the distinctive strengths of its location (e.g. London for finance and theater). Version 4.0 featured transformational partnerships first with Abu Dhabi and then Shanghai to create comprehensive universities to develop global leaders and citizens that quickly became among the most selective and successful in the world. The COVID pandemic has accelerated the development of Version 5.0 by connecting all of these campuses more closely into a virtual network where students across the locations are taking shared courses. David Finegold is the president of Chatham University. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/education
We continue the discussion with NYU President Emeritus John Sexton who shares how it took an intervention from his close friends to get him to give up his career as a professor of theology at St. Francis College and champion high school debate to go to law school and how it took a special recommendation from his friend and Constitutional Law Professor Lawrence Tribe to get Harvard Law to reconsider his initial rejection. He would go on to become one of the most successful law school deans in American history, lifting NYU into the upper echelon of legal education by systematically recruiting stars from the leading schools to join its faculty. It took several years for his close friend and eventual NYU Board chair to overcome his initial reluctance to become NYU President. David Finegold is the president of Chatham University. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/education
Ramsey McGlazer's Old Schools: Modernism, Education, and the Critique of Progress (Fordham University Press, 2020), traces the ways in which a group of modernist cultural practitioners (thinkers, politicians, artists, poets, novelists, and filmmakers) across varied linguistic and cultural contexts ((Italian, English, Irish, and Brazilian) resisted certain notions of education perceived as “progressive”. At the heart of this remarkable study, pulses a nexus of issues that are of interest to anyone teaching anything anywhere: What is education? How does it differ from “instruction”? What is education for? (if anything) What does it mean to ask the question “what is education for”? Who is education for? What are the stakes of that question? Education reforms from the end of the Victorian Era until the mid-20th century sought to surpass the “sterile and narrow” forms of education that insisted on rote learning (memorization, declamation, imitation, and so forth) that did not help students of any age or grade “transform.” Resisting the ideology of “progressive” education, the figures in McGlazer’s fascinating study propose instead a “counter tradition” that sought to offer resistant strategies in “old school” pedagogies focusing on rote means, reproducing (though McGlazer will “queer” that term) ordained content. The practitioners McGlazer focuses on include figures like Walter Pater, author of the influential Studies in the History of the Renaissance, first published in 1873 and whose interest in mechanistic pedagogies anchors the first chapter. Giovanni Pascoli and his focus on grammar follows, then a chapter on “direct instruction” in James Joyce’s Ulysses. McGlazer concludes by focusing on films centering on instruction, like the pedagogy of pain in Pier Paolo Pasolini’s Salò, or the 120 Days of Sodom (1975) and avant-garde Brazilian filmmaker Glauber Rocha’s film Claro (1975). McGlazer’s focus on this nucleus of texts and practitioners from the end of the 19th Century to about the middle of the 20th gives rise to questions about tradition, resistance, and the ideology of education that are evergreen and of interest to educators in a wide array of places and spaces and Old Schools will be of interest to anyone who has taught and anyone who has learned. Ellen Nerenberg is a founding editor of g/s/i-gender/sexuality/Italy and reviews editor of the Journal of Italian Cinema and Media Studies. Recent scholarly essays focus on serial television in Italy, the UK, and North America; masculinities in Italian cinema and media studies; and student filmmakers. Her current book project is La nazione Winx: coltivare la futura consumista/Winx Nation: Grooming the Future Female Consumer, a collaboration with Nicoletta Marini-Maio (forthcoming, Rubbettino Editore, 2020). She is President of the American Association for Italian Studies. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/education
New York University (NYU) President Emeritus and consummate story-teller John Sexton describes how his childhood experiences as a young entrepreneur growing up in a working-class neighborhood of Brooklyn prepared him to lead the world’s largest private university. He shares the profound impact that his teacher and mentor, Charlie, had on his lifelong passion for teaching, and the role that high-school forensics, first as a national champion debater, then as a volunteer coach of the debate at the local Catholic girls high school had on his vision of the modern, ecumenical university. David Finegold is the president of Chatham University. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/education
One of the major debates surrounding higher education is whether to make college – whether 2- or 4-year public colleges and universities – free for all qualified applicants. Dr. David Finegold, President of Chatham University, discusses why this is bad public policy, based on comparisons with the experience in the UK and Germany and an analysis of the policy proposal in the US context. He shows that the two key elements of a more equitable and effective approach already exist and simply need to be expanded – doubling the resources available for Pell grants to increase the level of grant and the income thresholds for those families who qualify for it, and converting all Federal Student Loans to income-contingent repayment so individuals only begin repaying the investment in their education once they are earning enough to afford it. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/education
Dr. David Finegold, the President of Chatham University in Pittsburgh, PA and international expert on education and training systems and how they relate to changes underway in the global economy and workplace, provides an introduction to this new podcast which will focus on the forces that are shaping The Future of Higher Education and leaders that have found ways to help their institutions thrive in this challenging environment. He discusses the long-term trends that are disrupting the higher education marketplace – demographic decline in number of high school graduates, rising price competition, declining public funding, growth in large, higher quality online providers – that have been compounded by the pandemic. And he outlines the different types of episodes to come: interview with university leaders who have transformed the fortunes of their colleges and universities for the better, who have pioneered new models of higher education, or have created strategic partnerships or mergers that have enabled their institutions to continue to pursue their mission in a new way. He’ll also be speaking with leading experts on higher education, like Nathan Grawe and Mary Marcy, about their new books. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/education
Education is thought to be the route out of poverty, but history disagrees. For generations, Americans have looked to education as the solution to economic disadvantage. Yet, although more people are earning degrees, the gap between rich and poor is widening. Cristina Groeger delves into the history of this seeming contradiction, explaining how education came to be seen as a panacea even as it paved the way for deepening inequality. The Education Trap: Schools and the Remaking of Inequality in Boston (Harvard UP, 2021) returns to the first decades of the twentieth century, when Americans were grappling with the unprecedented inequities of the Gilded Age. Groeger's test case is the city of Boston, which spent heavily on public schools. She examines how workplaces came to depend on an army of white-collar staff, largely women and second-generation immigrants, trained in secondary schools. But Groeger finds that the shift to more educated labor had negative consequences--both intended and unintended--for many workers. Employers supported training in schools in order to undermine the influence of craft unions, and so shift workplace power toward management. And advanced educational credentials became a means of controlling access to high-paying professional and business jobs, concentrating power and wealth. Formal education thus became a central force in maintaining inequality. The idea that more education should be the primary means of reducing inequality may be appealing to politicians and voters, but Groeger warns that it may be a dangerous policy trap. If we want a more equitable society, we should not just prescribe more time in the classroom, but fight for justice in the workplace. Stephen Pimpare is director of the Public Service & Nonprofit Leadership program and Faculty Fellow at the Carsey School of Public Policy at the University of New Hampshire. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/education
In Poor Queer Studies: Confronting Elitism in the University (Duke UP, 2020), Matt Brim shifts queer studies away from its familiar sites of elite education toward poor and working-class people, places, and pedagogies. Brim shows how queer studies also takes place beyond the halls of flagship institutions: in night school; after a three-hour commute; in overflowing classrooms at no-name colleges; with no research budget; without access to decent food; with kids in tow; in a state of homelessness. Drawing on the everyday experiences of teaching and learning queer studies at the College of Staten Island, Brim outlines the ways the field has been driven by the material and intellectual resources of those institutions that neglect and rarely serve poor and minority students. By exploring poor and working-class queer ideas and laying bare the structural and disciplinary mechanisms of inequality that suppress them, Brim jumpstarts a queer-class knowledge project committed to anti-elitist and anti-racist education. Poor Queer Studies is essential for all of those who care about the state of higher education and building a more equitable academy. Matt Brim is Associate Professor of Queer Studies in the English Department at the College of Staten Island, City University of New York; author of James Baldwin and the Queer Imagination; and coeditor of Imagining Queer Methods. John Marszalek III is author of Coming Out of the Magnolia Closet: Same-Sex Couples in Mississippi (2020, University Press of Mississippi). He is clinical faculty of the Clinical Mental Health Counseling Program at Southern New Hampshire University. Website: Johnmarszalek3.com Twitter: @marsjf3 Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/education
Listen to this interview of Joan Turner, author of On Writtenness: The Cultural Politics of Academic Writing (Bloomsbury Academic 2018). We talk about writers, writing, writers writing, unwritten subtexts, and written text. Interviewer: "What do you see as the step which writing practitioners can take in the direction of their discipline-based colleagues, and what's the step that researchers can take toward writing practice?" Joan Turner: "Well, obviously, it has to be something that has to be ongoing, and in many respects, it comes down to individuals. There are a lot of well-meaning researchers who value collaboration with writing practitioners, as there are many who don't. And I think is it probably incumbent upon the writing practitioners to kind of put themselves forward more, to kind of slough off the sense of inferiority that might surround them because of how institutions position writing development, and they just have to attempt to begin the conversation. I think that often, when they do, on an individual level, it works. Although often, another problem that occurs with that, is, if you're actually making contact with a particular department where you've got a lot of students, then you might make contact with a particular individual, who then leaves that institution or goes on to a different role in the institution, and is no longer collaborating with the writing center, and then you have to begin again with another one. So, it can be an uphill struggle, but I do have some optimism that things will get better." Daniel Shea, heads Scholarly Communications, a Special Series on the New Books Network. Daniel is Director of the Heidelberg Writing Program, a division of the Language Center at Heidelberg University, Germany. Just write Daniel.Shea@zsl.uni-heidelberg.de Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/education
Welcome to The Academic Life. You are smart and capable, but you aren’t an island, and neither are we. So we reached across our mentor network to bring you podcasts on everything from how to finish that project, to how to take care of your beautiful mind. Wish we’d bring in an expert about something? Email us at dr.danamalone@gmail.com or cgessler@gmail.com. Find us on Twitter: The Academic Life @AcademicLifeNBN. In this episode you’ll hear: reflections on the shutdown, the weight and tension involved in decision-making during this time, mental and soul exhaustion, centering the humanity in higher education work, and thoughts on what we’re taking out of this pandemic as a field. Our guest is: Dr. James (Jim) D. Breslin, PhD a higher education scholar, practitioner, and consultant who specializes in student success, academic support and advising, assessment, institutional effectiveness, and leadership and administration. He currently serves as the Assistant Provost for Assessment, Accreditation, and Institutional Effectiveness at Bellarmine University. Dr. Breslin has presented more than 70 conference sessions and published several peer-reviewed articles and book chapters on a variety of topics. He is engaged currently with research teams that range from developing new conceptual and practical frameworks for assessment to exploring the relationships between higher education professionals and peer educators. Dr. Breslin participates as an active citizen in the field of higher education and has consulted with institutions and organizations across the US and beyond. He has served on editorial boards for several peer-reviewed publications and in leadership roles in professional organizations, including his current roles as Director-elect of Professional Development on the ACPA Governing Board and Chair of the ACPA Assessment Oversight Task Force. Dr. Breslin has been recognized for his contributions to the field of higher education and most recently was named a Diamond Honoree by the American College Personnel Association Foundation. Your host is: Dr. Dana Malone, a higher education scholar and practitioner. Dana first met Jim in graduate school in their “Theories of College Student Development” course. Over the years, a kindred professional relationship – and friendship – developed, which includes working, presenting, and writing together as well as sharing drinks over Facetime. Listeners to this episode might be interested in:
Code Switch podcast.
Throughline podcast.
ACPA’s A Bold Vision Forward.
If anyone is interested in Dr. Breslin’s thoughts on pressing issues in higher ed just prior to COVID, check out Emerging Trends in Higher Education.
A recent read that stands out: Heavy: An American Memoir.
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Listen to this interview of Robert Samuels, author of Teaching Writing, Rhetoric, and Reason at the Globalizing University (Routledge, 2021). We talk about grammar, which is what everything really fits inside of. Mostly. Interviewer : "Clearly, the liberal globalist position will cause some pushback. What would you say to our listeners, what would you say to your readers to help them make that pushback into counterargument?" Robert Samuels : "Well, it's difficult, because on one hand, if I'm saying we should focus on logic and reason, it seems like I'm saying that we should ignore emotion, but what I'm also saying is that we should really think about how emotion is manipulated through language and the role that language plays in communication. And so the problem is you want to have a more complex argument, where it's not just either-or. But in our current debate culture it seems that everything often comes into this very polarized either-or discourse. And so it's difficult to figure out how to get people who are not already on your side to listen to you. And I think that's a general problem we have within culture and society, at least in the United States: that is, how to open up this space where people can try to judge arguments based on facts and their merit and their logic and not on some predetermined ideological investment." Daniel Shea, heads Scholarly Communications, a Special Series on the New Books Network. Daniel is Director of the Heidelberg Writing Program, a division of the Language Center at Heidelberg University, Germany. Just write Daniel.Shea@zsl.uni-heidelberg.de Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/education
Shelter in A Time of Storm: How Black Colleges Fostered Generations of Leadership and Activism (University of North Carolina Press, 2020) by Dr. Jelani Favors fills the “missing pages” of history by highighting the enduring role that Black colleges have played in African American freedom movements in the long-twentieth century. Favors shows that Black colleges created freedom fighters whose organizing, dedication, and fearlessness made the Black Freedom Struggle’s most pivotal moments possible. Favors also argues that Historically Black Colleges and Universities (HBCUs) were fortified interstitial spaces for consciousness-raising and solidarity-building among race women and race men. HBCU students, faculty, and administrators were vital players in fashioning blueprints for Black liberation and ensuring the inter-generational transmission of resistance wisdom. Taking the long view and moving through a tour of Black higher education, Favors theorizes that a hidden second curriculum and a Black college communitas thrived on each campus, making them both seedbeds of racial justice and shelter in a time of storm. Amanda Joyce Hall is a Ph.D. Candidate in History and African American Studies at Yale University. She is writing an international history on the global movement against South African apartheid during the 1970s and 1980s. She tweets from @amandajoycehall. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/education
Welcome to The Academic Life. You are smart and capable, but you aren’t an island, and neither are we. So we reached across our mentor network to bring you podcasts on everything from how to finish that project, to how to take care of your beautiful mind. Wish we’d bring in an expert about something? Email us at dr.danamalone@gmail.com or cgessler@gmail.com. Find us on Twitter: The Academic Life @AcademicLifeNBN. In this episode you’ll hear: reflections on the shutdown, lessons learned, leading through change and ambiguity, impacts and challenges facing students, the future of higher education, and the distinctive nuances of a vocation versus a job. Our guest is: Dr. Zebulun Davenport, the Vice President for Student Affairs at West Chester University. He earned his Doctorate in Higher Education and Leadership from Nova Southeastern University, an M.Ed. in College Student Personnel Administration, and a B.S. in Communications/Public Relations from James Madison University. His contributions have advanced campus culture, organizational structure, and student success. Dr. Davenport has served as a Vice President for Student Affairs for three institutions and under his leadership, two of those divisions of student affairs have received Diverse Magazine’s the distinction of “Most Promising Places to Work.” His expertise includes student retention, outcomes assessment, strategic planning, and strategies for assisting first-generation college students. Dr. Davenport’s publications include co-authoring two books entitled First-Generation College Students – Understanding and Improving the Experience from Recruitment to Commencement; and Student Affairs Assessment, Evaluation, and Research: A Guidebook for Graduate Students and New Professionals, a chapter in an edited volume entitled The Student Success Conundrum, in B. Bontrager (Ed.), Strategic Enrollment Management: Transforming Higher Education; a chapter in an edited monograph entitled Creating Collaborative Conditions for Student Success in S. Whalen (Ed.), Proceedings of the 8th National Symposium on Student Retention 2012, and a chapter in the fourth edition of The Handbook of Student Affairs Administration in Jossey Bass 2016. He has presented at workshops for numerous public agencies; educational institutions; state, regional, and national conferences; as well as to thousands of college students and professionals throughout his career. Your host is: Dr. Dana Malone, a higher education scholar and practitioner with a background in student affairs. Dana has known Zeb for several years. His dynamic personality and ability to relate over what really matters in work and life sparked a kindred connection from their first meeting. Listeners to this episode might be interested in:
Working with Emotional Intelligence by Daniel Goleman
Five Dysfunctions of a Team by Patrick Lencioni
Multipliers: How the Best Leaders Make Everyone Smarter
by Liz Wiseman
Uncommon Candor: A Leader's Guide to Straight Talk
by Nancy K. Eberhardt
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The Global Education Effect and Japan: Constructing New Borders and Identification Practices (Routledge, 2020) volume investigates the "global education effect"--the impact of global education initiatives on institutional and individual practices and perceptions--with a special focus on the dynamics of border-construction, recognition, subversion, and erasure regarding "Japan". The Japanese government's push for global education has taken shape mainly in the form of English-Medium Instruction programs and bringing in international students who actually serve as a foreign workforce to fill the declining labour force. Chapters in this volume draw from education, anthropology, sociology, linguistics, and psychology to examine the ways in which demographic changes, economic concerns, race politics, and nationhood intersect with the efforts to "globalize" education and create specific "global education effects" in the Japanese archipelago. This book will provide a valuable resource for anyone who is interested in Japanese studies and global education. Jingyi Li is a PhD Candidate in Japanese History at the University of Arizona. She researches about early modern Japan, literati, and commercial publishing. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/education
Welcome to The Academic Life. You are smart and capable, but you aren’t an island, and neither are we. So we reached across our mentor network to bring you podcasts on everything from how to finish that project, to how to take care of your beautiful mind. Wish we’d bring in an expert about something? Email us at cgessler@gmail.com or dr.danamalone@gmail.com. Find us on Twitter: The Academic Life @AcademicLifeNBN. In this episode you’ll hear about: navigating academia, gender creative parenting, and a discussion of the book Raising Them. Our guest is: Dr. Kyl Myers, author of Raising Them: Our Adventure in Gender Creative Parenting. Kyl is a sociologist, parent, partner, professor, and advocate of gender creative parenting. Kyl’s work has been featured on social media, a TedX Talk, and in numerous articles. She can be found at raisingzoomer.com and at kylmyers.com. Your host is: Dr. Christina Gessler, a historian of women, gender, and sexuality. Listeners to this episode might be interested in:
TheybyParenting.com
Parenting Beyond Pink and Blue, by Christia Spears Brown
Gender Revolution, Documentary from National Geographic
Beyond the Gender Binary by Alok Vaid-Menon
Raising Them: Our Adventure in Gender Creative Parenting by Kyl Myers
Raising Baby Grey, video and story from The New Yorker
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Today I talked Joe Essid and Brian McTague about their book Writing Centers at the Center of Change (Routledge 2020). We discuss about critical thinking through writing and we talk about what it is that's critical to writing. Interviewer: What's the next big change you see coming? Brian McTague: I don't know exactly what that's going to be, but I think it's going to have something to do with adapting what the previous 'normal' model was for writing centers into this new normal that definitely takes into account technology on a broader scale and how we communicate. You know, we can communicate face-to-face via technology, so does it have to be in person? One example from my own writing center: Over the last year we have done a lot of online-Zoom group workshops. And group workshops are something that we've always offered in person, and sometimes we'd get ten people, sometimes we'd get nobody. Now, we have a Zoom workshop, and we get up to eighty students, or actually, eighty participants, because there are also often some faculty and staff there, too. So to me, that shows that there's potential to learn a lot from what we've done well in this very challenging past year. Joe Essid: Brian, that's grounded optimism. And I think it's something I will do on our campus, once I have the breathing space. That's a post-pandemic opportunity to begin to host some workshops, and use Zoom, because then faculty can attend them from home, students don't have to trek to a room that we have to book. So, I think our writing workshop program is going to move to Zoom, and I can bring in outside experts. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/education
Welcome to The Academic Life. You are smart and capable, but you aren’t an island, and neither are we. So we reached across our mentor network to bring you podcasts on everything from how to finish that project, to how to take care of your beautiful mind. Wish we’d bring in an expert about something? Email us at cgessler@gmail.com or dr.danamalone@gmail.com. Find us on Twitter: The Academic Life @AcademicLifeNBN. In this episode you’ll hear about: the paid and unpaid workload required of adjuncts, Dawn’s personal pandemic perspective as she had to suddenly pivot from teaching on campus to teaching online, the effect of the pivot on her students, and her love of film studies and why she’s hopeful for the future. Our guest is: Dawn Fratini, who has nearly twenty years adjunct teaching experience at the community college and college level. She is currently an adjunct professor at Chapman University’s Dodge College of Film and Media Arts where she teaches courses in Film History, Animation History, the Walt Disney Company, the Horror Genre and more. She hold an MFA in Screenwriting and is a PhD candidate at UCLA’s School of Film, Television and Digital Media. She researches technical labor in Hollywood and is currently completing her PhD dissertation, The Genies in the System: The Motion Picture Research Council, 1947-1960. Our host is: Dr. Christina Gessler, a historian of women, gender, and sexuality. Christina and Dawn are members of the Friday Morning Molas, a writing group founded during the pandemic. Christina is the co-creator the Academic Life channel for NBN with Dr. Dana Malone, a channel they started during the pandemic. Listeners to this episode might be interested in:
Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, Margaret Herrick Library, Digital Collections.
UCLA Oral History Digital Collection.
Media History Digital Archive.
The Internet Archive.
Aca-Media podcast of the Society of Cinema and Media Studies, which looks at a variety of issues in the field, including teaching during the pandemic.
Teaching Media, which hosts an online journal on media pedagogy, and also serves as open source for sharing teaching ideas and resources.
SCMS Precarious Labor Organization. "The Precarious Labor Organization provides community and advocacy for the Society’s members who are in positions without job security or a clear route to promotion and advancement."
SCMS. "The Society for Cinema and Media Studies is the leading scholarly organization in the United States dedicated to promoting a broad understanding of film, television, and related media through research and teaching grounded in the contemporary humanities tradition.”
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Joris Vlieghe and Piotr Zamojski's book Towards an Ontology of Teaching: Thing-centred Pedagogy, Affirmation and Love for the World (Springer, 2019) opens an original and timely perspective on why it is we teach and want to pass on our world to the new generation. Teaching is presented in this book as a way of being, rather than as a matter of expertise, which is driven by love for a subject matter. With the help of philosophical thinkers such as Arendt, Badiou and Agamben, the authors articulate a fully positive account of education that goes beyond the critical approach, which has become prevailing in much contemporary educational theory, and which testifies to a hate of the world and to a confusion of what politics and education are about. Therefore, the authors develop the idea of a thing-centered pedagogy, as opposed to both teacher-centered and student-centered approaches. The authors furthermore illustrate their purely educational account of teaching by looking at the writing and the television performance of Leonard Bernstein who embodies what teaching out of love and care for a subject is all about. This book is of interest to all those concerned with fundamental and philosophical questions about education and to those interested in (music) education. Kai Wortman is a PhD candidate at the Institute of Education, University of Tübingen, funded by the State Postgraduate Scholarship Programme. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/education
Welcome to The Academic Life. You are smart and capable, but you aren’t an island, and neither are we. So we reached across our mentor network to bring you podcasts on everything from how to finish that project, to how to take care of your beautiful mind. Wish we’d bring in an expert about something? Email us at cgessler@gmail.com or dr.danamalone@gmail.com. Find us on Twitter: The Academic Life @AcademicLifeNBN. In this episode you’ll hear: what you need to know before you go, the talk you need to have with your family and friends before you leave for school, what to do when you get there, and a discussion of the book How to College. Our guest is: Lara Hope Schwartz, the co-author of How To College. She has served as a Faculty Fellow at American University’s Center for Teaching, Research, and Learning. She teaches at American University’s School of Public Affairs, and serves as Honors Program Director. Previously, Lara was Director of Strategic Engagement at the American Constitution Society for Law & Policy, Courts Matter director at Media Matters, Legal Director at the Human Rights Campaign, and Vice President of External Affairs at the American Association of People with Disabilities. She earned her Juris Doctor Cum Laude from Harvard Law School and her AB in English and American Literature Magna Cum Laude from Brown University. Our guest is: Andrea Malkin Brenner, PhD, the co-author of How To College. She was a faculty member in the Department of Sociology at American University for 20 years, and directed the University College program. She created the American University Experience (AUx) Program, a mandatory full-year course that serves as a college transition course, and a cross-cultural communication class. She holds a BA in Sociology from Brandeis University, an MA in Curriculum, Instruction and Administration in Higher Education from Boston College, and a PhD in Sociology from American University. She currently consults with colleges that wish to create their own first-year transitions courses. Your host is: Dr. Christina Gessler, a historian of women, gender, and sexuality. She specializes in decoding diaries written by rural women in 19th century America. Listeners to this episode might be interested in:
How to College: What to Know Before You Go and When You’re There, by Andrea Malkin Brenner and Lara Hope Schwartz
What Parents Should do to Help Students Prepare for The First Year of College
https://www.pennlive.com/opini... Lara Schwartz and Andrea Brenner virtual interactive workshop focused on building college learning communities where open, respectful, and collaborative communication can flourish.
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The Supreme Court’s decision in Bostock v. Clayton, which ruled that the Title VII prohibition on sex discrimination in employment extends to discrimination based on sexual orientation and transgender status, may imperil the fundamental right of parents to educate their children in line with their values. This right is examined brilliantly in the 2016 book, To Whom Do Children Belong? Parental Rights, Civic Education, and Children's Autonomy by scholar Melissa Moschella. Given the rise of the transgender movement and other aspects of wokeism, this book has only increased in importance. It is a rare combination of a serious scholarly work and a book that general audiences, particularly and crucially, the parents of school-age children should read. Moschella addresses timely questions such as, “Can we defend parental rights against those who believe we need more extensive state educational control to protect children's autonomy or prepare them for citizenship in a diverse society?” and draws upon psychological and social scientific research to make a compelling philosophical argument for the right of parents to determine fundamental questions of morals when it comes to their children. And this is not only a matter for philosophers. Moschella makes clear that under the cover of such seemingly innocuous verbiage as “diversity education” and “education for citizenship,” public schools are engaging in outright indoctrination of children in left-wing social justice and libertarian moral views. Moreover, progressives are increasingly targeting even private schools and some are even calling for an outright ban on homeschooling. Moschella’s book is eerily prescient in the way she was able to predict that parents who seek to pass on a traditional understanding of sexuality find their efforts directly undermined in ever more public schools. Many parents cannot afford private schools or are unable to home school—and, as noted, even those refuges are under threat. Moschella foretold in her book that if the views of the progressive scholars whose arguments she delineates with scrupulous fairness prevail, parents will have no choice but to send their children into an educational environment that may sow damaging confusion about the basic truths of human identity. Readers of this book need not even be religious but simply parents and other readers who worry that children will be stigmatized and parents’ rights erased if children are forced by schools to deny that maleness and femaleness are grounded on objective biological reality rather than subjective self-image, or that the purpose of human sexuality is not merely pleasure or self-expression, but to unite a man and woman in marriage and enable them to form a family. This is not solely a question of religious liberty but of conscience rights more broadly, which she discusses both authoritatively and movingly. Moschella examines the arguments for expanding school choice, vouchers and granting exemptions when educational programs or regulations threaten parents' ability to raise their children in line with their values and moral codes. The questions raised in this important book have become even more salient in the era of the Biden administration. Give a listen. Hope J. Leman is a grants researcher. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/education
Duke University officially integrated its student body in the early 1960s, but the University itself did little to make students of color feel as though Duke was their academic home. During this decade, black students organized, agitated, protested, and finally took the bold step of occupying the University's main administrative building for one harrowing day, all in an effort to bring equality and rights to this historically white university campus. In his deeply researched book, Point of Reckoning: The Fight for Racial Justice (Duke University Press, 2021) Theodore D. Segal tells the story of the students, administrators, and activists who forced Duke to acknowledge and address its segregation and disparity. Lane Davis is a doctoral candidate in the Graduate Program in Religious Studies at Southern Methodist University where he studies American religious history. Find him on Twitter @TheeLaneDavis Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/education
Welcome to The Academic Life. You are smart and capable, but you aren’t an island, and neither are we. So we reached across our mentor network to bring you podcasts on everything from how to finish that project, to how to take care of your beautiful mind. Wish we’d bring in an expert about something? Email us at cgessler@gmail.com or dr.danamalone@gmail.com. Find us on Twitter: The Academic Life @AcademicLifeNBN. In this episode you’ll hear about: the steps to creating a writing career after college; the children’s book market; the difference between a pitch, a hook, a logline, and a synopsis; the importance of building a support network; and a discussion of the book Premeditated Myrtle. Our guest is: Elizabeth C. Bunce, the author of the Myrtle Hardcastle mystery book series. Elizabeth’s books are inspired by real places and cultures of the past, often with otherworldly or magical elements. She has been writing for as long as she can remember, and has always been interested in literature, folklore, history, and culture. She studied English and anthropology in college. When she’s not writing, she’s usually making something—cosplay, needlework, historical costuming, quilting—but not cooking. Your host is: Dr. Christina Gessler, a historian of women, gender, and sexuality. She specializes in decoding diaries written by rural women in 19th century America. She belongs to a critique group for children’s book writers, and has been an active member of SCBWI for over a decade. When she’s not reading, writing, podcasting, or teaching, she can be spotted taking walks along the shore and working on her nature photography. She seldom cooks. Listeners to this episode might be interested in:
Premeditated Myrtle by Elizabeth Bunce
Wired for Story by Lisa Cron
The Magic Words: Writing Great Books for Children and Young Adults by Cheryl Klein
Book in a Month by Victoria Lynn Schmidt
Stealing Hollywood: Screenwriting Tricks for Authors by Andrea Sokoloff
The Society of Children’s Book Writers and Illustrators
The Highlights Foundation
The Vermont College of Fine Arts MFA in Writing for Children and Young Adults
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Morton Schoolman, Professor in the Rockefeller College of Public Affairs and Policy at the State University of New York at Albany, has published a new book that explores the idea of democratic enlightenment in the United States, and the way that we may want to consider both how to achieve this enlightenment and how we can be guided by our literary and philosophical traditions. Schoolman explains that we need to come to democratic enlightenment through a process of reconciliation, and that this concept of reconciliation is at the heart of the work by Walt Whitman and Theodore Adorno. The centerpieces of A Democratic Enlightenment: The Reconciliation Image, Aesthetic Education, Possible Politics (Duke UP, 2020) are explications of how Whitman and Adorno each, separately, approach this need and capacity for reconciliation, and how they delineate it in their work, and finally, how it is vitally important to democracy. Schoolman’s reading of Whitman notes that this is what Whitman set out to do with his poetry, to teach or guide the capacity to reconcile identity, especially with all those who are different. Whitman’s work and his reflection on this need for reconciliation was written during the period of Reconstruction, and he saw the need and the means to provide a path towards healing America’s differences through the democratic media of his time, poetry. Theodore Adorno is pursuing a parallel concept in his work, examining modern artwork as the fulcrum for reconciliation, explaining that these images, while they may be static in some form, are, in fact, images in motion—all visual works of art are in motion. Thus, both Adorno and Whitman provide Schoolman with an aesthetic space and definition for the place where democratic reconciliation can and does occur. But Schoolman builds on the foundation provided by these two theorists, himself constructing the place where he thinks it is most likely that citizens will experience and engage with this idea of reconciliation, especially around those who have been othered or prevented from inclusion by American politics and culture. Schoolman centers this space in film, in part because films are accessible by so much of the populace, and because they provide the aesthetic images, not only the narrative framework, to confront and engage democratic reconciliation. A Democratic Enlightenment: The Reconciliation Image, Aesthetic Education, Possible Politics is a fascinating and complex exploration of how aesthetic education has an important role in democratic politics, especially in regard to the function of the reconciliation image as a dynamic component of that education. Lilly J. Goren is professor of political science at Carroll University in Waukesha, WI. She is co-editor of the award winning book, Women and the White House: Gender, Popular Culture, and Presidential Politics (University Press of Kentucky, 2012), as well as co-editor of Mad Men and Politics: Nostalgia and the Remaking of Modern America (Bloomsbury Academic, 2015). Email her comments at lgoren@carrollu.edu or tweet to @gorenlj. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/education
Listen to this interview of Bill Cope and Mary Kalantzis, creators of the website newlearningonline.com and also professors at the College of Education, University of Illinois. We talk about monastic instruction in the sixth century, we talk about textbook learning in the sixteenth century, and we talk about cybersecurity education in the twenty-first century, but overall we talk about imbalances in self agency. Interviewer: "Could you describe one pedagogical affordance of the technology on your learning platform CGScholar?" Bill Cope: "So, what we're doing is we're using big data and learning analytics as an alternative feedback system. So, what we say, then, is, okay, well: 'The test is dead! Long live assessment!' We have so much data from CGScholar. Why would you create a little sample of an arrow or two at the end of a course, when we can from day one be data mining every single thing you do? And by the way, by the end of the course, we have these literally millions of data points and for every student. Now, the other thing, as well, is, our argument is––and we call this recursive feedback––is that every little data point is a piece of actionable feedback. Someone makes a comment on what you do, you get a score from somebody on your work against a Likert scale...so what we're doing is, we have this idea of complete data transparency, but also, we're not going to make any judgments for you or about you, or the system's not going to do it, without that feedback being actionable, so that you can then improve your work. It feeds into your work. So, the difference is, instead of assessment being retrospective and judgmental, what we're doing is making micro-judgments which are prospective and constructive and going towards your learning." Visit the Learning Design and Leadership Program here and visit CGScholar here. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/education
Chelsea Szendi Schieder’s Co-Ed Revolution: The Female Student in the Japanese New Left and Naoko Koda’s The United States and the Japanese Student Movement, 1948-1973: Managing a Free World provide new insights into the postwar Japanese student movement. Koda, a scholar of diplomatic history and international relations, situates student activism within the larger context of the Cold War. Among its historiographical contributions, Managing a Free World pushes back the timeline of the student movement’s origins to occupation-era policies, explores the role of subsequent American cultural diplomacy in combating the Marxist bent of major student organizations, and spotlights the particular importance of Okinawa in the development and ultimate neutralization of leftist activism in postwar Japan. Koda highlights the Kennedy administration’s “Kennedy-Reischauer Offensive” and promotion of modernization theory amongst intellectuals on the one hand and effective promotion of American democratic ideals in driving fissures in the New Left. In contrast, Co-Ed Revolution focuses on the convoluted gender dynamics of the campus-based New Left. Schieder approaches this issue from a number of different angles, including the media-manufactured public memory of a number of important women activists such as Kanba Michiko, killed in demonstrations against renewal of the U.S.-Japan Security Treaty, and the “titillating and terrifying” figures of the so-called “Gewalt Rosas” of the student movement such as Kashiwazaki Chieko. In addition to these analyses of both individual thinkers and their transformation into manipulable media spectacles, Schieder also shows that the historiographical tendency to focus on the aggressive and violent masculinity of the New Left in the late 1960s not only minimizes the role of women in the campus-based New Left, but does so in a way that repeats the internal gender politics of the movement itself; the “masculine ideal of political action” justified and masked the way that women were relegated to support and care work. These two books are part of a wave of recent scholarship reexamining the student movement and New Left in Japan from fresh angles, and seeing the campus protests of the 1960s as both a distinctly Japanese history and part of larger global currents. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/education
Listen to this interview of Shyam Sharma, Associate Professor and Graduate Program Director in the Department of Writing and Rhetoric at Stony Brook University. We talk about how mutually appreciative attitudes advance Writing in the Disciplines, about how other languages matter to writing in English, and about how US Presidents have changed the ways we teach writing and learn to write. Interviewer: "Where does language come in to the sort of writing development called Writing Studies or English for Academic Purposes or Academic Literacies?" Shyam Sharma: "Well, there are language-focused academic curriculums around the world. But language is not writing. If it was, then I wouldn't have my job. You know, for the most part, students who speak English as a native language wouldn't need to learn anything about genres and conventions and writing and rhetoric and communication. And so, where English is taught in non-English-speaking regions, the concern about language buries everything so far down that it is difficult for people to foreground it and to pay specialized attention to it and to develop research programs and to be funded and to be recognized and so on." Daniel Shea, heads Scholarly Communications, a Special Series on the New Books Network. Daniel is Director of the Heidelberg Writing Program, a division of the Language Center at Heidelberg University, Germany. Just write Daniel.Shea@zsl.uni-heidelberg.de Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/education
Welcome to The Academic Life. You are smart and capable, but you aren’t an island, and neither are we. So we reached across our mentor network to bring you podcasts on everything from how to finish that project, to how to take care of your beautiful mind. Wish we’d bring in an expert about something? Email us at dr.danamalone@gmail.com or cgessler@gmail.com. Find us on Twitter: The Academic Life @AcademicLifeNBN. In this episode you’ll hear: key characteristics of administrative and faculty roles, ideas about administrative leadership versus management, questions to consider if you’re on the fence about which route to pursue, lessons learned, and ways to cultivate collaborative and supportive working relationships in either role. Our guest is: Dr. Karin Lewis, an associate professor in the Teaching and Learning Department in the College of Education and P-16 Integration at the University of Texas Rio Grande Valley (UTRGV). She teaches undergraduate, graduate, and doctoral courses in cognition, learning, and human development, writing for inquiry, and diversity, equity, and inclusion, and she mentors doctoral students in their scholarship. She has an extensive network of colleagues and scholars as Past-Chair of the UTRGV Women’s Faculty Network and President-Elect of the UTRGV Faculty Senate with a demonstrated record of collegial collaboration and leadership among her colleagues across the university, as well as nationally. She brings experience as a peer reviewer and editor for several publishers and academic journals, as well as professional conferences, such as AERA. She demonstrates a steadfast commitment to productive collaboration, an ethic of care, social justice, and culturally responsive transformative pedagogies, with expertise in qualitative research methodologies. Prior to joining the faculty at UTRGV, for nine years Karin served as Assistant Provost of Undergraduate Education and Executive Director of the Department of Academic Enhancement at the University of Kentucky. Your host is: Dr. Dana Malone, a higher education scholar and practitioner. Dana first met Karin as a doctorate student at the University of Kentucky when Karin hired her as a graduate TA to teach courses offered out of Academic Enhancement. Listeners to this episode might be interested in:
Brown, B. (2018). Dare to Lead: Brave Work. Tough Conversations. Whole Hearts. Random House Books.
Covey, S. (2013). 7 Habits of Highly Effective People: Powerful Lessons in Personal Change. Simon & Schuster.
Gordon, J. (2017). The Power of Positive Leadership: How and Why Positive Leaders Transform Teams and Organizations and Change the World. John Wiley & Sons, Inc.
Sinek, S. (2011). Start with Why: How Great Leaders Inspire Everyone to Take Action. Penguin Group.
The work of Dr. Wayne Dyer, Coach John Wooden, and Maya Angelou, as well as the Positive Psychology Center at the University of Pennsylvania
Podcasts: Unlocking Us, Dr. Brené Brown; Dare to Lead, Dr. Brené Brown; Super Soul Conversations, Oprah Winfrey and The Happiness Lab, Dr. Laurie Santos
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Welcome to The Academic Life. You are smart and capable, but you aren’t an island, and neither are we. So we reached across our mentor network to bring you podcasts on everything from how to finish that project, to how to take care of your beautiful mind. Wish we’d bring in an expert about something? Email us at dr.danamalone@gmail.com or cgessler@gmail.com. Find us on Twitter: The Academic Life @AcademicLifeNBN. In this episode you’ll hear: realities of the shutdown with two young children; the internal reckoning when things beyond our control force a change in course, timeline adjustments and impacts on research as well as lessons learned and finding beauty in life amidst deep challenges. Our guest is: Brooke Lombardi, M.S., a social worker and Ph.D. candidate at The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Brooke researches perinatal health, specializing in the intersection of sexual victimization and the perinatal health care needs of women. Her dissertation is focused on the connection between lifetime experiences of sexual victimization and perinatal mental health disorders, such as PTSD, depression, and anxiety. She has co-authored papers related to perinatal health, human trafficking, and substance misuse in the perinatal period. Brooke is also a birth doula, adjunct faculty member at Elon University, partner, and mother to two. Your host is: Dr. Dana Malone, a higher education scholar and practitioner. Dana met Brooke as a live-in Resident Director (RD) and Brooke was an undergraduate Resident Assistant (RA) on staff. They stayed connected after Brooke graduated, and over several years, a beautiful friendship unfolded. Listeners to this episode might be interested in:
Inside Higher Ed article: “Surviving the Pandemic as Grad Student Parents”
The Chronicle of Higher Education article: “Covid-19 and the Academic Parent”
Inside Higher Ed article: “A Double Whammy For Student Parents”
Institute for Women’s Policy Research report, Student Parents in the Covid-19 Pandemic: Heightened Need and Imperative for Strengthened Support
Interview with authors of You’re Doing it Wrong: Mothering, Media, and Medical Expertise (RUP) on NBN Gender Channel
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Welcome to The Academic Life. You are smart and capable, but you aren’t an island, and neither are we. So we reached across our mentor network to bring you podcasts on everything from how to finish that project, to how to take care of your beautiful mind. Wish we’d bring in an expert about something? Email us at dr.danamalone@gmail.com or cgessler@gmail.com. Find us on Twitter: The Academic Life @AcademicLifeNBN. In this episode you’ll hear about a new, versatile resource for women associate professors, flipping the script on the mid-career stage, finding joy in the work and taking stock of priorities, as well as the importance of building a personalized mentor group. Our guest is: Dr. Vicki Baker, recognized as a “Top 100 Visionary” in Education by the Global Forum for Education and Learning. Vicki is at the forefront of innovation and strategy in faculty and leadership development. As a faculty member herself and Fulbright Specialist Alumna her goal is to help faculty members and colleges and universities thrive. Vicki is the author of Charting Your Path to Full: A Guide for Women Associate Professors, lead editor of Success After Tenure: Supporting Mid-Career Faculty, and co-author of Faculty Development in Liberal Arts Colleges. Her work has been featured in national and international media outlets including WalletHub, Times Higher Education, Hechinger Report, Wall Street Journal, The Atlantic, USA Today, New York Times, Chronicle of Higher Education, and the Huffington Post. She regularly consults with industry and higher education institutions on the topics of leadership, faculty development, change management, and mentoring. Vicki enjoys spending time with her husband, two children, and their dog. She participates in interval training three days a week and is an avid reader. Your host is: Dr. Dana Malone, a higher education scholar and practitioner. She specializes in college student relationships, gender, sexuality, and religious identities as well as assessment planning. Dana enjoys delicious, healthy food, practicing yoga, and wandering the Jersey shore. Listeners to this episode might be interested in: (1) Dr. Vicki Baker’s website with Co-Founder Dr. Laura Lunsford (mentoring and leadership development expert) for additional resources and services we offer. Lead Mentor Develop LLC (2) Great new book out by Pam Eddy & Elizabeth Kirby, Leading for Tomorrow (3) Another excellent book by Rena Seltzer, The Coach's Guide for Women Professors (4) Women in Academe Series by Jeanie K Allen (5) Seminal work in this area by the late Kelly Ward and Lisa Wolf-Wendel, Academic Motherhood: How Faculty Manage Work and Family Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/education
Welcome to The Academic Life. You are smart and capable, but you aren’t an island, and neither are we. So we reached across our mentor network to bring you podcasts on everything from how to finish that project, to how to take care of your beautiful mind. Wish we’d bring in an expert about something? Email us at cgessler@gmail.com or dr.danamalone@gmail.com. Find us on Twitter: The Academic Life @AcademicLifeNBN. In this episode you’ll hear about: the role of community colleges in higher education and in their local communities, the Rural Community College Alliance, and being a first generation college student. Our guest is: Dr Penny Wills, the President of Rural Community College Alliance. Your host is: Dr. Christina Gessler, a historian of women, gender, and sexuality. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/education
Welcome to The Academic Life. You are smart and capable, but you aren’t an island, and neither are we. So we reached across our mentor network to bring you podcasts on everything from how to finish that project, to how to take care of your beautiful mind. Wish we’d bring in an expert about something? Email us at cgessler@gmail.com or dr.danamalone@gmail.com. Find us on Twitter: The Academic Life @AcademicLifeNBN. In this episode you’ll hear about: the need for diversity and inclusion in campus organizations, what it means to do The Work, and a discussion of the book The Token. Our guest is: Crystal Byrd Farmer, an engineer turned educator. She is the author of The Token: Common Sense Ideas for Increasing Diversity in Your Organization. Your host is: Dr. Christina Gessler, a historian of women, gender, and sexuality. She reinterprets the historical narrative in both traditional and creative forms. Listeners to this episode might be interested in:
The Color of Law: A Forgotten History of How Our Government Segregated America by Richard Rothstein
Me and White Supremacy: Combat Racism, Change the World, and Become a Good Ancestor by Layla Saad
Why Are All the Black Kids Sitting Together in the Cafeteria? And Other Conversations About Race by Beverly Tatum
College Presidents and the Struggle for Black Liberation by Eddie Cole.
Seeing White podcast series from Scene on Radio
AWARE-LA. White Anti-Racist Culture Building Toolkit
Dismantling Racism Workbook
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In the wake of 2020’s movements for Black Lives and exposed racial disparities in working-class deaths during the COVID-19 pandemic, educational institutions are grappling on a massive level with their role in either reproducing or disrupting entrenched systems of exploitative power. While individual agency in enacting inclusive practices can be limited by these massive, intersecting forces, educators also wield tremendous influence over the forces within the learning environments they create for all students—particularly those who have been historically marginalized in society and schools alike. In Antiracism and Universal Design for Learning: Building Expressways to Learning Success (CAST Professional Publishing, 2020), Andratesha Fritzgerald pairs Universal Design for Learning (UDL)—a framework for embedding options in the methods, materials, assessments and instructional goals that anticipate inevitable learner variability in the classroom—with antiracism, to support educators in effectively honoring the brilliance of Black and Brown children. Drawing vivid portraits of classroom instruction, Fritzgerald shows how teachers committed to antiracist environments can open new roads of communication, engagement, and skill-building so that students feel honored and loved. Andratesha Fritzgerald, EdS, brings nearly two decades of experience as a teacher, curriculum specialist, administrator and director in urban schools to synthesize these two schools of thought/action through this book. She has been published in What Really Works with Universal Design for Learning (Corwin Press), and on Think Inclusive’s blog. Currently, Fritzgerald serves as Director of Teaching, Learning and Innovation for the East Cleveland, Ohio City School Districts, and is the founder of Building Blocks of Brilliance. Christina Anderson Bosch is a doctoral student in the College of Education at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. She reads widely in inclusive education scholarship, comparative special education research, and Universal Design for Learning practices to advance intellectual clarity and abolitionist imaginings about the school-prison nexus. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/education
This is part of our Special Series on Malcolm X and Black Nationalism. In this series, we delve into the background of Malcolm X's action and thought in the context of Black Nationalism, correcting the fundamentally mistaken notion that Malcolm X was a civil rights leader. He certainly did not see himself in that way, and explicitly argued otherwise. This helps us place the Afro-American struggle in its dimensions beyond the current American nation-state, including the Black Atlantic, and beyond. Today, our guest is Cedric Burrows, author of The Construction of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., and Malcolm X in Composition Textbooks: Rereading Readers, which was his Ph.D. Dissertation at the University of Kansas, available online. While scholars have written about the use of textbooks in writing courses, little attention is paid to how textbooks anthologize writers, especially women and people of color. This study examines the portrayal of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., and Malcolm X in composition textbook anthologies known as Readers, and sheds light on the ways Readers incorporate writers from African-American backgrounds. Through qualitative methods, Burrows analyzes how King and Malcolm X are anthologized in five popular Readers: The Bedford Reader, Rereading America, Patterns for College Writing, The Conscious Reader, and A World of Ideas. By intertwining the historical-critical method and narratives from my own experiences teaching Malcolm X and King from a Reader, Burrows analyzes the embedded cultural meanings in the biographical headnotes, the selection, and the discussion questions in the Readers. The results show that Readers tend to: (1) narrate King's and Malcolm X's biographies according to popular narratives in society; (2) provide little or inaccurate historical context to ground the selections; (3) alter the original sources of King and Malcolm X's text; and (4) format King and Malcolm X's rhetoric according to the Western rhetorical tradition while ignoring the African-American dimensions in their rhetoric. Burrows concludes by discussing how Readers are part of a larger issue within the educational system. Kirk Meighoo is Public Relations Officer for the United National Congress, the Official Opposition in Trinidad and Tobago. His career has spanned media, academia, and politics for three decades. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/education
I wish I had seen Laura Hilton and Avinoam Patt's Understanding and Teaching the Holocaust (University of Wisconsin Press, 2020) six months ago. I taught a course in the fall titled "The Holocaust and its Legacies." It's a course I've taught several times. It's a good course, co-taught with Professor of Theology. But it's a course that would have been better if I had read this book the summer before I taught it. Laura HIlton and Avinoam Patt have collected a series of essays designed specifically for high school and university level instructors who teach the Holocaust. Some of them aim to bring teachers up to speed on the most recent research about specific areas of the subject. Others look at specific kinds of sources and offer advice on how teachers might use them in the classroom. Some of them offer new interpretations, others cover well-established material concisely and effectively. Depending on their own backgrounds and interests, teachers will find some of these essays more valuable than others. But every teacher will emerge from this book having learned something new and having new ideas about how to communicate their subject and their passions to their students. Kelly McFall is Professor of History and Director of the Honors Program at Newman University. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/education
Teaching in Times of Crisis: Applying Comparative Literature in the Classroom (Routledge, 2021) explores how comparative methods, which are instrumental in reading and teaching works of literature from around the world, also provide us with tools to dissect and engage the moments of crises that permeate our contemporary political realities. The book is written in the form of a series of classroom reflections—or memos—capturing the political environment preceding and proceeding the 2016 US presidential election. It examines the ways in which the ethics involved in reading comparatively can be employed by teachers and students alike to map and foster "lifelines for cultural sustainability" (to borrow the term from Djelal Kadir’s Memos from the Besieged City) that are essential for creating and maintaining a healthy multicultural society. Nyawalo achieves this through comparative readings of postcolonial films, LGBTQ texts, French slam poetry, as well as episodes from Star Trek: The Next Generation, among other materials. The classroom reflections captured in each memo are shaped by the Appalachian setting in which the discussions and lessons took place. Inspired by this setting, the author develops pedagogic ethics of comparison—a method of reading comparatively—which privileges the local educational spaces in which students find themselves by mapping the contested cultural politics of Appalachian realities onto a world literature curriculum. Mich Yonah Nyawalo is an Associate Professor of Critical Ethnic, Black/Race Studies at Xavier University, Cincinnati, Ohio. His areas of specialization are globalization studies, postcolonial criticism, African literatures (including audio and visual cultures from the continent), media studies, critical pedagogy, and service learning. The years he has spent living and studying in Kenya, Uganda, France, Sweden, and the United States have highly defined his academic projects, which appropriate a mixture of critical tools and scholarly texts derived from the fields of African, African diaspora, and African-American studies. Some of the classes he teaches include World Literature, Black Transnationalism, Comparative Feminist Literature, Comparative Queer Theory and Literature, Introduction to Media and Culture, Graphic Novels and Animation, as well as Video Games and Virtual Worlds. Victoria Oana Lupașcu is an Assistant Professor of Comparative Literature and Asian Studies at University of Montréal. Her areas of interest include medical humanities, visual art, 20th and 21st Chinese literature and Global South studies. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/education
Welcome to The Academic Life. You are smart and capable, but you aren’t an island, and neither are we. So we reached across our mentor network to bring you podcasts on everything from how to finish that project, to how to take care of your beautiful mind. Wish we’d bring in an expert about something? Email us at cgessler@gmail.com or dr.danamalone@gmail.com. Find us on Twitter: The Academic Life @AcademicLifeNBN. In this episode you’ll hear about: why there aren’t enough jobs in academia for the number of PhDs who want them, what a “tenure-trap” is, why you might be happier in a job outside academia, and discussion of the book Leaving Academia: A Practical Guide. Our guest is: Dr. Christopher Caterine. He is a communications strategist, writer, and career coach. Since leaving academia, he has helped many graduate students and scholars find satisfying work in new arenas. Your host is: Dr. Christina Gessler, a historian of women, gender, and sexuality. She reinterprets the historical narrative in both traditional and creative forms. She supports her work-life balance with long walks and her love of photography, which you can find here. Listeners to this episode might be interested in:
Leaving Academia: A Practical Guide by Christopher Caterine
Succeeding Outside the Academy by Kelly Baker
So What Are You Going to Do with That? by Susan Basalla and Maggie Debelius
The Graduate School Mess by Lenny Cassuto
Going Alt-Ac: A Guide to Alternative Academic Careers
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In this episode, I speak with Dr. Barbara Dennis of Indiana University on her new ethnography, Walking with Strangers: Critical Ethnography and Educational Promise, published in 2020 by Peter Lang Press. Walking with Strangers: Critical Ethnography and Educational Promise features the IU-Unityville Outreach Project and tells the story of a 4-year-long participatory, critical ethnography in a local United States school district. The book speaks into the contemporary conversations around immigration, Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA), and the experiences of Dreamers. The project involved a multilingual team of graduate students, educators, community members, and students who together aimed to transform school practices in order to bring about more success with transnational students who were enrolling in the district at an increasing rate. Over the span of several years, what began with a simple request for help, morphed into a rich ethnographic understanding of the complex tensions produced by monocultural and assimilationist ideals when juxtaposed with strangers. A unique and innovative feature about the book lies in that it seamlessly weaves together substantive discussions, methodological practices, and ethical challenges revolving around a transformative, social justice project. Walking with Strangers has made significant and much-needed contributions to the field of critical and social justice oriented educational research. In particular, it zooms into the complex and localized dynamics among immigrant families and students, predominantly white communities, public schools structured by white culture, and teachers unprepared for educating transnational children. The book not only sheds light on the innovative approaches through which educational researchers and educators could bring positive changes to the school life of marginalized and disadvantaged students, but also candidly reflects on the places where such efforts failed when confronting white privilege and gender oppression. Barbara Dennis is a peace and social justice activist, and critical educational ethnographer. She is a professor of qualitative inquiry in the Inquiry Methodology program at Indiana University’s, School of Education. She regularly publishes on feminist ethnography, critical participatory ethics, and methodological theory. Pengfei Zhao is a critical researcher and qualitative research methodologist based at the University of Florida. She is currently working on a book manuscript studying the coming of age experience of rural Chinese youth during and right after the Cultural Revolution. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/education
The new essay collection Food Insecurity on College Campuses edited by Katharine M. Broton and Clare L. Cady explores the widespread problem of food insecurity among college students and the overlapping and compounding issues that lead students to choose between getting enough to eat and paying the costs of a college education. As the editors make clear in the introduction to the collection, today’s college student has changed significantly from the expected “young adult, attending college full-time immediately after high school,” and the economic landscape they are dealing with is far different from what many administrators and faculty assume. Students are more likely to delay college or enter as part-time students while taking care of families or working. The essays throughout the collection describe students’ barriers to graduation as interlocking and compounding, and none of them academic. In the example of “Amarillo College: Loving Your Student from Enrollment to Graduation,” the authors concluded the top 10 reasons that students failed to complete their degrees were all financial in nature, not related to academic preparedness or ability to learn. Michael Rosen‘s essay reveals that even very small amounts of money for textbooks, car repairs, security deposits, utilities, and lab fees may derail students. The essays in the collection describe a wide range of solutions that have been tested in a variety of institutions and locations. to food insecurity from food pantries and partnerships with campus dining services to wrap-around services with social workers and emergency financial support. The editors acknowledge that supplying students with food may temporarily provide them with a meal, but these do not solve the ongoing problems of poverty. Throughout the collection, authors point time and again to the need to direct students to multiple services and resources, not just food or a check. Without significant reform in the structural inequities that keep people in poverty, these are all stop-gap measures. Katherine Broton is an assistant professor in the Department of Educational Policy and Leadership Studies and (by courtesy) the Department of Sociology at the University of Iowa. Clare Cady is the cofounder of the College and University Food Bank Alliance and Director of Research and Innovation at Single Stop. Carrie Helms Tippen is Assistant Professor of English at Chatham University in Pittsburgh, PA, where she teaches courses in American Literature. Her 2018 book, Inventing Authenticity: How Cookbook Writers Redefine Southern Identity (University of Arkansas Press), examines the rhetorical strategies that writers use to prove the authenticity of their recipes in the narrative headnotes of contemporary cookbooks. Her academic work has been published in Gastronomica, Food and Foodways, American Studies, Southern Quarterly, and Food, Culture, and Society. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/education
These are dangerous times for democracy. We live in an age of winners and losers, where the odds are stacked in favor of the already fortunate. Stalled social mobility and entrenched inequality give the lie to the American credo that you can make it if you try. The consequence is a brew of anger and frustration that has fueled populist protest and extreme polarization, and led to deep distrust of both government and our fellow citizens--leaving us morally unprepared to face the profound challenges of our time. World-renowned philosopher Michael J. Sandel argues that to overcome the crises that are upending our world, we must rethink the attitudes toward success and failure that have accompanied globalization and rising inequality. Sandel shows the hubris a meritocracy generates among the winners and the harsh judgement it imposes on those left behind, and traces the dire consequences across a wide swath of American life. He offers an alternative way of thinking about success--more attentive to the role of luck in human affairs, more conducive to an ethic of humility and solidarity, and more affirming of the dignity of work. The Tyranny of Merit: What's Become of the Common Good? (FSG, 2020) points us toward a hopeful vision of a new politics of the common good. Renee Garfinkel, Ph.D. is a psychologist, writer, Middle East television commentator and host of The New Books Network’s Van Leer Jerusalem Series on Ideas. Write her at VanLeerIdeas@gmail.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/education
Welcome to The Academic Life. You are smart and capable, but you aren’t an island, and neither are we. So we reached across our mentor network to bring you podcasts on everything from how to finish that project, to how to take care of your beautiful mind. Wish we’d bring in an expert about something? Email us at cgessler@gmail.com or dr.danamalone@gmail.com. Find us on Twitter: The Academic Life @AcademicLifeNBN. In this episode you’ll hear about: navigating academia as a STEM student, getting pregnant and parenting while still a student, and difficult decisions about dropping out or staying in academia. Our guest is: Dr. Miriam Martin, an Assistant Professor of Teaching at the University of California, Davis. She teaches high-enrollment lecture and laboratory courses and specializes in learner-focused teaching practices that promote deep learning and an inclusive, equitable learning environment. Prior to teaching at UC Davis, she taught at several community colleges and also brought science experiments into elementary schools as a volunteer. She is the mother of two children and a pun-loving microbe-enthusiast. She invites you to follow up on our conversation through Twitter (@MicrobialGurl) or LinkedIn. Your host is: Dr. Christina Gessler, a historian of women, gender, and sexuality. She is an independent scholar, and the co-creator of the Academic Life channel on New Books Network. Listeners to this episode might be interested in:
“What matters in a PhD adviser? Here’s what the research says”
“How to survive grad school with a family”
“Lactation Support Program”
“A repository of peer-reviewed research and resources discussing the challenges facing white women and men and women of color in science”
PhD Balance (Twitter @PhD_Balance)
The Versatile PhD (Twitter @VersatilePhD)
“Life in extreme heat” (about the heat-loving microbes in Yellowstone National Park)
“Stalking Caulobacter”
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The synthesizing mind is one that identifies a program or asks a question, pulls together information from across disciplines or creates new data through experimentation, and integrates everything into a novel solution or answer. Some of history’s most revolutionary thinkers – like Aristotle or Darwin – were synthesizers. But what do synthesizing minds actually do? Howard Gardner, the Hobbs Research Professor of Cognition and Education at Harvard’s Graduate School of Education, Senior Director of Harvard’s Zero Project, and author of over thirty books joins New Books in Education to talk about his latest book: A Synthesizing Mind: A Memoir from the Creator of Multiple Intelligences Theory (MIT Press, 2021). In this unique memoir, Dr. Gardner analyzes clues from his own life that helped him realize his mind worked in unique ways that are vital in today’s rapidly changing world. In this wide-ranging discussion, Gardner talks about his work creating Multiple Intelligence Theory and more recent work in ethics, as well as exploring the nature and roles of different kinds of minds. Jonathan Haber is an educational researcher and consultant working at the intersection of pedagogy, technology, and educational policy. His books include MOOCS and Critical Thinking from MIT Press and his LogicCheck project analyzes the reasoning behind the news of the day. You can read more about Jonathan’s work at http://www.jonathanhaber.org. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/education
Jonathan Zimmerman’s The Amateur Hour: A History of College Teaching in America (Johns Hopkins UP, 2020) is the first full-length history of college teaching in the United States. It explores a paradox at the heart of American higher education: while the scholarly ideal is measured in research and objective output, the practice of teaching has remained outside the bureaucratic umbrella of college and university life. Zimmerman’s book demonstrates that the idea that college teaching is in a crisis state is a complaint that is as old as American college teaching itself. The Amateur Hour illuminates American college teaching and frames a fresh case for restoring intimate learning communities, especially for America's least privileged students. Anyone who wants to change college teaching will have to start here. Lane Davis is a doctoral candidate in the Graduate Program in Religious Studies at Southern Methodist University where he studies American religious history. Find him on Twitter @TheeLaneDavis Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/education
Welcome to The Academic Life. You are smart and capable, but you aren’t an island, and neither are we. So we reached across our mentor network to bring you podcasts on everything from how to finish that project, to how to take care of your beautiful mind. Wish we’d bring in an expert about something? Email us at cgessler@gmail.com or dr.danamalone@gmail.com. Find us on Twitter : The Academic Life @AcademicLifeNBN. In this episode you’ll hear: about the limits and the breadth of the first amendment, what to do when your free speech rights are violated, why having “free speech zones” on campus doesn’t work, and what you can do when someone else’s free speech is hurtful or offensive. Our guest is Will Creeley, legal director of The Foundation for Individual Rights in Education. Will began defending student and faculty rights for FIRE in 2006 after graduating from New York University School of Law, where he served as an associate executive editor for the New York University Law Review. He is a member of the First Amendment Lawyers Association and serves as Co-Chair of the Education Subcommittee of the American Bar Association’s Section of Administrative Law and Regulatory Practice. Your host is Dr. Christina Gessler, a historian of women, gender, and sexuality. She specializes in decoding diaries written by rural women in the 19th century. She credits her ability to read nearly-illegible things to a childhood spent trying read her dad’s handwriting. Christina’s dad was a public defender; human rights and how to defend them was dinner table talk nightly. Listeners to this episode might be interested in:
First Things First: A Modern Coursebook on Free Speech Fundamentals, by Ronald K.L. Collins, Will Creeley, David L. Hudson Jr., and Jackie Farmer.
"How to Respond to Richard Spencer," by Will Creeley, The New York Times (Oct. 19, 2017).
Jim Crow Campus: Higher Education and the Struggle for a New Southern Social Order, by Joy Ann Williamson-Lott.
"Fighting for Free Speech on America’s Campuses," by Cecilia Capuzzi Simon, The New York Times (Aug. 1, 2016).
FIRE's Tips for Student Activism
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Welcome to The Academic Life. You are smart and capable, but you aren’t an island, and neither are we. So we reached across our mentor network to bring you podcasts on everything from how to finish that project, to how to take care of your beautiful mind. Wish we’d bring in an expert about something? Email us at cgessler@gmail.com or dr.danamalone@gmail.com. Find us on Twitter: The Academic Life @AcademicLifeNBN. In this episode you’ll hear: about being an imbedded journalist, the senior years of kids in LA, the importance of mentors and college counselors at school, some challenges and obstacles of getting to college, and a discussion of the book Show Them You’re Good. Our guest is: Jeff Hobbs, the author of Show Them You’re Good. Jeff graduated with a BA in English language and literature from Yale in 2002. He is also the author of The Short and Tragic Life of Robert Peace; and The Tourists. He lives in Los Angeles with his wife and two children. Your host is: Dr. Christina Gessler, a historian of women, gender, and sexuality. She specializes in decoding diaries written by rural women in the 19th century. She chose her college because it 1) had great academic programs, 2) offered her great funding, 3) was on the beach, and 4) allowed pets to live in the dorms. It was the right choice for her. Listeners to this episode might be interested in:
Substitute by Nicholson Baker
Quiet by Susan Cain
Raising Cain by Dan Kindlon, PhD and Michael Thompson, PhD
Raising Victor Vargas, a film directed by Peter Sollet
Just Like Us by Helen Thorpe
Yale's Invisible Price Tags -- Yale Daily News article by Carlos Rodriguez
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Some of America's most pressing civil rights issues--desegregation, equal educational and employment opportunities, housing discrimination, and free speech--have been closely intertwined with higher education institutions. Although it is commonly known that college students and other activists, as well as politicians, actively participated in the fight for and against civil rights in the middle decades of the twentieth century, historical accounts have not adequately focused on the roles that the nation's college presidents played in the debates concerning racism. Based on archival research conducted at a range of colleges and universities across the United States, The Campus Color Line: College Presidents and the Struggle for Black Freedom (Princeton UP, 2020) sheds light on the important place of college presidents in the struggle for racial parity. Focusing on the period between 1948 and 1968, Eddie Cole shows how college presidents, during a time of violence and unrest, strategically, yet often silently, initiated and shaped racial policies and practices inside and outside of the educational sphere. With courage and hope, as well as malice and cruelty, college presidents positioned themselves--sometimes precariously--amid conflicting interests and demands. Black college presidents challenged racist policies as their students demonstrated in the streets against segregation, while presidents of major universities lobbied for urban renewal programs that displaced Black communities near campus. Some presidents amended campus speech practices to accommodate white supremacist speakers, even as other academic leaders developed the nation's first affirmative action programs in higher education. The Campus Color Line illuminates how the legacy of academic leaders' actions continues to influence the unfinished struggle for Black freedom and racial equity in education and beyond. Marshall Poe is the founder and editor of the New Books Network. He can be reached at marshallpoe@newbooksnetwork.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/education
New York City's Lower East Side has witnessed a severe decline in its Jewish population in recent decades, yet every morning in the big room of the city's oldest yeshiva, students still gather to study the Talmud beneath the great arched windows facing out onto East Broadway. In Yeshiva Days: Learning on the Lower East Side (Princeton University Press, 2020), Jonathan Boyarin presents a uniquely personal account of the year he spent as both student and observer at Mesivtha Tifereth Jerusalem, and a poignant chronicle of a side of Jewish life that outsiders rarely see. Boyarin explores the yeshiva's relationship with the neighborhood, the city, and Jewish and American culture more broadly, and brings vividly to life its routines, rituals, and rhythms. He describes the compelling and often colorful personalities he encounters each day, and introduces readers to the Rosh Yeshiva, or Rebbi, the moral and intellectual head of the yeshiva. Boyarin reflects on the tantalizing meanings of "study for its own sake" in the intellectually vibrant world of traditional rabbinic learning, and records his fellow students' responses to his negotiation of the daily complexities of yeshiva life while he also conducts anthropological fieldwork. A richly mature work by a writer of uncommon insight, wit, and honesty, Yeshiva Days is the story of a place on the Lower East Side with its own distinctive heritage and character, a meditation on the enduring power of Jewish tradition and learning, and a record of a different way of engaging with time and otherness. Jonathan Boyarin is the Diann G. and Thomas A. Mann Professor of Modern Jewish Studies at Cornell University. His books include Jewish Families, Mornings at the Stanton Street Shul: A Summer on the Lower East Side, and The Unconverted Self: Jews, Indians, and the Identity of Christian Europe. Schneur Zalman Newfield is an Assistant Professor of Sociology at Borough of Manhattan Community College, City University of New York, and the author of Degrees of Separation: Identity Formation While Leaving Ultra-Orthodox Judaism (Temple University Press, 2020). Visit him online at ZalmanNewfield.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/education
In this episode, I speak with Matt Rafalow, about his book, Digital Divisions: How Schools Create Inequality in the Tech Era (University of Chicago Press, 2020). This book provides an ethnographic study of students and teachers at three Los Angeles schools utilizing instructional technology. We discuss the role of play in learning, how disciplinary dispositions are influenced by race and class, and how the prevalence ed tech can reinforce existing social heirarchies. His recommended books included the following:
Teachers and Machines: Classroom Use of Technology Since 1920 by Larry Cuban (Teachers' College Press, 1986)
Learning to Labor: How Working Class Kids Get Working Class Jobs by Paul Willis and Stanley Aronowitz (Columbia University Press, 1981)
Keepin' It Real: School Success Beyond Black and White: Why School Success Has No Color by Prudence L. Carter (Oxford University Press, 2005)
Trevor Mattea is an educational consultant and speaker. His areas of expertise include deeper learning, parent involvement, project-based learning, and technology integration. He can be reached by email at info@trevormattea.com or on Twitter at @tsmattea. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/education
Listen to this interview of Shyam Sharma, author of Writing Support for International Graduate Students: Enhancing Transition and Success (Routledge, 2020). We talk about international students and rhetoric, international students and confidence, international students and community-based programming, and vision. Interviewer : "Could you give an example for how teachers can foster agency among international students?" Shyam Sharma : "Let's say you walk into a class and you ask, 'How do people greet in a formal academic setting.' If you say, 'How do people greet in a formal academic setting, in your local community' –– Just add that phrase at the end –– what happens is that the Chinese student versus the American student versus the Brazilian student get to share their ideas about how people (in English, of course), about how people greet each other formally. But by giving them a platform where their ideas can be brought in order to explore, that allows many of things, one being to set the terms of engagement which are, then, not my terms and you are the foreigner. Instead, at least it's a starting point. It allows the student to create these different terms of engagement on their own." Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/education
Listen to this interview of Helen Sword, author of Stylish Academic Writing (Harvard UP, 2012). We talk about bad writing, but a lot more about how to make it good. There's even a dog. Interviewer : "What is it that keeps most students and then, too, many early-career academics away from making the effort to write well?" Helen Sword : "Writing is seen as this utilitarian thing. You've got to learn it. It's got lots of rules. If you get things wrong, somebody's going to put red ink on there or red tracked changes or whatever. There's a lot of emotional baggage tied up with the hard work of writing well, and yet when I interviewed successful academic writers, what I heard over and over again, was about the pleasures that they take in the hard work of the craft. And that's where, for me, I link the pleasures of writing well back to stylish academic writing, to the craft of writing well. Those two things have got to go hand in hand to be a long-term sustainable kind of enterprise." Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/education
Listen to this interview of Jo Mackiewicz, author of Writing Center Talk over Time: A Mixed-Method Study (Routledge 2018). We talk about talk, tutor talk, student talk, spoken written-language, and Wisconsin. interviewer : "Now, this is pretty much something that a writing center is aiming for, isn't it? I mean, you don't want that––just as in the classroom with the teacher––you don't want that the writing tutor is doing all of the talking, do you?" Jo Mackiewicz : "Oh, yeah. One of the biggest goals of the writing center tutor is to try to get the student to talk. Because there's a great tendency for students to backchannel, to show they're understanding––and of course, that's their role and it makes sense that they would do that. But what a tutor wants to try to do, in the best case, is to get them to start talking, to try to start putting words together themselves, to try to reshape their words, to try to orally shape the words that would go in their papers." Daniel Shea, heads Scholarly Communications, a Special Series on the New Books Network. Daniel is Director of the Writing Program at Heidelberg University, Germany. Just write Daniel.Shea@zsl.uni-heidelberg.de Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/education
Welcome to The Academic Life. You are smart and capable, but you aren’t an island, and neither are we. So we reached across our own mentor networks to bring you podcasts on everything from how to finish that project, to how to take care of your beautiful mind. Wish we’d bring in an expert about something? Email us at cgessler@gmail.com or dr.danamalone@gmail.com. Find us on Twitter : The Academic Life @AcademicLifeNBN. In this episode you’ll hear: what happens when graduate school doesn’t go as you’d planned, and what happens to your degree and your career if you leave school before you complete your PhD. Our guest is: Rev. Rebecca Duke-Barton, a United Methodist pastor. She has a Master of Divinity from Wesley Theological Seminary, and was A.B.D. at Emory University before leaving the program. She has taught at Andrew College, and served as pastor in four United Methodist Churches. She also serves as president of the Georgia United Methodist Commission on Higher Education & Collegiate Ministry. Your host is: Dr. Christina Gessler, a historian. She specializes in diaries written by rural women in the 19th century. She credits her ability to read nearly-illegible things to her childhood spent trying read her dad’s handwriting. In high school she was trained in peer mentor programs; as an undergrad she worked in her campus Writing Center; while pursuing her Ph.D. she developed and ran a Mentor Program for graduate students. She met Rev. Rebecca Duke-Barton when they were both graduate students, and they’ve been friends ever since. Christina supports her work-life balance by taking photos in nature, which you can find at here. Listeners to this episode might be interested in:
Me, Myself, and Bob: A True Story About Dreams, God, and Talking Vegetables by Phil Vischer
Leaving Church: A Memoir of Faith by Barbara Brown Taylor
Let Your Life Speak: Listening for the Voice of Vocation by Parker Palmer
The Gifts of Imperfection by Brene Brown
CareerShifters
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The pelvic exam is considered a fundamental procedure for medical students to learn; it is also often the one of the first times where medical students are required to touch a real human being in a professional manner. In Feeling Medicine: How the Pelvic Exam Shapes Medical Training (NYU Press, 2020), Kelly Underman gives us a look inside these gynecological teaching programs, showing how they embody the tension between scientific thought and human emotion in medical education. Drawing on interviews with medical students, faculty, and the people who use their own bodies to teach this exam, Underman offers the first in-depth examination of this essential, but seldom discussed, aspect of medical education. Through studying, teaching, and learning about the pelvic exam, she contrasts the technical and emotional dimensions of learning to be a physician. Ultimately, Feeling Medicine explores what it means to be a good doctor in the twenty-first century, particularly in an era of corporatized healthcare. Claire Clark is a medical educator, historian of medicine, and associate professor in the University of Kentucky’s College of Medicine. She teaches and writes about health behavior in historical context. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/education
What do university presses do? And how do they contributed to public discourse? November 9 is the beginning of University Press Week, and today I had the honor of talking to Niko Pfund, the president of the Association of University Presses and the head of Oxford University Press. In the interview, we discuss the work of university presses and their value to the production of knowledge and a vibrant exchange of ideas. We also talked about the challenges UPs face generally and in the time of COVID. Pfund began his career at Oxford University Press (OUP) in New York in 1987 as an editorial assistant in law and social science before moving to NYU Press as an editor in 1990. He served as editor in chief at NYU before becoming director in 1996 and returned to Oxford in 2000 as its academic publisher. Currently he is responsible for the development of OUP’s acquisitions and editorial program for research books and reference, as well as for the management of the its North American offices. Marshall Poe is the founder and editor of the New Books Network. He can be reached at marshallpoe@newbooksnetwork.com Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/education
Are robots going to be our overlords? In Human Work in the Age of Smart Machines (RosettaBooks, 2020), Jamie Merisotis says they don't have to be. We can make them our friends. Jamie Merisotis is a globally recognized leader in philanthropy, education, and public policy. Since 2008, he’s served as president and CEO of Lumina Foundation, an independent, private foundation committed to making opportunities for learning beyond high school available to all. Jamie previously served as co-founder and president of the nonpartisan, D.C.-based Institute for Higher Education Policy. This episode covers the need to link ongoing learning and work in a virtuous cycle that provides workers with both meaning and stability. It addresses the challenges of the 4th Industrial Revolution and how in the new people-centered economy it’s important to develop those flexible skills and capabilities that will enable workers to distinguish themselves from what automation and artificial intelligence is capable of. Dan Hill, PhD, is the author of eight books and leads Sensory Logic, Inc. (https://www.sensorylogic.com). To check out his related “Dan Hill’s EQ Spotlight” blog, visit https://emotionswizard.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/education
Welcome to The Academic Life. You are smart and capable, but you’re not an island, and neither are we. So, we are reaching across our own contacts – and beyond - to bring you podcasts on everything from how to finish that project to how to take care of your beautiful mind. Want to hear a particular expert or topic? Email your ideas to cgessler@gmail.com or dr.danamalone@gmail.com or DM us on Twitter @AcademicLifeNBN. In this episode, you’ll hear: our paths to college and graduate school, and the instructive moments along the way, why you might need a mentor (or two or three) to accomplish your goals, and how this channel offers a virtual community for your journey – in, out, or through – academia. Your co-host is: Dr. Dana Malone, a scholar and practitioner energized by facilitating meaningful learning experiences for students and educators alike. She loves connecting with kindred academic spirits, like Christina, and collaborating on inspiring projects. When she’s not having engaging conversations on TAL podcast, she writes, teaches, and works with institutions on a contract basis. Her specialty areas include student cultures, the intersection of gender, sexuality, and religious identities as well as student success, assessment and evaluation, and strategic planning. She provides invited talks on her book, From Single to Serious. Dana is also known for kitchen dance parties, wandering the Jersey shore, and crushing hills on her spin bike. Check out more: www.danammalone.com. Your other co-host is: Dr. Christina Gessler, a historian. She specializes in decoding diaries written by rural women in the 19th century. She credits her ability to read nearly-illegible things to a childhood spent trying read her dad’s handwriting. In high school she was trained in peer mentor programs; as an undergrad she worked in her campus Writing Center; while pursuing her Ph.D. she developed and ran a Mentor Program for graduate students. She enjoys presenting history in nontraditional forms, like creating photography exhibits about the fields and farms that are no longer in use, and nonfiction poems about the intersection of nature and history. She met Dr. Dana Malone when she interviewed her for an episode on the NBN Gender Channel, and they’ve been friends ever since. Christina supports her work-life balance by taking photos in nature, which you can find at: https://www.facebook.com/themeditationwalks/ Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/education
A number of curious communities sprang up across the United States in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century: simulated cities, states, and nations in which children played the roles of legislators, police officers, bankers, journalists, shopkeepers, and other adults. They performed real work—passing laws, growing food, and constructing buildings, among other tasks—inside virtual worlds. In States of Childhood: From the Junior Republic to the American Republic, 1895-1945 (MIT Press, 2020), Jennifer Light examines the phenomena of “junior republics” and argues that they marked the transition to a new kind of “sheltered” childhood for American youth. Banished from the labor force and public life, children inhabited worlds that mirrored the one they had left. Light describes the invention of junior republics as independent institutions and how they were later established at schools, on playgrounds, in housing projects, and on city streets, as public officials discovered children's role playing helped their bottom line. The junior republic movement aligned with cutting-edge developmental psychology and educational philosophy, and complemented the era's fascination with models and miniatures, shaping educational and recreational programs across the nation. Light's account of how earlier generations distinguished "real life" from role playing reveals a hidden history of child labor in America and offers insights into the deep roots of such contemporary concepts as gamification, play labor, and virtuality. Jennifer S. Light is the Department Head of the Program in Science, Technology, and Society and a Professor of the History of Science and of Urban Studies and Planning at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Nushelle de Silva is a PhD candidate in the Department of Architecture at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Her work examines museums and exhibitions, and how the dissemination of visual culture is politically mediated by international organizations in the twentieth century. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/education
Listen to this interview of Kit Nicholls, Director of Cooper Union Center for Writing. We talk about writing, thinking, the university, and what everyone cares about. Interviewer : "That's the key, and the sense that I get from many students, and even also from faculty, when it comes to the point that they're writing up their results––well, it's basically, this is just a necessity, a thing that's just sort of got to be got around, got through. But if you can actually provide them with the view that the writing is the research, that you're doing your research right now as well. Or even if you can get them to drop the 'as well' and say, 'I'm doing my research still.'" Kit Nicholls : "Yeah, it's not like you do sort of all this prior work and then you sit down and write. That's a surefire way to produce some pretty terrible writing. It's much better to write your way through, which is exactly why the Center for Writing offers ongoing sessions, because otherwise students almost automatically come to the assumption that the Center of Writing is a place you come only when you've got an assignment to finish. It sends the message that writing is just a thing you do at the end. But anyone who seriously writes knows that writing is this long, complicated process." The interviewer, Daniel Shea, heads the podcast series Scholarly Communication, where the world of research publishing is brought to your ears. Daniel is Director of the Writing Program at Heidelberg University, Germany. Just write Daniel.Shea@zsl.uni-heidelberg.de Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/education
Some of America’s most pressing civil rights issues—desegregation, equal educational and employment opportunities, housing discrimination, and free speech—have been closely intertwined with higher education institutions. Although it is commonly known that college students and other activists, as well as politicians, actively participated in the fight for and against civil rights in the middle decades of the twentieth century, historical accounts have not adequately focused on the roles that the nation’s college presidents played in the debates concerning racism. Based on archival research conducted at a range of colleges and universities across the United States, The Campus Color Line: College Presidents and the Struggle for Black Freedom (Princeton UP, 2020) sheds light on the important place of college presidents in the struggle for racial parity. Focusing on the period between 1948 and 1968, Eddie Cole shows how college presidents, during a time of violence and unrest, strategically, yet often silently, initiated and shaped racial policies and practices inside and outside of the educational sphere. With courage and hope, as well as malice and cruelty, college presidents positioned themselves—sometimes precariously—amid conflicting interests and demands. Black college presidents challenged racist policies as their students demonstrated in the streets against segregation, while presidents of major universities lobbied for urban renewal programs that displaced Black communities near campus. Some presidents amended campus speech practices to accommodate white supremacist speakers, even as other academic leaders developed the nation’s first affirmative action programs in higher education. The Campus Color Line examines how the legacy of academic leaders’ actions continues to influence the unfinished struggle for Black freedom and racial equity in education and beyond. Eddie Cole is Associate Professor of Higher Education and Organizational Change at UCLA. Matthew Johnson is Associate Professor of History at Texas Tech University and author of Undermining Racial Justice: How One University Embraced Inclusion and Inequality. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/education
Transforming Ethos: Place and the Material in Rhetoric and Writing (Utah State UP, 2020) approaches writing studies from the rhetorical flank, the flank which, for many, is the only flank the discipline has. However, at a time when universities are optimizing structurally and streamlining pedagogically, the book must plead the case for a university where character is formed. Now that writing studies has shouldered up to its other disciplinary and institutional neighbors, composition instructors need to begin asking themselves tough questions about administration, teaching, and assessment, and perhaps more importantly, composition instructors need to begin providing answers. Rosanne Carlo provides answers, answers which spring from the New Rhetoric, from the writings of Jim Corder, from ethos as a gathering place for community, from kairos, chora, and from many another well found and well placed theoretical tool turned to her overriding purpose of teaching writing and teaching rhetoric as a way of life. Scholarly Communication is the podcast series about how knowledge gets known. Scholarly Communication adheres to the principle that research improves when scholars better understand their role as communicators. Give scholars more opportunities to learn about publishing, and scholars will communicate their research better. The interviewer, Daniel Shea, heads Scholarly Communication, a Special Series on the New Books Network. Daniel is Director of the Writing Program at Heidelberg University, Germany. Just write writingprogram@zsl.uni-heidelberg.de Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/education
Do you teach, or do you care about education? Then you have to read this book. At turns radical in the interventions it proposes in educational practice, at turns perspicacious in the views it opens on the act of teaching, at turns inspirational in the words it drops in the teacher's ear, Syllabus: The Remarkable, Unremarkable Document that Changes Everything (Princeton UP, 2020) belongs in every teacher's hand, as well as in the hands of many an administrator and policymaker. William Germano's and Kit Nicholls's idea to tag an entire pedagogy to one single document is brilliant, and it's brilliant because the document deserves the attention. As any college instructor and also many high school teachers will know, the syllabus kicks off the academic season, fills in as the rulebook and the referee, and presents that scoreboard of disciplinary knowledge called the reading list. William Germano and Kit Nicholls have much to say about all these functions of one remarkable and unremarkable document, much that is new and much that was already there but has now been put in new light; and more importantly, William Germano and Kit Nicholls say much, much more. In fact, every line of the syllabus becomes for them an opportunity to consider and discuss just what teachers want and (more to the point) just what their students want. Aligning these two in the interests of learners is one of the books many achievements. The book is not a how-to guide because, like all good books about such essentially human activities as parenting or writing or (as here) teaching and learning, Syllabus takes the wide view and Syllabus covers all the details: collaboration and community, schedules and heightened moments of learning, the citizen of the classroom, the optimal assignment, and the studied improvisation required to the teacher who would learn together with a classroom of students. These are just a few of William Germano's and Kit Nicholls's concerns in their book Syllabus, a book about what teaching looks like when teaching turns into learning. Daniel Shea heads Scholarly Communication, a Special Series on the New Books Network. Daniel is Director of the Writing Program at Heidelberg University, Germany. Just write writingprogram@zsl.uni-heidelberg.de Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/education
Dr. Christopher Harris (@chrisharris) is a neuroscientist, engineer and educator at the EdTech company Backyard Brains. He is principal investigator on an NIH-funded project to develop brain-based robots for neuroscience education. In their recent open-access research paper, Dr. Harris and his team describe, and present results from, their classroom-based pilots of this new and highly innovative approach to neuroscience and STEM education. They argue that neurorobotics has enormous potential as an education technology, because it combines multiple activities with clear educational benefits including neuroscience, active learning, and robotics. Dr. Harris did his undergraduate degree in Psychology and Philosophy at the University of Warwick, where he developed his life-long love of the brain. For his graduate work at the University of Sussex and subsequent postdoctoral work at the National Institutes of Health he applied electrophysiological, optical and computational techniques to construct cellular-resolution maps of large and diverse neural circuits. He is particularly interested in reward-system, visual system, and central motor pattern generator circuits. Dr. John Griffiths (@neurodidact) is an Assistant Professor at the University of Toronto, and Head of Whole Brain Modelling at the CAMH Krembil Centre for Neuroinformatics. His research group (www.grifflab.com) works at the intersection of computational neuroscience and neuroimaging, building simulations of human brain activity aimed at improving the understanding and treatment of neuropsychiatric and neurological illness. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/education
Kathryne M. Young, an Assistant Professor of Sociology at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, has written a combination of a sociological study and self-help book about and for American law school students. In How to Be Sort of Happy in Law School (Stanford UP, 2018), Dr. Young surveyed over 1,100 then-current law students, 250 alumni, and conducted detailed interviews with law students about their experiences in law school and concerns about pedagogy, other students, law professors, and hopes and fears about school and their future careers. Young’s work reveals the diversity of types of people and personalities who attend law school and how remarkably similar their experiences are, ranging from the most selective schools to the least. She reveals the varieties of perspectives and coping mechanisms used by students to grapple with the challenges of legal education. Dr. Young also includes much of her own impressions from when she was a law student at Stanford. Her perspectives and the responses of her subjects allow the book to also serve as a kind of self-help book for law students and anyone contemplating law school. In this interview, she discusses her sources, the current state of legal education and law students, and her hopes for reforms in legal education. Ian J. Drake is an Associate Professor of Political Science and Law at Montclair State University. His scholarly interests include American legal and constitutional history and political theory. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/education
Every fall on move-in day, parents tearfully bid farewell to their beloved sons and daughters at college dormitories: it is an age-old ritual. The residence hall has come to mark the threshold between childhood and adulthood, housing young people during a transformational time in their lives. Whether a Gothic stone pile, a quaint Colonial box, or a concrete slab, the dormitory is decidedly unhomelike, yet it takes center stage in the dramatic arc of many American families. This richly illustrated book examines the architecture of dormitories in the United States from the eighteenth century to 1968, asking fundamental questions: Why have American educators believed for so long that housing students is essential to educating them? And how has architecture validated that idea? Living on Campus: An Architectural History of the American Dormitory (University of Minnesota Press, 2019) is the first architectural history of this critical building type. Grounded in extensive archival research, Carla Yanni’s study highlights the opinions of architects, professors, and deans, and also includes the voices of students. For centuries, academic leaders in the United States asserted that on-campus living enhanced the moral character of youth; that somewhat dubious claim nonetheless influenced the design and planning of these ubiquitous yet often overlooked campus buildings. Through nuanced architectural analysis and detailed social history, Yanni offers unexpected glimpses into the past: double-loaded corridors (which made surveillance easy but echoed with noise), staircase plans (which prevented roughhousing but offered no communal space), lavish lounges in women’s halls (intended to civilize male visitors), specially designed upholstered benches for courting couples, mixed-gender saunas for students in the radical 1960s, and lazy rivers for the twenty-first century’s stressed-out undergraduates. Against the backdrop of sweeping societal changes, communal living endured because it bolstered networking, if not studying. Housing policies often enabled discrimination according to class, race, and gender, despite the fact that deans envisioned the residence hall as a democratic alternative to the elitist fraternity. Yanni focuses on the dormitory as a place of exclusion as much as a site of fellowship, and considers the uncertain future of residence halls in the age of distance learning. Bryan Toepfer, AIA, NCARB, CAPM is the Principal Architect for TOEPFER Architecture, PLLC, an Architecture firm specializing in Residential Architecture and Virtual Reality. He has authored two books, “Contractors CANNOT Build Your House,” and “Six Months Now, ARCHITECT for Life.” He is a professor at Alfred State College and the Director of Education for the AIA Rochester Board of Directors. Always eager to help anyone understand the world of Architecture, he can be reached by sending an email to btoepfer@toepferarchitecture. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/education
The updated paperback edition of Hate: Why We Should Resist it With Free Speech, Not Censorship (Oxford University Press) dispels misunderstandings plaguing our perennial debates about "hate speech vs. free speech," showing that the First Amendment approach promotes free speech and democracy, equality, and societal harmony. As "hate speech" has no generally accepted definition, we hear many incorrect assumptions that it is either absolutely unprotected or absolutely protected from censorship. Rather, U.S. law allows government to punish hateful or discriminatory speech in specific contexts when it directly causes imminent serious harm. Yet, government may not punish such speech solely because its message is disfavored, disturbing, or vaguely feared to possibly contribute to some future harm. "Hate speech" censorship proponents stress the potential harms such speech might further: discrimination, violence, and psychic injuries. However, there has been little analysis of whether censorship effectively counters the feared injuries. Citing evidence from many countries, this book shows that "hate speech" are at best ineffective and at worst counterproductive. Therefore, prominent social justice advocates worldwide maintain that the best way to resist hate and promote equality is not censorship, but rather, vigorous "counterspeech" and activism. New York Law School professor Nadine Strossen, the immediate past President of the American Civil Liberties Union (1991-2008), is a leading expert and frequent speaker/media commentator on constitutional law and civil liberties, who has testified before Congress on multiple occasions. Arya Hariharan is a lawyer in politics. She spends much of her time working on congressional investigations and addressing challenges to the rule of law. You can reach her via email or Twitter. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/education
“Consider the works of the renowned Nobel-prize-winning African American writer, literary and social critic, and activist Toni Morrison (b. 1931),” writes Majid Daneshgar. “Hers—like Said’s—are popular in the West and cover most of the principal themes covered by Orientalism, including otherness, outsider-ship, exploitation and cultural colonialism and imperialism. Yet … one would be hard-pressed to find, for instance, even a free publisher’s copy of Morrison’s essay The Origin of Others, in translation or not, on the bookshelf of one of the Muslim academy’s experts on Islam or history, or politics, or sociology.” With this provocative introductory passage to set the stage for his book, Studying the Qur’an in the Muslim Academy (Oxford University Press), Majid Daneshgar invites his readers on a journey exploring how the Muslim academy—that is, academic institutions in the Muslim-majority world—teaches Islamic Studies, with an emphasis on the Qur’an. Through his personal experience and scholarly endeavors spanning Southeast Asia, the Middle East, and Europe, Daneshgar illuminates how Qur’anic and Islamic Studies in the Muslim academy are inevitably circumscribed and delimited by political and polemical agendas—with special attention paid to how Edward Said’s Orientalism is marshaled toward these effort—thus offering only selective readings of the Qur’anic text and wider Islamic source material. In addition, he also shows how such agendas even color intra-Muslim engagement across sectarian and national lines. Daneshgar offers alternative approaches—drawing from both theory and philology—and argues that bringing theories and methods from both the Western academy and the Muslim academy into more constructive dialogue with each other will advance—not hinder—intellectual and public engagement with Islam and the Qur’an. In our increasingly global and interconnected world, we can settle for no less. Majid Daneshgar, Ph.D. is a Research Associate at the Orientalisches Seminar, University of Freiburg, Germany. Asad Dandia is a graduate student of Islamic Studies at Columbia University. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/education
In this episode, I speak with fellow New Books in Education host, Jonathan Haber, about his book, Critical Thinking (The MIT Press, 2020). This book explains the widely-discussed but often ill-defined concept of critical thinking, including its history and role in a democratic society. We discuss the important role critical thinking plays in making decisions and communicating our ideas to others as well as the most effective ways teachers can help their students become critical thinkers. Haber oversees the projects, Critical Voter, LogicCheck, and Degree of Freedom, and can be reached at jonathan@degreeoffreedom.org. His recommended resources included the following:
Thank You for Arguing, Fourth Edition: What Aristotle, Lincoln, and Homer Simpson Can Teach Us About the Art of Persuasion by Jay Heinrichs (Broadway Books, 2020)
Think Again I: How to Understand Arguments
Critical Thinker Academy
The Dream of Reason: A History of Western Philosophy from the Greeks to the Renaissance by Anthony Gottlieb (W. W. Norton & Company, 2016)
Trevor Mattea is an educational consultant and speaker. His areas of expertise include deeper learning, parent involvement, project-based learning, and technology integration. He can be reached by email at tsmattea@pm.me or on Twitter at @tsmattea. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/education
In this episode, I speak with Federico R. Waitoller about his book, Excluded by Choice: Urban Students with Disabilities in the Education Marketplace (Teachers College Press). This book highlights the challenges faced by students of color who have special needs and their parents who evaluate their educational options. We discuss the services to which students with disabilities are entitled, how they are manifested in neighborhood and charter schools, and how they may be in tension with practices sometimes found in schools marketing themselves based on high test scores and college enrollment numbers. You can follow him on Twitter at @Waitollerf. His recommended books included the following:
Ghosts in the Schoolyard: Racism and School Closings on Chicago's South Side by Eve L. Ewing (University of Chicago Press, 2018)
Culturally Sustaining Pedagogies: Teaching and Learning for Justice in a Changing World by Djano Paris and H. Samy Alim (Teachers College Press, 2017)
Savage Inequalities: Children in America's Schools by Jonathan Kozol (Broadway Books, 2012)
Federico R. Waitoller is an associate professor in the department of special education at the University of Illinois at Chicago. Trevor Mattea is an educational consultant and speaker. His areas of expertise include deeper learning, parent involvement, project-based learning, and technology integration. He can be reached by email at tsmattea@pm.me or on Twitter at @tsmattea. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/education
Teaching world history surveys can be a nightmare! How on Earth is anyone supposed to cover so much information from all over the world and from so many different time periods? It can be nothing short of overwhelming. But fear not, listeners! Professor David Eaton has a strategy to stay sane and make the class more accessible to your students. Instead of following the “laundry list” approach of covering everything under the sun, he suggests using selected case studies to illustrate key concepts. In his World History through Case Studies: Historical Skills in Practice (Bloomsbury Academic, 2019), he holds that mastering these concepts will build the critical thinking skills essential to a historian. While World History through Case Studies could be used in the classroom, the real target audience is world history teachers who wanted to make their courses more successful. In our conversation, Dr. Eaton discusses the book and offers his thoughts on the field of world history. We also get into some of his case studies, which range from the history of yoga to the domestication of cattle and from human sacrifice in Mesoamerica to genocide in Poland. There is something for everyone in this discussion. Dr. David Eaton is an Associate Professor at Grand Valley State University. Along with Matt Drwenski, Dr. Eaton hosts “On Top of the World” Michael G. Vann is a professor of world history at California State University, Sacramento. A specialist in imperialism and the Cold War in Southeast Asia, he is the author of The Great Hanoi Rat Hunt: Empires, Disease, and Modernity in French Colonial Vietnam (Oxford, 2018). When he’s not quietly reading or happily talking about new books with smart people, Mike can be found surfing in Santa Cruz, California. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/education
As a teenager visiting the Andy Warhol Museum, Beth Pickens realized the importance of making art. As an adult, she has dedicated her life to empowering working artists. Intimate yet practical, Your Art Will Save Your Life (The Feminist Press at CUNY) helps artists build a sustainable practice while navigating the world of MFAs, residencies, and institutional funding. Beth Pickens is a Los Angeles-based consultant for artists and arts organizations. She provides career consultation, grant writing, fundraising, and financial, project, and strategic planning services for clients across the US. Before relocating to Los Angeles in 2014, Pickens was based in San Francisco and served as Senior Program Manager at Yerba Buena Center for the Arts and Managing Director of both RADAR Productions and the Queer Cultural Center. Dr. Christina Gessler’s background is in women’s history, literature, and anthropology. She works as a historian, poet, and photographer. In seeking the extraordinary in the ordinary, Gessler writes the histories of largely unknown women, poems about small relatable moments, and takes many, many photos in nature. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/education
Despite stereotypes of colleges and universities still stuck in the age of the blackboard and sage-on-stage lectures, a quiet revolution has been taking place on America’s campuses led by a diverse group of learning innovators. Digital technology is one catalyst for this “turn to learning,” but professionals leading the charge include instructional designers, media specialists, and experts in data analytics – as well as technologists - working in conjunction with faculty and administrators to transform higher education. Joshua Kim, Director of Online Programs and Strategies at the Dartmouth Center for the Advancement of Learning, and Edward Maloney, Professor of English and Director of the Center for New Designs in Learning and Scholarship at Georgetown, document major transformations at colleges and universities that have been quietly taking place, even amidst noise about crisis and disruption, in their new book Learning Innovation and the Future of Higher Education (Johns Hopkins UP, 2020), Kim and Maloney were also behind the influential Inside Higher Education series 15 Scenarios for Higher Education that describes the various ways colleges and universities might open in the face of the COVID-19 threat, a series that was just compiled into a new book (introduced on today’s podcast!) called The Low-Density University. Jonathan Haber is an educational researcher and consultant working at the intersection of pedagogy, technology, and educational policy. His books include MOOCS and Critical Thinking from MIT Press and his LogicCheck project analyzes the reasoning behind the news of the day. You can read more about Jonathan’s work at http://www.degreeoffreedom.org. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/education
Debates about Ethnic Studies in K-12 and Higher Education have highlighted the importance of culturally inclusive pedagogy in schools. Despite discussions about Ethnic Studies, there is a more extended history of Mexican-origin people pushing for culturally responsive education. In Reading, Writing, and Revolution: Escuelitas and the Emergence of a Mexican American Identity in Texas (University of Texas Press, 2020), historian Philis M. Barragán-Goetz argues that through cultural negotiation, escuelitas (community schools) shaped Mexican American identity and civil rights activism in the late 19th and early 20th century. Barragán Goetz weaves in oral histories, government documents, newspapers, and archival sources to demonstrate the power in grassroots organizing for educational justice in Texas. She debunks a popular myth that Mexican Americans have not cared for education throughout history. Barragán Goetz writes that the progressive education movement in the late 19th century was not all that progressive if we examine the lived experienced of Mexican-origin people. Activists such as Idar Family, Villegas de Magnon, Maria Villarreal, Maria Renteria, and many involved in the two main Mexican American civil rights organizations of the time provided a foundation for Latina/os to be part of the fight for educational inclusion in the 20th century. Reading, Writing, and Revolution is not merely a book about educational history; it is a trailblazing study on how Mexican Americans have relied on any tools available to create a more inclusive educational system for themselves and their community. Philis M. Barragán Goetz is an Assistant Professor of History at Texas A&M University - San Antonio. She earned her Ph.D. from the University of Texas at Austin. She can be found on Twitter: @philismaria Tiffany Jasmin González, Ph.D. is the Postdoctoral Fellow in Women’s History at the Newcomb Institute of Tulane University. You can follow Tiffany on Twitter @T_J_Gonzalez Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/education
Even before the Covid-19 pandemic, boosters of digital educational technologies emphasized that these platforms are vital tools for cultivating global citizenship, connecting students across borders, and creating a participatory learning environment. In Bring the World to the Child: Technologies of Global Citizenship in American Education (MIT Press), Katie Day Good amply illustrates that there is little new about these promises of tech-enhanced education. She demonstrates that already at the turn of the twentieth century, education reformers and technology entrepreneurs promoted emerging media as the necessary tools for preparing America’s children for a century of movement, interconnection, and rapid change. Good examines the promulgation of both hi-tech gadgets, such as lantern slides and stereoscopes, and low-tech innovations that reformers believed would open the wide world to children’s senses and liberate them from provincial ignorance. Good’s analytical focus is on how these purportedly cosmopolitan technological applications served to strengthen American power on the world stage and masked, reinforced, and excused domestic racial and ethnic disparities instead of confronting them. Bring the World to the Child is a thought-provoking and necessary read for anyone concerned about how the present necessity of online instruction exacerbates inequalities in education and technological access. Katie Day Good is Assistant Professor in the Department of Media, Journalism, and Film at Miami University in Oxford, Ohio. Lance C. Thurner teaches history at Rutgers Newark. His research and writing address the production of knowledge, political subjectivities, and racial and national identities in eighteenth and nineteenth-century Mexico. He is broadly interested in the pedagogical applications of the digital humanities and the methods and politics of applying a global perspective to the history of science and medicine. More at http://empiresprogeny.org. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/education
What does it take to both fit in and yet also prosper and grow as a person in the workplace? In today's interview, I discuss this question and others with noted psychologist Arthur B. Markman. Markman is a professor of Psychology and Marketing at the University of Texas at Austin, where he also runs the university’s Human Dimensions of Organizations program. Besides his books, Art writes blogs for Psychology Today and Fast Company, and has a radio show/podcast called Two Guys on Your Head. Topics covered in this episode include:
The emotions that often get exhibited in relation to each of the Big 5 traits of Openness, Conscientiousness, Extraversion, Agreeableness and Neuroticism – as well as how a “dream team” working on a special project will embody a variety of those traits.
What it means to be a boss who punishes negligence instead of failure.
What are the kinds of signals you should be alert to in a job interview in order to get a grasp on what kind of corporate culture you might be stepping into.
Dan Hill, PhD, is the author of eight books and leads Sensory Logic, Inc. (https://www.sensorylogic.com). To check out his “Faces of the Week” blog, visit https://emotionswizard.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/education
In The Great Mistake: How We Wrecked Public Universities and How We Can Fix Them (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2016), Christopher Newfield diagnoses what he sees as a crisis in American public higher education. He argues that since roughly the 1980s, American public universities have entered into a devolutionary cycle of defunding brought about by privatization. The influence of private sector practices on public higher education, Newfield argues, has fundamentally shifted the view of higher education in American society from a public good to a private good. Despite this bleak assessment, Newfield’s book provides a roadmap for how to fix this crisis in public higher education. A central component of his plan is recognizing the university as a public good by acknowledging its wide range of benefits to society and democracy more generally. Newfield’s book will interest scholars from many disciplines, including higher education, U.S. political history, and the history of inequality in America. Christopher Newfield is a professor of literature and American studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara. Steven P. Rodriguez is a PhD candidate in history at Vanderbilt University. His research focuses on the history of Latin American student migration to the United States during the first half of the twentieth century. You can reach him at steven.p.rodriguez@vanderbilt.edu and follow his twitter at @SPatrickRod. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/education
Universities have become state-like entities, possessing their own hospitals, police forces, and real estate companies. To become such behemoths, higher education institutions relied on the state for resources and authority. Through government largesse and shrewd legal maneuvering, university administrators became powerful interests in urban planning during the twentieth century. LaDale Winling's Building the Ivory Tower: Universities and Metropolitan Development in the Twentieth Century (University of Pennsylvania Press) casts higher education as the beneficiary and catalyst of the century's monumental state building projects--receiving millions in New Deal construction funds, even more from WWII-era military research, and directing the bulldozer's path during urban renewal schemes around the country. As state-funding for higher education decreased in the second half of the twentieth century and universities became more dependent on endowment investment and commercial research, their interests diverged even more sharply from the needs and desires of surrounding communities. Winling discusses challenges he faced while researching the book, obstacles to organizing against harmful higher education practices today, and his ongoing digital project on redlining called Mapping Inequality. LaDale C. Winling is Associate Professor of History at Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University. Patrick Reilly is a PhD student in US History at Vanderbilt University. He studies police, community organizations, and urban development. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/education
In Afflicted: How Vulnerability Can Heal Medical Education and Practice (The MIT Press), Nicole Piemonte examines the preoccupation in medicine with cure over care, arguing that the traditional focus on biological intervention keeps medicine from addressing the complex realities of patient suffering. Although many have pointed to the lack of compassion and empathy in medical practice, few have considered the deeper philosophical, psychological, and ontological reasons for it. Piemonte fills that gap, examining why it is that clinicians and medical trainees largely evade issues of vulnerability and mortality and, doing so, offer patients compromised care. She argues that contemporary medical pedagogy and epistemology are not only shaped by the human tendency to flee from the reality of death and suffering but also perpetuate it. The root of the problem, she writes, is the educational and institutional culture that promotes reductionist understandings of care, illness, and suffering but avoids any authentic confrontation with human suffering and the fear and self-doubt that can come with that confrontation. Through a philosophical analysis of the patient-practitioner encounter, Piemonte argues that the doctor, in escaping from authentic engagement with a patient who is suffering, in fact “escapes from herself.” Piemonte explores the epistemology and pedagogy of medicine, examines its focus on calculative or technical thinking, and considers how “clinical detachment” diminishes physicians. She suggests ways that educators might cultivate the capacity for authentic patient care and proposes specific curricular changes to help students expand their moral imaginations. Nicole Piemonte is Assistant Dean for Medical Education and Assistant Professor at Creighton School of Medicine, Phoenix Regional Campus Claire Clark is a medical educator, historian of medicine, and associate professor in the University of Kentucky’s College of Medicine. She teaches and writes about health behavior in historical context. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/education
In this episode, I speak with Dr. Trena Paulus of East Tennessee State University and Dr. Alyssa Wise of New York University on their new book, Looking for Insight, Transformation, and Learning in Online Talk (Routledge, 2019). The book offers a comprehensive discussion of conducting research on online talk, which includes but is not limited to synchronous and asynchronous interactions on social media, discussion forums, and other forms of digital communication platforms. It walks readers through the different stages and procedures of conducting online research, addresses the major challenges that researchers often encounter in doing this type of work, and presents a new research framework for conceiving online research. The book has a strong emphasis on supporting researchers to unpack their implicit assumptions and make informed decisions. It also pays close attention to the unique ethical challenges in doing research online. In an era of physical distancing, many social and educational research activities have been moved from face-to-face to online settings. The book will provide researchers with timely, much-needed, and rich food for thought as they make this unexpected transition. Novice and experienced researchers from multiple disciplines, such as education, communication, media studies, health sciences, political sciences and business, will all benefit from the methodological insights that Paulus and Wise shared in this book. Trena M. Paulus is Professor of Qualitative Research Methods in the Department of Lifelong Education, Administration and Policy at East Tennessee State University, USA. Alyssa Friend Wise is Associate Professor of Learning Sciences and Educational Technology in the Steinhardt School of Culture, Education, and Human Development and Director of the Learning Analytics Research Network at New York University, USA. Pengfei Zhao is a qualitative research methodologist based at the University of Florida. She is currently working on a book manuscript studying the coming of age experience of rural Chinese youth during and right after the Cultural Revolution. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/education
The game of basketball is perceived by most today as an “urban” game with a locale such as Rucker Park in Harlem as the game’s epicenter (as well as a pipeline to the NBA). While that is certainly a true statement, basketball is not limited to places such as New York City. In recent years scholars have written about the meaning of the game (and triumphs on the hardwood) to other groups, such as Asian Americans (Kathleen Yep and Joel Franks) and Mexican Americans (Ignacio Garcia). To this important literature one can now add an examination of the sport in the lives of Native Americans, through Wade Davies' Native Hoops: The Rise of American Indian Basketball, 1895-1970 (University Press of Kansas, 2020). The game, as Davies notes, was not just something imposed upon Natives in locales such as the Indian Industrial Training School in Kansas (and elsewhere). The game provided linkages to the Native past, and was embraced as a way to “prove their worth” within a hostile environment designed to strip students of all vestiges of their cultural inheritance. The sport provided both young men and women with an opportunity to compete against members of other institutions (both Native and white) and to challenge notions of inferiority and inherent weaknesses. Davies’ work does an excellent job of detailing the role of the sport in the lives of individuals, schools, and eventually, Native communities. Additionally, it examines how these players competed against sometimes seven opponents (the five players on the court and the two officials) to claim their rightful place on the court. They also often had to deal with the taunts and racism of crowds at opposing gyms. Still, most of these schools managed to field competitive teams that created their own “Indian” style of basketball that proved quite difficult to defeat. Wade Davies is professor of Native American studies at the University of Montana, Missoula. Jorge Iber is a professor of history at Texas Tech University. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/education
In this episode, I speak with Dr. Xueli Wang from the University of Wisconsin-Madison on her new book, “On My Own: The Challenge and Promise of Building Equitable STEM Transfer Pathways (Harvard Education Press, 2020). For decades, the shortage of STEM talents has been a national concern in the United States. Many discussions about this issue focus on K-12, undergraduate, and graduate education, whereas Xueli takes us to a much less examined road to look at the transferring pathways from community colleges to 4-year colleges. In today’s interview, you will hear us talk about the educational opportunities that the transfer pathways offer to an entire generation of American youths, especially those coming from disadvantaged family backgrounds. We will also discuss how these opportunities have been to some degree compromised for various reasons, and what are some of the things that colleges, universities, communities and the whole society could do to better support aspirational transferring students to pursue their educational dreams. Educators, policy makers, parents, and students who are interested in the transfer pathways will benefit from Xueli’s book, a much-needed and timely contribution to the ongoing conversation on educational equity in the United States. Pengfei Zhao is a qualitative research methodologist based at the University of Florida. She is currently working on a book manuscript studying the coming of age experience of rural Chinese youth during and right after the Cultural Revolution. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/education
The courageous and inspiring personal narratives and empirical studies in Presumed Incompetent II: Race, Class, Power, and Resistance of Women in Academia (Utah State University Press, 2019) name formidable obstacles and systemic biases that all women faculty—from diverse intersectional and transnational identities and from tenure track, terminal contract, and administrative positions—encounter in their higher education careers. Edited by Yolanda Flores Niemann, Gabriella Gutiérrez y Muhs, and Carmen G. González, the book provides practical, specific, and insightful guidance to fight back, prevail, and thrive in challenging work environments. This new volume comes at a crucial historical moment as the United States grapples with a resurgence of white supremacy and misogyny at the forefront of our social and political dialogues that continue to permeate the academic world. Today I talked to two of the editors: Yolanda Flores Niemann (PhD, Psychology, University of Houston, 1992), a professor of psychology at the University of North Texas and Gabriella Gutiérrez y Muhs (MA and PhD Stanford University, 2000), a professor of modern languages and women studies at Seattle University. Dr. Christina Gessler’s background is in anthropology, women’s history, and literature. She works as a historian, poet, and photographer. In seeking the extraordinary in the ordinary, Gessler writes the histories of largely unknown women, poems about small relatable moments, and takes many, many photos in nature. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/education
Remember when Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) were going to shake higher education to its foundations by giving courses from the world’s most prestigious colleges and universities away free to the world? Today’s guest, Jeffrey Young – Senior Editor at the online educational publication EdSurge and host of the Edsurge podcast – talks about his time on the front lines of MOOCs and other technology advances in higher education. Jeffrey covered the rise and alleged fall of MOOCs extensively at the Chronicle of Higher Education, as well as exploring the MOOC story beyond the headlines during a Neiman Fellowship at Harvard University. The insights he developed can all be found in his book Beyond the MOOC Hype. (Chronicle of Higher Eduction, 2013) Over a million new people have signed up to take MOOC courses since the COVID-19 crisis hit. Does this represent a MOOC renaissance, or something else? Listen to our wide-ranging discussion to learn more about what MOOCs might mean today. Jonathan Haber is an educational researcher and consultant working at the intersection of pedagogy, technology, and educational policy. His books include MOOCS and Critical Thinking from MIT Press and his LogicCheck project analyzes the reasoning behind the news of the day. You can read more about Jonathan’s work at http://www.degreeoffreedom.org. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/education
If we want girls to succeed, we need to teach them the audacity to transgress. Through the lives of students at three very different schools, Sally Nuamah, an award-winning scholar-activist, makes the case for “feminist schools” that orient girls toward a lifetime of achievement in How Girls Achieve (Harvard University Press). This bold and necessary book points out a simple and overlooked truth: most schools never had girls in mind to begin with. That is why the world needs what Sally Nuamah calls “feminist schools,” deliberately designed to provide girls with achievement-oriented identities. And she shows how these schools would help all students, regardless of their gender. Educated women raise healthier families, build stronger communities, and generate economic opportunities for themselves and their children. Yet millions of disadvantaged girls never make it to school―and too many others drop out or fail. Upending decades of advice and billions of dollars in aid, Nuamah argues that this happens because so many challenges girls confront―from sexual abuse to unequal access to materials and opportunities―go unaddressed. But it isn’t enough just to go to school. What you learn there has to prepare you for the world where you’ll put that knowledge to work. A compelling and inspiring scholar who has founded a nonprofit to test her ideas, Nuamah reveals that developing resilience is not a gender-neutral undertaking. Preaching grit doesn’t help girls; it actively harms them. Drawing on her deep immersion in classrooms in the United States, Ghana, and South Africa, Nuamah calls for a new approach: creating feminist schools that will actively teach girls how and when to challenge society’s norms, and allow them to carve out their own paths to success. Sally A. Nuamah is a scholar, activist, and filmmaker. She has received numerous awards, including the Gates Millennium scholarship and the Black Women Organized for Political Action’s Under 40 Award in Education, and was selected a Change-Maker by the White House. “HerStory,” her award-winning documentary on girls and education in Ghana, has been screened across the world and is accessible through Discovery Education. Dr. Christina Gessler’s background is in women’s history, literature and anthropology. She studies the diaries and personal writings of 19th-century American women, and works as a historian and photographer. In seeking the extraordinary in the ordinary, Gessler writes the histories of largely unknown women, and takes many, many photos in nature. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/education
In this interview, we have a candid conversation with Dr. Christopher Key Chapple of Loyola Marymount University about his outlook, teaching philosophy, and new developments in the field – his Master of Arts in Yoga Studies in particular. Stay tuned for Part II where we will focus on Chris’ scholarship, in particular his new book Living Landscapes: Meditations on the Five Elements in Hindu, Buddhist, and Jain Yogas. Christopher Key Chapple is Doshi Professor of Indic and Comparative Theology and director of Master of Arts in Yoga Studies at Loyola Marymount University. For information on your host Raj Balkaran’s background, see rajbalkaran.com/scholarship. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/education
Medical students and physicians-in-training embark on a long journey that, although steeped in scientific learning and technical skill building, includes little guidance on the emotional and interpersonal dimensions of becoming a healer. On Becoming a Healer: The Journey from Patient Care to Caring about Your Patients (Johns Hopkins University Press) is written for anyone in the health care community who hopes to grow emotionally and cognitively in the way they interact with patients, On Becoming a Healer explains how to foster doctor-patient relationships that are mutually nourishing. Dr. Saul J. Weiner, a physician-educator, argues that joy in medicine requires more than idealistic aspirations―it demands a capacity to see past the "otherness" that separates the well from the sick, the professional in a white coat from the disheveled patient in a hospital gown. Weiner scrutinizes the medical school indoctrination process and explains how it molds the physician's mindset into that of a task completer rather than a thoughtful professional. Taking a personal approach, Weiner describes his own journey to becoming an internist and pediatrician while offering concrete advice on how to take stock of your current development as a physician, how to openly and fully engage with patients, and how to establish clear boundaries that help defuse emotionally charged situations. Readers will learn how to counter judgmentalism, how to make medical decisions that take into account the whole patient, and how to incorporate the organizing principle of healing into their practice. Each chapter ends with questions for reflection and discussion to help personalize the lessons for individual learners. Saul J. Weiner, MD is a professor of medicine, pediatrics, and medical education at the University of Illinois at Chicago, the deputy director of the Veterans Health Administration's Center of Innovation for Complex Chronic Healthcare, and the cofounder of the Institute for Practice and Provider Performance Improvement (I3PI). Dr. Yakir Englander is the National Director of Leadership programs at the Israeli-American Council. He also teaches at the AJR. He is a Fulbright scholar and was a visiting professor of Religion at Northwestern University, the Shalom Hartman Institute and Harvard Divinity School. His books are Sexuality and the Body in New Religious Zionist Discourse (English/Hebrew and The Male Body in Jewish Lithuanian Ultra-Orthodoxy (Hebrew). He can be reached at: Yakir1212englander@gmail.com Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/education
What if everything we tell each other – and ourselves – about why we choose college isn’t true? Is higher education an ideal, a personal goal, or might it be a “job-to-be-done?” In Choosing College: How to Make Better Learning Decisions Throughout Your Life (Jossey-Bass, 2019), author Michael Horn and his co-author Bob Moesta look at how people make decisions regarding higher education through “Jobs-to-be-Done” theory which interrogates and exposes the real reasons people make personal choices, from buying a milk shake to make life-changing decisions. Based on this theory, students are not applying to colleges, being selected by them, and choosing where to go, but are rather looking to “hire” higher education as a way to achieve a goal. This analysis provides important insights, both for college-bound students and their families, but also institutions of higher education, many of which might be tooling themselves to perform the wrong job. Join us for a conversation that looks at disruption in K-12 and higher education, including what might happen to schools during and post pandemic. Michael B. Horn is a Distinguished Fellow at the Clayton Christensen Institute for Disruptive Education, a Senior Strategist at Guild Education and author of books on education including Disrupting Class: How Disruptive Innovation Will Change the Way the World Learns, Blended: Using Disruptive Innovation to Improve Schools and his latest book Choosing College. He hosts his latest podcast, Class Disrupted, with co-host Diane Tavenner of Summit Public Schools. Jonathan Haber is an educational researcher and consultant working at the intersection of pedagogy, technology, and educational policy. His books include MOOCS and Critical Thinking from MIT Press and his LogicCheck project analyzes the reasoning behind the news of the day. You can read more about Jonathan’s work at http://www.degreeoffreedom.org. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/education
Claudia Rueda’s book Students of Revolution: Youth, Protest, and Coalition-Building in Somoza-Era Nicaragua (University of Texas Press, 2019) is a history of student organizing against dictatorship in twentieth-century Nicaragua. By mobilizing in support of the Frente Sandinista de Liberación Nacional and other anti-Somoza forces, students helped to build what Rueda calls “a culture of insurrection” that made armed revolutionary struggle seem imaginable and needed to Nicaraguans from many backgrounds. What made students such an effective political force in Nicaragua was that as valuable future professionals and idealized youth, students enjoyed great latitude to express dissent and counted upon widespread public sympathy when they faced state repression. Drawing from oral histories and rich archives of student movements, Rueda documents how student activism against authoritarianism developed from the 1930s to 1979 as university enrollment grew and diversified. Student tactics and ideological commitments shifted during these decades in response to events at home (brief, limited democratic openings and harsh crackdowns on student dissidence) and abroad (the Cuban Revolution). By the 1960s, student organizations included moderate as well as leftist groups who were ultimately able to make common cause against the last Somoza dictator, Anastasio Somoza Debayle. Joining a growing body of scholarship on student politics in Latin America during the Cold War, Rueda’s book illustrates the profound impact of student activism in a small country which did not see major uprisings in 1968. Nevertheless, as dissident, organized, and well-connected youth, Nicaraguan students were instrumental in laying the groundwork for a successful revolution over a decade later, when the Sandinistas brought down Somoza in 1979. Claudia Rueda is an assistant professor of history at Texas A&M Corpus Christi. Rachel Grace Newman is Lecturer in the History of the Global South at Smith College. She has a Ph.D. in History from Columbia University, and she writes about youth, higher education, transnationalism, and social class in t Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/education
No Platform: A History of Anti-Fascism, Universities and the Limits of Free Speech (Routledge, 2020) is the first to outline the history of the tactic of ‘no platforming’ at British universities since the 1970s, looking at more than four decades of student protest against racist and fascist figures on campus. The tactic of ‘no platforming’ has been used at British universities and colleges since the National Union of Students adopted the policy in the mid-1970s. The author traces the origins of the tactic from the militant anti-fascism of the 1930s–1940s and looks at how it has developed since the 1970s, being applied to various targets over the last 40 years, including sexists, homophobes, right-wing politicians and Islamic fundamentalists. This book provides a historical intervention in the current debates over the alleged free speech ‘crisis’ perceived to be plaguing universities in Britain, as well as North America and Australasia. No Platform: A History of Anti-Fascism, Universities and the Limits of Free Speech is for academics and students, as well as the general reader, interested in modern British history, politics and higher education. Readers interested in contemporary debates over freedom of speech and academic freedom will also have much to discover in this book. Evan Smith is a research fellow in history at the College of Humanities, Arts and Social Sciences at Flinders University in South Australia. Kirk Meighoo is a TV and podcast host, former university lecturer, author and former Senator in Trinidad and Tobago. He hosts his own podcast, Independent Thought & Freedom, where he interviews some of the most interesting people from around the world who are shaking up politics, economics, society and ideas. You can find it in the iTunes Store or any of your favorite podcast providers. You can also subscribe to his YouTube channel. If you are an academic who wants to get heard nationally, please check out his free training at becomeapublicintellectual.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/education
Colleges fiercely defend America’s higher education system, arguing that it rewards bright kids who have worked hard. But it doesn’t actually work this way. As the recent bribery scandal demonstrates, social inequalities and colleges’ pursuit of wealth and prestige stack the deck in favor of the children of privilege. For education scholars and critics Anthony P. Carnevale, Peter Schmidt, and Jeff Strohl, it’s clear that colleges are not the places of aspiration and equal opportunity they should (and claim to) be. The Merit Myth: How Our Colleges Favor the Rich and Divide America (The New Press) delves deeply into the rampant dysfunction of higher education today and critiques a system that pays lip service to social mobility and meritocracy, while offering little of either. Through policies that exacerbate inequality, including generously funding so-called merit-based aid rather than expanding opportunity for those who need it most, U.S. universities—the presumed pathway to a better financial future—are woefully (and in some cases criminally) complicit in reproducing racial and class privilege across generations. This timely and incisive book argues for unrigging the game by dramatically reducing the weight of the SAT/ACT; measuring colleges by their outcomes, not their inputs; designing affirmative action plans that honor the relationship between race and class; and making 14 the new 12—guaranteeing every American a public K–14 education. The Merit Myth shows the way to higher education becoming the beacon of opportunity it was intended to be. Anthony P. Carnevale, a chairman under President Clinton of the National Commission on Employment Policy, is the director of the Georgetown University Center on Education and the Workforce. He lives in Washington, DC. Peter Schmidt, the author of Color and Money, is an award-winning writer and editor who has worked for Education Week and the Chronicle of Higher Education. He lives in Washington, DC. Jeff Strohl is the director of research at the Georgetown University Center on Education and the Workforce. He lives in Washington, DC. Stephen Pimpare is Senior Lecturer in the Politics & Society Program and Faculty Fellow at the Carsey School of Public Policy at the University of New Hampshire. He is the author of The New Victorians (New Press, 2004), A People’s History of Poverty in America (New Press, 2008), winner of the Michael Harrington Award, and Ghettos, Tramps and Welfare Queens: Down and Out on the Silver Screen (Oxford, 2017). Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/education
We Are Worth Fighting For: A History of the Howard University Student Protest of 1989 (NYU Press, 2019) is the first history of the 1989 Howard University protest. The three-day occupation of the university’s Administration Building was a continuation of the student movements of the sixties and a unique challenge to the politics of the eighties. Upset at the university’s appointment of the Republican strategist Lee Atwater to the Board of Trustees, students forced the issue by shutting down the operations of the university. The protest, inspired in part by the emergence of “conscious” hip hop, helped to build support for the idea of student governance and drew upon a resurgent black nationalist ethos. At the center of this story is a student organization known as Black Nia F.O.R.C.E. Co-founded by Ras Baraka, the group was at the forefront of organizing the student mobilization at Howard during the spring of 1989 and thereafter. We Are Worth Fighting For explores how black student activists—young men and women— helped shape and resist the rightward shift and neoliberal foundations of American politics. This history adds to the literature on Black campus activism, Black Power studies, and the emerging histories of African American life in the 1980s. Joshua C. Myers teaches Africana Studies in the Department of Afro-American Studies at Howard University. He serves on the editorial board of The Compass and is editor of A Gathering Together: Literary Journal. Latif Tarik is Assistant Professor of History at Elizabeth City State University located in Elizabeth City, NC. He is Elizabeth City State University history program coordinator, editorial board member for the digital journal Evoke: A Historical, Theoretical, and Cultural Analysis of Africana Dance and Theatre, and serves as book review editor for the Southern Conference of African American Studies, Latif is a contributor to Race and Ethnicity In America From Pre-Contact to the Present, Islam and the Black Experience African American History Reconsidered, African Religions Beliefs and Practices through History, and Africology: The Journal of Pan African Studies. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/education
What can explain the success of science as an endeavor for getting closer to truth? Does science simply represent a successful methodology, or is it something more? In The Scientific Attitude: Defending Science from Denial, Fraud, and Pseudoscience (MIT Press, 2019), Lee McIntyre addresses recent attacks on science in areas such as climate change, vaccination, and even belief that the world is flat by explaining why science is a culture built around a “scientific attitude” that embraces evidence and a willingness to change beliefs based on where evidence leads. What does it mean for science education if the success of science derives as much from attitude as it does from methodology? And can science provide a model for other truth-seeking endeavors? Join us for a conversation that draws together ideas from science, philosophy, and education and applies them to the most important issues we face as a society. Lee McIntyre is a Research Fellow at the Center for Philosophy and History of Science at Boston University and an Instructor in Ethics at Harvard Extension School. Jonathan Haber is an educational researcher and consultant working at the intersection of pedagogy, technology, and educational policy. His books include MOOCS and Critical Thinking from MIT Press and his LogicCheck project analyzes the reasoning behind the news of the day. You can read more about Jonathan’s work at http://www.degreeoffreedom.org. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/education
In Pursuit of Knowledge: Black Women and Educational Activism in Antebellum America (NYU Press, 2019) is an intellectual and cultural history of the educational activism of African American women and girls in the long nineteenth century. Kabria Baumgartner focuses her narrative on the actions of “African American women and girls living in the antebellum Northeast” in cities such as New York, Boston, and Philadelphia. These women including individuals such as Sarah Mapps Douglas and Sarah Parker Remond wrote essays about education, built schools, and became educators in their own right while living their lives with a “sense of purpose” defined as a “purposeful womanhood”. Activism is “broadly construed” by the author to note that Black women engaged in “concerted efforts to procure advancing schooling (beyond the primary level) and teaching opportunities for themselves and their community”. Baumgartner notes that not only did these women advocate for entrance into educational institutions for themselves, but that they also developed schools that welcomed students of all races. In this text, the author essentially traces the historical development of victories against segregation won at the state and local level, in the educational system, a century before the historic Supreme Court decision in Brown vs. the Board of Education, Topeka Kansas in 1954 that helped to make the Civil Rights Movement a mass movement across the United States (U.S.). Baumgartner, in her text, importantly notes that these achievements gained in the nineteenth century were the result of both individual and collective efforts of Black women such as Sarah Harris, Mary E. Miles, Serena de Grasse, Rosetta Morrison, Sarah Parker Remond, Susan Paul, Sarah Mapps Douglass and Charlotte Forten. This text is concisely organized around two major sections and six chapters with an “Introduction” and a “Conclusion.” Baumgartner reads the activism of Black women in the nineteenth century as “continuous and dynamic, becoming more and more organized” by the mid-nineteenth century. For women such as Sarah Harris, profiled in Chapter One of the text, the schoolhouse was both “an extension of the home and a defining civic space” or place for these women to define a purposeful womanhood. Harris and other Black women who helped to integrate schools in Connecticut such as the Canterbury Female Boarding School did so with the larger goal of securing rights as citizens beyond the schoolhouse. Baumgartner weaves together a network of Black women activists in her narrative who forged a collective attack against school segregation and laid the foundations for the ideology of a beloved community moving beyond the schoolhouse that eventually became the intellectual basis for the Black freedom struggle in the twentieth century. She does this by reading an array of sources against the grain including census records, letters, pamphlets, school records, annual reports, almanacks, petitions, newspapers, abolitionist literature and published writings. Hettie V. Williams PhD is an Assistant Professor of African American history in the Department of History and Anthropology at Monmouth University where she teaches courses in African American history and U.S. history. She has published book chapters, essays, and edited/authored five books. Her latest publications include Bury My Heart in a Free Land: Black Women Intellectuals in Modern U.S. History (Praeger, 2017) and, with Dr G. Reginald Daniel, professor of historical sociology at the University of California, Santa Barbara, Race and the Obama Phenomenon: The Vision of a More Perfect Multiracial Union (University Press of Mississippi 2014). Website: hettiewilliams.com/ Follow me on twitter: @DrHettie2017 Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/education
Do you have an active intellectual life? That is a question you may feel uncomfortable answering these days given that the very phrase “intellectual life” can strike some people as pretentious or self-indulgent, even irresponsible in a time of pandemic disease. But what better time could there be for an examination of the subject of the inner life? And what is “the intellectual life,” anyway? In her 2020 book, Lost in Thought: The Hidden Pleasures of an Intellectual Life (Princeton University Press, 2020), Zena Hitz explores the interior world and shows that intellectual endeavor is not simply a matter of reading by oneself but can encompass everything from a lifelong fascination with falcons to strategies for retaining one’s sanity and humanity in a gulag or producing ground-breaking political and sociological writings in a prison cell in Mussolini’s Italy. In the course of her book, Hitz deploys real-world examples from young Einstein in his day job in a Swiss patent office to Malcolm X’s encounter with the fellow prison inmate who first urged him to embark on a life-changing course of reading to Dorothy Day’s encounters with books throughout her life and their influence on her youthful secular radicalism to her conversion to Catholicism and continued activism. We also encounter St. Augustine and take a deep dive into Elena Ferrante’s Neapolitan Novels and travel with a Preston Sturges hero in a screwball comedy/social commentary film. Hitz’s reader-friendly examination of the intellectual life is ideal reading for the millions of us confined to our homes due to the coronavirus and who now have time to read and think seriously about matters of mortality and the meaning of life, which are suddenly front and center in our daily lives. And at a time of pandemic-related economic peril for liberal arts colleges and programs, Hitz’s take on what ailed them even before our current crisis and her prescription for a way forward for those that survive the next several years are must reading for not only academics but all citizens who care about how civilization itself carries on. Give a listen. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/education
Where do good ideas come from? How does an idea go from creation to a research project? How is historical research done? And how does research find its way into a finished book? And what impact can a book have? Today, I discuss these topics and more with my colleague and friend Dr. Neil Roberts. Dr. Roberts teaches Africana studies, political theory, and the philosophy of religion at Williams College. Roberts is also the Chair and Associate Professor of Africana Studies and Faculty Affiliate in Political Science and Religion. Additionally, Roberts is the W. Ford Schumann Faculty Fellow in Democratic Studies. Adam McNeil is a third year Ph.D. in History student at Rutgers, the State University of New Jersey. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/education
In this episode, I speak with Dr. Scott Seider from Boston College and Dr. Daren Graves from Simmons University on their new book, Schooling for Critical Consciousness: Engaging Black and Latinx Youth in Analyzing, Navigating, and Challenging Racial Injustice (Harvard Education Press, 2020). Over the past thirty years, we have seen a steady increase in students of color in American public schools. The Public School Review reported that from 1997 to 2019, the number of white students in American public schools has declined from over 63 percent to 49.7 percent. One of the key questions that we need to ask is how we shall prepare students of color to become competent and responsible future citizens, especially given the increasingly widening racial disparity in almost all aspects of the social life. Schooling for Critical Consciousness addresses how schools can help Black and Latinx youth to understand these racial disparities, resist the negative effects of racial injustice and challenge its root causes. Documenting and analyzing how five different mission-driven urban high schools cultivate critical consciousness among their students, Scott Seider and Daren Graves reported the findings of a four-year, longitudinal, mixed methods study. Timely and informative, the book is very helpful for teachers, school leaders, and parents who are interested in supporting youths of color to develop their critical consciousness, navigate their life in the contemporary American society, and challenge the entrenched racial injustice. Pengfei Zhao is a qualitative research methodologist based at the University of Florida. She is currently working on a book manuscript studying the coming of age experience of rural Chinese youth during and right after the Cultural Revolution. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/education
Brian Greene is a Professor of Mathematics and Physics at Columbia University in the City of New York, where he is the Director of the Institute for Strings, Cosmology, and Astroparticle Physics, and co-founder and chair of the World Science Festival. He is well known for his TV mini-series about string theory and the nature of reality, including the Elegant Universe, which tied in with his best-selling 2000 book of the same name. In this episode, we talk about his latest popular book Until the End of Time: Mind, Matter, and Our Search for Meaning in an Evolving Universe (Random House, 2020) Until the End of Time gives the reader a theory of everything, both in the sense of a “state of the academic union”, covering cosmology and evolution, consciousness and computation, and art and religion, and in the sense of showing us a way to apprehend the often existentially challenging subject matter. Greene uses evocative autobiographical vignettes in the book to personalize his famously lucid and accessible explanations, and we discuss these episodes further in the interview. Greene also reiterates his arguments for embedding a form of spiritual reverie within the multiple naturalistic descriptions of reality that different areas of human knowledge have so far produced. John Weston is a University Teacher of English in the Language Centre at Aalto University, Finland. His research focuses on academic communication. He can be reached at john.weston@aalto.fi and @johnwphd. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/education
In Shakespeare for Snowflakes: On Slapstick and Sympathy (Zero Books, 2020), Ian Burrows examines the fraught meeting place of slapstick and tragedy, asking us under what literary and performative conditions we extend and withhold sympathy. Using source material as diverse as YouTube comments and the plays of Sarah Kane and William Shakespeare, Burrows forces us to confront the limits of our own empathy. This book also provides a useful entry point into the question of trigger warnings in academic lectures: after a trigger warning on one of Burrows’ lectures came to the attention of the British press, Burrows found himself the center of a controversy over the use of content warnings on material related to sexual assault. Burrows makes the case that such warnings are not an impediment to learning, and in fact may allow some students to more fruitfully engage with this topic. Andy Boyd is a playwright based in Brooklyn, New York. He is a graduate of the playwriting MFA program at Columbia University, Harvard University, and the Arizona School for the Arts. His plays have been produced, developed, or presented at IRT, Pipeline Theatre Company, The Gingold Group, Dixon Place, Roundabout Theatre, Epic Theatre Company, Out Loud Theatre, Naked Theatre Company, Contemporary Theatre of Rhode Island, and The Trunk Space. He is currently working on a series of 50 plays about the 50 U.S. states. His website is AndyJBoyd.com, and he can be reached atandyjamesboyd@gmail.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/education
On this episode of the New Books Network, Lee Pierce (they/she) interviews Thomas A. Discenna of Oakland University about the myriad ways that the labor of those employed by universities is situated as somehow distinct from ordinary labor. Focusing on a variety of sites where academic labor is discursively constructed in popular consciousness including among the professoriate itself, its critics and detractors, the unionization struggles of graduate students, the invisibility of contingent academics and the resistance to the unionization of student athletes. In Discourses of Denial: The Rhetoric of American Academic Labor (Routledge, 2017), Discenna paints a compelling picture of “the denial of academic labor” happening across public and private institutions, arguing that it functions to underwrite an attack on labor in all of its variations. The professoriate is, therefore, not a retrograde figure of more genteel times but the emblematic figure of late capitalism’s transition to cognitive labor and with it an unceasing colonization of the human lifeworld. I hope you enjoy listening as I much as I enjoyed chatting with Tom about this illuminating book. I’d love to hear from you at rhetoriclee@gmail.com or connect with me on Twitter, Instagram, and Facebook @rhetoriclee and @rhetoricleespeaking. Share your thoughts about the interview with the hashtag #newbooksnerd. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/education
On this episode of the New Books Network, Lee Pierce (she/they) interviews E. Michele Ramsey of PennState Berks on Major Decisions: College, Career, and the Case for the Humanities (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2019), a robust defense of Communication and the Humanities as disciplines of study. Major Decisions is a breathtaking work of research that proves the values and skills taught in humanities disciplines are exactly those needed in the 21st century. Despite the persistence of the myth “you can’t get a job with an English or Theatre major,” Major Decisions, which Ramsey co-authored with Laurie Grobman, shows that not only are humanities majors welcome on the job market; their critical thinking skills and creativity are also integral to advancing the work of science, technology, medicine, math, and engineering. Indeed, the core skills and knowledge imparted by an education in the humanities—including facility with written and verbal communication, collaboration, problem-solving, technological literacy, ethics, leadership, and an understanding of the human impacts of globalization—are immensely useful to employers across a variety of sectors. I hope you enjoy listening as I much as I enjoyed chatting with Michele about this important book. I’d love to hear from you at rhetoriclee@gmail.com or connect with me on Twitter, Instagram, and Facebook @rhetoriclee and @rhetoricleespeaking. Share your thoughts about the interview with the hashtag #newbooksnerd. ~lee Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/education
Today I talked to Dr. Nicholas Sutton speaks about his work at the Oxford Centre for Hindu Studies. We discuss his teaching philosophy, his mandate of making the study of Hinduism accessible to public audiences, and the Centre’s exciting collection of online courses. We also talked about two books he's recently published in the Oxford Centre's series on Hinduism: The Bhagavad Gita: A New Translation and Study Guide (Mandala Publishing, 2019) and The Yoga Sutras: A New Translation and Study Guide (Mandala Publishing, 2019). For information on your host Raj Balkaran’s background, see rajbalkaran.com/scholarship. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/education
Slavery and the University: Histories and Legacies (University of Georgia Press, 2019), edited by Leslie M. Harris, James T. Campbell, and Alfred L. Brophy, is the first edited collection of scholarly essays devoted solely to the histories and legacies of this subject on North American campuses and in their Atlantic contexts. Gathering together contributions from scholars, activists, and administrators, the volume combines two broad bodies of work: (1) historically based interdisciplinary research on the presence of slavery at higher education institutions in terms of the development of proslavery and antislavery thought and the use of slave labor; and (2) analysis on the ways in which the legacies of slavery in institutions of higher education continued in the post–Civil War era to the present day. The collection features broadly themed essays on issues of religion, economy, and the regional slave trade of the Caribbean. It also includes case studies of slavery’s influence on specific institutions, such as Princeton University, Harvard University, Oberlin College, Emory University, and the University of Alabama. Though the roots of Slavery and the University stem from a 2011 conference at Emory University, the collection extends outward to incorporate recent findings. As such, it offers a roadmap to one of the most exciting developments in the field of U.S. slavery studies and to ways of thinking about racial diversity in the history and current practices of higher education. Today I spoke with Leslie Harris about the book. Dr. Harris is a professor of history at Northwestern University. She is the coeditor, with Ira Berlin, of Slavery in New York and the coeditor, with Daina Ramey Berry, of Slavery and Freedom in Savannah (Georgia). Adam McNeil is a History PhD student at Rutgers University-New Brunswick. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/education
In this episode, I speak with Terry Iverson about his book, Finding America's Greatest Champion: Building Prosperity Through Manufacturing, Mentoring and the Awesome Responsibility of Parenting (Fig Factor Media, 2018). This book highlights the importance of manufacturing in our economy as well as the ways parents, mentors, and teachers can work together to foster the character traits and critical thinking skills required in the twentieth-century workforce. We discuss how American manufacturing compares with manufacturing in Europe and the roles of various stakeholders in developing workers who add value to any organization. His recommended books included the following:
Dream Differently: Candid Advice for America's Students by Vince M. Bertram
The Community College Solution: The Real Story from a College President and Former Corporate CEO by Thomas J. Snyder
How Can We Make Manufacturing Sexy? A Mindset of Passion and Purpose from the Production Floor to the Executive Suite by Karin Lindner
Trevor Mattea is an educational consultant and speaker. His areas of expertise include deeper learning, parent involvement, project-based learning, and technology integration. He can be reached by email at tsmattea@pm.me or on Twitter at @tsmattea. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/education
Islamic Studies classrooms have grown significantly over several generations. While once we could only find courses on the tradition in the most prestigious of institutions now Islam classes are taught at small liberal arts colleges, state schools, private universities, and even programs in Islamic theology and law. Teaching Islamic Studies in the Age of ISIS, Islamophobia and the Internet (Indiana University Press, 2019), edited by Courtney M. Dorroll, Assistant Professor at Wofford College, covers approaches, strategies, and topics important for the study of Islam today. Across several chapters we are introduced to various common dispositions students enter are classes with and how to address them. Many of these opinions are informed by popular stereotypes about Muslims and get reinforced by contemporary events. These moments often require immediate attention in the classroom, a burden most other subjects do not share, and unfortunately much of teaching about Islam is motivated by unlearning these biases. Throughout our conversation we explore how to achieve a simple course objective, that “Muslims Are People; Islam Is Complicated.” We discussed collaboration between junior and senior teachers, previous scholarship of teaching and learning in Islamic Studies, cross-cultural virtual exchange, Islamic religious education in European institutions, issues of Islamophobia and violence, questions of patriarchy and gender, remote teaching and online courses in the age of Coronavirus, and self-care as learning outcome. Kristian Petersen is an Assistant Professor of Philosophy & Religious Studies at Old Dominion University. You can find out more about his work on his website, follow him on Twitter @BabaKristian, or email him at kpeterse@odu.edu. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/education
Pawan Dhingra's new book Hyper Education: Why Good Schools, Good Grades, and Good Behavior Are Not Enough (NYU Press, 2020) is an up-close evaluation of the competitive nature of the United States education system and the extra-curricular and co-curricular activities associated with them. Dhingra reveals the subculture of high-achievement in education and after-school learning centers, spelling bees, and math competitions that have spawned as a result of a competitive markets in higher education and in life. This world is one in which immigrant families compete with Americans to be intellectually high-achieving and expect their children to invest countless hours in studying and testing in order to gain an upper-hand in the believed meritocracy of American public education. This is a world where enrichment centers, like Kumon, are able to capitalize and make profitable gains from parents who enroll their children as early as three years of age. There are even families and teachers who avoid after-school academics that are getting swept up in the competitive nature of this subculture called hyper education. Dr. Dhingra draws from more than 100 in-depth interviews with teachers, tutors, principals, children, and parents for this study. He delves into the narratives that parents of elementary and junior high school provide about this phenomenon and examines the roles played by schools, families, and communities. He moves beyond the “Tiger Mom” caricature that is often given to Asian American and white families who practice hyper education and asks if it makes sense. This book provides a behind-the-scenes look at hyper education from parents who have their children participate in Scripps National Spelling Bee, math competitions, and other national competitions, as well as after school learning centers. Dr. Dhingra shows that parents observe an increasingly competitive market for higher education and perceive good schools, good grades, and good behavior to not be enough for their high-achieving students. Pawan Dhingra, Ph.D. is a Professor of American Studies at Amherst College. Michael O. Johnston, Ph.D. is a Assistant Professor of Sociology at William Penn University. He earned his doctoral degree in Public Policy and Public Administration from Walden University. He researches place and the process of place making as it is presented in everyday social interactions. You can find more about him on his website, follow him on Twitter @ProfessorJohnst or email him at johnstonmo@wmpenn.edu. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/education
Karl Qualls' new book Stalin’s Niños: Educating Spanish Civil War Refugee Children in the Soviet Union, 1937-1951 (University of Toronto Press, 2020) examines how the Soviet Union raised and educated nearly 3,000 child refugees of the Spanish Civil War. An analysis of the archival record and numerous letters, oral histories, and memoirs reveals that this little-known story exemplifies the Soviet transformation of children into future builders of communism and illuminates the educational techniques shared with other modern states. Classroom education taught patriotism for the two homelands and the importance of emulating Spanish and Soviet heroes, scientists, soldiers, and artists. Extra-curricular clubs and activities reinforced classroom experiences and helped discipline the mind, body, and behaviors. Adult mentors, like the heroes studied in the classroom, provided models to emulate and became the tangible expression of the ideal Spaniard and Soviet. The Basque and Spanish children thus were transformed into hybrid Hispano-Soviets fully engaged with their native language, culture, and traditions while also imbued with Russian language and culture and Soviet ideals of hard work, camaraderie, internationalism, and sacrifice for ideals and others. Even during their horrific evacuation to the Soviet interior during World War II, the twenty-two Soviet boarding schools designed specifically for the Spanish refugee children – and better provisioned than those for Soviet children – served these displaced niños for fourteen years and transformed them into Red Army heroes, award-winning Soviet athletes and artists, successful educators and workers, and aids to Fidel Castro in building Cuba after his revolution. Stalin’s Niños also sheds new light on the education of non-Russian Soviet and international students and the process of constructing a supranational Soviet identity. Karl Qualls is Professor of History and the John B. Parsons Chair in Liberal Arts and Sciences at Dickinson College in Carlisle, PA. Steven Seegel is professor of history at University of Northern Colorado. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/education
How best to teach history and, for that matter any social science subject, to college students? The traditional answer has been to lecture them. Given that the typical length of an attentive lecture-listener is about 15 minutes, this might not be the best way to get the job done. Beginning in the late 1990s, a group of professors offered another technique now called "Reacting to the Past." You can read all about it here. Essentially, the "Reacting" technique asks students to play the roles of historical actors and to re-enact particular events and situations. The instructors using the method have had great success. Today I talked to Kelly McFall, a "Reacting" practitioner, about the techniques and his experience using it. McFall created a "Reacting" module called The Needs of Others: Human Rights, International Organizations, and Intervention in Rwanda, 1994 (W. W. Norton, 2018). In the interview, McFall talks about how the particular modules are created, how they are used in the classroom, and how any college teacher can become involved in creating new modules. Here are some resources for those interested in using "Reacting" series and getting involved in creating new modules. --The "Reacting to the Past" website is here. --The publisher's (W. W. Norton) website on the "Reacting to the Past" series is here. --The "Reacting to the Past" Facebook group is here. Marshall Poe is the editor of the New Books Network. He can be reached at marshallpoe@newbooksnetwork.com Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/education
Most Americans have a limited understanding of the history of segregation in the United States. While many are taught that segregation was as an institution of social control that dominated Southern society, economics, and politics from the late nineteenth century to the middle of the twentieth century, a much smaller proportion realize that Jim Crow policies and practices existed in cities throughout the north and west. In Strategies of Segregation: Race, Residence, and the Struggle for Educational Equality (University of California Press, 2018), David G. García makes a substantial contribution to the history of segregation in the US by examining its implementation and preservation in the city of Oxnard, California from 1903 to 1974. Located about an hour north of Los Angeles, García explains how the “white architects” of Oxnard instituted segregationist policies in housing and education during the initial decades of the twentieth century, which ultimately shaped life chances and outcomes for Mexican Americans. Although de jure segregation of ethnic Mexicans was not permitted in California schools, García uncovers four strategies implemented by local power brokers to accomplish just that. One of the unique features of segregation in Oxnard involved the “school-within-a-school model of racial separation” that was employed by city and district officials in three elementary campuses from 1903-1939. Blurring the distinction between de jure and de facto segregation, García argues that the “systematic subordination” of ethnic Mexicans in Oxnard was accomplished through daily acts of “mundane racism” at the individual and institutional level. Despite efforts to normalize their marginalization, Mexican Americans did not stand idle. Rather, partnering with African Americans in a “shared struggle” against the district’s segregationist policies, parents and community activists filed and won a class-action lawsuit (Soria v. Oxnard School Board of Trustees, 1974) that proved the school board was guilty of intentional de jure segregation and ordered immediate and affirmative remedies to achieve a racially balanced school system. David-James Gonzales (DJ) is Assistant Professor of History at Brigham Young University. He is a historian of migration, urbanization, and social movements in the U.S., and specializes in Latina/o/x politics. Follow him on Twitter @djgonzoPhD. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/education
The fear of campus sexual assault has become an inextricable part of the college experience. Research has shown that by the time they graduate, as many as one in three women and almost one in six men will have been sexually assaulted. But why is sexual assault such a common feature of college life? And what can be done to prevent it? Drawing on the Sexual Health Initiative to Foster Transformation (SHIFT) at Columbia University, the most comprehensive study of sexual assault on a campus to date, Jennifer S. Hirsch and Shamus Khan present an entirely new framework that emphasizes sexual assault’s social roots—transcending current debates about consent, predators in a “hunting ground,” and the dangers of hooking up. Sexual Citizens: A Landmark Study of Sex, Power, and Assault on Campus (Norton, 2020) is based on years of research interviewing and observing college life—with students of different races, genders, sexual orientations, and socioeconomic backgrounds. Hirsch and Khan’s landmark study reveals the social ecosystem that makes sexual assault so predictable, explaining how physical spaces, alcohol, peer groups, and cultural norms influence young people’s experiences and interpretations of both sex and sexual assault. Through the powerful concepts of “sexual projects,” “sexual citizenship,” and “sexual geographies,” the authors offer a new and widely-accessible language for understanding the forces that shape young people’s sexual relationships. Empathetic, insightful, and far-ranging, Sexual Citizens transforms our understanding of sexual assault and offers a roadmap for how to address it. In this interview, Dr. Hirsch, Dr. Khan, and I discuss three concepts that are central to their argument regarding the prevalence and prevention of sexual assault: Sexual projects, sexual citizens, and sexual geographies. Hirsch and Khan argue that sexual assault is connected to features of the university setting (e.g., alcohol, Greek life), race, class, and gender, and (mis)understandings of sex and consent. Additionally, the authors go on to discuss their research methods and how schools, parents, administrators, and other members of the campus community can take active steps to address and prevent sexual assault on college campuses. I highly recommend this book for both a general audience and those with a scholarly interest in sexual violence and/or elite educational institutions. Sexual Citizens would be a great book for undergraduate or graduate courses related to gender, gender-based violence, sexual assault, and organizations. Jennifer S. Hirsch is a professor of sociomedical sciences at the Mailman School of Public Health at Columbia University, and codirects SHIFT, the Sexual Health Initiative to Foster Transformation, at Columbia University. Shamus Khan is a professor of sociology at Columbia University, where he is the chair of the department. He writes on culture, inequality, gender, and elites. He was a co-Principal Investigator of SHIFT, a multi-year study of sexual health and sexual violence at Columbia University. Krystina Millar is a PhD student in the Department of Sociology at Indiana University. Her research interests include gender, sociology of the body, and sexuality. You can find her on Twitter at @KrystinaMillar. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/education
Paradox is a sophisticated kind of magic trick. A magician's purpose is to create the appearance of impossibility, to pull a rabbit from an empty hat. Yet paradox doesn't require tangibles, like rabbits or hats. Paradox works in the abstract, with words and concepts and symbols, to create the illusion of contradiction. There are no contradictions in reality, but there can appear to be. In Sleight of Mind: 75 Ingenious Paradoxes in Mathematics, Physics, and Philosophy (MIT Press, 2020), Matt Cook and a few collaborators dive deeply into more than 75 paradoxes in mathematics, physics, philosophy, and the social sciences. As each paradox is discussed and resolved, Cook helps readers discover the meaning of knowledge and the proper formation of concepts―and how reason can dispel the illusion of contradiction. The journey begins with “a most ingenious paradox” from Gilbert and Sullivan's Pirates of Penzance. Readers will then travel from Ancient Greece to cutting-edge laboratories, encounter infinity and its different sizes, and discover mathematical impossibilities inherent in elections. They will tackle conundrums in probability, induction, geometry, and game theory; perform “supertasks”; build apparent perpetual motion machines; meet twins living in different millennia; explore the strange quantum world―and much more. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/education
What do prisoner laborers, graduate students, welfare workers, and college athletes have in common? According to sociologist Erin Hatton, they are all part of a growing workforce of coerced laborers. Coerced: Work Under Threat of Punishment (University of California Press, 2020) explores this world of coerced labor through an unexpected and compelling comparison of these four groups of workers, for whom a different definition of "employment" reigns supreme—one where workplace protections do not apply and employers wield expansive punitive power, far beyond the ability to hire and fire. Because such arrangements are common across the economy, Hatton argues that coercion—as well as precarity—is a defining feature of work in America today. Theoretically forceful yet vivid and gripping to read, Coerced compels the reader to reevaluate contemporary dynamics of work, pushing beyond concepts like "career" and "gig work." Through this bold analysis, Hatton offers a trenchant window into this world of work from the perspective of those who toil within it—and who are developing the tools needed to push back against it. In this interview, Hatton and I discuss how she chose her unique cases for the book (graduate students, inmates, workfare workers, and college athletes), coercion related to status, agency and resistance, and the often harsh, punitive power of work supervisors and employers. I recommend this book for students, professors, and anyone else interested in labor, social stratification, qualitative methods, and culture. Erin Hatton, PhD, is an associate professor in the SUNY Buffalo Department of Sociology. Professor Hatton’s research focuses on work and political economy, while also extending into the fields of social inequality, labor, law and social policy. You can find her on Twitter at @eehatton. Krystina Millar is a PhD student in the Department of Sociology at Indiana University. Her research interests include gender, sociology of the body, and sexuality. You can find her on Twitter at @KrystinaMillar. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/education
Alan Taylor is the author of Thomas Jefferson’s Education published by W. W. Norton & Company in 2019. Thomas Jefferson’s Education tells the story of how Jefferson’s vision for educating the next generations of American came to be. Taking readers through Virginia’s, at time struggling, educational infrastructure, Taylor shows how Jefferson’s experience with education was both shaped by and contributed to his own vision of what a university should look like. Culminating in what is today the University of Virginia, Jefferson’s goals were, as Taylor points out, both achieved and left by the wayside in the complicated development of a university and education system. Taylor is Professor of History and the Thomas Jefferson Foundation Chair at the University of Virginia. Derek Litvak is a Ph.D. student in the department of history at the University of Maryland. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/education
Today, instead of discussing a new book, I am convening a “New Books in African American Studies Roundtable” to talk with two historians early in their careers about their recent transitions from graduate school into the professorate, and some of the scholarly and public projects they are developing at their respective institutions: Dr. Robert Greene II, Assistant Professor in History at Claflin University, and Dr. Tyler D. Parry, Assistant Professor of African American and African Diaspora Studies at the University of Nevada-Las Vegas. Both Drs. Greene and Parry are incredible examples of what scholarly integrity and kindness are. They also both are graduates of the University of South Carolina’s doctorate program in history! Adam McNeil is a 2nd year PhD in Early African American history at Rutgers University-New Brunswick. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/education
There’s a problem with school lunch in America. Big Food companies have largely replaced the nation’s school cooks by supplying cafeterias with cheap, precooked hamburger patties and chicken nuggets chock-full of industrial fillers. Yet it’s no secret that meals cooked from scratch with nutritious, locally sourced ingredients are better for children, workers, and the environment. So why not empower “lunch ladies” to do more than just unbox and reheat factory-made food? And why not organize together to make healthy, ethically sourced, free school lunches a reality for all children? Jennifer E. Gaddis' new book The Labor of Lunch: Why We Need Real Food and Real Jobs in American Public Schools (University of California Press, 2019) aims to spark a progressive movement that will transform food in American schools, and with it the lives of thousands of low-paid cafeteria workers and the millions of children they feed. By providing a feminist history of the US National School Lunch Program, Gaddis recasts the humble school lunch as an important and often overlooked form of public care. Through vivid narration and moral heft, The Labor of Lunch offers a stirring call to action and a blueprint for school lunch reforms capable of delivering a healthier, more equitable, caring, and sustainable future. In this interview, Dr. Gaddis first describes her experience conducting fieldwork in multiple public school cafeterias across the United States. Gaddis then reviews her book’s discussion of current state of school lunch and cafeteria work in American public schools, activism related to school lunch and cafeteria workers, the role of care and care work in the practice of serving school lunch, and how the structure of the National School Lunch Program magnifies and supports existing class and racial inequalities. Jennifer E. Gaddis is an assistant professor of Civil Society and Community Studies at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. You can find her on Twitter @JenniferEGaddis. Krystina Millar is a PhD student in the Department of Sociology at Indiana University. Her research interests include gender, sociology of the body, and sexuality. You can find her on Twitter at @KrystinaMillar. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/education
How does the world of book reviews work? In Inside the Critics’ Circle: Book Reviewing in Uncertain Times (Princeton University Press, 2020), Phillipa Chong, assistant professor in sociology at McMaster University, provides a unique sociological analysis of how critics confront the different types of uncertainty associated with their practice. The book explores how reviewers get matched to books, the ethics and etiquette of negative reviews and ‘punching up’, along with professional identities and the future of criticism. The book is packed with interview material, coupled with accessible and easy to follow theoretical interventions, creating a text that will be of interest to social sciences, humanities, and general readers alike. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/education
On this episode of the New Books Network, Dr. Lee Pierce (she/they)--Asst. Prof. of Rhetoric and Communication at the State University of New York at Geneseo--interviews Dr. Kate Lockwood Harris (she/they)--Department of Communication Studies at the University of Minnesota -on the courageous new book Beyond the Rapist: Title IX and Sexual Violence on US Campuses (Oxford University Press, 2019). Beyond the Rapists asks how and to what end scholars of communication and the public at large might look “beyond the rapist”--beyond the individuals who perpetuate violence and toward the organizations through whom violence is authorized and distributed. Dr. Lockwood Harris makes the provocative claim that organizations communicate differently but no less impactfully than direct action and advocates for a new perspective on what it means for an organization to do violence along raced and gendered lines in today’s higher education climate. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/education
In this episode we consider vital role of play, and what it does to expand a child’s creativity and resilience. Urban sociologist Tamara Mose is an Associate Professor at Brooklyn College, and author of The Playdate: Parents, Children and the New Expectations of Play (NYU Press, 2016). She tells us about the strengths and perils of playdates, and the need for children to have unstructured play. Educational consultant and teacher, Lucy Crehan, is the author of Cleverlands: The Secrets Behind the Success of the World’s Education Superpowers (Random House, 2017), an exploration of the lessons learned from the world’s top-performing education systems. Her research also highlights the importance of play in the learning process. In Finland, where math and reading scores are among the highest in the world, “they don’t start education formally until seven-years-old,” says Lucy. Instead of meeting academic targets in kindergarten or first grade, “they’re focusing on a much broader educational and social development before they start formal learning. Solutions discussed include: The need for diversity during playdates and in children’s lives, and the developmental role played by unsupervised play. The importance of high academic expectations for older children, and the creative role of play during the school year. Richard Davies and Jim Meigs are the host of the terrific podcast “How Do We Fix It?,” on which they talk to the world’s most creative thinkers about, well, how to fix things. Lots of things. Important ones. Highly recommended. You can find “How Do We Fix It” on Apple Podcasts. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/education
If you’re a grad student facing the ugly reality of finding a tenure-track job, you could easily be forgiven for thinking about a career change. However, if you’ve spent the last several years working on a PhD, or if you’re a faculty member whose career has basically consisted of higher ed, switching isn’t so easy. PhD holders are mostly trained to work as professors, and making easy connections to other careers is no mean feat. Because the people you know were generally trained to do the same sorts of things, an easy source of advice might not be there for you. Thankfully, for anybody who wishes there was a guidebook that would just break all of this down, that book has now been written. Going Alt-Ac: A Guide to Alternative Academic Careers (Stylus Publishing, 2020) by Kathryn E. Linder, Kevin Kelly, and Thomas J. Tobin offers practical advice and step-by-step instructions on how to decide if you want to leave behind academia and how to start searching for a new career. If a lot of career advice is too vague or too ambiguous, this book corrects that by outlining not just how to figure out what you might want to do, but critically, how you might go about accomplishing that. Zeb Larson is a recent graduate of The Ohio State University with a PhD in History. His research deals with the anti-apartheid movement in the United States. To suggest a recent title or to contact him, please send an e-mail to zeb.larson@gmail.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/education
Abraham Kuyper was one of the most important theologians in the Dutch Reformed tradition – and a newspaper editor, university founder and Prime Minister to boot. Lexham Press are publishing his "Collected Works in Public Theology," in editions that bring together his writings on business, economics, the arts and other cultural spheres. In today’s episode, we talk to Wendy Naylor, editor of the volume On Education (2019), about what makes Kuyper interesting, and why his educational theories continue to matter. What did Kuyper achieve as a politician, minister of religion and educational theorist? And how did his emphatic Calvinism work contribute to his commitment to educational pluralism? Crawford Gribben is a professor of history at Queen’s University Belfast. His research interests focus on the history of puritanism and evangelicalism, and he is the author most recently of John Owen and English Puritanism (Oxford University Press, 2016). Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/education
College sport is a multi-billion dollar industry. The men and women who lead the teams in the most important conferences often make millions of dollars between their coaching salaries and endorsement deals. But what about the athletes themselves? Most get a “free ride” (tuition, food and board), but is that sufficient? Given that the majority of the athletes in the major sports (read that to be football and men’s basketball) are African American, what type of recompense are they getting for their toil and sweat on the gridiron and the hardcourt? Since the overwhelming majority of these men do not make it to the NFL or the NBA, are they benefiting from being student-athletes, or are they being taken advantage of by schools and universities that make money off of their efforts and provide little in return? It is important questions such as these that John N. Singer addresses in his book, Race, Sports, and Education: Improving Opportunities and Outcomes for Black Male College Athletes (Harvard Education Press, 2019). By interviewing athletes, Singer gets to the heart of the debate about the value (or not) of collegiate athletics. Many of the subjects interviewed did benefit, but they relate how the machinery of college athletics still continues to exploit its principal workers: African American young men. Singer’s work opens the door to the voices of such individuals, and they have much to say about the current (sorry) state of things, and how the athletes themselves can work (with concerned faculty and administrators) to bring about change. Jorge Iber is a professor of history at Texas Tech University. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/education
As the upcoming 2020 U.S. election finally brings questions of economic justice center stage, this episode discusses the powerful short open-source book The Power of Debt: Identity and Collective Action in the Age of Finance (Institute on Inequality and Democracy, 2019). The book was published by the Institute on Inequality and Democracy in 2019 and coauthored by Prof. Hannah Appel of UCLA, Sa Whitley, a Ph.D. candidate in Gender Studies at UCLA, and Caitlin Kline, advisor to the Securities and Exchange Commission on derivatives enforcement issues. The book focuses on the urgent problem of staggering economic inequality through the lens of mass indebtedness. After assessing the grim situation - stagnating wages, historic levels of household debt, and the impossibility of accessing the means of life without debt - the authors ask whether we can organize against the injustices of debt as debtors as we once did against oppressive workplaces as workers. What goes into producing a politically salient identity category such as debtor? What do actual examples of debtor organizing tell us about the promises and perils of debtor organizing? What does it take to challenge the power of big banks and mighty investors? As an example, we discuss the strike that I am currently on with Harvard Graduate Students Union, speculating on how labor uprisings could benefit from concerted coalition building with debtors. At Harvard, undergraduates are saddled with unrepayable loans so they can access an education provided by grad students saddled with unpayable rents and bills - if the two groups could unite, what would be possible? In our conversation, Prof. Hannah Appel answered these questions amongst many others in a refreshingly spirited yet accessible style. A must-listen for scholars, organizers, and citizens concerned with economic inequality and possibilities for mobilization. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/education
Emily Wakild and Michelle K. Berry have written a practical, informative, and inspiring guide to teaching environmental history. It also happens to be fun. A Primer for Teaching Environmental History: Ten Design Principles (Duke University Press, 2018) offers strategies and approaches that educators can apply in a variety of settings: from high school classrooms to college courses, and from environmental history and environmental studies courses to US and world history surveys. Wakild and Berry draw on their years of experience in the classroom to describe not only the how, but also the why of effective teaching. They thereby empower readers to take these principles and make them their own. “Pedagogy is a process or shared endeavor,” write Wakild and Berry. With this book, they welcome educators from various backgrounds into this collaborative undertaking. Emily Wakild is Professor of History and Director of Environmental Studies at Boise State University. Michelle K. Berry is Assistant Professor of Practice in the Department of Gender & Women’s Studies and a lecturer in the History Department at the University of Arizona. Josh Nygren is Assistant Professor of History at the University of Central Missouri. You can find him on Twitter @joshua_nygren. Thanks to Justin Dean and UCM’s Digital Media Production program for production assistance. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/education
Stanley Fish is a well-known scholar regarding the First Amendment and free speech. In his latest book, The First: How to Think About Hate Speech, Campus Speech, Religious Speech, Fake News, Post-truth, and Donald Trump (One Signal, 2019), Professor Fish discusses the popular and legal meanings of the First Amendment’s speech and religion clauses. He argues that speech is not an apolitical concept, but is in fact often invoked for political purposes. Although he favors a robust zone of free speech, he is careful to note what speech law does and should protect versus what it does not, or should not, protect. He makes distinctions between freedom of inquiry in an academic setting and the claims of absolutists regarding free speech on campuses. He is also concerned with what he considers the “poor fit” of the modern interpretation of the religion clauses (Free Exercise and Establishment Clauses) with the Constitution’s concerns with individual liberty. In addition to the Constitution, Professor Fish discusses the roles of sunshine laws, post-modern interpretations of speech, and the political speech phenomenon of Donald Trump. Ian J. Drake is an Associate Professor of Political Science and Law at Montclair State University. His scholarly interests include American legal and constitutional history and political theory. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/education
What is merit? How is it claimed? In her much-awaited book The Caste of Merit: Engineering Education in India (Harvard University Press, 2019), Ajantha Subramanian addresses the pertinent question of caste inheritance and privilege in the making of merit and meritocracies. Focusing her attention on the premier institutions of engineering education in India, the Indian Institutes of Technology (IIT), Subramanian provides an insightful account of their emergence is post-independence India as a set of distinct and “world class” institutions underwritten by the Indian state. As Subramanian traces the colonial career of technical knowledge as the prehistory of the formation of IITs as well as the global circulation of ‘Brand IIT’, she provides us an account of how the alibis of caste inheritance emerge against graded inequalities. Whether it is through the language of law that only names caste discrimination as the basis of non-achievement while leaving unnamed caste inheritances as the basis of achievement, or through the judicial monikers of ‘general category’ and ‘reserved category’ or better still the ‘middle classness’ of those who claim educational achievement as their only capital, Subramanian’s book unravels the claims to casteless-ness crucial to the discourse on meritocracy in India and in the United States. Ajantha Subramanian is a Professor of Anthropology at Harvard University. Tune in to listen to the author talk about the dual value of technical education, the relationships between caste and mobility, the Indian diaspora in the Silicon Valley and the methodological repertoire and dilemmas of (not) talking about caste privilege. Bhoomika Joshi is a doctoral student in the department of anthropology at Yale University. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/education
Colleges and universities can play a virtual role in the moral, intellectual and spiritual development of a student’s life. But there is a growing mismatch between the culture of many campuses, and the challenges young people will face in their careers, politics and personal lives Author and columnist David Brooks suggested solutions in his stirring speech, “How a University Shaped My Soul”, given at the recent annual conference of Heterodox Academy. He spoke about the life lessons he learned as an undergraduate at The University of Chicago. “Our professors taught us intellectual courage. There is no such thing as thinking for yourself,” he said. “Even the words we think with are collective things, and most of us don’t think for truth, we think for bonding.” Brooks surprised his audience by praising students who challenge their professors, saying “on balance, it’s a good thing.” Since 2003, David Brooks has been an Op-Ed columnist at The New York Times. He is an executive director at the Aspen Institute, a commentator on PBS Newshour, and author of the new book, The Second Mountain: The Quest for a Moral Life (Random House, 2019) Richard Davies and Jim Meigs are the host of the terrific podcast “How Do We Fix It?,” on which they talk to the world’s most creative thinkers about, well, how to fix things. Lots of things. Important ones. Highly recommended. You can find “How Do We Fix It” on Apple Podcasts. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/education
In Consumer Management in the Internet Age: How Customers Became Managers in the Modern Workplace (Lexington Books, 2019), Joshua Sperber analyzes online consumer management, a practice in which customers monitor, report on, and—sometimes unwittingly—discipline workers through writing and posting online reviews. Sperber uses case studies of the websites Yelp and Rate My Professors (RMP), to explore how online reviewing, a popular contemporary hobby, tells us much about the collapse of the barriers separating work and leisure as well as our need for collective purpose and community wherever we can find it. This book explores the economic implications of online reviews, as reviews provide both valuable free content for websites and surveillance of, respectively, restaurant servers and college instructors. Rebekah Buchanan is an Assistant Professor of English at Western Illinois University. Her work examines the role of narrative–both analog and digitalin peoples lives. She is interested in how personal narratives produced in alternative spaces create sites that challenge traditionally accepted public narratives. She researches zines, zine writers and the influence of music subcultures and fandom on writers and narratives. You can find more about her on her website, follow her on Twitter @rj_buchanan or email her at rj-buchanan@wiu.edu. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/education
In this this interview, Dr. Carrie Tippen talks with A.R. Ruis about the 2017 book Eating to Learn, Learning to Eat: The Origins of School Lunch in the United States – published in 2017 by Rutgers University Press. Ruis narrates the development of school lunch programs from the late 19th century to the present, describing the evolution from locally organized charitable initiatives into the federally funded and managed programs that we know today. While school lunches seem almost inseparable from the American public school experience, Ruis explains that it was not clear in the 19th century whether schools had the ethical obligation or even the legal right to provide food. Ruis argues that the decision to supply lunches for students extends from constitutive moments in history when schools became a site for distributing health and wellness services of many kinds. Through case studies of Chicago, New York, and rural schools in the Midwest, Ruis demonstrates that while most schools followed a similar path to establishing lunch programs – starting with lunches provided by a private, charitable group and eventually being taken under school board control – the results varied greatly based on the challenges of the particular area and the philosophy of the school board. Through an extended discussion of the National School Lunch Act of 1946, Ruis describes a key tension still at work in school lunch debates today; that is, whether school lunch is a program for providing nutrition to children or providing a predictable market for surplus agricultural commodities. Ruis concludes, “History suggests that without development of a system that integrates eating and learning, that values skilled labor and community involvement, and that privileges children’s health over agricultural protection, malnourishment will continue to be ‘our greatest producer of ill health.’” A. R. Ruis is a historian of medicine and a learning scientist at the University of Wisconsin, Madison. You can find him on Twitter at @AndrewRuis. Carrie Helms Tippen is Assistant Professor of English at Chatham University in Pittsburgh, PA, where she teaches courses in American Literature. Her 2018 book, Inventing Authenticity: How Cookbook Writers Redefine Southern Identity (University of Arkansas Press), examines the rhetorical strategies that writers use to prove the authenticity of their recipes in the narrative headnotes of contemporary cookbooks. Her academic work has been published in Food and Foodways, American Studies, Southern Quarterly, and Food, Culture, and Society. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/education
With free college in the national conversation, there’s been no better time for Daniel T. Kirsch’s new book Sold My Soul for a Student Loan: Higher Education and the Political Economy of the Future (Praeger, 2019). Kirsch teaches at California State University, Sacramento. American colleges and universities boasts an impressive legacy, but the price of admission for many is now endless debt. As Kirsch shows in the book, increasing educational indebtedness undermines the real value of higher education in US democracy. To help readers understand this dilemma, he examines how the student debt problem emerged and what the long-term effects of this might be. Sold My Soul for a Student Loan examines this vitally important issue from an unprecedented diversity of perspectives, focusing on the fact that student debt is hindering the ability of millions of people to enter the job market, the housing market, the consumer economy, and the political process. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/education
We’ve all heard that a picture is worth a thousand words, but what if we don’t understand what we’re looking at? Social media has made charts, infographics, and diagrams ubiquitous―and easier to share than ever. We associate charts with science and reason; the flashy visuals are both appealing and persuasive. Pie charts, maps, bar and line graphs, and scatter plots (to name a few) can better inform us, revealing patterns and trends hidden behind the numbers we encounter in our lives. In short, good charts make us smarter―if we know how to read them. However, they can also lead us astray. Charts lie in a variety of ways―displaying incomplete or inaccurate data, suggesting misleading patterns, and concealing uncertainty―or are frequently misunderstood, such as the confusing cone of uncertainty maps shown on TV every hurricane season. To make matters worse, many of us are ill-equipped to interpret the visuals that politicians, journalists, advertisers, and even our employers present each day, enabling bad actors to easily manipulate them to promote their own agendas. In How Charts Lie: Getting Smarter about Visual Information (W. W. Norton, 2019), data visualization expert Alberto Cairo teaches us to not only spot the lies in deceptive visuals, but also to take advantage of good ones to understand complex stories. Public conversations are increasingly propelled by numbers, and to make sense of them we must be able to decode and use visual information. By examining contemporary examples ranging from election-result infographics to global GDP maps and box-office record charts, How Charts Lie demystifies an essential new literacy, one that will make us better equipped to navigate our data-driven world. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/education
If we want children from poor families and communities to succeed in school, then we must pay attention to more than merely what happens in school. With twelve case studies highlighting an array of Integrated Student Support (ISS) strategies from throughout the U.S., Paul Reville shows us that we already know a lot about how to move toward a world in which children have genuine equality of opportunity. Join us to hear about Reville and Elaine Weiss' book Broader, Bolder, Better: How Schools and Communities Help Students Overcome the Disadvantages of Poverty (Harvard Education Press, 2019). Stephen Pimpare is Senior Lecturer in the Politics & Society Program and Faculty Fellow at the Carsey School of Public Policy at the University of New Hampshire. He is the author of The New Victorians (New Press, 2004), A Peoples History of Poverty in America (New Press, 2008), winner of the Michael Harrington Award, and Ghettos, Tramps and Welfare Queens: Down and Out on the Silver Screen (Oxford, 2017). Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/education
In this episode of Talking Legal History, Siobhan talks with William P. Hustwit about his book Integration Now: Alexander v. Holmes and the End of Jim Crow Education (UNC Press, 2019). Hustwit is the Associate Professor of History and Chair of the History Department at Birmingham-Southern College. Fifty years after the Supreme Court decision, Integration Now explores how studying the case Alexander v. Holmes (1969) enhances understandings of the history underlying school desegregation. This episode is part of a series featuring legal history works from UNC Press. Recovering the history of an often-ignored landmark Supreme Court case, William P. Hustwit assesses the significant role that Alexander v. Holmes (1969) played in integrating the South’s public schools. Although Brown v. Board of Education has rightly received the lion’s share of historical analysis, its ambiguous language for implementation led to more than a decade of delays and resistance by local and state governments. Alexander v. Holmes required “integration now,” and less than a year later, thousands of children were attending integrated schools. Hustwit traces the progression of the Alexander case to show how grassroots activists in Mississippi operated hand in glove with lawyers and judges involved in the litigation. By combining a narrative of the larger legal battle surrounding the case and the story of the local activists who pressed for change, Hustwit offers an innovative, well-researched account of a definitive legal decision that reaches from the cotton fields of Holmes County to the chambers of the Supreme Court in Washington. Support for the production of this series was provided by the Versatile Humanists at Duke program. Siobhan M. M. Barco, J.D. explores U.S. legal history at Duke University. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/education
As you may know, university presses publish a lot of good books. In fact, they publish thousands of them every year. They are different from most trade books in that most of them are what you might called "fundamental research." Their authors--dedicated researchers one and all--provide the scholarly stuff upon which many non-fiction trade books are based. So when you are reading, say, a popular history, you are often reading UP books at one remove. Of course, some UP books are also bestsellers, and they are all well written (and, I should say, thoroughly vetted thanks to the peer review system), but the greatest contribution of UPs is to provide a base of fundamental research to the public. And they do a great job of it. How do they do it? Today I talked to Kathryn Conrad, the president of the Association of University Presses, about the work of UPs, the challenges they face, and some terrific new directions they are going. We also talked about why, if you have a scholarly book in progress, you should talk to UP editors early and often. And she explains how! Listen in. Marshall Poe is the editor of the New Books Network. He can be reached at marshallpoe@gmail.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/education
Professor Jay Driskell of Hood College, author of Schooling Jim Crow: The Fight for Atlanta's Booker T. Washington High School and the Roots of Black Protest Politics (University of Virginia Press, 2014), traces the roots of black protest politics to early 20th century Atlanta and the fight for equal education. In 1919 the NAACP organized a voting bloc powerful enough to compel the city of Atlanta to budget $1.5 million for the construction of schools for black students. This victory would have been remarkable in any era, but in the context of the Jim Crow South it was revolutionary. Schooling Jim Crow tells the story of this little-known campaign, which happened less than thirteen years after the Atlanta race riot of 1906 and just weeks before a wave of anti-black violence swept the nation in the summer after the end of World War I. Despite the constant threat of violence, Atlanta’s black voters were able to force the city to build five black grammar schools and Booker T. Washington High School, the city’s first publicly funded black high school. Schooling Jim Crow reveals how they did it and why it matters. In this pathbreaking book, Driskell explores the changes in black political consciousness that made the NAACP’s grassroots campaign possible at a time when most black southerners could not vote, let alone demand schools. He reveals how black Atlantans transformed a reactionary politics of respectability into a militant force for change. Contributing to this militancy were understandings of class and gender transformed by decades of racially segregated urban development, the 1906 Atlanta race riot, Georgia’s disfranchisement campaign of 1908, and the upheavals of World War I. On this cultural foundation, black Atlantans built a new urban black politics that would become the model for the NAACP’s political strategy well into the twentieth century. Beth A. English is director of the Liechtenstein Institute's Project on Gender in the Global Community at Princeton University. She also is a past president of the Southern Labor History Association.
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We say on this show all the time that democracy is hard work. But what does that really mean? What it is about our dispositions that makes it so hard to see eye to eye and come together for the greater good? And why, despite all that, do we feel compelled to do it anyway? Jonathan Haidt is the perfect person to help us unpack those questions. We also explore what we can do now to educate the next generation of democratic citizens, based on the research Jonathan and co-author Greg Lukianoff did for their latest book The Coddling of the American Mind: How Good Intentions and Bad Ideas are Setting Up a Generation for Failure (Penguin, 2018). Jonathan is social psychologist at New York University’s Stern School of Business. His research examines the intuitive foundations of morality, and how morality varies across cultures––including the cultures of American progressive, conservatives, and libertarians. Democracy Works is created by the McCourtney Institute for Democracy at Penn State and recorded at WPSU Penn State, central Pennsylvania’s NPR station.
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Anthony Kronman, former dean of Yale Law School, has written an account of his view of the decline of the American university from a bastion of free inquiry and an arena for the pursuit of excellence to become a vocational training school and mere reflection of the wider society. In The Assault on American Excellence (Free Press, 2019), Professor Kronman contends that this is a failure by faculty and administrators to provide students with the intellectual and moral challenges they need in order become a fully-formed human being. He reviews recent controversies happening at his school, Yale University, such as the debate over the name of Calhoun College and student and faculty objections to the use of the term “master” to describe the faculty head of a residential college. Kronman’s book is his response to what he sees as a crisis in higher education and an argument in favor of encouraging students, faculty, administrators and members of the general public to viewing college as a unique opportunity to pursue excellence in all its forms. Ian J. Drake is an Associate Professor of Political Science and Law at Montclair State University. His scholarly interests include American legal and constitutional history and political theory. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/education
The things that make people academics -- as deep fascination with some arcane subject, often bordering on obsession, and a comfort with the solitude that developing expertise requires -- do not necessarily make us good teachers. Jessamyn Neuhaus’s Geeky Pedagogy: A Guide for Intellectuals, Introverts, and Nerds Who Want to Be Effective Teachers (West Virginia University Press, 2019) helps us to identify and embrace that geekiness in us and then offers practical, step-by-step guidelines for how to turn it to effective pedagogy. It’s a sharp, slim, and entertaining volume that can make better teachers of us all. Stephen Pimpare is Senior Lecturer in the Politics & Society Program and Faculty Fellow at the Carsey School of Public Policy at the University of New Hampshire. He is the author of The New Victorians (New Press, 2004), A Peoples History of Poverty in America (New Press, 2008), winner of the Michael Harrington Award, and Ghettos, Tramps and Welfare Queens: Down and Out on the Silver Screen (Oxford, 2017). Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/education
The institutional history of mathematics in the United States comprises several entangled traditions—military, civil, academic, industrial—each of which merits its own treatment. David Lindsay Roberts, adjunct professor of mathematics at Prince George's Community College, takes a very different approach. His unique book, Republic of Numbers: Unexpected Stories of Mathematical Americans through History(Johns Hopkins University Press, 2019), anchors 20 biographical chapters to a decadal series of events, whose mathematical significance could not often have been anticipated. These short biographies range from the inauguration of military and civil engineering (Sylvanus Thayer) and the textbook industry (Catharine Beecher and Joseph Ray) to the influence of geopolitics during and after the Cold War (Joaquin Basilio Diaz, John F. Nash Jr.), and over the course of the book the subjects witness the professionalization of the research community (Charles H. Davis), radical expansions of educational access (Kelly Miller, Edgar L. Edwards Jr.), and contentious, transgenerational debates over curriculum design (Izaak Wirzsup, Frank B. Allen), among many other themes. Through their professional and institutional connections, the subjects of the chapters form a connected component, providing intriguing narrative hooks across time, geography, and status while evidencing the tightly bound community of American mathematics scholarship. The book can be read as professional history or as a collection of biographical essays, and i expect it to become a charming entry point for mathematical, historical, or not-yet-hooked readers into the forces that have shaped the discipline. Suggested companion work: David E. Zitarelli, A History of Mathematics in the United States and Canada: Volume 1: 1492–1900. Cory Brunson (he/him) is a Postdoctoral Fellow at the Center for Quantitative Medicine at UConn Health.
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Elena Jackson Albarrán’s book Seen and Heard in Mexico: Children and Revolutionary Cultural Nationalism (University of Nebraska Press, 2014) explores the changing politics of childhood during the period 1920-1940, in the wake of the Mexican Revolution. That conflict, a civil war which brought down an authoritarian regime, came with new political ideas about social justice that would elevate workers and peasants as quintessential revolutionary citizens. In the context of state formation and nation-building efforts, children became a key target population for revolutionary government programs to forge future citizens. Though interest in childrearing and health had been growing since the nineteenth century, in the 1920s and 1930s, the new state invested in children as never before and paid careful attention to the opinions of the nation’s youngest generation. The chapters examine state programs for art education, radio, and puppet theater as well as youth’s highly publicized incursion into civic life as spokespeople and representatives, both nationally and internationally. Drawing from an unusually-rich body of sources that attest to the importance ascribed to children in this era, Albarrán emphasizes how children received cultural messages and political ideas handed down by adults and found ways to make revolutionary scripts their own. The author notes that programming for children did not offer a universal vision of the Mexican child: rather, state officials crafted different opportunities for urban and rural populations, and some forms of participation were accessible only to children with a certain level of resources. Children pointed out these inequities, negotiating for the more inclusive horizon of opportunities that revolutionary tenets seemed to promise. Thus, Albarrán shows that children contributed to the contentious construction of ideas about the Mexican nation as critical interlocutors and as active citizens. Rachel Grace Newman is Lecturer in the History of the Global South at Smith College. She has a Ph.D. in History from Columbia University, and she writes about inequality, privilege, transnationalism, and youth in twentieth-century Mexico. She is also the author of a book on a binational program for migrant children whose families divided their time between Michoacán, Mexico and Watsonville, California. She is on Twitter (@rachelgnew).
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Most test prep books, textbooks, and classes miss the mark by only focusing on strategy and content. This essential guide tackles the other half of test prep: mindfulness and your mental performance. Mindfulness is widely embraced in the business and athletic communities as a valuable technique to optimize performance. Author Logan Thompson, an expert in both test prep and mindfulness, says that it's about time the test prep community embraces it as well. In his book, Beyond the Content: Mindfulness as a Test Prep Advantage (Kaplan Publishing, 2019) Logan Thompson explains, "The other half of test prep is the world of fleeting thoughts and emotions, always flickering, always murmuring inside your head, usually going unnoticed and unremarked upon. They shape our perceptions and perspectives. And, they dictate our performance on tests. The other half of test prep is happening all the time, whether we like it or not. Your mental and emotional state, your surfacing memories, your underlying beliefs are always there. The good news is that, by acknowledging the other half of test prep, exploring it, and working with it, you can gain access to your full potential." Elizabeth Cronin, Psy.D., is a licensed clinical psychologist and mindfulness meditation teacher with offices in Brookline and Norwood, MA. You can follow her on Instagram or visit her website at https://drelizabethcronin.com
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In her new book, Teaching Migrant Children in West Germany and Europe, 1945-1992 (Palgrave Macmillan, 2019), Brittany Lehman examines the right to education for migrant children in Europe between 1949 and 1992. Using West Germany as a case study to explore European trends, the book analyzes how the Council of Europe and European Community’s ideological goals were implemented for specific national groups. The book starts with education for displaced persons and exiles in the 1950s. Then it compares schooling for Italian, Greek, and Turkish labor migrants. Finally, the monograph circles back to asylum seekers and returning ethnic Germans. For each group, the state entries involved tried to balance equal education opportunities with the right to personhood, an effort which became particularly convoluted due to implicit biases. When the European Union was founded in 1993, children’s access to education depended on a complicated mix of legal status and perception of cultural compatibility. Despite claims that all children should have equal opportunities, children’s access was limited by citizenship and ethnic identity. Michael E. O’Sullivan is Professor of History at Marist College where he teaches courses about Modern Europe. He published Disruptive Power: Catholic Women, Miracles, and Politics in Modern Germany, 1918-1965 with University of Toronto Press in 2018. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/education
In this episode of New Books in Law Siobhan talks with Candy Gunther Brown about her book Debating Yoga and Mindfulness in Public Schools: Reforming Secular Education or Reestablishing Religion? (UNC Press, 2019). Dr. Brown is a professor in the Department of Religious Studies at Indiana University Bloomington. She is a historian and ethnographer of religion and culture. Yoga and mindfulness activities, with roots in Asian traditions such as Hinduism or Buddhism, have been brought into growing numbers of public schools since the 1970s. While they are commonly assumed to be secular educational tools, Candy Gunther Brown asks whether religion is truly left out of the equation in the context of public-school curricula. An expert witness in four legal challenges, Brown scrutinized unpublished trial records, informant interviews, and legal precedents, as well as insider documents, some revealing promoters of “Vedic victory” or “stealth Buddhism” for public-school children. The legal challenges are fruitful cases for Brown’s analysis of the concepts of religious and secular. While notions of what makes something religious or secular are crucial to those who study religion, they have special significance in the realm of public and legal norms. They affect how people experience their lives, raise their children, and navigate educational systems. The question of religion in public education, Brown shows, is no longer a matter of jurisprudence focused largely on the establishment of a Protestant Bible or nonsectarian prayer. Instead, it now reflects an increasingly diverse American religious landscape. Reconceptualizing secularization as transparency and religious voluntarism, Brown argues for an opt-in model for public-school programs. This episode is part of a series featuring legal history works from UNC Press. Support for the production of this series was provided by the Versatile Humanists at Duke program. Siobhan M. M. Barco, J.D. explores U.S. legal history at Duke University.
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With around two million children currently enrolled in home schools in the USA, no-one can doubt that the subject of Milton Gaither’s new book is timely. Gaither, a professor of education at Messiah College, PA, first published this study in 2008, but has updated his text to reflect both the levelling out of the number of children involved in the movement as well as to explain some of the scandals that have brought some parts of the movement into disrepute. Homeschool: An American History (Palgrave Macmillan, 2017) describes the long history of home education, from the colonial period to the present day, and it highlights the key roles played by individuals on the left, such as John Holt, and on the right, such as R. J. Rushdoony. Home education is changing, and might never have been more important than it is today – and this important new book explains why. Crawford Gribben is a professor of history at Queen’s University Belfast. His research interests focus on the history of puritanism and evangelicalism, and he is the author most recently of John Owen and English Puritanism (Oxford University Press, 2016).
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In her book, The Mindful Twenty-Something (New Harbinger, 2016), Holly Rogers presents a unique, evidence based approach to help you make important life decisions with clarity and confidence. As cofounder of the extremely popular Koru Mindfulness program developed at Duke University, her work with students serves as inspiration for this book. As a twenty-something, you may feel like you are being pulled in dozen different directions. With the daily tumult, busyness, and major life changes you experience as a young adult, you may also be particularly vulnerable to stress and its negative effects. Emerging adulthood, which occurs between the ages of 18 and 29, is a developmental stage of life when you’re faced with important decisions about school, relationships, sex, your career, and more. With so much going on, you need a guide to help you navigate with less stress and more ease. The Koru Mindfulness program, developed at Duke University and already in use on numerous college campuses—including Harvard, Yale, Princeton, MIT, Dartmouth, and several others—and in treatment centers across the country, is the only evidence-based mindfulness training program for young adults that has been empirically proven to have significant benefits for sleep, perceived stress, and self-compassion. Now, with The Mindful Twenty-Something, this popular program is accessible to all young adults struggling with stress. With Koru Mindfulness and the practical tools you’ll learn from this acceptance-based, proven effective approach, you’ll be able to cultivate the compassion and mindfulness skills you need to manage life’s challenges from a calm, balanced center, regardless of what comes your way. For more information about the Koru Mindfulness program at Duke University please visit their website at https://korumindfulness.org/
Elizabeth Cronin, Psy.D., is a licensed psychologist and mindfulness teacher with offices in Brookline and Norwood, MA. You can follow her on Instagram or visit her website at https://drelizabethcronin.com
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In The Chicana M(other)work Anthology: Porque Sin Madres No Hay Revolucion (University of Arizona Press, 2019) editors Cecilia Caballero, Yvette Martinez-Vu, Judith Perez-Torres, Michelle Tellez, and Christine Vega, bring together a diverse collective of Women of Color Mother-Scholars to end the silence experienced by Mothers of Color in academia. In this expansive collection of research, testimonios, and essays, the authors share the networks, tools, and strategies created by working-class Women of Color as they confront and overcome societal and institutional barriers to pursuing higher education and advancing in the professorate. Chicana M(other)work, the editors explain, is “care work that includes the care provided in homes, classrooms, communities, and selves.” As such, this labor permeates and informs the praxis performed by Mothers of Color in their overlapping spheres of influence. As part of the larger Chicana M(other)work Project, which includes managing a website, blog, podcast, and engaging in grassroots activism, this anthology serves as a rallying call and platform for Mothers of Color seeking to transform communities, universities, and societal institutions from the bottom-up. David-James Gonzales (DJ) is Assistant Professor of History at Brigham Young University. He is a historian of the U.S.-Mexico Borderlands, the development of multi-ethnic/racial cities, and the evolution of Latina/o identity and politics. His research centers on the relationship between Latina/o politics and the metropolitan development of Orange County, CA throughout the 20th century. You may follow him on Twitter @djgonzoPhD.
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David Resnick combines two of his passions, movies and education, in his book, Representing Education In Film: How Hollywood Portrays Educational Thought, Settings and Issues (Palgrave Macmillan, 2018). Films are powerful messengers which both project and reflect particular values, ideas and social behavior. Using many examples of Hollywood movies, Resnick analyzes the way movies perform in a variety of formal and informal educational settings, including sports, arts and religion. In this lively and engaging interview David Resnick shares insights he gained through decades of experience in education and research. Renee Garfinkel is a Jerusalem-based psychologist, writer, and television & radio commentator. Write her at r.garfinkel@yahoo.com or tweet @embracingwisdom
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The metaphor “object lesson” is a familiar one, still in everyday use. But what exactly does the metaphor refer to? In her book Object Lessons: How Nineteenth-Century Americans Learned to Make Sense of the Material World (Oxford University Press, 2018), my guest Sarah Anne Carter reveals that object lessons were a classroom exercise, in wide use during the nineteenth century. She traces them from the Swiss educational reformer Pestalozzi, through his English adherents, to seemingly unlikely outposts of educational revolution as the Oswego, New York school system. And she takes the story into politics, advertising, and racial segregation. Her book is study of intellectual history and of intellectual culture. But Sarah’s book, and this conversation, is also about asking questions of things which cannot speak. Sarah’s interest in objects comes not simply from her training as an intellectual historian, but as a curator of museums. She is curator and director of research at the Chipstone Foundation in Milwaukee, and is passionate about teaching people the history behind the objects that museums contain. Al Zambone is a historian and the host of the podcast Historically Thinking. You can subscribe to Historically Thinking on Apple Podcasts.
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Eric Blanc is the author of Red State Revolt: The Teachers’ Strike Wave and Working-Class Politics(Verso, 2019). Blanc is a former teacher, journalist, and doctoral student in sociology at New York University. He has written for The Nation, The Guardian, and Jacobin magazine. Red State Revolt explains the emergence and development of the historic wave of teacher strikes in Arizona, West Virginia, and Oklahoma. Blanc embedded himself into the organizations that helped plan the walkouts, gaining access to internal planning meetings and secret Facebook groups. The result is a rich portrait of the labor movement and contemporary political organizing. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/education
The sixties happened in Oklahoma too, argued Sarah Eppler Janda in Prairie Power: Student Activism, Counterculture, and Backlash in Oklahoma, 1962–1972(University of Oklahoma Press, 2018). While not a hub of activism and student protest on the scale of UC-Berkeley or Columbia, schools such as the University of Oklahoma and (to a lesser extent) Oklahoma State nonetheless had active student organizations such as Students for a Democratic Society. Borrowing from the language of the activists themselves, Janda dubs midwestern student protest to be “Prairie Power,” which had its beginnings in administrative paternalism and the stifling of student dissent. While typically less radical than its coastal analogues, Prairie Power was nonetheless similarly rooted in youth rebellion against censorship, American foreign policy, social norms, and racial hierarchy. Janda, a Professor of history at Cameron University, makes a compelling case for telling a broader story of 1960s and 1970s counterculture that looks beyond the usual places to uncover nuanced currents of protest on the Great Plains. Stephen Hausmann is a doctoral candidate at Temple University and Visiting Instructor of history at the University of Pittsburgh. He is currently writing his dissertation, a history of race and the environment in the Black Hills and surrounding northern plains region of South Dakota, Wyoming, and Montana.
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American society is deeply divided at this moment—not just on values and opinions but on basic perceptions of reality. In their latest book, One Nation, Two Realities: Dueling Facts in American Democracy (Oxford University Press, 2019), Morgan Marietta and David Barker attribute such division to the natural human tendency towards having different versions of reality. They introduce the concept of ‘dueling fact perceptions’ based on years of research, and for our interview, Morgan Marietta explains how they arrived at such conclusions and their implications for our country’s future. We have a sobering conversation about how fact-checking and greater education will not fix the problem of dueling fact perceptions, and we address the importance of trust—in our politicians, media, and other information sources—can ultimately shape how we use information to advance our beliefs. This interview is essential for those seeking to making sense of our current political climate and will provide realistic but thoughtful answers to many of your persistent questions about it. Morgan Marietta is Associate Professor of Political Science at the University of Massachusetts, Lowell, where he studies the political consequences of belief. His prior books include The Politics of Sacred Rhetoric: Absolutist Appeals and Political Influence, and A Citizen’s Guide to American Ideology: Conservatism and Liberalism in Contemporary Politics. He and co-author David Barker write the "Inconvenient Facts" blog at Psychology Today. Eugenio Duarte, Ph.D. is a psychologist and psychoanalyst practicing in Miami. He treats individuals and couples, with specialties in gender and sexuality, eating and body image problems, and relationship issues. He is also a university psychologist at Florida International University’s Counseling and Psychological Services Center, where he coordinates the eating disorders service. He is a graduate and faculty of William Alanson White Institute and former chair of their LGBTQ Study Group. He is also a contributing author to the book Introduction to Contemporary Psychoanalysis: Defining Terms and Building Bridges (Routledge, 2018).
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Brenda Elsey and Joshua Nadel’s new book, Futbolera: A History of Women and Sports in Latin America (University of Texas Press, 2019), uncovers the hidden history of the arrival of physical education for girls in the late-nineteenth century, it’s expansion beyond schools, and the subterranean struggles of girls and women to play and expand access and support for sports across Latin America. While sports has often been sidelined in histories of gender, class, nationalism, and the so-called Social Question in the region, Elsey and Nadel show how women’s involvement in sports animated eugenic debates over healthy citizens, nationalism, and proper motherhood in government, the Church, and the press. Beginning with women’s sports clubs in schools and moving to charity events, informal play, and regional leagues, women began to take up previously denied national and international pastimes much earlier than previously acknowledged. With women’s sports facing opposition, underfunding, neglect, silence, and outright outlawing (in the case of futbol in Brazil) throughout the twentieth century and up to the current World Cup, the authors show how generations of women athletes’ struggles and memories wove together a vibrant history of play, competition, and resilience. Despite the title, the book explores women’s involvement in tennis, track, gymnastics, basketball, and futbol (soccer), and medical and media debates over which activities were “properly” or “improperly” feminine for women’s psychology, bodies, and futures as mother’s. It covers case studies in Chile, Argentina, Brazil, Mexico, Costa Rica, and El Salvador. Jesse Zarley will be an assistant professor of history at Saint Joseph’s College on Long Island, where in Fall 2019 he will be teaching Latin American, Caribbean, and World History. His research interests include borderlands, ethnohistory, race, and transnationalism during Latin America’s Age of Revolution, particularly in Chile and Argentina. He is the author of a recent article on Mapuche leaders and Chile’s independence wars. You can follow him on Twitter.
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Annalee Good, an evaluator and researcher at the Wisconsin Center for Education Research at the University of Wisconsin – Madison, joins us in this episode to discuss her recently published book, Teachers at the Table: Voice, Agency, and Advocacy in Educational Policymaking (Lexington Press, 2018). Our conversation begins with her own journey from teaching middle school social studies to studying teacher engagement in policy advocacy. This research is particularly timely (though of course always timely!) with the 2018 wave of teacher strikes across the United States and record numbers of teachers running for office. Having teachers involved in policy advocacy is critical for policy quality and legitimacy, yet they often aren’t. Annalee’s book is a systematic inquiry into the institutional forces that make it hard for teachers to engage in policymaking, and she contrasts these barriers with the ways they are do have a voice and agency. Her study focuses on mentor and intern teachers who participated in a policy-focused professional development program in West Virginia. Through her qualitative data analysis, contextualized with national surveys, the voices of the participating teachers come through, underscoring that teachers have more power and more expertise than they often perceive. We close the episode hearing about the new work Annalee and Jerry are doing through the Wisconsin Education Policy, Outreach, and Practice group (WEPOP), which is dedicated to teacher-driven conversation about public policy. This group work runs summer policy 101 workshops with pre-service teachers, writes policy-in-practice briefs, and offers sessions at regional EdCamps. Find out more about their work and follow them on twitter @WEPOPwisc. Gerald Dryer is a graduate student in Educational Leadership and Policy Analysis at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. His research explores the relation between social justice and personalized learning in schools. Follow him on twitter @GeraldDryer or check out his research and vacation photos at: https://punkphd.wordpress.com. Julie Kallio is a graduate student in Educational Leadership and Policy Analysis at the University of Wisconsin – Madison. Her research interests include research-practice partnerships, educational change, innovation and improvement networks, and participatory design. You can find more about her work on her website, follow her on twitter, or email her at jmkallio@wisc.edu.
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In this episode, I talked with Ali Michael on her award-winning book, Raising Race Questions: Whiteness and Inquiry in Education (Teachers College Press, 2015). According to a 2014 report by the National Center for Education Statistics, white teachers comprise over 85% of the K-12 teaching force in the United States, whereas as of 2011, 52% of the public school students were white students, 16% black students, 24% Hispanic students, 5% Asian and Pacific Islander students, and 1% American India or Alaska Native students. In many urban areas, white teachers are teaching classes in which a majority of the students are non-white. In such a context, how is the issue of race addressed in American schools? How do white teachers connect to their students of color? Or simply, is it necessary to raise race questions? In Raising Race Questions, Ali Michael worked with a group of white teachers to inquire about race and schooling. She has masterfully shown to us, how teachers can become more racially competent through asking difficult questions, building inquiry groups, and working on personal and interpersonal reflection. The book offers four guiding principles for teachers to inquire about race and racism: (1) the inquiry aims to make teachers and classrooms more whole than creating fractures; (2) teachers’ and students’ positive racial identity matter; (3) a multicultural curriculum is not sufficient for building an antiracist classroom; (4) racial competence can be learned. These principles are inspiring and helpful for not only teachers, but also all the citizens who care about the issues of equity, inclusion, and social justice. Raising Race Questions won the 2017 Society of Professors of Education Outstanding Book Award. Its author, Ali Michael is the co-founder and director of the Race Institute for K-12 Educators. Other than this book, Dr. Michael also published regularly on popular and professional media such as the Huffington Post and Independent Schools Magazine. Pengfei Zhao holds a doctoral degree in Inquiry Methodology from Indiana University-Bloomington. Among her research interests are qualitative research methodology, youth culture, identity formation, and comparative sociological and educational studies. She is currently working on a book manuscript studying the coming of age experience of rural Chinese youth during and right after the Cultural Revolution.
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Gender in the Political Science Classroom (Indiana University Press, 2018) is part of a series at Indiana University Press on the scholarship of teaching and learning (SOTL), and there is much within the book that is directly within the SOTL arena, but this book is significantly broader and more extensive in its reach and analysis. Ekaterina M. Levintova and Alison K. Staudinger have brought together, into this volume, a variety of fascinating and important perspectives on political science as a discipline and how it is taught, studied, pursued and understood, especially in regard to the role, presence, absence, impact and understanding of gender. This is a useful and important text that does two different things simultaneously—it explores the ways of and roles in teaching political science (and other disciplines and subject areas that specifically focus on power in some form), while also examining the difficulty of how to teach more consciously in terms of gender, and the interaction between power and gender, especially as those topics and experiences interact with each other in an undergraduate classroom, and graduate pursuits as well. The breath of dimensions studied in this text provide a scope for analysis by teachers and by scholars. There is a lot here that will be of interest to many in Political Science, and in Education, as well as others in disciplines that also consider questions of power, of gender, and how we understand the substance of a discipline, especially one that has been traditionally male for much of its history. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/education
In this episode, I talked with Patricia Leavy on her new book, Spark (The Guilford Press, 2019). The book is a highly original novel about an unexpected yet extremely fruitful journey of a sociologist professor, Peyton Wilde. Peyton, together with a diverse group of companions, was charged with answering a perplexing question in a five-day seminar held in Iceland. As they worked to address the question from very different perspectives, the experience also transformed each and every one of the team members. This innovative text offers far more than what a typical novel could offer: The author seamlessly incorporates into it a process of social inquiry. Readers can relate to the book on multiple levels—It can be read for fun, for a book club discussion, or adapted as a required text for qualitative inquiry courses in fields such as education, social work, and communication. Pengfei Zhao holds a doctoral degree in Inquiry Methodology from Indiana University-Bloomington. Among her research interests are qualitative research methodology, youth culture, identity formation, and comparative sociological and educational studies. She is currently working on a book manuscript studying the coming of age experience of rural Chinese youth during and right after the Cultural Revolution.
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Who is excluded from science? What is the role of museums in this exclusion? In Equity, Exclusion and Everyday Science Learning: The Experiences of Minoritised Groups (Routledge, 2019), Dr Emily Dawson, an Associate Professor in the Department of Science and Technology Studies at University College London, introduces the idea of everyday science learning to critically engage with our understandings of science and the role of institutions in that understanding. The book challenges science centres and museums to move from participation policies and schemes, which have failed to significantly change the institution and its audience, to offer recognition and respect to diverse social groups. The need for change is grounded in detailed empirical work across a range of communities and organisations in London, with lessons that go well beyond science education and debates over the role of the museum. The book is essential reading for all social science and humanities scholars, as well as offering important insights for scientists too. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/education
Jamila Lee-Johnson and Ashley Gaskew, doctoral students in education at the University of Wisconsin – Madison, join us in this episode to discuss their recently published co-edited volume entitled, Critical Theory and Qualitative Data Analysis in Education. In addition to talking about their own journey to becoming critical scholars, Jamila and Ashley talk to us about the importance of centering voices and perspectives that have been traditionally marginalized in the academy. Their work builds a pathway forward for rigorous data analysis that will shape future generations of critical scholars. After an overview of the book and its contribution, Ashley and Jamila each summarize their chapters. Ashley’s chapter applies Habermas’ theory of colonization of the lifeworld to the analysis of for-profit television advertisements. She talks about why it is important to study the for-profit sector in higher education, how she transcribed and coded the advertisement, and what this technique allows us to understand about how for-profit sectors are shaping the higher education system. Jamila’s chapter uses tweets from Black Twitter and the #BlackWomenAtWork hashtag. She tells us the inspiration for her inquiry, how she applies Critical Discourse Analysis and W.E.B. Du Bois’ theory of double consciousness to code and interpret tweets, and what this analysis contributes. These are just two examples of the range of data sources and theories that authors use in the book, with other chapters analyzing syllabi, photos, interviews, and political campaign speeches. The book came together as a result of a graduate-level seminar taught by Rachelle Winkle-Wagner, and Jamila and Ashley talk about what it was like to be involved as both editors and writers in the project. They describe how they worked with authors, provided feedback, and humanized the writing and editing process, demonstrating yet another level of their scholarship. Julie Kallio is a graduate student in Educational Leadership and Policy Analysis at the University of Wisconsin – Madison. Her research interests include educational change, innovation and improvement networks, and participatory design. You can find more about her work on her website, follow her on twitter, or email her at jmkallio@wisc.edu.
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What does it take for all girls to achieve? What will it take to remove the seen and unseen barriers-- some a matter of policy and others cultural practice--to more girls achieving the equitable education that is their human right? Sally Nuamah has an answer to these questions. She is the author of How Girls Achieve(Harvard University Press, 2019). Nuamah is assistant professor at the Sanford School of Public Policy at Duke University, a documentarian, and entrepreneur. Drawing on ethnographic research in classrooms in the United States, Ghana, and South Africa, Nuamah calls for a new approach to overcome institutional sexism: feminist schools. Feminist schools will actively teach girls how and when to challenge society’s norms, and allow them to carve out their own paths to success. How Girls Achieve combines political science theory, lessons from educational practice, and application to public policy. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/education
Who funds local school board elections? Local residents or major donors living elsewhere? Jeffrey R. Henig, Rebecca Jacobsen, and Sarah Reckhow seek to answer this question in Outside Money in School Board Elections: The Nationalization of Education Politics (Harvard Education Press, 2019). Henig is a professor of political science and education at Teachers College and professor of political science at Columbia University. Jacobsen is an associate professor of education politics and policy in the College of Education at Michigan State University. Reckhow is an associate professor of political science at Michigan State University. Sarah Reckhow joined the podcast to talk about the book. Drawing on a detailed study of elections in five districts (Bridgeport, Connecticut, Denver, Indianapolis, Los Angeles, and New Orleans), Outside Money explores what happens when national issues shape local politics. The authors suggest that the involvement of wealthy individuals and national organizations in school board elections shows the nationalization of local education politics. This nationalization has potentially significant implications for social justice and democracy. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/education
From the earliest days of medical research into autism, both psychologists and the general public have characterised those on the autism spectrum as literal-minded, unimaginative and lacking in empathy. While in recent years a fresh emphasis on neurodiversity has served to sweep aside this kind of reductive thinking, many people still view autistic readers as limited in their capacity to engage with literary texts. In his new book See It Feelingly: Classic Novels, Autistic Readers, and the Schooling of a No-Good English Professor (Duke University Press, 2018), educator and author Ralph James Savarese challenges the notion that autistic readers are unable to immerse themselves in figurative language or get lost in imaginative worlds. Instead, Savarese, himself the father of a young autistic man, explores the many diverse and illuminating ways in which neurodivergent readers can engage with literature. From a young reader who identifies with the cetacean “antagonist” of Moby Dick to a woman who provides stunning new insights into Philip K. Dick's Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, See It Feelingly foregrounds the unique perspectives of autistic readers and highlights their inventive approaches to literary analysis. In this podcast, Professor Savarese speaks to Miranda Corcoran about the impetus for this project and his experience working with neurodivergent readers. Miranda Corcoran is a lecturer in twenty-first-century literature in University College Cork. Her research focuses on Cold-War fiction, science fiction, horror and the gothic. She is currently writing a monograph on witchcraft and adolescence in popular culture. She is a regular contributor to Diabolique and blogs about popular culture here. You can follow her on Twitter @middleagedwitch
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On this episode of the New Books Network, Lee Pierce (she/they)--Asst. Prof. of Rhetoric at SUNY Geneseo--interviews Dave Dillon of Grossmont College--on a valuable work for higher education: Blueprint for Success in College and Career, available under a Creative Commons License (open access) from the Rebus Community Press (2018). Although NBN does not typically review textbooks, this is a unique opportunity to share a cutting-edge resource for educators, students, and a general audience that is not only completely free but also a recipient of the 2019 Textbook Excellence Award from the Textbook and Academic Authors Association. In this interview, Lee and Dave discuss how the project came into being, the urgent need to teach “doing college” for the next generation of learners, and how publishing with a University Press compares and contrasts with OER publishing. Blueprint for Success is a student guide for classroom and career success, focusing on subjects ranging from study skills, time management, and career exploration to health and financial literacy. As one of the reviewers for Blueprint for Success puts it, the book is valuable for “making succeeding in college possible for a wide audience. It is a straightforward, useful, and accessible textbook that makes it easier to navigate college and develop skills for succeeding beyond the classroom." Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/education
Faith Ed: Teaching About Religion in an Age of Intolerance (Beacon Press, 2017) by Linda K. Wertheimer profiles the beauty and difficulty of teaching about religion in public schools. Teaching about religion in a public school in the United States is rewarding, but very difficult. It is not hyperbolic to say that one moment, everything is going fine and students are learning a lot and the next the class is on the news and steeped in controversy. Do an internet search using the term “Burkagate,” or look up the story of a Wellesley, Massachusetts 6th-grade class who visited a mosque on a field trip in Boston in 2010. In 2015, a school district in Virginia cancelled all classes in December 2015 after a controversy erupted from a teacher asking students to copy Arabic calligraphy which just happened to recite the Shahada, the Muslim statement of faith and one of the pillars of Islam. A Florida school district found itself mired in controversy over a guest speaker from the Council of American-Islamic Relations (CAIR for short). The book is out in hardback and paperback from Beacon Press. Greg Soden is the host "Classical Ideas," a podcast about religion and religious ideas. You can find it on iTunes here.
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In the information age, knowledge is power. Hence, facilitating the access to knowledge to wider publics empowers citizens and makes societies more democratic. How can publishers and authors contribute to this process? This podcast addresses this issue. We interview Professor Austin Choi-Fitzpatrick, whose book, The Good Drone: How Social Movements Democratize Surveillance (forthcoming with MIT Press) is undergoing a Massive Online Peer-Review (MOPR) process, where everyone can make comments on his manuscript. Additionally, his book will be Open Access (OA) since the date of publication. We discuss with him how do MOPR and OA work, how he managed to combine both of them and how these initiatives can contribute to the democratization of knowledge. You can participate in the MOPR process of The Good Drone through this link: https://thegooddrone.pubpub.org/ Felipe G. Santos is a PhD candidate at the Central European University. His research is focused on how activists care for each other and how care practices within social movements mobilize and radicalize heavily aggrieved collectives.
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Elizabeth Todd-Breland’s new book A Political Education: Black Politics and Education Reform in Chicago since the 1960s (University of North Carolina Press, 2018) tells the story of the struggle for educational reform in one of America's biggest and most segregated cities. By highlighting the activism of local Black women and Black teachers, Todd-Breland uncovers hidden histories of how Black women have been at the forefront of this fight from the 1960s to the present. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/education
Andrew McClellan and Sally Anne Duncan’s book offers a behind-the-scenes exploration of the career of Paul J. Sachs (1878-1965) and the graduate program he developed at Harvard University and the Fogg Museum that came to be known as the “museum course.” Sachs and the course played a major role in training students who became museum directors and curators at American art museums from the late 1920s through the 1960s. By drawing upon archival correspondence, class notes, and oral histories, The Art of Curating: Paul J. Sachs and the Museum Course at Harvard (Getty Research Institute, 2018) delves into the practical training in connoisseurship, the art market, exhibition planning, conservation, and financial management as well as the philosophical discussions that made up the class. Participants’ training and insider connections gained at Harvard had a profound impact on the development of American art museums in the first half of the twentieth century. While the book looks into some of the male students that went on to distinguished careers, it and also addresses the women who took the course and the challenges they faced in terms of the museum positions that were open to them at the time. This book is a compelling read for curators, academic art historians, museum studies scholars, and anyone interested in the history of art museums, the people behind them, and the historiography of art history. Noelle Giuffrida is research associate and affiliate faculty at the Center for East Asian Studies at the University of Kansas.
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We know, perhaps too well, the innovation-centric history of personal computing. Yet, computer users were not necessarily microelectronics consumers from the get-go; rather, earlier efforts to expand mainframe computing as a public utility made elite information technology accessible to a wide audience. In A People's History of Computing in the United States (Harvard University Press, 2018), Joy Lisi Rankin seeks to restore this broader perspective by situating the history of educational computing within the arc of U.S. social politics in the 1960s and 1970s. The result is a new perspective that challenges the business-dominated historiography of computing by explaining the convergence between the technical and social through efforts that began locally. As these projects expanded in scope, their advocates articulated a vision of "computing citizenship" throughout the rise of what we now call the "information age." Through a series of cases, beginning with timesharing at Dartmouth and the development of the BASIC programming language, through efforts by the state of Minnesota to make the fruits of its high-tech industry available to all, and ending with perhaps the most successful early computing network, the University of Illinois's PLATO project, Rankin makes a compelling case for a social history of computing. Historians of technology, education, and U.S. social history will all find a new resource—and perhaps a new timeline—in this beautifully researched and written book.
Mikey McGovern is a PhD candidate in Princeton University’s Program in the History of Science. He works on computing, quantification, communication, and governance in modern America. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/education
Ahmad Atif Ahmad’s Pitfalls of Scholarship: Lessons from Islamic Studies (Palgrave Macmillan, 2016) is a unique reflection on the field of Islamic studies. It is not quite a memoir, although it is reflective of Islamic studies, academia, and higher education in general. It is also not quite a book of theory, although it offers several deep readings of various figures in the Muslim intellectual canon. Rather, it is a collection of essays. Chapter 1, for example is a rumination the humanities and its place in the modern academy. Ahmad then goes on to concept of academic frustration. He builds on this in the third chapter by examining the iconic Muslim intellectual al-Ghazali. The final chapter ties the wider world into the academy and considers themes of nationalism and democracy. In this interview, we talk to Ahmad about what it is to be a scholar in 21st-century America (and specifically a scholar of Islam in 21st-century America), the politics of the field, what it is to be bold in academia, and the value of curiosity, all with Ahmad’s jocular cheer and sage advice. Ahmad Atif Ahmad is professor of religious studies at the University of California in Santa Barbara (UCSB). He also serves on UCSB’s 'Council on Faculty Issues and Awards' and the UC-System wide Academic Advisory Committee for Internship Programs in the University Center in Washington, DC. He previously served as associate director of the University of California Center in Washington, Sultan Qaboos Chair of Mideast Studies at the College of William and Mary in Williamsburg, Virginia, and as visiting associate professor at Utrecht University in the Netherlands. The author of ‘Islamic Law: Cases, Authorities, and Worldview (London: Bloomsbury, 2017), ‘The Fatigue of the Sharia’ (NYC: Palgrave, 2012), and ‘Structural Interrelations of Theory and Practice in Islamic Law' (Leiden: Brill, 2006), Ahmad teaches courses on Islamic legal reasoning in medieval Islam and early modern Egypt. Nadirah Mansour is a graduate student at Princeton University’s Department of Near Eastern Studies working on the global intellectual history of the Arabic-language press. She tweets @NAMansour26 and produces another Middle-East and North Africa-related podcast: Reintroducing.
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When the young Diné boy Hopi-Hopi ran away from the Santa Fe Indian Boarding School in the early years of the twentieth century, he carried with him no paper map to guide his way home. Rather, he used knowledge of the region, of the stars, and of the Southwest’s ecology instilled in him from before infancy to help navigate over rivers, through mountains, and across deserts. In The Earth Memory Compass: Diné Landscapes and Education in the Twentieth Century (University of Kansas Press, 2018), Farina King argues that education and the creation of “thick” cultural knowledge played, and continues to play, a central role in the survival of Diné culture. King, Assistant Professor of History at Northeastern State University in Tahlequah, Oklahoma, takes a unique methodological approach in telling the story of Diné education and knowledge. The Earth Memory Compass is, in King’s words, an “autoethnography,” weaving her personal story of cultural discovery and family history into a larger narrative of Indigenous boarding school experiences and deep learning within families and other sites of indigenous education. The book tracks four of the six sacred directions in Diné culture, East, South, West, and North, each connected with a sacred mountain in the Southwest, and in doing so tells a rich and complicated history of how the Diné people resisted and sometimes embraced American education while never losing their own much older forms of knowledge in the process. Stephen Hausmann is a doctoral candidate at Temple University and Visiting Instructor of history at the University of Pittsburgh. He is currently writing his dissertation, a history of race and the environment in the Black Hills and surrounding northern plains region of South Dakota, Wyoming, and Montana. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/education
In his groundbreaking new book, Alef is for Allah: Childhood, Emotion, and Visual Culture in Islamic Societies (University of California Press, 2018), Jamal Elias takes his readers on a riveting intellectual tour thematically centered on the interaction of childhood, visual culture, and affect in contemporary Muslim majority societies, and in Muslim intellectual thought more broadly. Drawing on while also significantly extending and reworking recent theoretical explorations in the field of affect theory, Elias interrogates, with lucidity as well as with dazzling insight, the promises, aspirations, and tensions invested in childhood and the figure of the child in Muslim visual culture. Elias convincingly shows that not only is childhood itself a concept and construct fraught with ambiguity, but also that the mobilization of the ideal child through material and visual culture can take remarkably malleable forms and purposes. Alef is for Allah moves seamlessly between such varied contexts as Iran, Turkey, and Pakistan to illumine the depth and diversity of the intersection of piety, nationalism, and visual culture in Islam and Muslim societies. This lyrically written book also includes incredible and excellently presented images making it particularly well suited for undergraduate and graduate seminars on material Islam, Muslim visual culture, affect studies, and childhood studies. SherAli Tareen is Associate Professor of Religious Studies at Franklin and Marshall College. His research focuses on Muslim intellectual traditions and debates in early modern and modern South Asia. His academic publications are available at https://fandm.academia.edu/SheraliTareen/. He can be reached at stareen@fandm.edu. Listener feedback is most welcome.
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I don’t know about the colleges and universities you’re familiar with, but the U.S. military has a pretty visible presence on my campus—through the ROTC, a newly remodeled Veterans Resource Center, and the student veterans themselves who enroll in my classes each semester. So I was immediately intrigued when I heard about the book Grateful Nation: Student Veterans and the Rise of the Military-Friendly Campus (Duke University Press, 2017) by Ellen Moore. In Grateful Nation, Moore uses interviews and observations to document the experiences of student veterans, the challenges they face re-integrating into academic life, strategies they use to navigate that experience, and the nature of the resources available to them along the way. Moore considers an interesting paradox—that despite the presence of overtly military-friendly programs and practices on most US campuses today, there is still a perception, stemming from the Vietnam War era, that college campuses are anti-military and anti-veteran spaces; this misperception serves to silence or censor discussions of contemporary military conflicts on campus, even among veterans themselves. If you find this all as interesting as I do, you’ll want to listen to my upcoming interview with Dr. Ellen Moore about her book. Carrie Lane is a Professor of American Studies at California State University, Fullerton and author of A Company of One: Insecurity, Independence, and the New World of White-Collar Unemployment (Cornell University Press, 2011). Her research concerns the changing nature of work in the contemporary U.S. She is currently writing a book on the professional organizing industry. To suggest a recent title or to contact her, please send an email to clane@fullerton.edu.
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Today, we're talking to Janelle Adsit about her book, Toward an Inclusive Creative Writing (Bloomsbury, 2017). In it, Adsit takes a hard look at the way American colleges and universities teach creative writing. What do students who enter creative-writing classrooms encounter as these young men and women hope to discover who they are and can be as writers? Does the teaching they receive help or hinder them? As Adsit’s title suggests, one of the problems she’s found with writing instruction in our institutions is that it’s too exclusive, too centered on limited and limiting ideas of what counts as good writing and, by extension, who can be good writers. Too often, in writing classrooms across the country, students encounter models that are predominately male and predominately white. How, Adsit asks, can we foster the writing of students who don’t identify with these models? How can we guide our students to write from and give voice to their own diversity? At stake in these questions is not merely the experience of students in the classroom, but, in the long run, the future of American literature, for in these classrooms are our authors-to-be, those writers who will go on to write the books we’ll read in the coming decades. Adsit hopes to lead us forward into a brighter literary future, one in which our literature is as rich and diverse as the Americans who read it. Eric LeMay is on the creative writing faculty at Ohio University. His work ranges from food writing to electronic literature. He is the author of three books, most recently In Praise of Nothing: Essay, Memoir, and Experiments (Emergency Press, 2014). He can be reached at eric@ericlemay.org.
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Our evolutionary success, according to co-authors Alex Bentley and Michael O'Brien, lies in our ability to acquire cultural wisdom and teach it to the next generation. Today, we follow social media bots as much as we learn from our ancestors. We are radically changing the way culture evolves. In The Acceleration of Cultural Change: From Ancestors to Algorithms (MIT Press, 2017), Bentley and O'Brien describe how the transmission of culture has become vast and instantaneous across an internet of people and devices, after millennia of local, ancestral knowledge that evolved slowly. Long-evolved cultural knowledge is aggressively discounted by online algorithms, which prioritize popularity and recency. If children learn more from Minecraft than from tradition, this is a profound shift in cultural evolution. Bentley and O'Brien examine the broad and shallow model of cultural evolution seen today in the science of networks, prediction markets, and the explosion of digital information. They suggest that in the future, artificial intelligence could help solve the problem of information overload, learning to integrate concepts over the vast milieu of digitally stored information. Professor Alex Bentley is Chair of the Department of Anthropology at the University of Tennessee. Follow him on Twitter @ralexbentley. Hoover Harris, editor of Degree Or Not Degree?, holds a PhD in English and writes and speaks about trends in higher education. He can be reached by email at hooverharris@icloud.com or on Twitter @degreenot.
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In an atmosphere filled with social media and fake news, history is more important than ever. But, what do you really know about history? In the second edition of his book, Teaching What Really Happened: How to Avoid the Tyranny of Textbooks and Get Students Excited About Doing History(Teachers College Press, 2018). Dr. James W. Loewen interrogates what we think we know about our past. Loewen, a sociologist and professor at the University of Vermont, shows readers that history must be reconsidered in order to avoid previously accepted misconceptions. As Loewen demonstrates throughout this valuable text, teachers must look beyond the textbook to discover what really happened and to teach their students how to "do" history. Teaching What Really Happened is an eye-opening book that reinvigorates history and empowers its readers. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/education
What is learning? There is a robust body of literature that seeks to tell us what the most effective classroom techniques and strategies are, but Joshua Eyler goes further. In his new book How Humans Learn: The Science and Stories behind Effective College Teaching (West Virginia UP, 2018), Eyler digs deeply into research from a broad range of disciplines to help us understand the act of learning itself, and then showing us how that deeper understanding can translate into more effective teaching and learning in our own classrooms. It’s an important book for all college instructors. Stephen Pimpare is Senior Lecturer in the Politics & Society Program and Faculty Fellow at the Carsey School of Public Policy at the University of New Hampshire. He is the author of The New Victorians (New Press, 2004), A Peoples History of Poverty in America (New Press, 2008), winner of the Michael Harrington Award, and Ghettos, Tramps and Welfare Queens: Down and Out on the Silver Screen (Oxford, 2017).
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McKenzie Wark’s new book offers 21 focused studies of thinkers working in a wide range of fields who are worth your attention. The chapters of General Intellects: Twenty-One Thinkers for the Twenty-First Century (Verso, 2017) introduce readers to important work in Anglophone cultural studies, psychoanalysis, political theory, media theory, speculative realism, science studies, Italian and French workerist and autonomist thought, two “imaginative readings of Marx,” and two “unique takes on the body politic.” There are significant implications of these ideas for how we live and work at the contemporary university, and we discussed some of those in our conversation. This is a great book to read and to teach with! Carla Nappi is the Andrew W. Mellon Chair in the Department of History at the University of Pittsburgh. You can learn more about her and her work here. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/education
According to most experts, boys have more trouble in schools than girls. Further, African-American boys have even more trouble than, say, white boys. What to do? According to some, one possible solution to the latter problem is all-Black male schools, or "ABMSs." In her new book In a Classroom of Their Own: The Intersection of Race and Feminist Politics in All-Black Male Schools (University of Illinois Press, 2018), Keisha Lindsay critiques ABMSs from a feminist perspective and has some helpful things to say about how to educate young African-Americans generally. Adam McNeil is a PhD student in History, African American Public Humanities Initiative and Colored Conventions Project Scholar at the University of Delaware. He can be reached on Twitter @CulturedModesty.
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In today’s episode, I talked with Dr. Jeong-Hee Kim about her new book, Understanding Narrative Inquiry: The Crafting and Analysis of Stories as Research (Sage Publications, 2016). The book offers a comprehensive overview of the theoretical foundation and practical guidance of narrative inquiry. It embodies narrative thinking by seamlessly weaving together epistemological theories, methodological discussions, and personal stories. Seasoned with Dr. Kim’s unique sense of humor, Understanding Narrative Inquiry is highly accessible and at the same time extremely insightful. A highlight of the interview will be Dr. Kim’s discussion on how to strike a balance between aesthetic play and rigorous social research in narrative studies. It is also helpful to hear her explanation of the various ways researchers can think with theories in crafting their stories. The book has received the 2017 Outstanding Publication Award from the Narrative Research Special Interest Group (SIG) of the American Educational Research Association (AERA). Jeong-Hee Kim is a Professor of Curriculum Studies at Texas Tech University. Kim is a curriculum theorist, teacher educator, and narrative inquiry methodologist. Her research centers on various epistemological underpinnings of curriculum studies, focusing on phenomenological and hermeneutical ways of understanding the field of curriculum studies and teacher education. Pengfei Zhao holds a doctoral degree in Inquiry Methodology from Indiana University-Bloomington. Her work employs critical qualitative research methodologies to examine topics such as youth culture, educational reform, and research ethics in both East Asian and American contexts.
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Pretty much everyone knows that the American healthcare system is, well, very inefficient. We don’t, so critics say, get as much healthcare bang for our buck as we should. According to Bryan Caplan, however, the American educational system–higher education in particular–is much, much worse. In The Case against Education: Why the Education System Is a Waste of Time and Money (Princeton University Press, 2018), Caplan argues that we are quite literally paying a fortune and getting almost nothing of any collective value. Pretty much all the news in this book is bad. Students spend a ton on secondary ed, but they don’t learn many marketable skills. In fact, the don’t learn much at all: they forget almost everything they learn in college quite quickly. Taxpayers heavily subsidize this “learning” experience, but the social payoff is dramatically less than the investment. College is a good deal for good students, but it’s a very bad deal for the many poor students who don’t finish and have thus wasted their savings and several years of their lives–years they could have been working and accumulating money instead of throwing it away. College doesn’t make us culturally or ethically better people by almost any definition of “better.” Interestingly, despite what conservative pundits say, it doesn’t even change our political views: even though the vast majority of professors are liberal, and their courses perhaps have a liberal slant, students come out of college with the same political attitudes they brought to it. What does college do for students? According to Caplan’s compelling argument, it signals to employers that they are conscientious and hard working enough to (you guessed it) finish college and, by inference, work an ordinary job. That, he says, is a very costly signal. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/education
What can a researcher do to promote social justice? A conventional image of a researcher describes her staying in the ivory tower for most of the time, producing papers filled with academic jargons periodically, and occasionally providing consultations for policymakers. In Just Research in Contentious Times: Widening the Methodological Imagination (Teachers College Press, 2018), renowned critical psychologist Michelle Fine challenges us to imagine social research radically differently. According to Fine, if a researcher’s social justice work was only targeted at top politicians of this era, she probably would feel our era had never been darker. Fine argues that social research can do far more than that: It could create new solidarities across multiple marginalized groups, democratize the knowledge production process, disrupt the reproduction of oppressive social structure, and ultimately, sow the seed of positive social changes. Just Research in Contentious Times documents Fine’s long-term grounded research efforts at the frontline of the battle for social justice. She and her research team work with dropout students, female prisoners, Muslim youths, LGBTQ teachers, and many other marginalized social groups to bear the witness of their sufferings, probe the inequality of the current system, and raise the public’s consciousness on pressing social issues. By doing that, she champions a research approach which emphasizes the participation of community members as co-researchers, one that she terms as critical participatory action research (CPAR). Just Research in Contentious Times blends her passion for CPAR with highly personal yet profoundly touching self-reflection, rigorous data analysis, and innovative theoretical discussions. It is a compelling and inspiring read for anyone who is interested in social justice work.
Michelle Fine is a distinguished professor of critical social psychology, women’s studies, and urban education at the Graduate Center, the City University of New York. She is the author or editor of more than a dozen books, including Framing Dropouts: Notes on the Politics of an Urban High School (1991), Disruptive Voices: The Possibilities of Feminist Research (1992), Working Method: Research and Social Justice (with Lois Weis, 2004), and Muslim American Youth: Understanding Hyphenated Identities through Multiple Methods (with Selcuk Sirin, 2008).
Pengfei Zhao holds a doctoral degree in Inquiry Methodology from Indiana University-Bloomington. Among her research interests are youth culture, identity formation, qualitative research methods, and comparative sociological and educational studies. She is currently working on a book manuscript studying the coming of age experience of rural Chinese youth during and right after the Cultural Revolution. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/education
Shenila Khoja-Moolji’s Forging an Ideal Educated Girl: The Production of Desirable Subjects in Muslim South Asia (University of California Press, 2018) is a pathbreaking and incredibly timely monograph that combines tools of education studies, gender studies, and post-colonial genealogy to interrogate the promises and paradoxes invested in the idea of girls’ education. Shifting her camera of analysis between global discourses on female education and empowerment and the translation of those discourses in the form of educational policies, cultural developments, and political maneuverings in post-colonial societies like Pakistan, Khoja-Moolji masterfully unveils the fraught nature of an otherwise often taken for granted ideal of girls’ education. Through a close and careful reading of varied and often colorful state and non-state archives, this book traces the often contingent and contradictory projects of nationalism and citizenship reflected in competing imaginaries of the ideal of an “educated girl” over time, with a focus on the context of Pakistan. This remarkably lucid text will be widely read by scholars of education, gender, South Asia, and post-colonial thought, and will also make an excellent choice for undergraduate and graduate seminars.
SherAli Tareen is Associate Professor of Religious Studies at Franklin and Marshall College. His research focuses on Muslim intellectual traditions and debates in early modern and modern South Asia. His academic publications are available here. He can be reached at sherali.tareen@fandm.edu. Listener feedback is most welcome.
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The vast chasm between classical economics and the humanities is widely known and accepted. They are profoundly different disciplines with little to say to one another. Such is the accepted wisdom. Fortunately, Professors Gary Saul Morson and Morton Schapiro, both of Northwestern University, disagree. In their new book, Cents and Sensibility: What Economics Can Learn from the Humanities (Princeton University Press, 2017), they argue that the mathematically rigid world of classical economics actually has a lot to learn from the world of great literature. Specifically, they argue that “original passions” (the term is from an overlooked work of Adam Smith) in the form of culture, story telling, and addressing ethical questions are found in great works of literature, but lacking in modern economic theory. Good judgment, they write, “cannot be reduced to any theory or set of rules.” Along the way, they weave together Adam Smith, Lev Tolstoy, Jared Diamond, college admissions practices, the US News and World Report rankings, and the family. This is an ambitious and original work. Many will disagree with it, but few will be able to put it down.
Daniel Peris is Senior Vice President at Federated Investors in Pittsburgh. Trained as a historian of modern Russia, he is the author most recently of Getting Back to Business: Why Modern Portfolio Theory Fails Investors. You can follow him on Twitter @Back2BizBook or at http://www.strategicdividendinvestor.com Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/education
Pamela Woolner, senior lecturer in education at Newcastle University, joins us in this episode to discuss her edited volume, School Design Together (Routledge, 2014). Pam is an expert in understanding and developing learning environments, particularly the use of participatory research methods to engage and empower users to share their experiences and knowledge.
My conversation with Pam begins with her background in psychology and how her early research studying the use of visuals in math then led her to her research on school environments. In the interview, Pam reflects on the genesis of the book: a 2011 conference to bring together a diverse collective of architects, designers, educators, and researchers at the conclusion of the UK’s Building Schools for the Future programme.
For those unfamiliar with learning environments research, a common question is, “Which comes first, the innovative space or innovative teaching?” To answer this question, Pam discusses the complexity of school change, and describes using a cyclical approach that engages a range of participants, at different levels of participation, and at different times in the process. Throughout our conversation, Pam shares her insight about the ways the physical environment is linked to change in schools.
Julie Kallio is a graduate student in Educational Leadership and Policy Analysis at the University of Wisconsin – Madison. Her research interests include educational change, innovation and improvement networks, physical spaces of schools, and participatory design. You can find more about her work on her website, follow her on twitter, or email her at jmkallio@wisc.edu. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/education
The eight elite institutions that comprise the Ivy League, sometimes known as the Ancient Eight—Harvard, Yale, Princeton, Penn, Columbia, Brown, Dartmouth, and Cornell—are American stalwarts that have profoundly influenced history and culture by producing the nation’s and the world’s leaders. The few black students who attended Ivy League schools in the decades following WWII not only went on to greatly influence black America and the nation in general, but unquestionably awakened these most traditional and selective of American spaces. In the twentieth century, black youth were in the vanguard of the black freedom movement and educational reform.
In Upending the Ivory Tower: Civil Rights, Black Power, and the Ivy League (NYU Press, 2018), historian Stefan Bradley illuminates how the Black Power movement, which was borne out of an effort to edify the most disfranchised of the black masses, also took root in the hallowed halls of America’s most esteemed institutions of higher education. Between the close of WWII and 1975, the civil rights and Black Power movements transformed the demographics and operation of the Ivy League on and off campus. As desegregators and racial pioneers, black students, staff, and faculty used their status in the black intelligentsia to enhance their predominantly white institutions while advancing black freedom. Although they were often marginalized because of their race and class, the newcomers altered educational policies and inserted blackness into the curricula and culture of the unabashedly exclusive and starkly white schools.
This book attempts to complete the narrative of higher education history, while adding a much needed nuance to the history of the Black Power movement. It tells the stories of those students, professors, staff, and administrators who pushed for change at the risk of losing what privilege they had. Putting their status, and sometimes even their lives, in jeopardy, black activists negotiated, protested, and demonstrated to create opportunities for the generations that followed. The enrichments these change agents made endure in the diversity initiatives and activism surrounding issues of race that exist in the modern Ivy League.
Upending the Ivory Tower not only informs the civil rights and Black Power movements of the postwar era but also provides critical context for the Black Lives Matter movement that is growing in the streets and on campuses throughout the country today. As higher education continues to be a catalyst for change, there is no one better to inform today’s activists than those who transformed our country’s past and paved the way for its future. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/education
Most people have heard of the Masters of Fine Arts–“MFA”–degree, but few know about the grueling process one must undergo to complete one. In Talking Art: The Culture of Practice and the Practice of Culture in MFA Education (University of Chicago Press, 2018), sociologist and ethnographer Dr. Gary Alan Fine asks how MFA students learn to make art and to speak intelligently about their work, how they become “artists” and what what it means to be an “MFA.”
Gary Alan Fine is the James E. Johnson Professor of Sociology at Northwestern University. Fine has received fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the Russell Sage Foundation, the Rockefeller Foundation, and the Center for Advancement Study in the Behavioral Sciences, and the Institute for Advanced Study.
Michael O. Johnston, Ph.D. is an Assistant Professor of Sociology at William Penn University. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/education
How have academics been represented in children’s books? In Picture-Book Professors: Academia and Children’s Literature (Cambridge University Press, 2018), Melissa Terras, Professor of Digital Cultural Heritage at the University of Edinburgh, tells the story of the professor in children’s books since 1850. The book details the history of highly problematic depictions of academics, usually as kindly old men, baffled buffoons, or evil madmen, depictions that exclude those who are not white, often middle class origin, men. Terras’ work is a great example for digital humanities scholarship, offering a powerful case for new methods to answer crucial questions of equality and diversity for humanities scholars and across universities more generally. Alongside the analysis, Terras has published an anthology, The Professor in Children’s Literature, including some of the works discussed in the book. Both Picture-Book Professors and the accompanying anthology are open access and free to read, and will be of interest to every academic as well as the wider public too! Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/education
How do schools empower but also potentially emasculate young black men? In his new book, Black Boys Apart: Racial Uplift and Respectability in All-Male Public Schools (University of Minnesota Press, 2018), Freeden Blume Oeur uses observational and interview methods to better understand the lived experiences of young black men in two all-male schools. Situating the book in “privilege, power, and politics” (p. 7), Blume Oeur encourages the reader to think beyond typical narratives around race and masculinity. The book elaborates on how the two all-male school come to be, structurally — through policies like No Child Left Behind, but also theoretically–through narratives of racial uplift and resilience. Blume Oeur explores gender dynamics in the schools as well, addressing issues like contradictory discourses around girls as competition or distraction, as well as the “adultification” of young black men. Overall, this book encourages the reader to think beyond traditional narratives, think more about the “hidden curriculum” of schools, and understand the lived experiences of these young black men in his study.
This book would be a great addition to any higher level undergraduate or graduate level Sociology of Education or Sociology of Race course. Anyone involved in educational systems, from primary school to higher education, should also read this book.
Sarah E. Patterson is a postdoc at the University of Western Ontario. You can tweet her at @spattersearch. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/education
The study of education policy is a scholarly field that sheds light on important debates and controversies revolving around education policy and its implementation. In this episode, we will be talking with three scholars who have made substantial contributions to this field by introducing an innovative perspective to the studies of educational policy—the discursive perspectives. In their new edited volume, Discursive Perspectives on Education Policy and Implementation (Palgrave Macmillan, 2017), editors Jessica Lester, Chad Lochmiller, and Rachael Gabriel, together with other contributors of the book, argue that we should pay close attention to how language is used as a mediation in the entire process of education policy conceptualization and implementation. The book offers compelling and diverse examples to demonstrate how researchers interested in different aspects of policy studies may employ language-based methodologies to enrich our understanding of crucial issues in the realm of policymaking. Thoughtfully produced and carefully presented, the book also won this year’s AERA Qualitative Research SIG outstanding book award.
About the host: Pengfei Zhao holds a doctoral degree in Inquiry Methodology from Indiana University-Bloomington. Her work employs critical qualitative research methodologies to examine topics such as youth culture, educational reform, and research ethics in both East Asian and American contexts. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/education
Despite all the buzz about the reconstruction of Mostar’s beautiful Old Bridge, Mostar remains a largely divided city, with Bosniaks on one side and Croats on the other. In Citizens of an Empty Nation: Youth and State-Making in Postwar Bosnia-Herzegovina (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2015), anthropologist Azra Hromadžić takes the reader into the halls (and into the bathroom) of Mostar Gymnasium, Bosnia-Herzegovina’s first integrated high school. Through ethnographic details about the possibilities for and limitations of inter-ethnic socializing within the school, Hromadžić draws much broader insights about the complicated relationship between internationally-sponsored reunification initiatives and the ethnic segregation that is built into the very framework of the post-war state.
Jelena Golubovic is a PhD candidate in Anthropology at Simon Fraser University. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/education
If you work in Asian studies as a scholarly field, you should read Fabio Lanza’s new book.
The End of Concern: Maoist China, Activism, and Asian Studies (Duke University Press, 2017) takes as its central case study the Committee of Concerned Asian Scholars (CCAS) and The Bulletin of Concerned Asian Scholars that the CCAS published. Tracing the history of the organization from its founding in the midst of the global 60s to its transformations with the dissipation of global Maoism, the book is a carefully researched, beautifully written, and generous history of this organization and its members. But it is also much more broadly relevant to (and directly engaged with) themes of importance for any of us who work on scholarly pursuits within or beyond the academy right now, as it gives careful consideration to the modern history of tensions that many of us experience right now: between scholarship and activism, between the political and the intellectual, between thinking and acting. (And of course, these are not necessarily mutually exclusive poles or firm dichotomies.) Lanza’s book also gives helpful context to the history of Asian studies as a discipline and the role of “China” within it, looking closely at the contexts of its emergence, its transformations, and the scholarly practices that it has helped to create. Put another way, this is a book that’s also, on some level, about what it is )and what is has been, and what it could be in the future) to be a scholar of/in/with Asian studies.
Carla Nappi is the Andrew W. Mellon Chair in the Department of History at the University of Pittsburgh. You can learn more about her and her work here. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/education
How can educators ensure that young people who attain a postsecondary credential are adequately prepared for the future? Matthew T. Hora and his co-authors, Ross Benbow and Amanda Oleson, explain that the answer is not simply that students need more specialized technical training to meet narrowly defined employment opportunities. Beyond the Skills Gap: Preparing College Students for Life and Work (Harvard Education Press, 2016) challenges this conception of the “skills gap,” highlighting instead the value of broader twenty-first-century skills in postsecondary education. They advocate for a system in which employers share responsibility along with the education sector to serve the collective needs of the economy, society, and students.
The study, set in Wisconsin, takes place against the backdrop of heated political debates over the role of public higher education. This thoughtful and nuanced account, enriched by keen observations of postsecondary instructional practice, promises to contribute new insights to the rich literature on workforce development and to provide valuable guidance for postsecondary faculty and administrators.
Matthew T. Hora is an assistant professor of adult and higher education at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, and a research scientist at the Wisconsin Center for Education Research. Follow him on Twitter @matt_hora.
Hoover Harris, editor of Degree Or Not Degree?, holds a PhD in English and writes and speaks about trends in higher education. He can be reached by email at hooverharris@icloud.com or on Twitter @degreenot. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/education
In this episode, I speak with Steven Alvarez about his book, Brokering Tareas: Mexican Immigrant Families Translanguaging Homework Literacies (SUNY Press, 2017). This book highlights a grassroots literacy mentorship program that connects emerging bilingual and trilingual K-12 students with college students from similar backgrounds. We discuss how New York immigration has changed over the past quarter century, the attributes of effective mentors and support programs, and alternatives to the deficit theory in education.
He recommends the following books for listeners interested in his work and our conversation:
• Writing on the Move: Migrant Women and the Value of Literacy by Rebecca Lorimer Leonard
• Del Otro Lado: Literacy and Migration Across the U.S.-Mexico Border by Susan V. Myers
• Decolonizing Literacy: Mexican Lives in the Era of Global Capitalism by Gregorio Hernandez-Zamora
Alvarez joins New Books in Education for the interview. To share your thoughts on the podcast, you can connect with him on Twitter at @chastitellez and on Instagram at @stevenpaulalvarez and @tacoliteracy.
Trevor Mattea is a teacher at Cascade Canyon School as well as an educational consultant and speaker. His areas of expertise include deeper learning, parent involvement, project-based learning, and technology integration. He can be reached by email at info@trevormattea.com or on Twitter at @tsmattea. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/education
There are numerous political debates about education policy today, but some of the most heated surround vouchers, charter schools, and other questions about public funding and oversight of private schools. Though many of these questions feel new, they, in fact, have a long history. Public vs. Private: The Early History of School Choice in America (Oxford University Press, 2018) examines that history, tracing early debates about school choice. Robert N. Gross, a history teacher and assistant academic dean at Sidwell Friends School in Washington, DC, explains how public schools developed with their promoters intending them to be a new monopoly in education. Then, in the late 19th century, Catholic immigrants sought to set up private schools, leading to an era of conflict and compromise between public and private school policy. Gross shows how and why regulation become an important tool for both sides in those conflicts. Further, the book shows how schools were thought of as a public utility and become a key part of larger trends in state regulation of private entities performing public functions.
In this episode of the podcast, Gross discusses his new book. He explains the goals of public school promoters in the 19th and early 20th centuries, and how private schools challenged the dominance of common schools. Finally, we also discuss the importance of this history for thinking about regulation, public schools, and the law today.
Christine Lamberson is an Assistant Professor of History at Angelo State University. Her research and teaching focuses on 20th-century U.S. political and cultural history. She’s currently working on a book manuscript about the role of violence in shaping U.S. political culture in the 1960s and 1970s. She can be reached at clamberson@angelo.edu.
Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/education
Black Greek-Letter organizations (BGLOs) appeared as an initiative from black college students to provide support, opportunities and service, as well as a free space for the black community. Despite most BGLO members are black, there are some non-black students who decide to join these organizations. In their new book Diversity in Black Greek-Letter Organizations: Breaking the Line (Routledge, 2018), Wendy M. Laybourn and Devon R. Goss explore the motivations for membership as well as the impact that these experiences had for non-black BGLO members. Membership to BGLOs provides non-black members with the opportunity to reinterpret their own racial identities. Diversity in Black Greek-Letter Organizations provides a good opportunity to explore the opportunities and challenges of cross-racial interactions within civil society organizations.
Felipe G. Santos is a PhD candidate at the Central European University. His research is focused on how activists care for each other and how care practices within social movements mobilize and radicalize heavily aggrieved collectives. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/education
In cities ravaged by years of bloodshed and warfare, how did black populations, many formerly enslaved, help shape the new world that the Civil War left open for them to mold? In Dr. Hilary Green’s book Educational Reconstruction: African American Schools In The Urban South, 1865-1890 (Fordham University Press, 2016), she answers that question and more. Dr. Green chronicles the history of the black educational struggles in the urban centers of Richmond, Virginia and Mobile, Alabama during the Reconstruction period. During Reconstruction, African Americans fought vigorously on behalf of their race to have educational opportunities to better themselves in the postbellum South. Weathering the storms of physical violence, arson, political strife, and overall incivility in Richmond and Mobile, Dr. Green recovers the important history of how African Americans saw the interconnectedness of educational attainment to democracy and citizenship.
Adam McNeil is a PhD student in History, African American Public Humanities Initiative and Colored Conventions Project Fellow at the University of Delaware. He can be reached on Twitter @CulturedModesty. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/education
Though many Americans, Republicans especially, regard universities as heavily disposed to the political left, few people understand how much this matters, how it happened, how deeply ideologically siloed the academy is, or what can be done about it. In The University We Need: Reforming American Higher Education (Encounter Books, 2018), Professor Warren Treadgold shows the crucial role of universities in American culture and politics, the causes of administrative bloat and inept academic hiring, the decline of teaching and research, and some possible ways of reversing the downward trend.
In addition to recommending policies to address issues such as grade inflation and poor scholarship, Treadgold offers a specific proposal for the founding of a new, world-class university. He describes how to create a school which could seriously challenge the dominance of Harvard, Princeton, Yale, Stanford, and Berkeley, attracting conservative and moderate faculty and students and providing a much-needed alternative to the failing status quo.
Warren Treadgold is the National Endowment for the Humanities Professor of Byzantine Studies and Professor of History at Saint Louis University. With a BA and PhD from Harvard, he has taught at UCLA, Stanford, UC Berkeley, Hillsdale College, and Florida International University and has held research fellowships at the University of Munich, the Free University of Berlin, All Souls College at Oxford, and the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars in Washington. He has published ten books and many articles on Byzantine, medieval, and late ancient history and literature and published articles on higher education in Commentary, The Weekly Standard, The Wilson Quarterly, and Academic Questions.
Hoover Harris, editor of Degree Or Not Degree?, holds a PhD in English and writes and speaks about trends in higher education. He can be reached by email at hooverharris@icloud.com or on Twitter @degreenot. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/education
In this episode, I speak with Steven Alvarez about his book, Community Literacies en Confianza: Learning From Bilingual After-School Programs (National Council of Teachers of English, 2017). This book highlights effective bilingual after-school programs and how their models can be applied to the traditional classroom contexts. We discuss the role of relationships and trust in fostering learning as well as emerging Latinx identities in the South.
Alvarez recommends the following books for listeners interested in his work and our conversation:
Culturally Sustaining Pedagogies: Teaching and Learning for Justice in a Changing World by Django Paris
Raciolinguistics: How Language Shapes Our Ideas About Race by H. Samy Alim
The Translanguaging Classroom: Leveraging Student Bilingualism for Learning by Ofelia García
Alvarez joins New Books in Education for the interview. To share your thoughts on the podcast, you can connect with him on Twitter at @chastitellez and on Instagram at @stevenpaulalvarez and @tacoliteracy.
Trevor Mattea is a teacher at Cascade Canyon School as well as an educational consultant and speaker. His areas of expertise include deeper learning, parent involvement, project-based learning, and technology integration. He can be reached by email at info@trevormattea.com or on Twitter at @tsmattea. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/education
In this episode, I speak with Aaron M. Kuntz about his book, The Responsible Methodologist: Inquiry, Truth-Telling, and Social Justice (Left Coast Press, 2015). This book offers a thorough and much-needed interrogation of the role of research methodologist in today’s neo-liberalist era. Kuntz reflects upon the social and cultural structure that gave rise to the conventional role of a methodologist, a technocrat and middle-manager of knowledge production. He urges social and educational researchers in general, and research methodologists in particular, to move away from such a morally indifferent position and to encompass a social justice oriented approach to research. In his book, Kuntz also mobilizes the latest social theories from post-structuralism to new materialism to reconceptualize the meaning of truth and the responsibility of researchers.
This thought-provoking and beautifully executed book will bring the readers to the central issues and debates with which contemporary researchers and research methodologists have been wrestling. It will be of interest to research methodologists, social and educational researchers, and professionals doing social justice work across different domains.
Pengfei Zhao holds a doctoral degree in Inquiry Methodology from Indiana University-Bloomington. Among her research interests are qualitative research methodology, youth culture, identity formation, and comparative sociological and educational studies. She is currently working on a book manuscript studying the coming of age experience of rural Chinese youth during and right after the Cultural Revolution. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/education
In The Flight of a Butterfly or the Path of a Bullet? Using Technology to Transform Teaching and Learning (Harvard Education Press, 2018), Larry Cuban looks at the uses and effects of digital technologies in K–12 classrooms, exploring if and how technology has transformed teaching and learning. In particular, he examines forty-one classrooms across six districts in Silicon Valley that have devoted special attention and resources to integrating digital technologies into their education practices. Ultimately, Cuban asks if the use of digital technologies has resulted in transformed teaching and learning in these classrooms. His unexpected findings address not only edtech and its uses, but also the complex interrelations of policy and practice, and the many—often unintended—consequences of reforms and initiatives in the education world.
Larry Cuban, PhD, is Professor Emeritus of Education at Stanford University. He blogs about education at larrycuban.wordpress.com.
Hoover Harris, editor of Degree Or Not Degree?, holds a PhD in English and writes and speaks about trends in higher education. He can be reached by email at hooverharris@icloud.com or on Twitter @degreenot. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/education
In what ways do middle class students obtain advantages in schools? In her new book, Negotiating Opportunities: How the Middle Class Secures Advantages in School (Oxford University Press, 2018), Jessica McCrory Calarco uses ethnographic data to elaborate on what she calls “negotiated advantage.” By understanding students as active agents in their own everyday lives, Calarco discovers that middle class student negotiate particular advantages over their working class peers. These advantages include more attention from the teacher, more accommodations, and more assistance. Calarco explores each of these advantages in turn, finding that often classroom expectations are unclear and student fall back on coaching learned from parents in terms of how they should behave in school. It is in these behaviors that we see a divide between working class students and middle class students and their outcomes. Overall, this book presents clear examples from the data and lays out the main takeaway throughout the text.
This book will be of interest to sociologists in general, but especially to those working in social stratification and education. Anyone involved in the education system, from elementary to higher education, should pick up this book. In terms of using the text in the classroom, this book would be easily accessed by undergraduates, but would also pair incredibly well with other stand-alone texts used in a graduate level course on stratification or focusing on education.
Sarah E. Patterson is a postdoc at the University of Western Ontario. You can tweet her at @spattersearch. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/education
Patricia Leavy and Victoria Scotti‘s Low-Fat Love Stories (Sense Publishers, 2017) is a collection of short stories and artistic portraits focusing on women’s dissatisfying relationships. What makes these stories different from conventional fictions is that all the stories are based on extensive interviews with women of different ages and from different racial, ethnic, and cultural backgrounds across the United States. In the book, readers will read extremely candid and moving personal stories, identity struggles, and painstaking self-reflection. As a product of art-based research, the book also critically interrogates how popular culture shapes women’s self-perception, influences their understanding of romantic relationship, and eventually contributes to their sufferings of low self-esteem, depression, or anxiety. A methodological conversation and an interview guide are attached at the end of the book to reflect on the rigorous research that the authors have conducted.
The book is very versatile in the sense that it will attract not only social science researchers but also general audience. In addition, the authors provide several innovative approaches to engage with the stories and encourage course instructors from various social science disciplines to use this book as teaching material.
Pengfei Zhao holds a doctoral degree in Inquiry Methodology from Indiana University-Bloomington. Among her research interests are qualitative research methodology, youth culture, identity formation, and comparative sociological and educational studies. She is currently working on a book manuscript studying the coming of age experience of rural Chinese youth during and right after the Cultural Revolution.
Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/education
The Future of University Credentials: New Developments at the Intersection of Higher Education and Hiring (Harvard Education Press, 2016) offers a thorough and urgently needed overview of the burgeoning world of university degrees and credentials. At a time of heightened attention to how universities and colleges are preparing young people for the working world, questions about the meaning and value of university credentials have become especially prominent. Sean R. Gallagher, EdD, guides us through this fast-changing terrain, providing much-needed context, details, and insights.
The book casts a wide net, focusing on traditional higher education degrees and on the myriad certificates and other postsecondary awards that universities and other institutions now issue. He describes the entire ecosystem of credentials, including universities and colleges, employers, government agencies, policy makers and influencers—and, not least, the students whose futures are profoundly affected by these certifications. And he looks intently at where university credentials might be headed, as educational institutions seek to best serve students and employers in a rapidly changing world.
Hoover Harris, editor of Degree or Not Degree?, holds a PhD in English Literature and writes and speaks about trends in higher education. He can be reached by email at hooverharris@icloud.co or on Twitter @degreenot. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/education
In this episode, I speak with Laura McLaughlin Taddei and Stephanie Smith Budhai about their book, Nurturing Young Innovators: Cultivating Creativity in the Classroom, Home and Community (International Society for Technology in Education, 2017). This book offers a helpful guide for K-12 teachers in implementing makerspaces. We discuss makerspaces, their role in education, and the ways teachers and parents can collaborate to foster new skills. They recommend the following books for listeners interested in their work and our conversation:
—Inside the Box: A Proven System of Creativity for Breakthrough Results by Drew Boyd
—STEAM Makers: Fostering Creativity and Innovation in the Elementary Classroom by Jacie Maslyk
—Digital Citizenship in Action: Empowering Students to Engage in Online Communities by Kristen Mattson
—Fostering Resilient Learners: Strategies for Creating a Trauma-Sensitive Classroom by Kristin Souers and Pete Hall
—Teaching the 4Cs with Technology: How Do I Use 21st-Century Tools to Teach 21st-Century Skills? by L. Taddei and S. Budhai
—Worlds of Making: Best Practices for Establishing a Makerspace for Your School by Laura Fleming
McLaughlin Taddei and Smith Budhai both join New Books in Education for the interview. To share your thoughts on the podcast, you can connect with McLaughlin Taddei on Twitter at @drlaurataddei.
Trevor Mattea is a teacher at Cascade Canyon School as well as an educational consultant and speaker. His areas of expertise include deeper learning, parent involvement, project-based learning, and technology integration. He can be reached by email at info@trevormattea.com or on Twitter at @tsmattea. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/education
In Schoolhouse Wreck: The Betsy DeVos Story (Strong Arm Press, 2018), Jason Linkins delivers a searing critique of controversial Trump administration Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos. The book tracks the DeVos family’s accumulation of wealth through the multi-level marketing company Amway, which was founded by her Betsy DeVos’ father-in-law, and the family’s subsequent forays into philanthropy and Michigan Republican politics. Linkins offers a harsh assessment of her push for charter schools in Michigan, and argues she is determined to lower the firewall between church and state in America’s schools. He also explores her record in the federal government, contended she has sided with unscrupulous for-profit colleges and private student lenders at the expense of students. But while the public perception of DeVos is one of an incompetent, Linkins concludes DeVos is a savvy political operator with deep convictions who should not be underestimated.
Bill Scher is a Contributing Editor for POLITICO Magazine. He has provided political commentary on CNN, NPR and MSNBC. He has been published in The New York Times, The New Republic, and The New York Daily News among other publications. He is author of Wait! Don’t Move to Canada, published by Rodale in 2006. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/education
In Schooling Diaspora: Women, Education, and the Overseas Chinese in British Malaya and Singapore, 1850s to 1960s (Oxford University Press, 2018), Karen Teoh relates the history of English and Chinese girls’ schools that overseas Chinese founded and attended from the 1850s to the 1960s in British Malaya and Singapore. She examines the strategies of missionaries, colonial authorities, and Chinese reformists and revolutionaries for educating girls, as well as the impact that this education had on identity formation among overseas Chinese women and larger society. These schools would help to produce what society ‘needed’, in the form of better wives and mothers, or workers and citizens of developing nation-states, while ensuring compliance with desired ideals. Chinese women in diaspora found that failing to conform to any number of state priorities could lead to social disapproval, marginalization, or even outright deportation.
Through vivid oral histories, and by bridging Chinese and Southeast Asian history, British imperialism, gender, and the history of education, Schooling Diaspora shows how these diasporic women contributed to the development of a new figure: the educated transnational Chinese woman.
Karen M. Teoh is Associate Professor of History and Director of the Asian Studies Program at Stonehill College (Massachusetts). Her research focuses on Chinese migration and diaspora from the 17th century to the present, and examines how changing notions of gender roles, ethnicity, and cultural hybridity have shaped the identities of groups and individuals.
Tyler Yank is a senior doctoral candidate in History at McGill University (Montreal, Canada). Her work explores bonded women and British Empire in the western Indian Ocean World. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/education
How do students become LGBT activists at Christian Universities and Colleges? And what is the impact on the school but also on the activists themselves? In his new book, Gay on God’s Campus: Mobilizing for LGBT Equality at Christian Colleges and Universities (University of North Carolina Press, 2018), Jonathan S. Coley uses interviews with LGBT activists on Christian campuses and other sources of data to answer these questions. LGBT activists in his study fall into three participant identities which tie to the “group ethos” he discovers. These typologies help to understand the ways in which students participate as activists but also how they come to know themselves. In addition, Coley situates his findings in the literature but also explains how his study differs and expands on previous findings. In general, he finds that “fit” is important to the activists and that only about a third of his participants fall into traditional definitions of activists. Coley also finds that denomination plays a key role in the development and reaction of activists groups on campus. Overall, this book gives a clear picture of LGBT activists on Christian university and college campuses.
This book will be enjoyed by sociologists in general, but especially by those interested in social movements, religion, sexuality, and higher education. This book would be useful in a graduate level or higher level undergraduate social movements course given the clear organization of theory and examples used throughout the book and specifically in the tables.
Sarah E. Patterson is a postdoc at the University of Western Ontario. You can tweet her at @spattersearch Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/education
When thinking of Title IX, most people immediately associate this important education policy with either athletics or a general idea of increasing opportunities for women in education. Rarely do those same people know how Title IX originated, how the role of Title IX changed over time, and how it contributes to what R. Shep Melnick calls “the Civil Rights State.” During the Obama and Trump administrations, Title IX has been involved with the recent attention that universities—and society writ large—have given to sexual assault and sexual harassment. As the public has demanded action to solve this issue in education, how to regulate this action through Title IX has proved to be a more difficult and controversial task. In his new book The Transformation of Title IX: Regulating Gender Equality in Education (Brookings Institution Press, 2018), Melnick addresses these legal questions and looks ahead to the future of Title IX as we near the two-year mark of the Trump administration. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/education
Deondra Rose has written Citizens by Degree: Higher Education Policy and the Changing Gender Dynamics of American Citizenship (Oxford University Press, 2018). She is an assistant professor of public policy and political science at Duke University.
Citizens by Degree examines the development and impact of federal higher education policy, specifically the National Defense Education Act, the Higher Education Act, and Title IX. Rose argues that these policies have been an overlooked-factor driving the progress that women have made in the United States. By significantly expanding women’s access to college, they led to women to surpassing men as the recipients of bachelor’s degrees, while also empowering them to become more economically successful and politically engaged. The book focuses on how Southern Democrats shaped U.S. higher policy development during the mid-twentieth century, expanding opportunities for women, while maintaining discriminatory practices for African Americans. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/education
When the state takes over, can local democracy survive? Over 100 school districts have been taken over by state governments since the late 1980s. In doing so, state officials relieve local officials, including those elected by local residents, of the authority to operate public schools. In cities with an increasingly powerful group of African-American leaders, a state takeover has the potential to roll-back gains in descriptive representation and democratic governance.
How this has played out is the purpose of Domingo Morel‘s new book, Takeover: Race, Education, and American Democracy (Oxford University Press, 2018). Morel focuses on two cities, Central Falls, RI and Newark, NJ, as well as original quantitative data from cities across the country. What he discovers is a very real threat to local democracy, but one that has played out different ways. The case of Newark differs greatly from Central Falls, and Morel shows what we can learn about racial and ethnic politics by focusing on the changing ways that schools are operated.
Morel is assistant professor of political science at Rutgers University, Newark. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/education
Betsy DiSalvo, assistant professor in the School of Interactive Computing at Georgia Institute of Technology, joins us in this episode to discuss the recently published co-edited volume entitled, Participatory Design for Learning: Perspectives from Practice and Research (Routledge, 2017). The book puts into conversation ideas from the fields of the learning sciences and participatory design research.
Betsy describes the learning sciences as already an interdisciplinary field of computing and cognition, with ties to psychology, sociology, and education, among others. Despite the common methodology of design-based research, what it means to do design has been underexplored. In contrast, the field of participatory design has developed techniques and scaffolding to engage in the practices of design, but often leaves unexplored how people learn from their design experiences. The opportunity for the fields to learn from, with, and through each other is evident from each chapter in the book.
The case studies in the book illuminate the particulars of design, and Betsy describes her work engaging students in video game glitch testing and Day of the Dead puppets. We discuss the details of this case study from three different angles: what it means to use participatory design methods, along the lines of designing for design; the ideas of value-driven learning, in addition to other terms, such as interest-based learning, culturally relevant or responsive practices, and connected learning; and how to communicate the complexity of the design process.
As conversations often do, this one leaves the reader (and authors themselves!) with more questions than answers. The authors conclude with a realization that there are far more divergent ideas about participatory design than we had anticipated (p.233) and that the two disciplines have only just begun to scratch the surface of understanding and respecting each other (p. 241). With the book and her perspectives shared in the interview, Betsy describes an area of scholarship that is full of opportunity and meaning at the leading edge of participatory design for learning.
Julie Kallio is a graduate student in Educational Leadership and Policy Analysis at the University of Wisconsin Madison. Her research interests include educational change, innovation and improvement networks, and participatory design. You can find more about her work on her website, follow her on twitter, or email her at jmkallio@wisc.edu. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/education
What is the history of a “history book”? In How to Read a History Book: The Hidden History Of History (Zero Books, 2018), Marshall Poe, founder and Editor-In-Chief of the New Books Network, tells the story of why and how we have the “history books” we have. The book uses the literary device of “Elizabeth Ranke,” an ideal type of the modern academic historian, to show how academic disciplines, the structure of college and careers, the tensions between popular and academic publishing, and the morality and ethics of history, shape the “history book.” Whilst each chapter critically relates a stage in Elizabeth’s life and career to the form “history books” take, the overall message of the book is a positive defense of history in the current social and political juncture. A short and accessible text, the book will be essential reading for anyone interested in the artifact called “a history book.” Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/education
Love in the Time of Ethnography: Essays on Connection as a Focus and Basis for Research (Rowman and Littlefield, 2017) is edited by Lucinda Carspecken, anthropologist and lecturer in the School of Education, Indiana University Bloomington. In this beautifully curated book, contributors from various social science disciplines—sociology, anthropology, education, psychology, etc.—explore different facets of a basic component of human life, love. The authors define love broadly to include affective feelings, expressions, practice and philosophy across different cultures and traditions. It not only reveals how affective feelings are deeply shaped by different cultural, social and political practice, but also examines love’s potential to transcend the boundaries between self and the other, to increase the solidarity among young activists, to overcome traumatic experiences, and to anchor the relationship between human beings and nature. While grounded in the ethnographic approach, the book also intentionally includes unconventional academic writings such as poems and autobiographies. Of particular interest is the discussion of love as a primary tenet in social science research methodology: the conceptualization of research praxis as love-in-action and the expatiation of the relationship between love and validity.
Audience who are interested in the emotional and affective aspects of human life will find this book inspiring. It will also draw attention from social research methodologists who are searching for alternative research paradigms other than the predominant post-positivist approach.
Pengfei Zhao holds a doctoral degree in Inquiry Methodology from Indiana University-Bloomington. Among her research interests are youth culture, identity formation, qualitative research methods, and comparative sociological and educational studies. She is currently working on a book manuscript studying the coming of age experience of rural Chinese youth during and right after the Cultural Revolution. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/education
On Second Thought: Learned Women Reflect on Profession, Community, and Purpose (University of Utah Press, 2017) is a collection of thirteen essays by women, all in the second half of their lives, in which they contemplate the ways in which the different facets of their identities—personal, professional and spiritual—have hitherto unfolded and intertwined. Among their number is the folklorist, ethnographer, oral historian, and prolific independent scholar Luisa Del Giudice, who is also the editor of the volume and the driving force behind it.
The seed for the book began some years ago, when a career crisis led Del Giudice to question many aspects of her life. In the process, she developed an acute awareness of its often fragmented nature, a fragmentation exacerbated, if not caused, by an academic establishment that tends to looks askance on its members bringing any aspect of their personal lives, still less their spiritual beliefs, into their work. Del Giudice decided to push back against the resulting dichotomous state, which effectively pits the pursuit of knowledge (academia) against the pursuit of wisdom (spirituality). She contacted a number of women, most of whom she knew personally, and asked if they would be willing to provide written reflections on their lives to date often complex and multifaceted lives that encompassed a range of personal and professional identities. She encouraged each to describe how their existence has accrued meaning and purpose, as well as any spiritual leanings underpinning that process.
The result is a kind of textual “Wise Women’s Circle.” It includes four folklorists (aside from Del Giudice herself, there is Mary Ellen Brown, Sabina Magliocco, and Christine Zinni) along with contributors whose professional backgrounds embrace a range of other scholarly disciplines, as well as practitioners of law, medicine, public health, and art. The spiritual and cultural leanings expressed are similarly diverse and include Catholicism, Paganism, Episcopalianism, Jungian Psychology, Judaism and Zen Buddhism.
The paths of the women have often been shaped by societal and cultural expectations and institutional constraints. Despite the singular nature of each essay, a number of recurring themes emerge, not least the importance of cultural heritage, the challenges of combining a professional role with that of a domestic caregiver, workplace side-lining, the power of story-telling, and, perhaps most notably, an ongoing experience of existing within a creative, albeit uncomfortable, state of betwixt and betweeness. Del Giudice describes the contributors as “masters of bricolage and diverse resources who find meaning in lonely marginalized places, who struggle to weave together disparate aspects of life to make them meaningful” (23). All can speak to lessons learned, rewards gained, and the critical need for women’s voices to be heard.
Overall, this collection is designed to inspire its readers to examine their own lives, to help them clarify their own sense of purpose, and then commit to fulfilling it, despite the obstacles which will surely arise.
Rachel Hopkin is a UK born, US based folklorist and radio producer and is currently a PhD candidate at the Ohio State University. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/education
During the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Native American students from across the United States attended federally-managed boarding schools where they were taught English, math, and a variety of vocational skills, all for the purpose of forcing their assimilation into white, American society. While enrolled at these schools, students also showcased their writing, editing, and printing skills by publishing school newspapers. In Recovering Native American Writings in the Boarding School Press (University of Nebraska Press, 2017), Assistant Professor of English Jacqueline Emery provides the first comprehensive collection of Native American writings published in boarding school newspapers, and demonstrates the ways in which students used these periodicals to both challenge and reflect assimilationist practices at the schools. The collection includes student-authored letters, editorials, fiction, and folklore, and examines the writings of Gertrude Bonin, Charles Eastman, and Luther Standing Bear, among additional, lesser-known writers.
Samantha M. Williams is a PhD candidate in History at the University of California, Santa Cruz. She is currently writing her dissertation, which examines the history of the Stewart Indian School in Carson City, Nevada through the lenses of settler colonialism and public history. She can be reached at swillia7@ucsc.edu. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/education
It takes courage to walk into a classroom when students don’t look like you. It takes courage to return every day to teach a class when students devalue education. Media has portrayed the scenario in films like Freedom Writers and Dangerous Minds with white teachers symbolizing the great white hope to a class of minority students. Well, Michelle Kuo is not the great white hope, but she becomes hope and maintains hope for young black students in Mississippi Delta, specifically Patrick.
Kuo writes about her journey in the memoir Reading with Patrick: A Teacher, a Student, and a Life-Changing Friendship (Random House, 2017). Her story focuses on race, justice and education in the rural south where she taught American History through black literature. Kuo, a Harvard graduate born to Taiwainese parents, wanted to work in a place where she was needed. Thus, she was assigned to an alternative school, which the local administration used as a dumping ground for the so-called “bad kids”—where rabble-rousers who had already been expelled from mainstream schools now given a final chance before being permanently ejected from the public education system. Her memoir navigates the terrain of teacher speaking to students through books and poems they can understand. Reading with Patrick points to a teacher who breaks the rule, choosing favorites. The memoir includes effective teaching tools Kuo used in the classroom. Most importantly, the memoir illustrates humanity when Kuo leaves Helena for a law school but returns after discovering her favorite student, Patrick, has gone to jail.
Michelle Kuo teaches in the History, Law and Society program at the American University of Paris. She and Patrick share the royalties from this book. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/education
In her new book, Youth Encounter Programs in Israel: Pedagogy, Identity and Social Change (Syracuse University Press, 2017), Karen Ross conducts an in-depth analysis of Jewish-Palestinian youth encounter peace-building programs in Israel. She adopts a narrative approach and carefully considers how these youth programs impacted their young participants in long-term, positive and profound ways. Of particular interest is her insights about how to research and evaluate the “impact” of education programs in a non-linear, non-causal and broadly conceived approach. Her work has rich and multi-layered practical implications for the continuous peace-building efforts both within and out of the Israeli/Palestinian context.
Karen Ross is an assistant professor in the Department of Conflict Resolution, Human Security, and Global Governance at the University of Massachusetts, Boston.
Pengfei Zhao holds a doctoral degree in Inquiry Methodology from Indiana University-Bloomington. Among her research interests are youth culture, identity formation, qualitative research methods, and comparative sociological and educational studies. She is currently working on a book manuscript studying the coming of age experience of rural Chinese youth during and right after the Cultural Revolution.
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“Marriage is the foundation of a successful society,” proclaimed the Clinton-era welfare reform bill. Since then, national and state governments have spent nearly a billion dollars on programs designed to encourage poor and low-income Americans to get married and to remain married. But do any of these initiatives achieve their stated goals? To find out, listen to our interview with Jennifer Randles, author of Proposing Prosperity?: Marriage Education Policy and Inequality in America (Columbia University Press, 2016), who knows first-hand what happens in such programs, bringing important new insight into evaluating claims that there is a “success sequence” that will bring people out of poverty.
Stephen Pimpare is Senior Lecturer in the Politics & Society Program and Faculty Fellow at the Carsey School of Public Policy at the University of New Hampshire. He is the author of The New Victorians (New Press, 2004), A People’s History of Poverty in America (New Press, 2008), winner of the Michael Harrington Award, and Ghettos, Tramps and Welfare Queens: Down and Out on the Silver Screen (Oxford University Press, 2017). Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/education
We all recognize that parenting involves a seemingly endless succession of choices, beginning perhaps with the choice to become a parent, through a sequence of decisions concerning the care, upbringing, acculturation, and education of a child. And we all recognize that many of these decisions are impactful. More specifically, we know that the choices parents make often deeply impact the lives of others, including especially the life of the child. Given the sheer number of impactful and other-regarding choices involved, one might expect parenthood to be a major site of philosophical attention. But it isn’t really. In The Philosophical Parent: Asking the Hard Questions about Having and Raising Children (Oxford University Press, 2017), Jean Kazez philosophically engages with a broad sample of the questions that parents must confront. Her analyses are philosophically nuanced but also accessible to non-academic readers. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/education
Richard Rabinowitz is one of the leading public historians in the United States. He has helped conceptualize, design, organize, and build over 500 history programs across the U.S. at such sites as the Lower East Side Tenement Museum in New York; the Birmingham Civil Rights Institute; and the National Underground Railroad Freedom Center in Cincinnati. Between 2004 and 2011, Richard curated six blockbuster history exhibitions at the New-York Historical Society, including Slavery in New York and Revolution! The Atlantic World Reborn. He also drew up the interpretive and curatorial plan for the Slavery and Freedom exhibition at the new National Museum of African American History and Culture in Washington, D.C. Most of this work has come out of his founding and directing the American History Workshop.
The journey he has taken—from receiving his PhD in the History of American Civilization at Harvard to becoming a public historian and working on these exhibits—is the subject of his recent book: Curating America: Journeys through Storyscapes of the American Past (University of North Carolina Press, 2016). Over the course of the hour, I talk with Richard about the changing ways people have come to engage with the past and how this has impacted, and been shaped by, his many museum projects and exhibitions. Richard focuses on the materiality of lived experience. From it he culls knowledge of big ideas (such as freedom, revolution, and oppression) and uses places, objects, and the bodily sensorium to create “storyscapes” in which audiences can recognize themselves. Crucial to this process is the knowledge that audiences and museum-goers bring with them. Richard speaks to how he has, together with these stakeholders, generated a new historical awareness that is more reflective of our ever-changing present.
Michael Amico holds a PhD in American Studies from Yale University. His dissertation, The Forgotten Union of the Two Henrys: The True Story of the Peculiar and Rarest Intimacy of the American Civil War, is about the romance between Henry Clay Trumbull and Henry Ward Camp of the Tenth Connecticut Regiment. He is the author, with Michael Bronski and Ann Pellegrini, of “You Can Tell Just by Looking”: And 20 Other Myths about LGBT Life and People (Beacon, 2013), a finalist for the Lambda Literary Award in Nonfiction. He can be reached at mjamico@gmail.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/education
Ricardo D. Salvatore‘s new book, Disciplinary Conquest: U.S. Scholars in South America, 1900-1945 (Duke University Press, 2016) offers an alternative narrative on the origins of Latin American Studies in the United States. Salvatore claims that during the first half of the twentieth century scholars defined the contours of Latin American studies. Scholars did so both in the context of the ‘dollar diplomacy’ and the ‘good neighbor’ policy towards the region. Salvatore argues that, in contrast to the military interventions in Mexico, Central America, and the Caribbean, the approach toward South America was defined by scholarly “disciplinary interventions.” Salvatore follows the life and work of five field-defining scholars who approached the South-American “terra incognita” from the vantage point of the hegemonic hemispheric power. An archaeologist (Hiram Bingham), a historian (Clarence Haring), a political scientist (Leo S. Rowe), a sociologist (Edward A. Ross), and a geographer (Isaiah Bowman), defined spaces of inquiry that were transnational in scope and scale.
Salvatore argues that the creation of transnational fields of inquiry intended to render the region “visible” to audiences in the United States. The definition of new disciplinary spaces such as “South-American studies” contrasted with the then-prevalent domestic narratives focused on “national” topics. These new transnational spaces, Salvatore claims, were the product of the “imperiality” of the knowledge produced by the five scholars studied in Disciplinary Conquest. Nonetheless, the narrative proposed by the author defies a simplistic depiction of Haring, Rowe, Bingham, Ross, and Bowman as mere pawns of empire. Salvatore shows how some of them produced works that grappled with “anti-American” sentiment in the region while others tried to create alternatives to official policy designs. Moreover, Salvatore shows how these men approached South America as progressive intellectuals interested in democratic governance, social justice, and progress in the region. Salvatore notes how these concerns led to envisioning two different South Americas. One South America, positively appraised by these scholars, was made up of the “ABC powers” (Argentina, Brazil, Chile, and by extension, Uruguay). The ABC countries showed promise, from the scholars point of view, regarding democratic development and social equality. Scholars construed another, less-promising from the U.S. perspective, South America by placing focus on the Andean region. Salvatore thus shows how these early iterations of Latin American studies resulted in the creation of various scholarly-defined, and externally-imposed, transnational fields of inquiry.
Alvaro Caso Bello is a Ph.D. Candidate at Johns Hopkins University. He can be reached at acasobe1@jhu.edu. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/education
Andrea L. Turpin is an Associate Professor of History at Baylor University. Her book, A New Moral Vision: Gender, Religion and the Changing Purposes of American Higher Education, 1837-1917 (Cornell University Press, 2017), begins with the early institutions of higher learning and the contest over the idea of separate and unique education. She examines the gender history of both private and state colleges. Evangelical Protestant commitments to personal conversions and missions fuel women’s higher education beyond rudimentary instructions preparing them for domestic life. The objective was a godly social order based on the individual relationship with God. After the Civil War the influence of religious liberals, increased emphasis on research and growing demands for women’s education instigated a reevaluation of the university’s role in moral preparation. Separate men’s, women’s and co-education institutions multiplied and moved toward seeking the public good in sex-specific ways. Women trained for social service professions; men for government and institutional leadership. The shift away from personal piety to gendered character formation and service to nation created increasingly rigid notions of separate male and female cultures in the public life of the Progressive Era. Turpin’s examination highlights the role of higher education in constructing the moral and gender map of a nation.
Lilian Calles Barger, www.lilianbarger.com, is a cultural, intellectual and gender historian. Her current book project is entitled The World Come of Age: An Intellectual History of Liberation Theology. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/education
The book discussed here is the The Joy of Mathematics (Prometheus Books, 2017), whose lead author, Alfred Posamentier, is our guest today. The subtitle Marvels, Novelties, and Neglected Gems That Are Rarely Taught in Math Classdescribes the book nicely. Much of the book can be read by someone with only a couple of years of high school math, and the book does a terrific job of showing the reader why those of us who love math do so. We like arithmetic, algebra, geometry, infinity, and the counterintuitively surprising, and the book contains lovely examples of all of these. Enjoy! Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/education
When undergraduate students look through a course catalog and see the title World Religions they probably have some idea what the course will be about. But why is that? Why do World Religions seem so self-evident in this historical moment?
In After World Religions: Reconstructing Religious Studies (Routledge, 2016), edited by Christopher R. Cotter, Leverhulme Early Career Research Fellow in the School of Divinity at the University of Edinburgh, and David G. Robertson, Lecturer in Religious Studies at the Open University, several authors attempt to delineate the history and engage with the problems of the World Religions paradigm. The history of the production of the category religion has defined the concept as a universal sui generis entity. This system of classification was bound up in scientism, evolutionary thinking, colonial encounters, and Protestant biases. The World Religions Paradigm extends from this model and has governed both research and teaching in Religious Studies. The essays in After World Religions offer strategies to interrogate or subvert the World Religions Paradigm from within, how to approach introductory courses in the study of religion outside of this governing structure, and the role of emergent pedagogical techniques.
In our conversation we discussed the history of religion, textbooks as data, navigating graduate instruction, questions of the sacred, archeological data, new age stuff, critical thinking as opposed to the accumulation of information, the destabilizing effects of alternative data, the planet Pluto, and another podcast, the wonderful Religious Studies Project.
Kristian Petersen is an Assistant Professor of Religious Studies at the University of Nebraska Omaha. He is the author of Interpreting Islam in China: Pilgrimage, Scripture, and Language in the Han Kitab (Oxford University Press, 2017). He is currently working on a monograph entitled The Cinematic Lives of Muslims, and is the editor of the forthcoming volumes Muslims in the Movies: A Global Anthology (ILEX Foundation) and New Approaches to Islam in Film (Routledge). You can find out more about his work on his website, follow him on Twitter @BabaKristian, or email him at kjpetersen@unomaha.edu. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/education
If you were a cadet at West Point and knew with virtual certainty that upon graduation you would be sent into the teeth of the Vietnam war, what would you do? Well, if you were Tom Carhart and five of his buddies, you’d decide to have one last hurrah and steal the Navy’s mascot before the Army-Navy game. Students at West Point had stolen said mascot–“Bill the Goat”–once before, namely in 1954. To avoid further embarrassment at the hands of its arch-rivals, the Navy thereafter placed “Bill” in a high-security facility under Marine guard. No matter, Tom and his fellow cadets said. Even if they were caught (and they knew they would be found out eventually), what could the Army do? Send them to Vietnam? That was in the works anyway. So, as Tom explains in his terrific book The Golden Fleece: High-Risk Adventure at West Point (Potomac Books, 2017), off they went to steal the goat…and off they went to Vietnam.
Tom’s a great storyteller, and his book is at moments funny and touching. Moreover, he offers deep insight into what it was like to be a cadet in the 1960s, to know that you were going to war, and to go to war and come back. Not everyone did, of course. I highly recommend you pick up The Golden Fleece. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/education
Noel Brown is a film and television scholar at Liverpool Hope University. His research has focused on Hollywood and British cinema (classical and contemporary), family entertainment, children’s culture and animation. His first three books were published by I.B. Tauris and include, The Hollywood Family Film: from Shirley Temple to Harry Potter, Family Films in Global Cinema: The World Beyond Disney, and British Children’s Cinema: from The Thief of Bagdad to Wallace and Gromit. Now his newest, The Children’s Film: Genre, Nation and Narrative (Wallflower Press, 2017) looks at children’s film to explore its cultural and social impact, and it shows the evolution of a beloved genre that has resonated across ages and generations.
The Children’s Film is part of the Short Cuts Series published by Wallflower Press, an imprint of Columbia University Press. Information on Noel Brown’s work is available at http://lhu.academia.edu/NoelBrown.
Susan Raab is president of Raab Associates, an internationally recognized agency that specializes in marketing literature, products and initiatives that help improve the lives of young people. Clients have includedNational Geographic, Scholastic, the International Board on Books for Young People, and bestselling authors and illustrators. Susan is marketing advisor for the Society of Children’sBook Writers and Illustrators (SCBWI). She’salso a journalist reporting on publishing, education and human rights. Her work as a broadcast correspondent has been hosted by the University of Connecticut, and by the University of Florida’s Recess Radio, a program syndicated to 500 public radio stations. Her many interviews, including with Art Spiegelman, Jon Scieszka, Norton Juster, Laurie Halse Anderson and many others talking about art and literature can be heard here. Follow Susan at: https://twitter.com/sraab18
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As the Middle East continues to become more topical to American and European audiences, a need for textbooks to teach the history of the region has become urgent. Some such textbooks take a topical approach, others use a chronological narrative. Betty Anderson‘s A History of the Middle East: Rulers, Rebels, and Rogues (Stanford University Press, 2016) combines both. Taking us through the whirlwind of the last few centuries, she focuses on three types of actors: the titular rulers, rebels and rogues, where rulers rule, rebels rebel, and rogues operate somewhere in-between. Anderson demonstrates that all three have shaped the development of the Middle East politically, socially, culturally, intellectually, and economically.
NA Mansour is a graduate student at Princeton University’s Department of Near Eastern Studies working on the global intellectual history of the Arabic-language press. She tweets @NAMansour26 and produces another Middle-East and North Africa-related podcast: Reintroducing.
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Nigel Warburton holds a PhD in Philosophy from Cambridge and has held academic positions at University of Nottingham and the Open University. But he is today a freelance public philosopher. He has offered philosophy courses at the Tate Modern gallery, he conducts monthly philosophical discussions at Blackwell’s Bookshop in Oxford, and co-hosts with David Edmonds the wildly popular podcast series Philosophy Bites. Nigel is the author of several books of philosophy, including The Art Question (Routledge 2002), Free Speech: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford 2009), and A Little History of Philosophy (Yale 2012). The "Why We Argue" podcast is produced by the Humanities Institute at the University of Connecticut as part of the Humility and Conviction in Public Life project. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/education
The dominant narrative in the history of the study of the Middle East has claimed that the Cold War was what pushed Middle East studies to develop, as part of a greater trend in area studies. Drawing on his previous work in 2004’s Contending Visions of the Middle East: The History and Politics of Orientalism, Zachary Lockman‘s Field Notes: The Making of Middle Eastern Studies in the United States (Stanford University Press, 2016) looks at the power of institutions, corporations, and foundations in the shaping of Middle East studies in the United States. It’s the story of how money changes hands and in the process, attempts to influence academic output; in many ways, this story complements what we already know of what research was being produced and how it was affecting the field at large. However, what we often neglect to mention is that universities themselves cannot found area studies centers alone and often receive the funding from wealthy benefactors. In Middle East studies, as in other fields, this also meant these benefactors had a research agenda; with area studies, there was a desire to break free of the disciplines history, philology, etc and establish unifying theories of area studies. While today’s Middle East studies is roughly bound together by a shared geographic interest and not by a unifying theory, this drive influenced how the field was shaped and the various infrastructures that still exist today.
NA Mansour is a graduate student at Princeton University’s Department of Near Eastern Studies working on the global intellectual history of the Arabic-language press. She tweets @NAMansour26 and produces another Middle-East and North Africa-related podcast: Reintroducing.
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Erica Halverson, professor of education at the University of Wisconsin Madison, joins us in this episode to discuss the recently published co-edited volume entitled, Makeology: Makers as Learners (Routledge, 2016). My conversation with Erica actually begins around her earlier work with Kimberly Sheridan (2014), in which they establish the warrant for studying making and learning and define theoretical and empirical approaches to making, makers, and makerspaces. We then discuss the insights that emerged from across each section of the book: the cultures and identities of makers, their tools and materials, and connecting making to the disciplines.
For those unfamiliar with the Maker Movement, Erica describes what it is like to attend a Maker Faire. She also shares three vivid stories of makers, including two Hasidic Jewish men who created an electronic Mezuzah that chastises you for not touching it when you walk through the doorway, a boy who made a bow and arrow from straight wood pieces and hinges, and a social studies teacher who asked students to make monuments for women who should be honored on the Washington Mall. Responding to the cultural and gender stereotypes of the Maker Movement, Erica talks about a shared commitment that she sees among scholars in the learning sciences and the maker movement to the equity and diversity component of identity and culture. Throughout our conversation, Erica shares her perspectives on the role of authentic assessment and audience, the whimsy of making (beyond “put a bird on it!”), the role of tools, the STEM monster, and the challenges and opportunities of studying arts-based education.
Julie Kallio is a graduate student in Educational Leadership and Policy Analysis at the University of Wisconsin, Madison. Her research interests include educational change, innovation and improvement networks, and participatory design. You can find more about her work on her website, follow her on twitter, or email her at jmkallio@wisc.edu.
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Anxiety has become a social epidemic. People feel anxious all the time about nearly everything: their work, families, and even survival. However, research shows that some of us are more prone to chronic anxiety than others, due in large part to experiences in utero and during the first year of life. My guest, psychologist Dr. Daniel Keating, explores these biological and genetic mechanisms in his new book, Born Anxious: The Lifelong Impact of Early Life Adversity–and How to Break the Cycle (St. Martin’s Press, 2017). His many years of research inform his ideas about the role of social inequality in elevated stress levels, and the impact of stress and adversity on gene expression and manifestations of anxiety. In our interview, we talk about the implications of these findings for understanding why some people perpetually feel tightly-wound and easily triggered. He also shares his suggestions for breaking this cycle and reducing our proneness to anxiety.
Daniel P. Keating is a professor of psychology at the University of Michigan. He has conducted research at leading North American universities, at Berlin’s Max Planck Institute, and with the Canadian Institute for Advanced Research, where he was a fellow for two decades and led the program in human development. His research focuses on developmental differences–cognitive, social, and emotional and in physical and mental health. Listen to our interview by clicking below.
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Jim Rickabaugh, Senior Advisor to the Institute for Personalized Learning, joins us in this episode to discuss his recently published book, entitled Tapping the Power of Personalized Learning: A Roadmap for School Leaders (ASCD, 2016). Jim has worked in education for the last 40 years as a classroom teacher, building and district leader, regional director, author, and consultant. The book addresses both the why and how of personalized learning, using vignettes, quotes, activities, and questions for reflection to help readers make sense of what this looks like in practice. At the heart of the book is the honeycomb model, developed at the Institute, which serves as both a roadmap and conceptual model for change. As Jim says in the interview, “it’s not magic to make this happen, but when it happens, it’s magical.” This book presents his vision for leading students, teachers, parents, and the system of schooling into the future.
Julie Kallio is a graduate student in Educational Leadership and Policy Analysis at the University of Wisconsin Madison. Her research interests include educational change, innovation and improvement networks, and participatory design. You can find more about her work on her website, follow her on twitter, or email her at jmkallio@wisc.edu. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/education
Despite the prominence of LGBTQ issues in our current social consciousness, many people still know little about the LGBTQ community, which means that teaching about this community and its issues is an important job. It’s also a difficult one that’s been handled with varying degrees of effectiveness and sensitivity over the past few decades. Many of us can recall during our undergrad or graduate training having a single class day devoted to the topic, or our instructors trying to squeeze it in alongside other material. Fortunately, the teaching of LGBTQ issues has advanced dramatically, thanks to the work of psychologists such as Theodore Burnes and Jeanne Stanley. Their new edited book, entitled Teaching LGBTQ Psychology: Queering Innovative Pedagogy and Practice (American Psychological Association, 2017), covers pedagogical concepts as well as practical suggestions for bringing the material to life and helping students feel at home with it. In our interview, we have a frank discussion about the challenges of teaching LGBTQ psychology–such as fear, prejudice, and misinformation among students–and how to best rise to those challenges.
Theodore Burnes is associate professor and director of the LGBT specialization of Antioch University’s clinical psychology masters program. He has 15 years of experience constructing, facilitating, and evaluating undergraduate and graduate coursework in psychology, Black studies, writing, LGBT studies, poetry, women’s studies, teacher education, and counseling in various university settings. He is a licensed psychologist and licensed professional clinical counselor in private practice in Los Angeles.
Jeanne Stanley is Executive Director of Watershed Counseling and Consultation Services. She regularly conducts training around the country on best practices for supporting and affirming LGBTQ individuals and is a licensed psychologist in private practice in the Chestnut Hill are of Philadelphia. Listen to our interview by clicking below.
To subscribe to the New Books in Psychology podcast, click here.
Eugenio Duarte is a licensed psychologist and psychoanalyst practicing in New York City. He treats individuals and couples, with specialties in LGBTQ issues, eating and body image problems, and relationship problems. Follow him on Twitter and Instagram. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/education
Lee Trepanier, Professor of Political Science at Saginaw Valley State University in Michigan, edited this important analysis of why the humanities matter, especially within higher education. Trepanier’s collection, Why the Humanities Matter Today: In Defense of Liberal Education (Lexington Books, 2017), brings together authors in a variety of fields within the humanities to reconsider the arguments that have been made in support of the humanities over the past decades, even as these disciplines have declined in terms of majors and faculty appointments across the United States. Kirk Fitzpatrick, James W. Harrison, Nozomi Irei, David Lunt, Kristopher G. Phillips and the collection editor, Lee Trepanier, represent perspectives from philosophy, literature, history, languages, political philosophy, while also engaging the question of what constitutes a liberal education in the 21st century, especially given the role of education within society. This text, which provides some thoughtful considerations beyond the often-given reasons for why the humanities are fundamentally important, is a kind of starting point for dialogue across disciplines, within colleges and university, but also among the public in considering the role of higher education in our contemporary democracy. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/education
Author, illustrator and international speaker/teacher, Linda Ragsdale talks about her Peace Dragon Tale series of books for children and shares how the powerful skills of View, Voice and Choice can lead children and adults through challenging parts of their lives with a peaceful and productive outcome.
A survivor of the 2008 Mumbai terrorist attack, her work in peace education has led her around the world, empowering over 30,000 students to see and speak with a new voice, and an expanded capability of choice.
Every path of her career supports her current work, which has bloomed in her Peace Dragon series picture books, including Not Opposites, and Alphabetter (Flowerpot Press, 2017). Each story is part of a living curriculum where conflict management skills can be applied whenever an issue arises. More information on Linda’s books and Peace Dragon initiative are at www.thepeacedragon.com.
Susan Raab is president of Raab Associates, an internationally recognized agency that specializes in marketing literature, products and initiatives that help improve the lives of young people. Clients have included National Geographic, Scholastic, the International Board on Books for Young People, and bestselling authors and illustrators. Susan is marketing advisor for the Society of Children’s Book Writers and Illustrators (SCBWI). She’s also a journalist reporting on publishing, education and human rights. Her work as a broadcast correspondent has been hosted by the University of Connecticut, and by the University of Florida’s Recess Radio, a program syndicated to 500 public radio stations. Her many interviews, including with Art Spiegelman, Jon Scieszka, Norton Juster, Laurie Halse Anderson and many others talking about art and literature can be heard here. Follow Susan at: https://twitter.com/sraab18
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Dr. Edward Vickers, Professor of Comparative Education at Kyushu University, joins New Books Network to discuss his recently published book, entitled Education and Society in Post-Mao China (Routledge Studies in Education and Society in Asia, 2017). He co-authored the book along with Xiaodong Zeng, Professor at Beijing Normal University.
The book chronicles educational development in post-Mao PR China. In just 40 years, the nation and its educational system rapidly transformed, ranging from subtle reforms made after the Chairman’s death in 1976 to rapid changes that came about with the Reform and Opening, culminating with the current international craze seen in the country’s educational sector today. The book covers the important aspect of this development, with a keen sense of politics and power.
For any questions, comments, or recommendations for the New Books in Education podcast, you can connect with the host, Ryan M. Allen, at @PoliticsAndEd. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/education
In this episode, I speak with Tim Walker, the author of Teach Like Finland: 33 Simple Strategies for Joyful Classrooms (W. W. Norton & Company, 2017). This book stems from recent interest in Finland’s educational system resulting from its success on international assessments and explains how policy translates into classroom routines and structures as well as what American teachers can learn from their Finnish counterparts. We discuss how the two countries take different views on what makes good teachers and learning outcomes as well as ways teachers can promote well-being in any school context.
He recommends the following books for listeners interested in his work and our conversation:
Finnish Lessons 2.0: What Can the World Learn from Educational Change in Finland? by Pasi Sahlberg
The Smartest Kids in the World: And How They Got That Way by Amanda Ripley
The Well-Balanced Teacher: How to Work Smarter and Stay Sane Inside the Classroom and Out by Mike Anderson
Walker joins New Books in Education for the interview. To share your thoughts on the podcast, you can connect with him on Twitter at @timdwalk.
Trevor Mattea is an educational consultant and speaker. His areas of expertise include deeper learning, parent involvement, project-based learning, and technology integration. He can be reached by email at info@trevormattea.com or on Twitter at @tsmattea. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/education
“Hookup” has become a buzzword, a misleading concept for students, parents and educators alike–one that confuses more than explains the nuances of this complex and pervasive trend. In American Hookup: The New Culture of Sex on Campus (W. W. Norton, 2017), Lisa Wade analyzes its cultural roots: the evolution of courtship, our unrealized feminist revolution, America’s new business model of higher education, and the increasingly tenuous economic futures faced by young people. The hookup came to dominate college campuses in this context, but the trouble extends beyond hooking up to the culture itself. It rewards students who endorse and embrace meaningless sex, while ostracizing those who don’t. And there is no escaping it. It permeates not just dorm rooms and frat houses, but dining halls, quads, Facebook and Instagram feeds, and even classrooms. It is now part of the quintessential college experience, necessary for forming and maintaining friendships, and it often determines social status, whether students opt in or out.
By including students’ own perspectives and experiences through their college years and beyond, Wade presents a personal and compelling portrait of hookup culture, exploring how it affects a diverse range of students and what it says about the changing face of dating and sex in Tinder-era America. By the end of their senior year, even the most enthusiastic supporters of hookup culture wanted to feel more in hookups and to hurt or be hurt less, to abide by their own standards of attraction, and to opt out of a culture of sexual competition that leaves very few winners and too many losers. Wade challenges readers to envision new sexual cultures, ones that are more equal, more pleasurable, more respectful, kinder, and safer. Wade’s takeaway is for educators, parents, and students alike, asking not “How can we go back?” but “Where do we go from here?” College campuses have always been and should be a place of cultural revolution, and there’s no better place to re-imagine hookup culture and transform American culture in the process. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/education
Mark Bray, Chair Professor in the Faculty of Education, University of Hong Kong, joins the New Books Network to discuss his recently coedited book volume, entitled Researching Private Supplementary Tutoring: Methodological Lessons from Diverse Cultures (Comparative Education Research Centre and Springer, 2016).
Sometimes called private supplemental tutoring, shadow education, and many other monikers, this practice is actually a global phenomenon that impacts education in societies around the world. Perhaps often considered an issue mostly concentrated in East Asia, this book covers methodological lessons and issues when studying this kind of education throughout the world, from Jamaica to Iran to Cambodia.
The publication was coedited with Ora Kwo, associate professor in the Comparative Education Research Centre at the University of Hong Kong, and Boris Jokic, scientific associate in the Centre for Educational Research and Development at the Institute for Social Research in Zagreb, Croatia. Dr. Bray previously joined New Books Network to discuss Comparative Education Research Approaches and Methods.
For any questions, comments, or recommendations for the New Books in Education podcast, you can connect with the host, Ryan M. Allen, at @PoliticsAndEd. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/education
Carrie J. Preston‘s new book tells the story of the global circulation of noh-inspired performances, paying careful attention to the ways these performances inspired twentieth-century drama, poetry, modern dance, film, and popular entertainment. Inspired by noh’s practice of retelling stories in different styles and tenses, Learning to Kneel: Noh, Modernism, and Journeys in Teaching (Columbia University Press, 2016) also weaves together a number of writing styles, and incorporates Preston’s own lessons in noh chant, dance, and drumming and experience writing plays based on noh models and choreographing dances with noh-related gestures throughout the book. The result is a fascinating exploration of the relationships between pedagogy and performance traced through the work of Ezra Pound, W. B. Yeats, Bertolt Brecht, Samuel Beckett, and others. Learning to Kneel pays special attention to the politics of performance and pedagogy and the themes of submission and subversion, and urges a rethinking of many assumptions that we bring to understanding noh and its translations. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/education
In his new book Drawn to See: Drawing as an Ethnographic Method (University of Toronto Press, 2016) Andrew Causey argues that social science practitioners can cultivate new ways of experiencing the world through drawing. He has developed thirty-nine “etudes,” drawing exercises that challenge the reader to become a more rigorous observer and to transform their relationship with both visual media and academia. These etudes have been tried and tested over many years in his class, Visual Anthropology, at Columbia College – Chicago. With exciting interdisciplinary possibilities, this is book expands the toolbox available to ethnographers. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/education
In this episode, I speak with Pat Farenga about the new edition of John Holt’s Freedom and Beyond (HoltGWS LLC, 2017). This book offers a broad critique of traditional schooling and its capacity for solving social problems. We discuss John Holt’s transition from classroom teacher to public intellectual as well as the broader implications of schools prioritizing job training over citizenship and self-actualization. He recommends the following books for listeners interested in Holt’s work and our conversation:
The Continuum Concept: In Search of Happiness Lost by Jean Liedloff
Deschooling Society by Ivan Illich
The Changing Nature of Man: Introduction to a Historical Psychology by Jean Hendrick Van Den Berg
Man’s Search for Meaning by Viktor E. Frankl
Farenga joins New Books in Education for the interview. To share your thoughts on the podcast, you can connect with him on Twitter at @patfarenga.
Trevor Mattea is an educational consultant and speaker. His areas of expertise include deeper learning, parent involvement, project-based learning, and technology integration. He can be reached by email at info@trevormattea.com or on Twitter at @tsmattea. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/education
As I write this, the women’s basketball team for the University of Connecticut is in the midst of a 107 game winning streak. It’s quite reasonable to assert that Geno Auriemma will end his career as the most successful coach in basketball history.
In the excitement of setting so many records, many people don’t remember a world where women’s basketball at the university level was, at best, an afterthought. Kelly Belanger’s new book, Invisible Seasons: Title IX and the Fight for Equity in College Sports (Syracuse University Press, 2016) offers a valuable reminder that what is might not have been. The book examines the efforts by female basketball players at Michigan State University in 1977 to assert their right to an equitable share of university resources and respect. This period was a critical one for the newly passed Title IX, a statue in American law prohibiting educational institutions from discriminating by gender. With the federal government debating how to determine if a school had violated the law, players, coaches and universities tried to figure out how the law applied to them. The result at Michigan State was a protracted struggle by many of the female basketball players to claim their legal rights.
Belanger teaches English and writing at Valparaiso University. She also played basketball at Michigan state in the early 1980s, when the court case that concluded this struggle was still in process. She has an eye for details and nuance and her retelling of the story as history is excellent. But her background in rhetoric allows her to flesh out her historical account with a thoughtful analysis of the rhetorical choices made by each of the ‘sides.’ Anyone interested in Title IX or in women’s sports should add this book to their reading list. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/education
It’s common for colleges in the U.S. to have service learning programs of one kind or another. These are sometimes criticized as being liberal or even radical endeavors — especially if “social justice” language is employed. But what if these are, in fact, conservative programs at their heart, ones that, in the context of the corporatized university, are furthering the neoliberal project and inhibiting the development of better social welfare policies? Listen to our interview with Randy Stoecker as he discusses his book, Liberating Service Learning and the Rest of Higher Education Civic Engagement (Temple University Press, 2016), for a first-hand critique as well as some thoughts on how we might all better serve our students — and the communities they would engage with.
Stephen Pimpare is Senior Lecturer in the Politics & Society Program and Faculty Fellow at the Carsey School of Public Policy at the University of New Hampshire. He is the author of The New Victorians (New Press, 2004), A People’s History of Poverty in America (New Press, 2008), winner of the Michael Harrington Award, and Ghettos, Tramps and Welfare Queens: Down and Out on the Silver Screen (Oxford, 2017). Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/education
How might we account for the rapid rise of for-profit educational institutions over the past few decades, who are the students who attend them, how can we evaluate what those schools do and why, and are there actually lessons that traditional higher ed institutions can learn from them? Join us as we speak with Tressie McMillan Cottom about her new book Lower Ed: The Troubling Rise of For-Profit Colleges in the New Economy (The New Press, 2017).
Stephen Pimpare is Senior Lecturer in the Politics & Society Program and Faculty Fellow at the Carsey School of Public Policy at the University of New Hampshire. He is the author of The New Victorians (New Press, 2004), A Peoples History of Poverty in America (New Press, 2008), winner of the Michael Harrington Award, and Ghettos, Tramps and Welfare Queens: Down and Out on the Silver Screen (Oxford, 2017). Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/education
There has been much talk in the news recently about funding for public education, the emergence of charter schools, and the potential of school vouchers. How much does competition for financing in urban public schools depend on marketing and perpetuating poverty in order to thrive? Are the actors in this drama deliberately playing up stereotypes of race and class? A Good Investment? Philanthropy and the Marketing of Race in an Urban Public School (University of Minnesota Press, 2015) offers a firsthand look behind the scenes of the philanthropic approach to funding public education a process in which social change in education policy and practice is aligned with social entrepreneurship. The appearance of success, equity, or justice in education, the author argues, might actually serve to maintain stark inequalities and inhibit democracy.
A Good Investment? Philanthropy and the Marketing of Race in an Urban Public School shows that models of corporate or philanthropic charity in education may in fact reinforce the race and class hierarchies that they purport to alleviate. As their voices reveal, the teachers and students on the receiving end of such a system can be critically conscious and ambivalent participants in a school’s racialized marketing and image management. Timely and provocative, this nuanced work exposes the unintended consequences of an education marketplace where charity masquerades as justice.
Amy Brown is an educational anthropologist and a faculty member in the Critical Writing Program at the University of Pennsylvania. In her research she often explores how the increasing privatization of public education affects teaching and learning practices. Another area of focus for Brown is how “philanthrocapitalism” and reliance on private sector funding influence constructions of gender, class and race as well as distribution of power and resources. A Good Investment? Philanthropy and the Marketing of Race in an Urban Public School is her first book.
James Stancil is an independent scholar, freelance journalist, and the President and CEO of Intellect U Well, Inc. a Houston-area non-profit dedicated to increasing the joy of reading and media literacy in young people. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/education
Daniel Magaziner’s latest book, The Art of Life in South Africa (Ohio University Press, 2016, and UKZN Press, 2017), is a welcome addition to the intellectual history of South Africa. Rich in color images and documentary history, The Art of Life tells the story of African art in white apartheid South Africa, juxtaposing the beauty of an ordinary life well lived, against the random cruelty of the apartheid state.
The book follows the story of the Ndaleni Art School in modern-day KwaZulu-Natal from 1952 until its closing in 1981. The school was set up to teach the art teachers of the Bantu education system, but in doing so, it opened up the student’s lives to more complex discussions of creativity, beauty and resilience. Magaziner sets up the tale by spinning the individual lives against the opposing pressures of both the apartheid state and the black consciousness movement. On the one side, rigid oppression, and on the other, the push to fight apartheid or be deemed a collaborator.
The individual stories of former Ndaleni students force the reader to see beyond the black and white of these opposing narratives. The people profiled chose to lead fulfilled lives, not because they were defying apartheid, but because their only choice was to simply live. The book is, at its heart, a human story, set against the backdrop of apartheid.
Erin Freas-Smith, Ph.D can be reached at efreassmith@gmail.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/education
In What’s Wrong with the Poor: Psychiatry, Race, and the War on Poverty (University of North Carolina Press, 2016), Mical Raz offers a deep dive into the theoretical roots of the Head Start program, and offers a fascinating story of unexpected policy origins and of the interplay between psychiatric theory, race, and U.S. social welfare policy.
Stephen Pimpare is Senior Lecturer in the Politics & Society Program and Faculty Fellow at the Carsey School of Public Policy at the University of New Hampshire. He is the author of The New Victorians (New Press, 2004), A People’s History of Poverty in America (New Press, 2008), winner of the Michael Harrington Award, and Ghettos, Tramps and Welfare Queens: Down and Out on the Silver Screen (Oxford, 2017). Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/education
Ellen Hazelkorn, Policy Advisor to the Higher Education Authority (HEA), and Director, Higher Education Policy Research Unit (HEPRU), Dublin Institute of Technology, joins the New Books Network to discuss her recently published book, entitled The Civic University: The Policy and Leadership Challenges (Edward Elgar Pub 2016). She is the co-editor of the book, along with John Goddard, Louise Kempton, and Paul Vallance.
The book explores the new challenges that universities face in this era defined by globalization and internationalization, but also by the consequences of funding shortages and slashed budgets. The authors of the book look at ways institutions can better embed themselves into their surrounding cities or environments to have greater meaning and connection, instead of becoming separate Ivory Tower islands. While the focus is on the management of solutions to these issues and challenges, the target audience for this book is anyone interested in education, civics, or policy.
Ellen Hazelkorn previously joined the New Books Network to discuss Rankings and the Reshaping of Higher Education.
For any questions, comments, or recommendations for the New Books in Education podcast, you can connect with the host, Ryan M. Allen, at @PoliticsAndEd. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/education
In Steamboat School (Jump at the Sun, 2016), an historical picture book based on true events, author Deborah Hopkinson recounts the story of Reverend John Berry Meachum’s brave act to defy an 1847 Missouri law designed to prohibit African American children from attending school. This fictional account is told from the point of view of a young boy who is at first a student at Meachum’s secret school, which held in a church basement. But when the Missouri law is passed and it is no longer safe to continue teaching the students there, Meachum enlists his students and decides to build a steamboat to house a new, legal, school set afloat on the Mississippi River and thus on federal property. The book concludes with a nonfiction afterword about Reverend Meachum’s life and the research behind the book.
Deborah Hopkinson is the author of more than 40 books for young readers including picture books, middle grade fiction, and nonfiction. In her presentations at schools and conferences, she helps bring history and research alive. Her work is especially well suited for STEM and CCSS connections.
Her nonfiction includes Courage & Defiance, Stories of Spies, Saboteurs and Survivors in WWII Denmark, Titanic: Voices from the Disaster, a Robert F. Sibert Award honor book and YALSA Excellence in Nonfiction honor book, and Shutting out the Sky, Life in the Tenements of New York 1880-1924, an NCTE Orbis Pictus award honor book and Jane Addams Award honor book. Deborah’s award-winning picture books include Sky Boys, How They Built the Empire State Building, an ALA Notable and Boston Globe-Horn Book Honor book and Apples to Oregon won the Golden Kite Award and Spur Storytelling Award.
Susan Raab is president of Raab Associates, an internationally recognized agency that specializes in marketing literature, products and initiatives that help improve the lives of young people. Clients have included National Geographic, Scholastic, the International Board on Books for Young People, and bestselling authors and illustrators. Susan is marketing advisor for the Society of Children’s Book Writers and Illustrators (SCBWI). She’s also a journalist reporting on publishing, education and human rights. Her work as a broadcast correspondent has been hosted by the University of Connecticut, and by the University of Florida’s Recess Radio, a program syndicated to 500 public radio stations. Her many interviews, including with Art Spiegelman, Jon Scieszka, Norton Juster, Laurie Halse Anderson and many others talking about art and literature can be heard here. Follow Susan at: https://twitter.com/sraab18 Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/education
Within the context of the social upheaval of the 1960s and 1970s, elite institutions of higher education began to feel pressure to open their doors to women. In ‘Keep the Damned Women Out’: The Struggle for Coeducation (Princeton University Press, 2015), an expansive study in institutional decision making, Nancy Weiss Malkiel analyzes how institutions ultimately decided to approach coeducation and what their institutions would ultimately look like following this radical change. By using examples from both the United States and the United Kingdom, one gets a sense of how men at these institutions viewed coeducation, how women who ended up attending these schools reacted, and how traditionally women-only institutions handled the change. Finally, Nancy Weiss Malkiel answers the important set of questions within this move toward coeducation: what did coeducation do and what did it not do? Nancy Weiss Malkiel is emerita professor of history at Princeton University. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/education
With Growing Each Other Up: When Our Children Become Our Teachers (University of Chicago Press, 2016), Sara Lawrence-Lightfoot offers an intimately detailed, emotionally powerful and different perspective of the parenting experience than we are used to, showing that parents grow themselves, learning the lessons their children teach. While countless books have been written about the challenges of parenting, nearly all of them position the parent as instructor and support-giver, the child as learner and in need of direction. But the parent-child relationship is more complicated and reciprocal; over time it transforms in remarkable, surprising ways. As our children grow up, we begin to learn from them. The lessons parents learn from their offspring–voluntarily and involuntarily, with intention and serendipity, often through resistance and struggle– are embedded in their evolving relationships and shaped by the rapidly transforming world around them. Growing Each Other Up is rich in the voices of actual parents telling their own stories of raising children and their children raising them; watching that fundamental connection shift over time.
Sara Lawrence-Lightfoot is a MacArthur prize-winning sociologist whose work examines the culture of schools, the broad ecology of education, and the relationship between human development and social change. She has written 10 books, including Worlds Apart: Relationships Between Families and Schools (1978), Beyond Bias: Perspectives on Classrooms (1979), and The Good High School: Portraits of Character and Culture (1983), which received the 1984 Outstanding Book Award from the American Educational Research Association, and Balm In Gilead: Journey of A Healer (1988), which won the 1988 Christopher Award, given for “literary merit and humanitarian achievement.” Dr. Lightfoot is the Emily Hargroves Fisher Professor of Education at Harvard University.
Susan Raab is president of Raab Associates, an internationally recognized agency that specializes in marketing literature, products and initiatives that help improve the lives of young people. Clients have included National Geographic, Scholastic, the International Board on Books for Young People, and bestselling authors and illustrators. Susan is marketing advisor for the Society of Children’s Book Writers and Illustrators (SCBWI). She’s also a journalist reporting on publishing, education and human rights. Her work as a broadcast correspondent has been hosted by the University of Connecticut, and by the University of Florida’s Recess Radio, a program syndicated to 500 public radio stations. Her many interviews, including with Art Spiegelman, Jon Scieszka, Norton Juster, Laurie Halse Anderson and many others talking about art and literature can be heard here. Follow Susan at: https://twitter.com/sraab18
Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/education
The Pope said that Donald Trump wasn’t much of a Christian if all he can think about is building walls. Trump replied that it was “disgraceful” for a any leader, even the Pope, “to question another man’s religion or faith.” I imagine that many Americans agreed with Trump on this score. But is Trump’s “radical tolerance” position really sensible? Can’t someone reasonably and respectfully say to another “Gee, I think you’ve got that particular point of scripture wrong” or even “I think your faith is, well, misguided for reasons X, Y an Z”?
In his thought-provoking book The Limits of Religious Tolerance (Amherst College Press, 2016), Alan J. Levinovitz argues that we can and indeed must question religion, both our own and everyone else’s. How else, he asks, are we to understand why we and our fellow citizens believe what we say we believe? To be sure, Levinovitz advises that we only engage in critical discussions of religion in certain, well-defined contexts: churches, synagogues, mosques and such are good places to practice religion, not debate it. In contrast, Levinovitz proposes, universities–places defined by rational investigation and (in theory) civil discussion–are perfect for debates about religion. And, Levinovitz continues, institutions of higher education should do everything in their power to encourage it.
Thanks to Amherst College Press, Levinovitz’s wonderful book is available free for download here.
Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/education
In this episode, I speak with Ondine Gross, the author of Restore the Respect: How to Mediate School Conflicts and Keep Students Learning (Brookes, 2016). Her book outlines how teachers and administrators can implement mediation protocols in their schools. We discuss different approaches to school discipline and their consequences, the components of a successful mediation, and the skills required of effective mediators.
She recommends the following books for listeners interested in her work and our conversation:
Why Are All the Black Kids Sitting Together in the Cafeteria: And Other Conversations About Race by Beverly Daniel Tatum
Black Males and Racism: Improving the Schooling and Life Chances of African Americans by Terence Fitzgerald
How to Talk So Kids Will Listen & Listen So Kids Will Talk by Adele Faber and Elaine Maslish
Gross joins New Books in Education for the interview. To share your thoughts on the podcast, you can connect with her on Twitter at @ondinetalks.
Trevor Mattea is an educational consultant and speaker. His areas of expertise include deeper learning, parent involvement, project-based learning, and technology integration. He can be reached by email at info@trevormattea.com or on Twitter at @tsmattea. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/education
In this episode, I speak with Lee Gutkind, the editor of What I Didn’t Know: True Stories of Becoming a Teacher (In Fact Books, 2016). His book shares more than twenty firsthand accounts of teachers working in different contexts. We discuss how personal narratives can contribute to our understanding a profession, the writing process, and the similarities and difference between these stories and those featured in his other work.
He recommends the following books for listeners interested in his work and our conversation:
I Wasn’t Strong Like This When I Started Out: True Stories of Becoming a Nurse by Lee Gutkind
Frank Sinatra Has a Cold and Other Essays by Gay Talese
You Can’t Make This Stuff Up: The Complete Guide to Writing Creative Nonfiction–from Memoir to Literary Journalism and Everything in Between by Lee Gutkind
Gutkind joins New Books in Education for the interview. To share your thoughts on the podcast, you can connect with him on Twitter at @LeeGutkind.
Trevor Mattea is an educational consultant and speaker. His areas of expertise include deeper learning, parent involvement, project-based learning, and technology integration. He can be reached by email at info@trevormattea.com or on Twitter at @tsmattea. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/education
In this episode, I speak with Steven Levy, the author of Starting from Scratch: One Classroom Builds Its Own Curriculum (Heinemann, 1996). His book shares his reflections on the complexities of teaching by drawing upon his years spent implementing project-based learning in the elementary grades. We discuss his beginnings and influences, the roles of expertise and curiosity in teaching, and the qualities that make a good teacher.
He recommends the following books for listeners interested in his work and our conversation:
Leaders of Their Own Learning: Transforming Schools Through Student-Engaged Assessment by Ron Berger, Leah Rugen, and Libby Woodfin
How to Differentiate Instruction in Mixed-Ability Classrooms by Carol Ann Tomlinson
Levy joins New Books in Education for the interview. You can watch a video of students reflecting on their experiences in his classroom on YouTube. To share your thoughts on the podcast, you can connect with him via email at slevy@elschools.org.
Trevor Mattea is an educational consultant and speaker. His areas of expertise include deeper learning, parent involvement, project-based learning, and technology integration. He can be reached by email at info@trevormattea.com or on Twitter at @tsmattea. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/education
In this episode, I speak with Heather Shumaker, the author of It’s OK to Go Up the Slide: Renegade Rules for Raising Confident and Creative Kids (TarcherPerigee, 2016). Her book offers advice to parents looking for new approaches to common problems facing their school-age children. We discuss how our perception of childhood has changed over time, the importance of acknowledging dilemmas and desires that may seem trivial from an adult perspective, and the role of modeling in teaching behaviors.
Shumaker joins New Books in Education for the interview. To share your thoughts on the podcast, you can connect with her on Twitter at @HeatherShumaker.
She recommends the following books for listeners interested in her work and our conversation:
The End of Homework: How Homework Disrupts Families, Overburdens Children, and Limits Learning by Etta Kralovec and John Buell
The Homework Myth: Why Our Kids Get Too Much of a Bad Thing by Alfie Kohn
The Case Against Homework: How Homework Is Hurting Children and What Parents Can Do About It by Sara Bennett and Nancy Kalish
How to Talk So Kids Will Listen & Listen So Kids Will Talk by Adele Faber and Elaine Maslish
Miseducation: Preschoolers at Risk by David Elkind
Becoming the Parent You Want to Be: A Sourcebook of Strategies for the First Five Years by Laura Davis
Trevor Mattea is an educational consultant and speaker. His areas of expertise include deeper learning, parent involvement, project-based learning, and technology integration. He can be reached by email at info@trevormattea.com or on Twitter at @tsmattea. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/education
In this episode, I speak with Heather Dowd, the author of Classroom Management in the Digital Age: Effective Practices for Technology-Rich Learning Spaces (EdTechTeam, 2016). Her book offers a series of structures for teachers beginning to use technology in their classrooms, including procedures, expectations, strategies, and methods for parent communication. We discuss what classroom management looks like in different school contexts as well as the impact of technology on organization, engagement, and community.
She recommends the following books for listeners interested in her work and our conversation:
Kagan Cooperative Learning by Spencer Kagan
Brain Rules: 12 Principles for Surviving and Thriving at Work, Home, and School by John Medina
The HyperDoc Handbook: Digital Lesson Design Using Google Apps by Lisa Highfill, Kelly Hilton, and Sarah Landis
Dowd joins New Books in Education for the interview. To share your thoughts on the podcast, you can connect with her on Twitter at @heza.
Trevor Mattea is an educational consultant and speaker. His areas of expertise include deeper learning, parent involvement, project-based learning, and technology integration. He can be reached by email at info@trevormattea.com or on Twitter at @tsmattea. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/education
Rebecca S. Natow, Senior Research Associate with the Community College Research Center at Teachers College, Columbia University, joins New Books Network to discuss her recently published book, entitled Higher Education Rulemaking: The Politics of Creating Regulatory Policy (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2016).
In the book, she explores what happens after higher education legislation becomes law, specifically focusing on implementation of programs and rules in the sector. For the study, in-depth interviews were conducted with individuals from the US Department of Education, congressional staffers, representatives from higher educational institutions, both student and consumer representatives, mediation experts, state government officials, and representatives from the lending industry.
Professor Natow previously joined New Books Network to discuss The Politics of Performance Funding for Higher Education Origins, Discontinuations, and Transformations.
For any questions, comments, or recommendations for the New Books in Education podcast, you can connect with the host, Ryan M. Allen, at @PoliticsAndEd. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/education
What is the future for Arts and Humanities in Europe? The podcast discusses these questions with Paul Benneworth, one of the authors, along with Magnus Gulbrandsen and Ellen Hazelkorn, of The Impact and Future of Arts and Humanities Research (Palgrave, 2016). Dr. Benneworth, from the University of Twente’s Center for Higher Education Policy Studies, was part of a pan-European project to consider the impact of Impact and the way Arts and Humanities narrate their public value, research which was the basis for the book. The book draws on a wealth of empirical and theoretical material, including comparative case studies from Ireland, Norway, and The Netherlands. The comparative approach allows the book to contextualise engagements with science policy, the role and purpose of the university, public value, and innovation, to offer a new vision of Arts and Humanities research that avoids instrumentalisation. The book is important and essential reading for all interested in the future of higher education and research. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/education
Matthew Pauly’s Breaking the Tongue: Language, Education, and Power in Soviet Ukraine, 1923-1934 (University of Toronto Press, 2014) offers a detailed investigation of the language policy–officially termed Ukrainization–that was introduced in Ukraine during the formative years of the Soviet Union. Out of a massive amount of archival records and documents, Pauly reconstructs a complex and controversial process that happened to have significant consequences for the subsequent decades.
In his research, Pauly presents Ukrainization as a process that impacts multiple fields, outlining the connection between the nation formation and language/cultural policy. The areas that appear to have experienced changes as a result of Ukrainization include educational institutions, political establishment, economy, ethnic groups. Significant attention is given to education and pedagogy. Breaking the Tongue in much detail discusses the role of educators in the process of the Ukrainian culture popularization. While accounting for the policy decisions made and promoted by the Communist leaders, Pauly intriguingly brings to light the contributions which could be attributed to children. On the one hand, for obvious reasons children were the main target of Ukrainization; on the other hand, children through the involvement in youth organization were actively participating in the dissemination of the Ukrainian language and culture.
Through the twelve chapters that constitute the research, Pauly observes the trajectory of Ukrainization: its enthusiastic implementation was followed by introducing limitations and restrictions. According to Pauly, Ukrainization could go as far as the Communists leaders would allow: the revival of the interest in the Ukrainian Studies in Ukraine, although it may seem and sound paradoxical, presented potential threats to the solidifying Soviet Union. Breaking the Tongue documents how ardent and genuine supporters of the development of the Ukrainian language and culture were subsequently persecuted being accused of sabotage and nationalism. The final part, “Biographical and Informational sketches,” presents information about the activists who became victims of the Soviet repression: it is a reminder of the controversial language policy as well as manipulative strategies employed by the Soviet authorities in the process of producing programs that would secure the stability of the Soviet Union.
Matthew Pauly is an associate professor in the Department of History, Michigan State University. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/education
Kate Merkel-Hess‘s new book looks closely at a loose group of rural reformers in 1920s and 1930s China who were trying to create a rural alternative to urban modernity. Focusing on the Rural Reconstruction Movement of roughly 1933-1937, The Rural Modern: Reconstructing the Self and State in Republican China (University of Chicago Press, 2016) argues that the Communists were neither the first nor the only group of urban intellectuals to look to the villages as the foundation of a new nation. The book demonstrates that rural reconstruction was not a failure: the efforts that Merkel-Hess describes to generate a rural version of Chinese modernity established an important precedent that has reverberated through modern Chinese history. Along the way, it introduces some fascinating documents in the course of its analysis, including primers and pamphlets aimed at popular readers that promoted the vision that literacy was a basis for self-transformation, self-discipline, and modern citizenship. The conclusion of the book considers how the approaches and values of a late turn to developmentalism were picked up in the postwar period. Highly recommended! Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/education
Anyone who has spent time in a school as an adult probably knows how hard it is for teachers to leave their work when they come home every night. There always seems to be more work for them to do, along with inordinate responsibility and a sense that every extra minute spent on tomorrow’s lesson plan will generate better outcomes for students. But teachers also bring their non-school lives along with them when they return each day. We have young teachers and old teachers; single teachers and those who are married with children; teachers who have lived their entire lives in their communities and those who have traveled the world before settling down. Each of them already brings at least one thing that is unique and worthwhile. Maybe it is their energy, optimism, or sense of purpose. Maybe it is their wealth of firsthand experience or their understanding of the community and its history. Is there something we should look for in our teachers? How can we prepare them to share the best of what they have to offer as we encourage them to grow in new ways? What can teachers learn from reflecting on how their biographies and life circumstances intersect with their work?
In Teacher: Two Years in the Mississippi Delta (University Press of Mississippi, 2016), Michael Copperman recounts his experiences as a recent college graduate recruited by Teach for America to serve in a community far from his home that was burdened both by poverty and racial segregation.
Copperman joins New Books in Education for the interview. To share your thoughts on the podcast, you can connect with him on Twitter at @MikeCopperman.
During our conversation, he also recommended the following books:
What I Didn’t Know: True Stories of Becoming a Teacher by Lee Gutkind
Hanging Bridge: Racial Violence and America’s Civil Rights Century by Jason Ward
Trevor Mattea is an educational consultant and speaker. His areas of expertise include deeper learning, parent involvement, project-based learning, and technology integration. He can be reached by email at info@trevormattea.com or on Twitter at @tsmattea. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/education
Dr. Damien M. Sojoyner, Assistant Professor of Anthropology at the University of California, Irvine, joins the New Books Network to discuss his recently published book, entitled First Strike: Educational Enclosures in Black Los Angeles (University of Minnesota Press, 2016). Through both ethnographic and historical analyses, First Strike explores the tragic relationship between education and the prison system in California.
For any questions, comments, or recommendations for the New Books in Education podcast, you can connect with the host, Ryan M. Allen, at @PoliticsAndEd. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/education
How can children grow to realize their inherent rights and respect the rights of others? In Human Rights in Children’s Literature: Imagination and the Narrative of Law (Oxford University Press, 2016), authors Jonathan Todres and Sarah Higinbotham explore this question through both human rights law and children’s literature. Both international and domestic law affirm that children have rights, but how are these norms disseminated so that they make a difference in children’s lives? Human rights education research demonstrates that when children learn about human rights, they exhibit greater self-esteem and respect the rights of others. The Convention on the Rights of the Child — the most widely-ratified human rights treaty — not only ensures that children have rights, it also requires that states make those rights “widely known, by appropriate and active means, to adults and children alike.” This first-of-its-kind requirement for a human rights treaty indicates that if rights are to be meaningful to the lives of children, then government and civil society must engage with those rights in ways that are relevant to children.
Human Rights in Children’s Literature investigates children’s rights under international law — identity and family rights, the right to be heard, the right to be free from discrimination, and other civil, political, economic, social and cultural rights — and considers the way in which those rights are embedded in children’s literature from Peter Rabbit to Horton Hears a Who! to Harry Potter. This book traverses children’s rights law, literary theory, and human rights education to argue that in order for children to fully realize their human rights, they first have to imagine and understand them. Learn more at: www.jonathantodres.com
Susan Raab is president of Raab Associates, an internationally recognized agency that specializes in marketing literature, products and initiatives that help improve the lives of young people. Clients have included National Geographic, Scholastic, the International Board on Books for Young People, and bestselling authors and illustrators. Susan is marketing advisor for the Society of Children’s Book Writers and Illustrators (SCBWI). She’s also a journalist reporting on publishing, education and human rights. Her work as a broadcast correspondent has been hosted by the University of Connecticut, and by the University of Florida’s Recess Radio, a program syndicated to 500 public radio stations. Her many interviews, including with Art Spiegelman, Jon Scieszka, Norton Juster, Laurie Halse Anderson and many others talking about art and literature can be heard here. Follow Susan at: https://twitter.com/sraab18 Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/education
Parents often wonder what their children do at school all day. How different is it from what they remember years ago? Teachers often hear similar questions from their friends. Is it like what they imagine? If these adults could really understand, what might they say about school? Does it matter? It would seem that the most effective critiques are those offered by the individuals with the most firsthand knowledge. But the analysis of outsiders is also powerful. These people can draw on their varied backgrounds to bring new perspectives to familiar challenges. They may see things that those with more experience can more easily miss, perhaps even the lived experience of students. What can we learn from those stories? In Substitute: Going to School with a Thousand Kids (Blue Rider Press, 2016), Nicholson Baker describes his month spent working as a substitute teacher with students of all ages or anyone looking to deepen their understanding of those experiences before offering their own policy proposals.
Baker joins New Books in Education for the interview. To share your thoughts on the podcast, you can connect with him on Twitter at @nicolsonbaker8.
During our conversation, he also recommended the following books:
Up the Down Staircase by Bel Kaufman
Philosophy of Education by Nel Noddings
The Way It Spozed to Be: A Report on the Classroom War Behind the Crisis in Our Schools by James Herndon
Trevor Mattea is an educational consultant and speaker. His areas of expertise include deeper learning, parent involvement, project-based learning, and technology integration. He can be reached by email at info@trevormattea.com or on Twitter at @tsmattea. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/education
As you spend more time working in one role, organization, or field, it can become easy to lose perspective on how your work is similar or different from that being done by people in other positions, places, and industries. How are you asked to spend your time? How are you given feedback? How are you evaluated? Do your workplace norms make any sense? What would an outsider say about them? Because so many teachers enter the profession right out of college and either spend their entire careers in schools or leave within a few years, they are not often in the position to hear or offer these kinds of school critiques. In Confessions of a Bad Teacher: The Shocking Truth from the Frontline of American Public Education (Sourcebooks, 2013), John Owens describes his frustrations upon leaving the publishing industry after 30 years and pursuing a second career teaching high school English in a New York City public school at the height of the education reform movement.
Owens joins New Books in Education for the interview. To share your thoughts on the podcast, you can connect with him on Twitter at @JOwensTeacher.
During our conversation, he also recommended the following books:
Reign of Error: The Hoax of the Privatization Movement and Danger to America’s Public Schools by Diane Ravitch
The Death and Life of the Great American School System: How Testing and Choice Are Undermining Education by Diane Ravitch
Trevor Mattea is an educational consultant and speaker. His areas of expertise include deeper learning, parent involvement, project-based learning, and technology integration. He can be reached by email at info@trevormattea.com or on Twitter at @tsmattea. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/education
Time and resources are scarce for many teachers. Often times, these same teachers are under immense pressure to produce higher test scores and severely constrained with the actions they can take in their own classrooms. What are the consequences of working under conditions in which you have increasing responsibilities without sufficiently corresponding support and professional autonomy? Teachers may only prioritize the content that appears on standardized assessments and rarely address other worthwhile knowledge and skills. They may also work excessively long hours, ultimately undermining their personal well-being and their professional effectiveness. What if teachers were instead incentivized to model mindfulness and teach practices to students? Could we avoid more situations like the ones described above? In The Way of Mindful Education: Cultivating Well-Being in Teachers and Students (W. W. Norton and Company, 2014) and The Mindful Education Workbook: Lessons for Teaching Mindfulness to Students (W. W. Norton and Company, 2016), Daniel Rechtschaffen provides a definition for mindfulness that clearly distinguishes it from other similar or related ideas and articulates its unique benefits for teachers and students by drawing on classroom dilemmas and corresponding practices.
Rechtschaffen joins New Books in Education for the interview. To share your thoughts on the podcast, you can connect with him on Twitter at @mindfuleducate.
During our conversation, he also recommended the following books:
Mindful Games: Sharing Mindfulness and Meditation with Children, Teens, and Families by Susan Kaiser Greenland
The Mindful Child: How to Help Your Kid Manage Stress and Become Happier, Kinder, and More Compassionate by Susan Kaiser Greenland
Building Emotional Intelligence: Techniques to Cultivate Inner Strength in Children by Linda Lantieri
Wherever You Go, There You Are by Jon Kabat-Zinn
Full Catastrophe Living: Using the Wisdom of Your Body and Mind to Face Stress, Illness, and Pain by Jon Kabat-Zinn
Mindfulness for Beginners: Reclaiming the Present Moment and Your Life by Jon Kabat-Zinn
Trevor Mattea is an educational consultant and speaker. His areas of expertise include deeper learning, parent involvement, project-based learning, and technology integration. He can be reached by email at info@trevormattea.com or on Twitter at @tsmattea. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/education
From the title, you might guess that Alfred Posamentier and Stephen Krulik’s Effective Techniques to Motivate Mathematics Instruction (Routledge, 2016) is aimed at mathematics teachers which it is. However, the techniques and strategies discussed in the book can be effectively employed by a much larger group of people, and one who hasconsiderably more influence with students. Those people are parents, who play as large or larger a role in their children’s education than do teachers. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/education
It feels like schools are in the midst of unprecedented change — sometimes more in different places and sometimes more in different ways. Many people are thinking about education differently than they did a few years ago. Others still are learning and assessing in new ways, using different tools, and collaborating with different partners. But in what ways are schools changing the most? What happens when multiple changes occur simultaneously? How can people who have different relationships to schools prepare themselves and support change? In Education Nation: Six Leading Edges of Innovation in Our Schools (Jossey-Bass, 2012), Milton Chen draws upon his years of experience using television and the Internet to share educational material in order to explain what schools look like when separate school innovations begin to converge.
Chen joins New Books in Education for the interview. To share your thoughts on the podcast, you can connect with him on Twitter at @miltonchen2.
Trevor Mattea is an educational consultant and speaker. His areas of expertise include deeper learning, parent involvement, project-based learning, and technology integration. He can be reached by email at info@trevormattea.com or on Twitter at @tsmattea. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/education
Megan Tompkins-Stange is the author of Policy Patrons: Philanthropy, Education Reform, and the Politics of Influence (Harvard Education Press, 2016). She is assistant professor at the Gerald Ford School of Public Policy at the University of Michigan. Who hasn’t applied for a foundation grant? But what do they want out of the funding? In Policy Patrons, we learn quite a bit, especially as it relates to influencing the direction of public policy. Tompkins-Stange’s book explores under-studied area of philanthropic foundations. Relying on extensive original interviews, the book shows how foundations, such as the Gates Foundation and Ford Foundation, vary in style and approach to public policy, and how this relates to the on-going reform of public schools in the United States. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/education
One of the most commonly used words right now in education is “innovation.” It seems to be part of any response to our collective anxiety over the fact that the way we educate children does not seem to have changed as quickly as the ways we access information, communicate with each other, or travel from place to place. Of course, before innovation was an education buzzword, it was a buzzword in Silicon Valley. It is easy to list examples of companies that are innovative — Google, Apple, Uber, etc. — but it is much harder to define. This leaves us to wonder, is innovation in schools just integrating more apps and touchscreens? If not, what is it? And if we want innovation in schools, how do we get there? In The Innovator’s Mindset: Empower Learning, Unleash Talent, and Lead a Culture of Creativity (Dave Burgess Consulting, 2015), George Couros, provides a framework evaluating whether school practices are truly innovative as well as a guide for leaders interested in fostering changes in their schools that are both original and positive.
Couros joins New Books in Education for the interview. To share your thoughts on the podcast, you can connect with him on Twitter at @gcouros.
Trevor Mattea is an educational consultant and speaker. His areas of expertise include deeper learning, parent involvement, project-based learning, and technology integration. He can be reached by email at info@trevormattea.com or on Twitter at @tsmattea. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/education
Recent controversies surrounding sexual harassment and assault on college campuses have sparked heated discussions surrounding the everyday experiences of women on college campuses. Female students and faculty members have often felt at odds with their institutions and other members of their workplaces when sexual harassment and assault enter the work environment. What is one to do when experiencing gender-based discrimination in the academic workplace? Ellen Mayock in her recent book Gender Shrapnel in the Academic Workplace (Palgrave Macmillan, 2016) seeks to put a name to the phenomenon that many women in academia face as well as provide solutions to institutional failures that allow for these experiences of harassment and assault to occur. Drawing upon feminist theory, linguistics, and the power of personal narratives, Mayock discusses how gender shrapnel occurs in the academic workplace. The later chapters of the book provide very tangible solutions to gender shrapnel that individuals and institutions can embark upon in order to curb the instances of gender shrapnel in academia. Ellen Mayock is currently the Ernest Williams II Professor of Romance Languages within the Department of Romance Languages at Washington and Lee University. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/education
Darian M. Parker joins the New Books Network to discuss his recently published book, Sartre and No Child Left Behind: An Existential Psychoanalytic Anthropology of Urban Schooling (Lexington Books, 2015). Through an ethnographic lens, Parker provides an anthropological glimpse into a New York City public school that is considered to be failing. Despite being rooted in a strong theoretical framework, the book should be accessible to anyone interested in education or policy making because of the familiar narrative laid out in a relatable manner.
For any questions, comments, or recommendations for the New Books in Education podcast, you can connect with the host, Ryan M. Allen, at @PoliticsAndEd. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/education
The gender binary is recently giving way to gender infinity, and our youngest members of society are both driving and benefiting from this evolution. They’re finding novel ways of expressing their true gender identities, whether or not those match what’s on their birth certificates. But the journeys of these gender creative children are often bumpy, as they encounter psychological, physical, and even legal challenges. This all raises important question for these children’s parents, teachers, doctors, and therapists, such as: What are the best ways to support these children’s gender paths? How do we help them face the challenges ahead with courage and authenticity? And, perhaps most importantly, how do we deal with our own fear, ignorance, or resistance to currents of change that we don’t always understand?
Dr. Diane Ehrensaft tackles these issues in her prescient and essential new book, The Gender Creative Child: Pathways for Nurturing and Supporting Children Who Live Outside Gender Boxes (TheExperiment, 2016). She is a developmental and clinical psychologist with over 30 years of experience working with gender-nonconforming children and their families. She joined me on New Books in Psychology to discuss her book and topics such as the difference between gender-dysphoric “persisters”versus “desisters,” the dangers of making children wait and see before undergoing gender transition, and the cutting-edge gender-affirmative treatment model used by doctors and therapists working with these children.
Eugenio Duarte, Ph.D. is a licensed psychologist and psychoanalyst practicing in New York City. He treats individuals and couples, with specialties in LGBTQ issues, eating and body image problems, and working with cultural minorities. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/education
It can be tempting to generalize certain attributes of schools as either being good or bad. Magnet and charter schools are often characterized as being inherently good. They usually offer special programs that ground all of their instruction. Having that choice is appealing to many families, and why not? Someone must have put a lot of thought into creating that special program, convincing stakeholders to open a school, and persuading teachers to build their curriculum around the program often times forgoing a higher salary at another school. With the neighborhood school, it seems like had to be there, and there is not anything special” about it that ties it together, except maybe geography. How is it supposed to compete with International Baccalaureate or STEM or performing arts? These things seem to give school a purpose. But what if the special program is something unexpected, perhaps something with a bit more baggage? How do geography, industry, and what our society expects from students influence the special programs made available to them? Are there any school lotteries you would think twice about before entering your child? In A Curriculum of Fear: Homeland Security in US Public Schools (University of Minnesota Press, 2016), Nicole Nguyen, provides an ethnography of a public high school that responded to calls for reform by adopting homeland security as its primary focus and lens for all other classes. She explores the history of militarization in schools, its impact on students, and the intersection of ethics and personal politics.
Nguyen joins New Books in Education for the interview. To share your thoughts on the podcast, you can connect with her via email at nguyenn@uic.edu.
Trevor Mattea is an educational consultant and speaker. His areas of expertise include deeper learning, parent involvement, project-based learning, and technology integration. He can be reached by email at info@trevormattea.com or on Twitter @tsmattea. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/education
Whatever your role — teacher, principal, or superintendent — when you work in a school system, you experience tensions between your reasons for going into education and how you actually spend your time in schools. You might be driven to support student-directed learning, coach new teachers, or initiate portfolio assessment, but you continually find yourself called away from those drivers. Instead, you have to assume some other responsibility that you may not see as essential but has gradually taken up more your time sometimes without explanation. How do we change institutions, like schools, to ensure that we are focused on our actual priorities? How do we jumpstart uncomfortable conversations? What can we learn from schools that were willing to totally rethink how they do things? In #EdJourney: A Roadmap to the Future of Education (Jossey-Bass, 2014), Grant Lichtman shares reflections following his three-month road trip across the country to visit schools and discuss innovation with stakeholders inside and outside the classroom.
Lichtman joins New Books in Education for the interview. You can find more information about his work on his blog. To share your thoughts on the podcast, you can connect with him on Twitter at @GrantLichtman. You can reach the host on Twitter at @tsmattea.
Trevor Mattea is an educational consultant and speaker. His areas of expertise include deeper learning, parent involvement, project-based learning, and technology integration. He can be reached at info@trevormattea.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/education
Most of the time, school performance is not like performance in other arenas. In music, we want people to play something for us. In sports, we want people to show us our skills. Performance in school is filtered through test scores and letter grades. When we ask students how they are doing in reading, we do not expect them to actually read to us or share their thoughts on a recent books they have finished. We expect to learn them to tell us a reading level or point to wherever they are on a rubric. But what does that mean? Have we lost sight of the actual value of the things we are attempting to measure and quantify? What if we looked at school work the way we attend practices, games, and recitals?
In Digital Student Portfolios: A Whole School Approach to Connected Learning and Continuous Assessment (Theory and Practice, 2014), Matt Renwick, outlines the rationale for portfolio work in the twenty first century, including how portfolios can motivate and empower students, provide evidence for report cards and school conferences, guide the instruction of teachers, and share school language with families. Renwick joins New Books in Education for the Interview. You can find more information about his work on his blog. To share your thoughts on the podcast, you can connect with him on Twitter at @ReadByExample.
Trevor Mattea is an educational consultant and speaker. His areas of expertise include deeper learning, parent involvement, project-based learning, and technology integration. He can be reached by email at info@trevormattea.com or on Twitter @tsmattea.
Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/education
Battles over school politics from curriculum to funding to voucher systems are key and contentious features of the political landscape today. Many of these familiar fights started in the 1970s. However, these battles have roots even earlier in mid-twentieth century school reform debates according to Campbell F. Scribner of the University of Maryland-College Park, who has a new book on the topic, The Fight for Local Control: Schools, Suburbs, and American Democracy (Cornell University Press, 2016).
The Fight for Local Control discusses rural struggles for local control of school districts in this earlier period, mostly in the North, and their connection to the later suburban/urban battles. Rural resistance to the closing of one-room schools and the consolidation of small school districts provided a language and model that was then used by suburban communities to fight urban, state, and federal regulation of their schools, including the famously contentious fights over integration in the form of busing. The book also examines how conservatives later abandoned local control arguments in favor of individual choice policies.
In this episode of the podcast, Scribner discusses how he got into the topic and the main insights of the book. He tells us about the regional differences in school systems and education politics. He explains some of the virtues and pitfalls of local control arguments and how his book might inform our thinking about current education politics. Finally, he also talks about doing research on rural schools with sparse, decentralized records.
Christine Lamberson is an Assistant Professor of History at Angelo State University. Her research and teaching focuses on 20th century U.S. political and cultural history. She’s currently working on a book manuscript about the role of violence in shaping U.S. political culture in the 1960s and 1970s. She can be reached at clamberson@angelo.edu. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/education
The school structures we present to teachers can sometimes resemble two extremes. In the first set of circumstances, teachers have enormous autonomy over what they teach, when they teach it, and how they teach it. In the second, they have almost no choices whatsoever. The texts are all provided, along with the objectives, the script, and the pacing guide. I am not sure that either of these working conditions are sustainable longterm. Obviously, no one enjoys being told exactly what to do. It conveys a lack of trust and respect. But it is an awesome responsibility to be told that everything is up to you. When we live in a culture that continually reinforces the idea that the longterm success of every student is tied to a single teacher’s priorities, words, and actions, this is a recipe for burnout. Are there practices that provide room for creativity without placing an unreasonable burden on individual teachers? How might teachers’ aims inform their choices? How can all teachers facilitate deeper learning in a sustainable way? In Learning That Lasts: Challenging, Engaging, and Empowering Students with Deeper Instruction (Jossey-Bass, 2016) Ron Berger and co-authors, Libby Woodfin and Anne Vilen, outline instructional moves, lesson structures, and discussion protocols that ask more from students and work in a variety of teaching contexts.
Woodfin joins New Books in Education for the interview. You can find more information about her work with Expeditionary Learning on its website.
Trevor Mattea is an educational consultant and speaker. His areas of expertise include deeper learning, parent involvement, project-based learning, and technology integration. He can be reached by email at info@trevormattea.com or on Twitter @tsmattea.
Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/education
Paula S. Fass is a professor of history emerita at the University of California, Berkeley. Her book The End of American Childhood: A History of Parenting from Life on the Frontier to the Managed Child (Princeton University Press, 2016) traces the changing views of childhood and childrearing as it followed the fortunes of the nation. Beginning with the nation’s founding when independence was fostered in children, to the nineteenth-century sentimental view of childhood as a time of innocence, to today’s parental anxiety about their children’s success, Fass examines both the changing opinions of childrearing experts and the class differentiated practices of rural and urban Americans. As childhood extended into late adolescences the transition to adulthood was harder to define. Fass challenges parents to identify with what they share with previous generations and reconnect with the values that set American childhood apart from the rest of the world: the fostering of independence, self-definition, and competence.
Lilian Calles Barger, www.lilianbarger.com, is a cultural, intellectual and gender historian. Her current book project is entitled The World Come of Age: Religion, Intellectuals and the Challenge of Human Liberation. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/education
Russell Rickford is an assistant professor of history at Cornell University. We Are an African People: Independent Education, Black Power and the Radical Imagination (Oxford University Press, 2016) offers an intellectual history of the Pan African nationalist schools that emerged in the late 1960s from dissatisfaction with urban school desegregation and its failure to provide an equal education and foster racial pride. Influenced by Third World theories and African anti-colonial campaigns, these black institutions promoted self-determination and black political sovereignty. Beginning with the campaigns for the community control of schools to visions of a Black University, Rickford identifies the key ideological strengths and weaknesses that ultimately resulted in the failure to build strong independent institutions necessary for cultural renewal. The Afrocentric ideas and schools that survived were congruent with a neoliberal ideology that elided the socio-economic conditions of African Americans.
Lilian Calles Barger, www.lilianbarger.com, is a cultural, intellectual and gender historian. Her current book project is entitled The World Comes of Age: Religion, Intellectuals and the Challenge of Human Liberation. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/education
Dr. Jon Hale, Assistant Professor of Educational History, Department of Teacher Education, College of Charleston, joins the New Books Network to discuss his new book, entitled The Freedom Schools: Student Activists in the Mississippi Civil Rights Movement (Columbia University Press, 2016). Through primary interviews and in-depth historical analysis, the author provides a bottom-up view of the Mississippi Freedom Schools, part of the Mississippi Freedom Summer of 1964, an important legacy to the US Civil Rights Movement.
For any questions, comments, or recommendations for the New Books in Education podcast, you can connect with the host, Ryan Allen, at @PoliticsAndEd. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/education
Why does higher education still matter? In Academic Diary: Or Why Higher Education Still Matters, Les Back, a professor of Sociology at Goldsmiths’ College, University of London, offers a series of reflections framed by the time of the academic year. The first book from Goldsmiths Press, Academic Diary consists of short entries that think through the problems of university management, defend the idea of scholarship, and consider what ideas of being ‘honored’ as an academic might mean. Other chapters extol the virtues of the library and take a witty and wry look at the academy. Thus, the book, with its insights into academic life as well as broader analysis of the social forces shaping the university, offers a picture of the contemporary university, illuminating the pleasures and pains of working within this modern institution. Ultimately, Academic Diary offers a defense of the idea of the university and will be relevant and readable to anyone working or interested in the sector.
Dave OBrien is the host of New Books in Critical Theory and is a Senior Lecturer in Cultural Policy at the Institute for Cultural and Creative Entrepreneurship, Goldsmiths College, University of London. His research covers a range of areas between sociology and political science, including work on the British Civil Service, British Cultural Policy, cultural labour, and urban regeneration. His most recent books are Cultural Policy: Management, Value and Modernity in the Creative Industries and After Urban Regeneration (edited with Dr. Peter Matthews). He tweets@Drdaveobrien. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/education
Dr. Chuing Prudence Chou, Professor, Department of Education, National Chengchi University, rejoins the New Books Network to discuss her newly edited volume, Chinese Education Models in a Global Age (Springer, 2016), co-edited with Jonathan Spangler, Doctoral Fellow, Institute of European and American Studies, Academia Sinica. The book brings together a diverse group of scholars from around the world to discuss and explore the meanings and challenges of a supposed Chinese education model. Not only focusing on the People’s Republic of China, the authors attempt to build their analysis around the many represented experiences in education found in Chinese communities throughout the world.
For any questions, comments, or recommendations for the New Books in Education podcast, you can connect with the host, Ryan Allen, at @PoliticsAndEd. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/education
I grew up in Michigan, in the United States, where I was surrounded by places named with Native American names. I drove to Saginaw to play in basketball tournaments and to Pontiac to watch an NBA team play. Now in Kansas, I live near towns called Kiowa and Cherokee. But for much of my life, despite my profession as an historian, names like these were just background noise in the everyday reality of my life, not reminders of the fact that Native Americans have lived in and with the presence of settlers for centuries.
Andrew Woolford has done much to help me recognize and understand this. Woolford is one of the preeminent scholars on the relationship between “natives” and settlers in the United States and Canada. He is also one of the most thoughtful voices in considering whether this relationship should be called genocidal.
In my discussion with him, we tried to get at the essence of his ideas by looking at three of his works. We begin with the volume of essays he co-edited with Alexander Hinton and Jeff Benvenuto, titled Colonial Genocide in Indigenous North America. The book collects the contributions of a variety of authors researching the issue. The essays generally offer focused examinations of specific issues of events. But the editors also offer valuable reflections on what we know and don’t know about the subject. It’s an outstanding resource for people interested in the question broadly. We then move on to Woolford’s own work, titled This Benevolent Experiment:Indigenous Boarding Schools, Genocide, and Redress in Canada and the United States (University of Nebraska Press, 2015).The book is a wonderful examination of the Indigenous school systems in Canada and the United States in the late 19th and 20th centuries. Woolford extracts from his research a wonderful new metaphor to illustrate the way in which genocide worked in North America, one that has much broader utility in the field. And he offers a careful, well-reasoned explanation for why he thinks genocide is indeed the most appropriate term for the cultural and physical violent that characterized the period. Both books are excellent.
Finally, while we didn’t have much time to address it specifically, Woolford edited a recent special edition of the Journal of Genocide Research focusing on the topic. It’s also a rich source of information and insight.
Put together, the three works offer perhaps the best way into the growing field of genocide studies in North America. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/education
Rajika Bhandari, Deputy Vice President, Research and Evaluation Institute of International Education (IIE), and Mirka Martel, Assistant Director of Research and Evaluation at IIE, join New Books in Education to discuss a new report from the organization, Social Justice and Sustainable Change: The Impacts of Higher Education (IIE, 2016). This new report is part of a ten-year study of the Ford Foundations International Fellowship Program alumni and their impacts in their communities globally. The report is free to read on IIEs website and very assessable, with data displayed in easy-to-read charts and graphics showing the link between higher education and social justice and the effect that higher education can have on marginalized populations and leadership around the world. For any questions, comments, or recommendations for the New Books in Education podcast, you can connect with the host, Ryan Allen, at @PoliticsAndEd. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/education
Many of us are familiar with the court-mandated bussing programs created in an effort to achieve school desegregation in the 1960s and 1970s. Far fewer of us realize there were also voluntary transfer programs that were crafted in out-of-court settlements in the decades that followed. For example, as part of the Canford Program, wealthy districts like those in Arbor Town accept between 6-60 students from nearby South Bay City, where resources are more scarce. These children who win the lottery have access to all of the same teachers, facilities, and curricular materials as the students living in the surrounding neighborhoods. Still, their experiences are far from the same. Canford students ride the bus each morning. Their trips are long and chaotic, and as a result, they often arrive late, hungry, or unsettled. These students must quickly transition into routines that fail to take this reality into account, and issues of equity quickly arise. Do the benefits of such a program exceed its costs? How might such a program be redesigned? To what extent is the bus (or recess) part of school anyway? In The Bus Kids: Children’s Experiences with Voluntary Desegregation (Yale University Press, 2009), Ira Lit, recounts the experiences of small children participating in an inter-district transfer program designed to allow students living in a low-income community to attend better-resourced schools in other nearby towns.
Lit joins New Books in Education for the interview. You can find more information about his work with the Stanford Teacher Education Program on its website.To share your thoughts on the podcast, you can connect with him via email at iralit@stanford.edu. You can reach the host on Twitter at @tsmattea.
Trevor Mattea is an educational consultant and speaker. His areas of expertise include deeper learning, parent involvement, project-based learning, and technology integration. He can be reached at info@trevormattea.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/education
All of us experience trauma at various points throughout our lives. On one end of the spectrum, we have negative experiences from which we tend to think we can recover quickly. This might include a fight with a friend or an hurtful comment made in passing. On the other end of the spectrum, we have those experiences that induce so much anger, sadness, fear, or disgust that we readily acknowledge our difficulty moving forward. These are everything from the death of loved one to the diagnosis of a disease to an instance of sexual abuse. How might creative expression help with the healing process? What can we learn and teach others from the writing and artwork that emerge from these traumas? How might we come to value personal writing as worthy of increased scholarship? In Facing the Sky: Composing Through Trauma in Word and Image (Parlor, 2015), Roy Fox, shares his reflections based on years spent developing a graduate course that asks students to come to terms with the most difficult moments in their lives.
Fox joins New Books in Education for the interview. To share your thoughts on the podcast, you can connect with him via email at foxr@missouri.edu. You can reach the host on Twitter at @tsmattea.
Trevor Mattea is an educational consultant and speaker. His areas of expertise include deeper learning, parent involvement, project-based learning, and technology integration. He can be reached at info@trevormattea.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/education
Pedro Garcia de Leon, Policy Analyst for Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), joins New Books in Education to discuss the organizations new data website, gpseducation.oecd.org. The new site streamlines all of OECDs educational data into one easily searchable location. It even provides customizable data graphics that can be used in presentations or shared on social media. The team at OECD hopes that educational researchers, policymakers, or anyone interested in education will find the site useful to access this wealth of data.
For any questions, comments, or recommendations for the New Books in Education podcast, you can connect with the host, Ryan Allen, at @PoliticsAndEd. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/education
In New Mexico, before World War Two, Catholic sisters in full habits routinely taught in public schools. In her fascinating new book, Religious Lessons: Catholic Sisters and the Captured Schools Crisis in New Mexico (Oxford University Press, 2012), Dr. Kathleen Holscher explores how this curious situation arose and how this partnership between public schools and female religious orders was brought to an end by the court case Zellers v. Huff. Through a sensitive and rich exploration of diverse sources, including trial transcripts and her own interviews, Holscher captures the complex ways people in New Mexico and the wider United States understood religious freedom and the proper relationship between church and state while constructing a fascinating and ultimately moving narrative of division and reconciliation. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/education
How can academics respond to the rise of social media? Or should they respond at all? In Social Media for Academics (Sage, 2016), Mark Carrigan, from the Centre for Social Ontology, offers an informed and reflective take on social media, with some practical guidelines for academics. The book introduces key concepts, such as digital scholarship, social media and ‘the public’, alongside discussions of specific platforms including twitter (Mark himself tweets @mark_carrigan). The book is not only a guide for academics who are interested in social media, as it considers the impact of new media forms on scholarship itself, with considerations of academic identities, academic networks and relationships, as well as the benefits and risks of embracing social media.The book is essential reading for any academic seeking an informed understanding of both the ‘how to’ and, perhaps more importantly, the ‘why’ and ‘what’ of social media for academics.
Dave O’Brien is the host of New Books In Critical Theory and is a Senior Lecturer in Cultural Policy at the Institute for Cultural and Creative Entrepreneurship, Goldsmiths College, University of London. His research covers a range of areas between sociology and political science, including work on the British Civil Service, British Cultural Policy, cultural labour, and urban regeneration. His most recent books are Cultural Policy: Management, Value and Modernity in the Creative Industries and After Urban Regeneration (edited with Dr Peter Matthews). He tweets@Drdaveobrien Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/education
All of us are familiar with multiple-choice tests. They may be the one thing that you can find in kindergarten classrooms, college courses, and workplace training programs. But why are they so common? Multiple-choice tests may be the simplest and easiest way to see if someone knows something — or at least that someone probably knows something. No one would contend that this form of assessment moves beyond the lowest levels of Bloom’s Taxonomy — remembering and understanding. Of course, we want students — and employees — who can do more than that. What kinds of assessments can measure whether someone can apply, analyze, evaluate, or create something? How would teachers prepare students for those evaluations? How would schools promote those practices? In Transforming Schools: Using Project-Based Learning, Performance Assessment, and Common Core Standards (Jossey-Bass, 2015), Bob Lenz and co-authors Justin Wells and Sally Kingston outline a series of practices designed to promote higher levels of cognition as well as the means to implement them school wide.
Wells joins New Books in Education for the interview. You can find more information about his work with Envision Schools on its website. To share your thoughts on the podcast, you can connect with him on Twitter at @jusowells. You can reach the host on Twitter at @tsmattea.
Trevor Mattea is an educational consultant and speaker. His areas of expertise include deeper learning, parent involvement, project-based learning, and technology integration. He can be reached at info@trevormattea.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/education
March Madness is big business. Each year the NCAA collects $700 million for television rights to the men’s college basketball tournament, under the terms of a 14-year, $10.8 billion contract with CBS and Turner Broadcasting. The two networks, in turn, bring in just over a billion dollars each year in advertising revenue. And it’s estimated that over nine billion dollars changes hands in bets every year, as some 40 million Americans fill out their brackets to predict the outcome of all 67 games in the three-week tournament.
And this is “amateur” sports.
In his new book Changing the Playbook: How Power, Profit, and Politics Transformed College Sports (University of Illinois Press, 2015), historian Howard Chudacoff describes the key turning points that led to today’s big-money world of college sports. Focusing on the decades since World War II, Howard shows how college football, rather than basketball, led to the unchecked power of coaches, athletic directors, and wealthy boosters that we see today. He also explains the NCAA’s rise to authority over college sports, a place now sealed by its control of the March Madness billions. There are plenty of screeds out there against the money and corruption in college sports. But as a historian of sport and a former university representative to the NCAA, Howard offers a different take – a well-researched and illuminating history that is both critical of school administrators and the NCAA but also appreciative of athletics at American universities. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/education
Dr. Katerina Bodovski, Associate Professor of Education, Department of Education Policy Studies, College of Education, Penn State University, joins New Books in Education to discuss her new and very personal book, Across Three Continents: Reflections on Immigration, Education, and Personal Survival (Peter Lang, 2015), from the American University Studies series. In it, Dr. Bodovski weaves a narrative of her personal life journey from the Soviet Union, to Israel, and finally to the United States, while adding in a perspective from a sociologist and educator.
For any questions, comments, or recommendations for the New Books in Education podcast, you can connect with the host, Ryan Allen, at @PoliticsAndEd. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/education
Teenagers live in their phones. As an educator you can try to pull them away or meet them where they are. The 160-Character Solution: How Text Messaging and Other Behavioral Strategies Can Improve Education (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2015) urges educators to meet teens on their must-have device.
Author Benjamin Castleman of the University of Virginia shows how text messaging combined with insights from behavioral science―more specifically the fields of behavioral economics and social psychology―can be leveraged to help students complete assignments, perform to their full potential on tests, and choose schools and colleges where they are well positioned for success.
In his own research, Castleman has studied how to use personalized text messages to reduce "summer melt," in which up to 40 percent of high school graduates who have been accepted to college, mostly from underserved communities, fail to show up for the fall semester.
Behavioral strategies extend beyond texting and even beyond smartphone technology. By focusing on behavioral changes, Castleman demonstrates that small tweaks in how we ask questions, design applications, and tailor reminders can lead to better decision making and have remarkable impacts on student and school success. The 160-Character Solution makes a broader case for employing these behavioral strategies to improve educational outcomes from preschool all the way to college.
John Balz is Director of Strategy at VML, a full-service marketing agency with offices around the globe. He has spent his career applying behavioral science strategies in the marketing and advertising field through direct mail and email, display and .coms, mobile messaging, e-commerce and social media. You can follow on Twitter @Nudgeblog and contact him at nudgeblog@gmail.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/education
Everyone hates being underestimated. We want to feel included without others showing us condescension. At the same time, no one wants to be overestimated. We want to feel challenged without others overwhelming us. We recognize that children can be frustrated or disengaged, but we often fail to see that their feelings and behaviors are caused by the same things that stir up these feelings in adults — flawed assumptions about their abilities and interests. What if kids are more capable cognitively than we think? What if we demand too much of them pragmatically? Nowadays, we simultaneously adultify children and infantalize them, depending on the situation. But what if we have those situations backwards? In The Importance of Being Little: What Preschoolers Really Need from Grownups (Viking, 2016), Erika Christakis shares her insights gleaned from years working with young children as a parent, preschool teacher, and preschool director.
Christakis joins New Books in Education for the interview. You can find more information about her work on her website. To share your thoughts on the podcast, you can connect with her on Twitter at @ErikaChristakis. You can reach the host on Twitter at @tsmattea.
Trevor Mattea is an educational consultant and speaker. His areas of expertise include deeper learning, parent involvement, project-based learning, and technology integration. He can be reached at info@trevormattea.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/education
When adults today look back on their time as children, many of their memories may come from moments when they were engaged in free play with kids in their neighborhood — exploring creeks, riding bikes, and playing pick-up sports. Moments like these, occurring outside of adult-imposed structures, put children in a position to make decisions, take risks, and navigate social relationships. Now parents are much more likely to organize playdates on behalf of their children or push them into organized sports and summer camps. But do these interactions provide the same kinds of learning experiences? If parents value free play, what choice do they have? In Playborhood: Turn Your Neighborhood into a Place for Play (Free Play Press, 2012), Mike Lanza describes how individual families can establish hangout spaces for kids in order to foster self-reliance and joy for their children and build community with their neighbors.
Lanza joins New Books in Education for the interview. You can find more information about his work on his website. To share your thoughts on the podcast, you can connect with him on Twitter at @playborhood. You can reach the host on Twitter at @tsmattea.
Trevor Mattea is an educational consultant and speaker. His areas of expertise include deeper learning, parent involvement, project-based learning, and technology integration. He can be reached at info@trevormattea.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/education
Nadim Bakhshov joins the New Books in Network to discuss his book Against Capitalist Education: What is Education for? (Zero Books, 2015). The book posits new alternatives to educational thought and philosophy through an innovated, yet classic, style of dialogue between two characters, John and George, whom both channel philosophers, intellectuals, and great thinkers in history.
You can connect to the guest via his Twitter at @nadimbakhshov or website, and also listen to his podcast on the subject here. For questions or comments on the New Books in Education podcast, you can connect to the host at @PoliticsAndEd. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/education
El Sistema, the massive Venezuelan youth orchestra program, has been hailed in some quarters as the next big idea in music education (if not as the savior of classical music itself). Any who have found the press coverage of El Sistema suspiciously rosy, however, will find quite another account in Geoffrey Baker's engrossing and at times sharply critical book, El Sistema: Orchestrating Venezuela's Youth (Oxford University Press, 2014). Baker takes an ethnographic approach to El Sistema, investigating the daily lives and experiences of students and teachers, while simultaneously drawing on recent research in music pedagogy to subject the structure and history of the program to an ideological critique.
El Sistema describes itself as an organization devoted to the "pedagogical, occupational, and ethical rescue" of children through orchestral music, dedicated to protecting and healing the most vulnerable ranks of Venezuelan society. To this, Baker raises troubling questions. Is it really the case that the average student in El Sistema comes from a precarious economic background? Supposing that musical training can foster social development, is the symphony orchestra, with its rigid hierarchies of command, really the best way to train model citizens? And in the long run, can Venezuela — or indeed, any country — provide long term employment for such a large cohort of professionally trained musicians?
Further Listening/Viewing/Reading:
Gustavo Dudamel conducting the Teresa Carreño Youth Orchestra here.
Lawrence Scripp's interview with Luigi Mazzocchi: "The Need to Testify: A Venezuelan Musician's Critique of El Sistema and his Call for Reform"
(Full version here)
(Shorter, journalistic version here) https://van-us.atavist.com/all-that-matters
Geoffrey Baker's El Sistema blog here.
Special issue of Action, Criticism, and Theory for Music Education on El Sistema here. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/education
The experience of the African American middle class has been an important area of research in the USA. However, the British experience has, by comparison, not been subject to the same amount of attention, particularly with regard to the middle class experience of education. Dr. Nicola Rollock, Deputy Director, Centre for Research in Race & Education and Senior Lecturer at the University of Birmingham’s School of Education, along with her co-authors, explores this under researched area in The Colour of Class: The Educational Strategies of the Black Middle Classes (Routledge, 2014). Drawing on Critical Race Theory, the idea of intersectionality, and Bourdieu, the book depicts the strategies associated with choosing schools, the narratives of families’ educational experiences, along with the legacy of racism within the British education system. The book is an important intervention into recent debates around educational attainment, charting the changing strategies, and changing perceptions, held by this section of middle class society. Ultimately despite so much attention given to other sociological categories, such as class or gender, when thinking about education race remains vitally important. This conclusion, alongside its wealth of empirical material and highly accessible style, make it essential reading.
Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/education
There is no shortage of talk about our public schools being broken. Some critics say we need to embrace a reform agenda that includes more standardized testing and a longer school day for students and performance pay and an end to tenure for teachers. Others respond that the effects of these measures are overstated or counterproductive and that the most sensible place to start is to dramatically increase funding for public schools in their current form. Whatever their positions or priorities, both sides in this debate are likely making the same key assumption — public schools are the best way to promote socio-economic mobility. This means that they still envision a lot of the same things, like an adult teaching a large group of children, who are approximately the same age, content that someone else has decided is important for them to learn. What if they instead accepted that other social programs would be a more effective means of achieving equity in our society? What if they believed that public education was a worthwhile endeavor, but that its true power was in its ability to facilitate creativity, critical thinking, civic participation, and self-direction? That would result in a much richer discussion with ideas that look completely different from the schools we recognize today. In Schools on Trial: How Freedom and Creativity Can Fix Our Education Malpractice (Doubleday, 2016), Nikhil Goyal makes the case for completely rethinking our conception of school and its purpose and presents models we can look towards to take it in a radically new direction.
Goyal joins New Books in Education for the interview. You can find more information about his work on his website. To share your thoughts on the podcast, you can connect with him on Twitter at@nikhilgoya_l. You can reach the host on Twitter at@tsmattea. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/education
From time to time, we all ponder life’s most difficult questions. “Is there a god?” “How can I live a good life?” “What happens when you die?” When we share our worries or wonderings with friends and family, we can leave those conversations feeling connected, comforted, and even energized. But when these questions are not regular topics of conversation — as is often the case — we lose sight of how they are shared, leaving us feeling anxious, confused, and alone. Adults are even more hesitant to raise these issues with children. Why give them reason to worry? We forget that we had these questions as children too. We are actually missing an opportunity to provide reassurance as well as an opportunity to learn. While we can share our knowledge and experience with children, children are open-minded and can cause us to question our long-held assumptions. They make excellent conversation partners. In The Philosophical Child (Rowman and Littlefield, 2015), Jana Mohr Lone shares her insights gleaned from countless philosophical conversations with children of all ages and provides guidance for parents and teachers who hope to build stronger relationships, model thinking dispositions, and deepen their own understandings.
Lone joins New Books in Education for the interview. You can find more information about her work with the University of Washington’s Center for Philosophy for Children on its website. To share your thoughts on the podcast, you can connect with her on Twitter at @janamohrlone. You can reach the host on Twitter at @tsmattea. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/education
Our lives are so busy nowadays that we are almost always multitasking to the extent that those around us let us get away with it. We rarely take the time to be fully present for others and allow our observations to inform how we treat them. When we are not attuned to others, we rely on our assumptions about what they are need. These assumptions are often wrong, leaving others feeling disempowered and disrespected. What are the consequences when we allow these assumptions to guide how we treat small children? What is there to see when you are observing a baby? Is there really an empowering and respectful way to change a diaper? In Baby Knows Best: Raising a Confident and Resourceful Child, the RIE Way (Little, Brown, and Co., 2015), Deborah Carlisle Solomon outlines the parenting approach first developed by Magda Gerber and Resources for Infant Educarers 35 years ago for parents and teachers in a changing world.
Solomon joins New Books in Education for the interview. You can find more information about Resources for Infant Educarers on its website. To share your thoughts on the podcast, you can reach the host on Twitter at @tsmattea. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/education
Dr. Miao Li, assistant professor, Department of Sociology and School of Philosophy and Social Development at Shandong University, joins New Books in Education to discuss Citizenship Education and Migrant Youth in China: Pathways to the Urban Underclass (Routledge, 2015). Part of the Research in International and Comparative Education series, the book explores China’s large floating population of migrants who have flocked to urban areas for employment, despite lagging educational opportunities for their children. Utilizing rich ethnographic data with interviews from teachers, principals, and students, Dr. Li thoroughly explores how global economic realities and national educational policies detrimentally affect people on the micro-level.
For questions or comments on the podcast, you can connect to the host at @PoliticsAndEd. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/education
Lisong Liu‘s thoughtful new book is an important and insightful read for any of us who are currently engaged in conversations about supporting the increasing numbers of international students in the North American academy. Since the inception of open-door and reform policies in 1978, more than three million Chinese students have been sent abroad, most frequently to the United States. Chinese Student Migration and Selective Citizenship: Mobility, Community and Identity Between China and the United States (Routledge, 2015) looks carefully at the historical contexts in which this happened. To help readers understand the translational histories of student migration between China and the US, Liu analyzes the impact of China’s economic, political, and educational reforms; changing relations between the US & China; and the transformations in Chinese American communities, American immigration law, and race relations that accompanied the transformation of students into migrants with a relatively high professional and socioeconomic status. Liu also looks carefully at “migrants’ transnational networks, cultural hybridity, and interpretations of citizenship,” arguing that student migration “embodies the persistent but transformed ‘American Dream’ in China.” While carefully grounded in a very specific historical context, this book offers insights that speak well beyond the particular case study that Liu examines. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/education
William C. Smith (ed.), senior associate with RESULTS Educational Fund, joins New Books in Education to discuss The Global Testing Culture: Shaping Education Policy, Perceptions, and Practice (Symposium Books, 2016). This edited volume provides an analysis of the global testing culture that has permeated societies throughout the world. With a diverse range of academic contributors, perspectives of this global phenomenon are thoroughly explored and problematized at various levels of societies, from an expansive macro view from the top, down to the micro view of individual actors.
You can find more information on the author and on the Right to Education Index (RTEI) at www.results.org. For questions or comments on the podcast, you can connect to the host at @PoliticsAndEd. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/education
We tend to think of Philosophy as a professional academic subject that is taught in college classes, with its own rather specialized problems, vocabularies, and methods. But we also know that the discipline has its roots in the Socratic activity of trying to incite debate and critical reflection among our fellow citizens. That is, we acknowledge that, apart from its existence as a technical discipline, Philosophy is a kind of civic activity that, we hope, can help us to address life’s biggest questions, even when we find ourselves deeply divided over their answers. In Teaching Plato in Palestine: Philosophy in a Divided World (Princeton University Press, 2015), Carlos Fraenkel tells the tale of his attempts to recapture Philosophy’s Socratic dimension. He recounts his adventures in doing philosophy in nonstandard contexts, with atypical interlocutors, and in unfamiliar places. Along the way, we see a hopeful and encouraging vision of philosophy emerge as a collection of rational techniques and intellectual virtues that can, indeed, rescue our individual and collective lives from impending incivility. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/education
Education as Politics: Colonial Schooling and Political Debate in Senegal, 1850s-1914 (University of Wisconsin Press, 2015) questions and complicates the two dominant narratives of African colonial education, namely that colonial education was a tool of indoctrination and that its establishment was resisted by chiefs and other traditional power brokers because of its perceived threat to their authority. Author Kelly M. Duke Bryant challenges these interrelated narratives by using archival sources – mainly correspondence – to demonstrate the nuanced reasons for both the early resistance to and the later acquiescence to, French colonial education. Duke Bryant looks at the evolution of schooling throughout Senegal during the early colonial period, and at the School of Sons of Chiefs and Interpreters in particular, and concludes that “colonial education reshaped local political processes and hierarchies in important ways”.Education as Politicsserves as a backdrop to the election of Blaise Diagne, the first African elected to the Assemble Nationale (French National Assembly) in 1914, and in the interview, Duke Bryant outlines the ways in which new forces mobilized by colonial schooling set the stage for this momentous event. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/education
Whatever its current prestige in our society, teaching is undoubtedly complex work. Like physicians and therapists, teachers work with people, rather than things. They try to help their students to improve over time, and while they have influence, they do not have complete control. Unlike these other human-centered professions, we often see teachers as being directly responsible for the success or failure of their students. It is their job to create equality of opportunity. The onus of our entire nation is placed on individuals, and the pressure is enormous. How do teachers navigate the anxieties associated with this work? How do they deal with the conflicting demands of their numerous stakeholders? How has their work changed in response to new technology and an emphasis on standardized testing? In Getting Schooled: The Reeducation of an American Teacher (Metropolitan Books, 2014), Garret Keizer reflects on his return to teaching English at the same rural Vermont high school he left to pursue a full-time writing career fifteen years earlier.
Keizer joins New Books in Education for the interview. You can find more information about his writing on his website. To share your thoughts on the podcast, you can connect with him via email at inquiries@garretkeizer.com. You can reach the host on Twitter at @tsmattea. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/education
Tom Sperlinger, Reader in English Literature and Community Engagement at the University of Bristol, joins New Books in Education to discuss Romeo and Juliet in Palestine: Teaching Under Occupation (Zero Books, 2015). The book is an account of Tom’s time teaching English literature at Al-Quds University, located in the Occupied West Bank. Because of their unique environment and perspective, the students in his class had interpretations of Romeo and Juliet, Julius Caesar, and other seminal English literature works that struck a chord with the author. Through his book, he provides a glimpse into the everyday aspects of a place that is not often discussed in terms of higher education.
You can find the author on Twitter at @TomSperlinger. For questions or comments on the podcast, you can also find the host at @PoliticsAndEd. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/education
Dr. Edmund Hamann, Dr. Stanton Wortham, Dr. Enrique G. Murillo (Eds.) have provided a fascinating and expansive volume on Latino education in the US that features an array of scholars from around the world, entitled Revisiting Education in the New Latino Diaspora (Information Age Publishing, 2015), part of the Education Policy in Practice: Critical Cultural Studies series. This volume is actually an in-depth update from a pervious book, Education in the New Latino Diaspora, with new demographics, lenses, and perspectives, on new trends and happenings in this ever-changing space.
Dr. Hamann joins New Books in Education for the interview to discuss the book. For questions or comments on the podcast, you can also find the host on Twitter at @PoliticsAndEd. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/education
We treat children differently than we treat adults. For example, if we would like children to do something, we use directives with them, rather than asking them. When we do ask them to do something, we expect them to do it, even if they are busy or uninterested. In fact, we would be surprised, annoyed, or angry if they refused. Although something said to a child might be phrased as a question, it is rarely a choice. Perhaps this is not a problem as long as adults have the best interests of children in mind. But what if they do not? Are we treating children fairly? Do they have any advocates without conflicting interests? In Escape from Childhood: The Needs and Rights of Children (CreateSpace, 2013), John Holt compares the plight of children to other oppressed groups and outlines ways for adults to show greater respect to children in their lives as well as his rationale for extending basic rights afforded to adults to any child who would like to invoke them.
Pat Farenga, the president of Holt Associates, recently republished the text for the first time in 25 years, and he joins New Books in Education for the interview. You can find more information about his work with Holt Associates on its website. To share your thoughts on the podcast, you can connect with him on Twitter at@patfarenga. You can reach the host on Twitter at@tsmattea. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/education
We may disagree about whether phonics or whole language is the better approach to reading instruction or whether bilingual education or English immersion is the better way to support English language learners. Whatever our opinions are, they are founded on the perceived immediate impact on students in school. But how might the way we use language with children years before they enter school affect their academic potential? Does it have the ability to improve more than their vocabulary? Can it foster creativity, empathy, and perserverence? In Thirty Million Words: Building a Child’s Brain (Dutton, 2015), Dr. Dana Suskind outlines research on the critical language period and connects it to an early-childhood curriculum and a series of public policy solutions.
Suskind joins New Books in Education for the interview. You can find more information about her work with the Thirty Million Words Initiative on its website. To share your thoughts on the podcast, you can connect with heron Twitter at @DrDanaSuskind. You can reach the host on Twitter at @tsmattea. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/education
Many of us went through school not fully knowing what we were supposed to be learning or how our teachers were measuring our progress. These priorities and processes were largely hidden to us as students because they were assumed to be irrelevant or uninteresting. How much learning can happen under these conditions? What if teachers translated standards into student-friendly language and worked with students to develop personalized goals? What if teachers asked students to examine their work and articulate their growth to their parents and classmates? How might increasing ownership and changing accountability allow for greater learning? In Leaders of Their Own Learning: Transforming Schools Through Student-Engaged Assessment(Jossey-Bass, 2014), Ron Berger and co-authors, Leah Rugen and Libby Woodfin, outline a series of practices designed to make students more active participants in their school experience, including student-led conferences, celebrations of learning, and passage presentations.
Berger joins New Books in Education for the interview. You can find more information about his work with Expeditionary Learning on its website. To share your thoughts on the podcast, you can connect with him on Twitter at @RonBergerEL. You can reach the host on Twitter at @tsmattea. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/education
The discontented graduate student is something of a cultural fixture in the U.S. Indeed theirs is a sorry lot. They work very hard, earn very little, and have very poor prospects. Nearly all of them want to become professors, but most of them won’t. Indeed a disturbingly large minority of them won’t even finish their degrees. It’s little wonder graduate students are, as a group, somewhat depressed.
In his thought-provoking book The Graduate School Mess: What Caused It and How We Can Fix It (Harvard University Press, 2015), Leonard Cassuto tries to figure out why graduate education in the U.S. is in such a sadstate. More importantly, he offers a host of fascinating proposals to “fix” American graduate schools. Listen in. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/education
AirBnB has dramatically altered the landscape for the hotel, tourism, and real estate sectors. Uber and Lyft have done the same to transportation. But, how come we haven't seen the same in American higher education? Ryan Craig, Managing Director of University Ventures, engages that question in his new book, entitled College Disrupted: The Great Unbundling of Higher Education (Palgrave McMillan, 2015). The author is critical of the current higher educational system in the US, which he says focuses too much on the "four Rs": Rankings, Research, Real Estate, and Rah! (college sports) rather than on teaching and learning. For this reason, students graduate (or don't) without the skills needed to actually get a job. In the book, Craig suggests that universities should unbundle the various services they offer and allow students to choose things that they need or want. He compares this unbundling to the current trend in cable providers, as many people are leaving behind the mammoth packages with 300 channels and instead pairing down their wants to more specific options, especially via the web. We haven't really seen this in higher education, yet, but this book shows that the current system could be moving in that direction. Ryan Craig joins New Books in Education for the interview to discuss the book. You can find him on Twitter at @ryancraiguv. For questions or comments on the podcast, you can also find the host on Twitter at @PoliticsAndEd. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/education
With 40 years of public school experience, from teacher to high-ranking official of one of the largest school systems in the US, Eric Nadelstern has a deep perspective and nuanced understanding of the current educational landscape. Now Professor of Practice in Education Leadership, Teachers College, Columbia University, he has his synthesized his experiences and success into a concise book, entitled Ten Lessons from New York City Schools: What Really Works to Improve Education (Teachers College Press 2013). Written for teachers, principals, superintendents, school boards, parents, policymakers, and anyone interested or connected to education, this book is almost a guide or handbook for how to work towards a successful system of education. Using his years of experience, Professor Nadelstern’s 10 lessons range from the expected (like rewarding success), to the more unconventional (like making everyone in the system accountable), to the difficult (like closing down failing schools). You will have to listen to the interview and read the book for the full, in-depth list.
Professor Nadelstern joins New Books in Education for the interview to discuss the book. For questions or comments on the podcast, you can also find the host on Twitter at @PoliticsAndEd. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/education
Every year, thousands of teachers visit San Diego to understand project-based learning and find inspiration in the work done by students at High Tech High. Their multimedia presentations have been installed in public art galleries, and state and local ecologists have relied on their field guides for years. These high school students spend their time doing the complex work of professionals in countless fields. But what are the benefits of teaching this way? How do teachers create their own curricula? What structures do they use in their classrooms? In Work That Matters: The Teacher’s Guide to Project-Based Learning (Paul Hamlyn Foundation, 2012), Alec Patton outlines the rationale and foundations for project-based learning, while succinctly addressing the practical questions posed by curious teachers.
Patton joins New Books in Education for the interview. You can find more information about his work, including his own projects with students, on his digital portfolio. To share your thoughts on the podcast, you can connect with him on Twitter at @AlecPatton. You can reach the host on Twitter at @tsmattea. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/education
Ellen Hazelkorn, Policy Advisor to the Higher Education Authority (Ireland) and Director of the Higher Education Policy Research Unit (HEPRU), Dublin Institute of Technology, provides an in-depth analysis of higher educational rankings and what they mean globally in the second edition release of Rankings and the Reshaping of Higher Education: The Battle for World-Class Excellence (Palgrave Macmillan, 2015). The author explores the measurements, metrics, and processes used by the most influential university rankings, such as Academic Ranking of World Universities, QS World University Rankings, Times Higher Education’s the World University Rankings, and others. From the perspective of higher education institutions, to students and policymakers, the book is an essential resource for understanding this pressurized educational discourse, which now impacts almost every country throughout the world.
Professor Hazelkorn, who is also President of the European Association of Institutional Research (EAIR) and on the Management Committee of ESRC/HEFCE at the Centre for Global Higher Education (CGHE), Institute of Education, UCL, joins New Books in Education for the interview to discuss the book. For questions or comments on the podcast, you can also find the host on Twitter at @PoliticsAndEd. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/education
Dr. William Elliott III, associate professor in the School of Social Welfare at the University of Kansas, and Melinda Lewis, associate professor of practice in the School of Social Welfare at the University of Kansas, explore the landscape of the US higher education student loan situation in The Real College Debt Crisis: How Student Borrowing Threatens Financial Well-Being and Erodes the American Dream (Praeger 2015). Using real-life examples along with academically rooted studies, the authors attempt to answer the question, “Does the student who goes to college and graduates but has outstanding student debt achieve similar financial outcomes to the student who graduates from college without student debt?”
Co-author Melinda Lewis joins New Books in Education for the interview to discuss the book. For questions or comments on the podcast, you can also find the host on Twitter at @PoliticsAndEd. You can also find the authors on Twitter at @melindaklewis and Dr. Elliott’s organization at @AssetsEducation. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/education
Recent years have witnessed a spate of journalistic and popular writings on the looming threat to civilization that lurks in traditional Islamic seminaries or madrasas that litter the physical and intellectual landscape of the Muslim world. In his riveting new book What is a Madrasa? (University of North Carolina Press, 2015), Ebrahim Moosa, Professor of History and Islamic Studies at the University of Notre Dame, challenges such sensationalist stereotypical narratives by providing a nuanced and richly textured account of the place and importance of Madrasas in Islam both historically and in the contemporary moment. Rather than approaching madrasas from a policy studies viewpoint as institutions requiring reform and modernization, this book instead examines madrasas on their own terms with a view of highlighting their internal complexities and tensions. Focused primarily on the madrasas of South Asia, what makes this book particularly remarkable is the way it brings together the intellectual histories and traditions that define madrasa education and the everyday practices in madrasa life today. The reader of this book travels through an arcade of the seminal texts, scholars, and sites that have shaped the madrasa as an institution and its curricula over the last several centuries. But moreover, this book also provides readers intimate portraits of daily life at madrasas through the eyes of students who study there, thus bringing into view the rhythms of everyday practices that punctuate the lives of madrasa students, and the hopes, anxieties, and aspirations that irrigate their religious and social imaginaries. In our conversation, in addition to discussing these themes, we also talked about Professor Moosa’s own journey as a teenager in the madrasas of South Asia to the corridors of the American academy. Written in an exceptionally lucid fashion, this book is essential reading for anyone interested in understanding the complexities of Muslim traditions of knowledge and education. It will also be particularly well suited for undergraduate and graduate seminars on Muslim intellectual thought, education, and Islam in South Asia. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/education
With high educational and professional attainment, Asian Americans are often portrayed as the "Model Minority" in popular media. This portrayal, though, is widely panned by academics and activists who claim that it lacks nuance. Madeline Y. Hsu, Associate Professor, University of Texas at Austin, provides such nuance through here historical account of Chinese immigration to the US, entitled The Good Immigrants: How the Yellow Peril Became the Model Minority (Princeton University Press, 2015). Dr. Hsu brings focus to "side door" immigration–students, paroled refugees, and even current H-1B visa holders–that has been crucial to Chinese immigration to the US for well over a century. Through her historical analysis, she shows that the US immigration policy towards China has mostly been skewed towards a selection of higher skilled or more educated émigré.
Dr. Hsu joins New Books in Education for the interview to discuss her book. For questions or comments on the podcast, you can also find the host on Twitter at @PoliticsAndEd. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/education
Dr. Ruth Hayhoe, professor at the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education of the University of Toronto, has dedicated her academic career to the study of Chinese education. Now, after several decades of becoming one of the most recognizable names in the field of international and comparative education, she has compiled some of her most relevant works into a succinct piece for the World Library of Educationalists series, entitled China Through the Lens of Comparative Education: The Selected Works of Ruth Hayhoe (Routledge. 2015). The book consists of three parts: Comparative Education and China, Higher Education and History, Religion, Culture and Education, all of which are made up of past pieces selected by Dr. Hayhoe herself.
Dr. Hayhoe joins New Books in Education for the interview to discuss this book and her distinguished career. For questions or comments on the podcast, you can also find the host on Twitter at @PoliticsAndEd. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/education
Nick Sousanis‘s new book is a must-read for anyone interested in thinking or teaching about the relationships between text, image, visuality, and knowledge. Unflattening (Harvard University Press, 2015) uses the medium of comics to explore “flatness of sight” and help readers think and work beyond it by opening up new perceptive possibilities. It proposes that we think about unflattening as a “simultaneous engagement of multiple vantage points from which to engender new ways of seeing,” and beautifully embodies what it can look like to make that happen. Readers will find thoughtful reflections on the possibilities and constraints afforded by working and thinking with different kinds of verbal and visual language, including a consideration of comics as “an amphibious language of juxtapositions and fragments,” and some wonderful work on storytelling and imagination. The book includes a wonderful “Notes” section that offers some background on the inspiration behind many of the images (including Flatland, Calvino’s Six Memos for the New Millennium, Deleuze & Guattari, and many others) a bibliography for further reading, and a series of maps of the structure of the book when it was a work-in-progress. It’s a fabulous book that is a pleasure to read and deserves a wide readership.
For more on Nick’s work on Unflattening and beyond, check out his website: http://spinweaveandcut.com/. For listeners and readers interested in teaching with the book, check out this site: http://scholarlyvoices.org/unflattening/index.html Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/education
Universities across the world have become more attuned to a global competition in higher education. International rankings and world class status are now critical focuses for these institutions. Academics have also gotten swept into this perceived competition, as their research plays a key factor for rankings and prestige. This phenomenon has pressed Dr. Chuing Prudence Chou to edit a volume chronicling these concerns and implications, entitled The SSCI Syndrome in Higher Education: A Local or Global Phenomenon (Sense Publishers, 2013), a series in Comparative and International Education: A Diversity of Voices. The authors contend that the completion and pressure of high stakes publishing has created an unhealthy environment, even lessening collaboration. For the social sciences, being published in a journal listed in the Social Sciences Citation Index has become a must for professors. However, Dr. Chou and her colleagues contend that the focus on SSCI has marginalized other journals and also academics whom come from non-English speaking countries. While the book’s roots are in Taiwan, the lessons are far reaching for higher education globally.
Dr. Chou joins New Books in Education for the interview. For questions or comments on the podcast, you can also find the host on Twitter at @PoliticsAndEd. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/education
Much of the public debate about the relationship between science and theology has been antagonistic or adversarial. Proponents on both sides argue that their respective claims are contradictory–that the claims of science trump and even discredit the claims of religion or theology. Some have sought to portray the relationship in a different light. The evolutionary biologist Stephen J. Gould famously asserted that the two realms were “nonoverlapping magisteria.” But recently theologians and scientists have begun to mark out new ground for robust conversation.
Tom McLeish‘s book Faith and Wisdom in Science (Oxford University Press, 2014) takes this conversation to new heights. Locating the impulse for science in much biblical literature, particularly the wisdom books of the Hebrew Bible, he shows how one might understand science as a theological endeavor. Rather than a paradigm of “science and theology,” he posits a “theology of science,” an interrelationship that not only gives us new eyes with which to read the history of science more coherently but also yields a renewed appreciation for science as part of a “ministry of reconciliation” with the natural world and the causes of human suffering.
Tom McLeish is Professor of Physics and former Pro-Vice-Chancellor for Research at Durham University. He studied for his first degree and PhD in polymer physics at the University of Cambridge and in 1987 became a lecturer in physics at the University of Sheffield. In 1993 he took the chair in polymer physics at the University of Leeds. He took up his current position in Durham in 2008. He is a fellow of the Institute of Physics, the Royal Society of Chemistry, the American Physical Society, and the Royal Society. He is also involved in science communication with the public via radio, television, and school lectures, discussing topics ranging from the physics of slime to the interaction of faith and science. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/education
The development of higher education in Asia has been as dramatic as the region’s rapid economic rise. The landscape of this diverse and ever-changing sector is thoroughly explored in Asia: The Next Higher Education Superpower? (Institute of International Education [IIE] and the American Institute For Foreign Study Foundation, 2015). Dr. Rajika Bhandari, IIE’ Deputy Vice President for Research and Evaluation, and Dr. Alessia Lefebure, Director of the Alliance at Columbia University and Adjunct Professor at the university’s School of International and Public Affairs, edited this in-depth volume exploring Asian higher education by bringing together a globally and culturally diverse group of experienced academics, up-and-coming researchers, and even practitioners.The multiple perspectives provided throughout the book weave an expansive analysis of the region’s rich higher educational tapestry–from the reverence of international rankings, to issues of quality control, the branch campus phenomenon, and a myriad of other focused and fascinating inquiry.
Dr. Lefebure joins New Books in Education for the interview. For questions or comments on the podcast, you can also find the host on Twitter at @PoliticsAndEd. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/education
Funding for higher education in the U.S. is an increasingly divisive issue. Some states have turned to policies that tie institutional performance to funding appropriations so to have great accountability on public expenditure. In exploring the origins and implementation for these kinds of policies, Kevin Dougherty and Rebecca Natow recently published a new in-depth book on this topic, entitled The Politics of Performance Funding for Higher Education: Origins, Discontinuations, and Transformations (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2015). In the book, the authors have explored the origins of this policy, its effects on the landscape of American higher education, and its future. This publication weaves extensive policymaker, educator, and administer interviews to form a thorough picture of the nature and debates of these policies– from policy entrepreneurs to advocacy coalitions. They even explore comparisons to performance funding policies abroad.
Dougherty, Associate Professor of Higher Education and Education Policy at Teachers College-Columbia University, and Natow, Postdoctoral Research Associate at the Community College Research Center, both join New Books in Education for the interview. For questions or comments on the podcast, you can also find the host on Twitter at @PoliticsAndEd. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/education
Social media and digital technology now allow researchers to collect vast amounts of a variety data quickly. This so-called “big data,” and the practices that surround its collection, is all the rage in both the media and in research circles. What makes data “big,” is described by the v’s: volume, velocity, variety, and veracity. Volume refers to the massive scale of the data that can be collected, velocity, the speed of streaming analysis. Variety refers to the different forms of data available, while veracity considers the bias and noise in the data. Although many would like to focus on these details, two other v’s,validity and volatility, hold significance for big data. Validity considers the level of uncertainty in the data, asking whether it is accurate for the intended use. Volatility refers to how long the data can be stored, and remain valid.
In her new book, Big Data, Little Data, No Data: Scholarship in the Networked World (MIT Press, 2015), Professor Christine L. Borgman, Presidential Chair in Information Studies at the University of California, Los Angeles, examines the infatuation with big data and the implications for scholarship. Borgman asserts that although the collection of massive amounts of data is alluring, it is best to have the correct data for the kind of research being conducted. Further, scholars must now consider the economic, technical, and policy issues related to data collection, storage and sharing. In examining these issues, Borgman details data collection, use, storage and sharing practices across disciplines, and analyzes what data means for different scholarly traditions. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/education
In late 2001 Finland became the darling of the education and policy communities, as its students toped the reading literacy, mathematics, and science PISA test rankings. While these results were somewhat of a surprise to Finns, the outcomes persisted throughout subsequent cross-national examinations. Policymakers and educators from across the world have since been fascinated as to how the Scandinavian country created such a successful system. Was it the teachers? The students? The schools? In Finnish Lessons 2.0: What Can the World Learn from Educational Change in Finland? (Teachers College Press, 2014), Dr. Pasi Sahlberg, visiting professor at Harvard’s Graduate School of Education, explains the nuances of his homeland’s educational system and even its historical foundations in this new updated version. The book offers lessons that can be understood by policymakers in other systems, but also provides a strong counter to the Global Education Reform Movement (GERM), which, dubbed by Dr. Sahlberg, is led by calls for increased standardized testing, school competition, and privatization. Above all, Dr. Sahlberg hopes that this book and the Finnish experience can put faith back into the idea of public education.
Dr. Sahlberg joins New Books in Education for the interview and you can follow him on Twitter at @pasi_sahlberg or find his website at pasisahlberg.com. For questions or comments on the podcast, you can also find the host on Twitter at @PoliticsAndEd. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/education
The intersection between Spanish-bilingual education and sex education might not be immediately apparent. Yet, as Natalia Mehlman Petrzela shows in her new book, Classroom Wars: Language, Sex, and the Making of Modern Political Culture (Oxford University Press, 2015), the meeting between these two paradigms of education firmly connects in California during the 1960s and 70s. Under the backdrop of California during an era of the sexual revolution, a dramatic influx of Latinos, and awakened protest movements, Dr. Petrzela, assistant professor at The New School, explores this historical landscape of education and society. From well-known political icons like Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan, to lesser-known figures such as Ernesto Galarza, and even details from regular people who lived the moment, Classroom Wars provides an in-depth and nuanced look into this interesting intersection in American educational history.
Dr. Petrzela joins New Books in Education for the interview and you can follow her on Twitter at @nataliapetrzela or find her website at nataliapetrzela.com. For questions or comments on the podcast, you can also find the host on Twitter at @PoliticsAndEd. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/education
Although the push to persuade everyone to learn to code is quite the current rage, the coding movement has roots that extend back for more than a few decades. In 1980 Seymour Papert published his book, Mindstorms: Children, Computers, and Powerful Ideas, arguing that learning to code would help children to better understand not only educational subject matter, but how to think. This book influenced the push in the early 1980s to place coding in schools. This early “learn to code” movement, though revolutionary, was unsustainable for many reasons.
In the new book Connected Code: Why Children Need to Learn Programming (MIT, 2014), Yasmin B. Kafai, Professor of Learning Sciences at the University of Pennsylvania’s Graduate School of Education, and Quinn Burke, Assistant Professor in the Department of Teacher Education at the College of Charleston, reexamine this early movement and the necessity of reintegrating coding into the K-12 curriculum. Kafai and Burke, too, view coding education as essential in assisting children in understanding how to think about different subjects. But the authors do not simply theorize coding as helping with computational thinking. Kafai and Burke assert that learning how to code is productive for computational participation. That is, programming helps learners not only with thinking, but also with communicating and making social connections. Computational participation, therefore, has ramifications that go beyond the schoolhouse. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/education
Wikipedia is one of the most popular resources on the web, with its massive collection of articles on an incredible number of topics. Yet, its user written and edited model makes it controversial in many circles. In Wikipedia U: Knowledge, Authority, and Liberal Education in the Digital Age (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2014), Thomas Leitch of the University of Delaware English Department has written a book that challenges many of the criticisms of Wikipedia. Yet he also reviewed the importance of authority as an issue with all research in the twenty first century. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/education
Contemporary American political culture is arguably more divisive than ever before. Blue states are bluer, red states are redder, and purple states are becoming harder and harder to find. Because of this divisiveness, teaching social studies and civics education has now become an overwhelmingly difficult task. Should a teacher share political leanings? How can teachers ensure that students are learning a wide political spectrum? Diana Hess and Paula McAvoy set out to answer these questions and more in The Political Classroom: Evidence and Ethics in Democratic Education (Routledge 2014), from the Critical Social Thought series. The researchers undertook a massive years-long longitudinal study of high schools in Illinois, Indiana, and Wisconsin. From different classroom styles and teacher pedagogy, to impact on students, The Political Classroom offers an in-depth glimpse into the American civics education classroom.
Dr. Hess joins New Books in Education for the interview and you can find more helpful resources on social students and civics education at thepoliticalclassroom.com. For questions or comments on the podcast, you can also find the host on Twitter at @PoliticsAndEd. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/education
Studying the forces behind and the implications for education’s ascension as a predominant global phenomenon is becoming a more important, yet convoluted, endeavor. Envisioned as a way to succinctly encapsulate this narrative, Robin Shields, Senior Lecturer in the Higher Education Management at the University of Bath, has written Globalization and International Education (Bloomsbury Academic, 2013) in the Contemporary Issues in Education Studies series. Beginning with the first conceptions of development by the colonial powers, through the modernization theories prevalent through the Cold War, and to the expansion of the mass knowledge economy of today, Shields’ book chronicles the historical and contemporary challenges or issues in this field through case studies and easy-to-follow theoretical summaries. The book provides for a useful handbook for this expansive and complicated field, perfect for students, educators, or anyone else interested in international and comparative education or development.
Dr. Shields joins New Books in Education for the interview and you can follow him on Twitter at @robinshields. For questions or comments on the podcast, you can also find the host on Twitter at @PoliticsAndEd. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/education
There has been a dramatic leap in education across the world over the past 150 years–from the importance and longevity to Western-style universities to truth and knowledge production created through schooling, permeating to almost every culture throughout the globe. Dr. David Baker, professor at Penn State University, calls this phenomenon the “education revolution” in his most recent book, entitled The Schooled Society: The Educational Transformation of Global Culture (Stanford University Press 2014).
What is the “Schooled Society” and how was it created? Drawing on neo-institutional theories and real world examples, Dr. Baker provides an interesting and compelling take on society and its interactions with education. He joins New Books in Education for the interview. For questions or comments on the podcast, you can find the host on Twitter at @PoliticsAndEd. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/education
China today attracts one of the largest foreign student populations in the world. In 1975, though, very few foreign students were allowed to study in then-isolated China, especially Western students. But, Dr. Peter Peverelli was a part of a small cohort of students who studied in Beijing Language Institute at the tail end of the turbulent Cultural Revolution. In One Turbulent Year - China 1975 (Boekscout, 2013), Dr. Peverelli writes on his experiences in Beijing as one of the first Western students allowed to study in China through a special exchange agreement between the Chinese and Dutch governments. Despite their student status, Dr. Peverelli and his classmates had VIP status and were seen as essentially diplomats. He even attended the state funeral for Zhou Enlai, one of the most important political figures in China during the past century. One Turbulent Year chronicles daily life under incredible and rare circumstances, as these Western European college students were interacting not just with Chinese locals, but also with their Eastern Bloc and "Third World" counterparts at the height of the Cold War. These were still universities students, they coveted holiday breaks, took leisurely bike rides around the city between classes, and still had parties and drank beer, but it was just under the backdrop of this critical juncture in Chinese history. Dr. Peverelli joins New Books in Education for the interview. You can also read his blog or follow him on Twitter at @SItheorist for more details and updates on his book. For questions or comments on the podcast, you can also find the host on Twitter at @PoliticsAndEd. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/education
Conventional thinking tells us that private school education is better than public schooling in the US. Why else would parents pay the hefty price tag often associate with private education, especially at very elite schools? But, Dr. Christopher Lubienski and Dr. Sarah Lubienski question this assumption in their new book, entitled The Public School Advantage: Why Public Schools Outperform Private Schools (University of Chicago Press, 2013). In this publication, the authors use two large-scale datasets on mathematics outcomes to isolate the effects of schooling on children and they find that public schools actually score better than their private school counterparts in this measure when the proper variables are held constant. To explain their findings, Lubienski and Lubienski argue that public school usually have better certified teachers and more often teach with more modern pedagogical methods. While the book does not contend that all public schools are great, the authors would like their findings that show traditional public schools do in fact show positive outcomes to be considered alongside a policy discourse that is increasingly dominated by calls of privatization and autonomy–such as vouchers and charter schools. Dr. Christopher Lubienski joins New Books in Education for the interview. You can follow him and the host of this podcast on Twitter at @CLub_edu and @PoliticsAndEd, respectively. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/education
Philosophy does not have to be stuck in the clouds. It can have relevance in everyday life, for everyday people, and Scott Samuelson attempts to do just that in his book, entitled The Deepest Human Life: An Introduction to Philosophy for Everyone (University of Chicago Press, 2014). Samuelson weaves in a personal narrative from his experience teaching at Kirkwood Community College, Cedar Rapids, Iowa and a deep historical exploration of philosophy. His students provide interesting and everyday lessons that the author forges into the foundation for complex philosophical issues. The book is organized into four sections that each focus on a single question, yet vast question: What is Philosophy? What is Happiness? Is Knowledge of God Possible? and What is the Nature of Good and Evil?. From Socrates, to Pascal, from the Stoics to Epicureans, Samuelson allows for an easier understanding of advanced philosophical discourse, and without watering down the complexity. He joins New Books in Education for the interview. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/education
“This is a book that wants you to surpass and destroy it.”
Eric Hayot‘s new book has the potential to transform how we teach and practice academic writing, and it invites the kind of reading and engagement that makes such a transformation possible. The Elements of Academic Style: Writing for the Humanities (Columbia University Press, 2014) is a style guide geared specifically toward academic writers in the humanities, paying special attention to the field of literary and cultural theory but applying equally well across humanistic disciplines. At turns funny, moving, and brilliant – not always qualities we associate with writing style guides – Hayot’s book treats writing as a process that encompasses “behavioral, emotional, & institutional parameters.” The first section of the book treats writing as a form of life, addressing the contexts and habits of the writer and the institutional contexts in which we teach and write. It also offers some strategies for getting writing done in the course of the typically crazy, packed life of the academic writer, and includes some great advice for thinking about the relationship between a dissertation and a book. The second section addresses strategies of academic writing, introducing the scalable “Uneven-U” model for conceptualizing the structure of paragraphs, essays, and beyond. It also includes some helpful ways to understand and craft openings and closings, and reminds us how important it is to keep the experience of our readers in mind as we write. The third section offers great advice on some of the elemental tactics of writing practice, including citation, sentence rhythm, and much more. The final section suggests a way to think about the writing in terms of “becoming”: a writer, a written work, a form of life.
The Elements of Academic Style is a book well worth reading and rereading. I’ve already been using it in my teaching and writing, and it’s a fitting work to inaugurate the New Books Network Seminar! Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/education
It’s becoming more and more common to see comparisons of educational attributes between other countries. From international tests like PISA or TIMSS rankings, to study habits, and classroom life, policymakers, educators, and even everyday people want to make cross-country comparisons. But, comparisons, if not analyzed correctly, can be grossly simplified or misinterpreted. So then, how can we do comparative education with nuance? Mark Bray, Bob Adamson, and Mark Mason provide a wonderfully robust handbook for just this question with their edited volume entitled Comparative Education Research Approaches and Methods (Comparative Education Research Centre [CERC], the University of Hong Kong, 2014). The book is largely comprised of chapters synthesized into “Units of Comparisons,” including: comparing places, systems, times, race, class, and gender, cultures, values, policies, curricula, pedagogy, ways of learning, and educational achievement. Each of these chapters thoroughly explains proper analysis of cross-country comparisons depending on unit and lens.
In this second edition, Bray, Adamson, and Mason build upon classic foundations of the field, such as the Bray and Thomas Cube, while updating the book to reflect the newest trends and technological innovations that have occurred since the first edition published in 2007. Particularly, the rise of East Asia as a dominant actor in the field of comparative education is reflected throughout the book with examples and case studies from the region. All of the editors and contributors are connected to CERC at the University of Hong Kong, which provides a close familiarity with the region by the writers. The book has been translated into eight different languages and has been well received by countries throughout the world. Dr. Bray, CERC director and UNESCO Chair Professor in Comparative Education at the university, joins New Books in Education to discuss the book. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/education
China has had an amazing developmental path over the past thirty years. Decade long double digit economic growth numbers along with more assertion on the international stage have led to some concern of a “Rising China”, one that may eventually threaten the status quo. But economic rise is not the only area in which China has dramatically developed, as education too has seen a major boost since opening up in the late 1970s. With international testing like PISA showing that China has some of the top students in the world, some policymakers in the West are looking to their system with envy. In Who’s Afraid of the Big Bad Dragon? (Jossey-Bass, 2014), Dr. Yong Zhao, Presidential Chair and professor at the University of Oregon’s College of Education, provides true nuance to the Chinese educational system, which might not be worth replicating after all.
In Zhao’s book, he chronicles China’s long history of testing through the imperial exam system up to today’s gaokao, the Chinese university entrance exam. He further dives into China’s attempts to “catch up” to the West, often failing with ventures like the Chinese Educational Mission (1872-1881). Set on this historical narrative backdrop, Zhao weaves in contemporary educational issues from the Chinese system, such as rampant professorial research falsification and the test cramming lifestyle of the typical Chinese student. He concludes that the “authoritarian” type of education found in China should not be imported to the US, writing that it “stifles creativity, smothers curiosity, suppresses individuality, ruins children’s health, distresses students and parents, corrupts teachers and leaders, and perpetuates social injustice and inequity” (p. 187). Dr. Zhao joins New Books in Education to discuss this fascinating and pertinent topic. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/education
In the early 1830s, the French school teacher Eugénie Luce migrated to Algeria. A decade later, she was a major force in the debates around educational practices there, insisting that not only were women entitled to quality education, but that women's education served a fundamental role in the French mission in the colonies. "Woman is the most powerful of all influences in Africa as in Europe," she wrote in 1846, the year after she founded a school for the instruction of indigenous Muslim girls.
In A Frenchwoman's Imperial Story: Madame Luce in Nineteenth-Century Algeria, Rebecca Rogers (Stanford University Press, 2013), a Professor at the Université Paris Descartes and an expert in the history of the French educational system, lucidly explores Luce's work in the field, bringing a wealth of precise details– everything from what the lessons in the school room were like to prize-giving ceremonies and hygiene inspections. But Rogers also lets the reader in on the questions that remain about Luce's own life.
Rogers notes that while "Eugénie Allix's efforts to establish and finance her school have left ample traces in the colonial archives," there are many details of her life that are not present and which can only be lightly sketched. For example, "[C]ivil registers offer tenuous insight into Eugénie's social network during her first decade of life in Algeria"… The circumstances of her second marriage "have left no trace in the archival record"… It's an interesting meditation on the limitations of archives– how the story that is told of the life after is dependent upon the letters and signatures and red tape that the people of history have left behind them, as well as the moves the biographer must make to fill those gaps.
So often the stories of women in history become the stories of all the men they knew and yet, in this case, the archive itself prevents that. As Rogers writes, the men in her life "[b]oth shaped her life in ways the biographer can only imagine" and yet the biographer is left to imagine precisely because the proof is not there. "She appears in the colonial archives as very much an independent woman," which represents a rather refreshing reversal, almost as unique today as it would've been in the 19th century: a woman whose story stands solely on her work. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/education
“All classes are sorta boring” (p. 19). This statement is one that college students might believe, along with many of their professors, but not Dr. Mark Carnes, author of Minds on Fire: How Role-Immersion Games Transform College (Harvard University Press, 2014). In Carnes’ book, he describes a new type of learning and classroom pedagogy called “Reacting”, where students take control of the class by being immersed into various roles in a certain event in history and given a competitive goal to complete by the end of the exercise, sometimes over a month long. For instance, students could be assigned as Jacobins in the French Revolution or Gandhi during the partitioning of British India. Each role is different and each student is tasked with various objectives to complete. The method, which can be used in disciplines beyond history, is akin to Model UN or mock trials, but on overdrive.
Carnes, professor of history at Barnard College, asserts that through these immersion activities students will gain a better sense of morality, foster greater leadership and community-building skills, and learn more on a particular subject overall than a traditional class setting, as students are tasked with knowing their characters and historical background information much more intently than their typical class workload. The reacting method taps into the “subversive play” that has been present on college campuses for centuries–from fraternities, mixers, and football, to beer pong, Facebook, and World of Warcraft. The role immersion method gets students excited about going to class and even raises the stakes for how much students care, which can result in crying sessions after a tough loss in the imagined world, as Carnes witnessed on several occasions. Despite countering teachings from Plato, Rousseau, Dewey, and other educational thinkers, Minds on Fire provides a compelling case on how to rethink the modern classroom experience in higher education. Dr. Carnes joins New Books in Education for an interesting discussion on his book and urges anyone interested in implementing this new pedagogical tool to visit the Reacting to the Past website. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/education
Teachers have recently become a target in the educational reform debate. Most would agree that great teachers are crucial for education. However, there is no singular formula for a great teacher. So then, what makes a great teacher? Do those characteristics transcend culture? These questions and more are explored in a new book titled West Meets East: Best Practices from Expert Teachers in the United States and China (ASCD, 2014). The book is a collaboration from several American and Chinese academics: Leslie Grant, James Stronge, Xianxuan Xu, Patricia Popp, Yaling Sun, and Catherine Little.
Dr. Grant, Assistant Professor of Education at The College of William and Mary, joins New Books in Education to discuss West Meets East. In the interview, Dr. Grant provides an overview of her coauthored book, including how the project began with collaboration between The College of William and Mary and Yunnan Normal University, in Yunnan Province, China. Grant and her coauthors interviewed teachers across the US and China whom had all been honored with teaching awards by their respective countries. The authors explored four characteristics of these teachers: personal qualities, planning and assessment, instructional practices, and classroom management. While their comparative educational study showed distinct differences amongst the two groups, the researchers also found that some characteristics that cross over to both cultural groups of great teachers, like a shared sense of purpose and responsibility. This cross-cultural comparative book is ideal for teachers, policymakers, and anyone interested in education or comparative studies. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/education
With a new focus on vocational and work ready education, the notion of a liberal education is becoming less valued in American society. Though, there are still defenders of this well-rounded and classic form of education. One staunch defender is Dr. Michael S. Roth, current President of Wesleyan University and author of Beyond the University: Why Liberal Education Matters (Yale University Press, 2014). As the title suggests, Dr. Roth contends that liberal education is still important in higher education and how it can be molded onto modern advancements, such as aligning liberal education with MOOCs.
To illustrate liberal education’s impact on American society, Dr. Roth’s book casts an expansive list of intellectuals, politicians, and writers who all espouse “enlightened” principles of education. From Thomas Jefferson’s belief that better education was needed so that the elites would not unfairly run society, to W. E. B. DuBois’ and Jane Addams’ inspiration from their German experiences, and Benjamin Franklin’s lampooning of Harvard elitism, this book includes a diverse, yet connected, plethora of figures throughout history. Dr. Roth helps to relate these historical narratives to contemporary educational conversations by interjecting his personal experiences in various areas of the book. Old ideals of “specialization” and the current vocational craze especially bond to provide relevance to today’s conversations. The book closes with Thomas Dewey, the influential American educator, and with a moment from the author’s lecture in China, where liberal education is just beginning to take hold. Dr. Roth joins the New Books in Education to discuss his book, his interesting education career, and to tell us what “pragmatic education” means. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/education
“Don’t Send Your Kid to the Ivy League.” This was the headline of a recent New Republic article that reverberated across the internet recently, going viral as it was shared over 160 thousands times on Facebook. The author of this piece, Dr. William Deresiewicz, joins the New Books in Education podcast to discuss his new book Excellent Sheep: The Miseducation of the American Elite and the Way to a Meaningful Life (Free Press 2014), which further elaborates upon his recent viral article and another from 2008, “The Disadvantages of an Elite Education“.
In Excellent Sheep, Deresiewicz draws on his decades of experience at Ivy League institutions; first, at Columbia where he did his undergraduate and graduate degrees, and then later at Yale where he taught for a decade. With an insiders view and a critical lens, he dissects what education at these types of institutions has become. He asserts that the hypercompetitive nature of elite institutions has taken away from self-discovery of students, a key facet to innovation and creativity. Deresiewicz’s book also confronts the social implications of a less meritocratic elite system of education. Particularly, he is concerned by the kind of elites that are being produced by prestigious education in America, with graduates that disproportionally pursue careers in self-serving fields like finance. Like his past viral essays, Excellent Sheep is a thought-provoking look at American society and provides keen insights into the world of elite education. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/education
Helene Snee, a researcher at the University of Manchester, has written an excellent new book that should be essential reading for anyone interested in the modern world. The book uses the example of the ‘gap year’, an important moment in young people’s lives, to deconstruct issues of class, cosmopolitanism and identity. Like many other aspects of contemporary life, common assumptions about travel (as opposed to tourism) or the individual experience (as opposed to patterns in social life) are taken apart in the book. The book reflects broader debates around class in British society that have been influenced by French theorist Pierre Bourdieu, such as the recent Great British Class Survey. The book situates itself in the tradition that seeks to unsettle the assumptions about taken for granted ideas about what is good judgement or good taste, asking why one form of, largely, middle class self development is privileged over others.
A Cosmopolitan Journey? Difference, Distinction and Identity Work in Gap Year Travel (Ashgate, 2014) is not just a contribution to critical theory. In order to understand the lives of the gap year individuals, Snee uses online blogs as evidence for the way that the ‘gappers’ tell stories that are about the places they have come from (rather than travelled to), about having ‘authentic’ (& potentially middle class) experiences during their travels and about being self-developing individuals. Crucially the book shows how even the word ‘travelling’ draws boundaries with ‘tourism’ to show how power and class dominance function to make it seem as if ‘not everyone has the good taste to take a gap year’, rather than the choice of a gap year being part of a much broader social structure.
Snee’s combination of travel and tourism as a topic, using predominantly young people’s experiences as an example, along with the way the text speaks directly to sociological debates between thinkers such as Bourdieu and Giddens, mark A Cosmopolitan Journey out as essential reading for a very wide audience. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/education
In the post 9/11 era in which Muslims in America have increasingly felt under the surveillance of the state, media, and the larger society, how have female Muslim students on US college campuses imagined, performed, and negotiated their religious lives and identities? That is the central question that animates Dr. Shabana Mir‘s dazzling new book Muslim American Women on Campus: Undergraduate Social Life and Identity (University of North Carolina Press, 2014). This book was the winner of the Outstanding Book Award awarded by the National Association for Ethnic Studies.
In her book, Dr. Mir engages a number of interlocking themes such as the varied and at times competing understandings of Islam among female Muslim undergraduates, the haunting legacy of Orientalist discourse and practice on U.S. college campuses, questions of religious authority among Muslim students on campus, and contradictions of pluralism in US higher education. Through a theoretically sophisticated and compelling ethnographic study focused on the college experience of female Muslim undergraduates at George Washington University and Georgetown University in Washington DC, Dr. Mir brings into view the hopes, tensions, and aspirations that mark the intersections of their religious and academic and social lives on campus. Some of the specific issues analyzed in this book include female Muslim American understandings of and attitudes towards alcohol culture on campus, clothing and the hijab, and questions of gender and sexual relations. Dr. Mir’s incredibly nuanced study shows both the diversity and complexity of the undergraduate experience for Muslim American students. This truly multidisciplinary book will be of much interest to not only scholars of Islam, American religion, gender, and anthropology, but also to anyone interested and invested US higher education. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/education
Thomas A. Bryer joins the podcast to discuss his book Higher Education Beyond Job Creation: Universities, Citizenship, and Community (Lexington Books 2014). Dr. Bryer is the director of the Center for Public and Nonprofit Management University of Central Florida (UCF) and associate professor in the university’s School of Public Administration.
Should the goal of higher education simply be about job creation? In Higher Education Beyond Job Creation, Dr. Bryer argues that job creation and economic factors should not be the only higher education policy consideration for policymakers, administrators, and alumni, and that community engagement, civic training, and other areas of interests should also be concerns for institutions. The book introduces the concept of SEE DEMOS (Student Empowered Education/ Democratizing Education for Members of Society), which is how students can become “active ethical citizens” through experiential learning and social engagement (p. 46). Dr. Bryer provides pedagogical examples of service learning throughout the book, focusing on a “joined up” service-learning course at UCF, where students are embedded with a local low-performing high school and tasked with mentoring students. The course has had wonderful results from both the school and the university perspectives. Dr. Bryer joins New Books in Education for the interview. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/education
From 1945 to the mid-1970s, the rate at which Americans went to and graduate from college rose steadily. Then, however, the rate of college going and completion stagnated. In 1980, a quarter of adult Americans had college degrees; today the figure is roughly the same. What happened?
In her book Degrees of Inequality: How the Politics of Higher Education Sabotaged the American Dream (Basic Books, 2014), Suzanne Mettler argues that American students–and particularly those from the lower and lower-middle class–have been priced out of good higher education. Over the past several decades, college tuition has risen far faster than inflation and, of course, the ability of disadvantaged parents and students to pay for it. Mettler points out that the colleges themselves are usually blamed for the spike in tuition, and she agrees that they are to some degree at fault. But she argues that the Federal and State governments are the primary culprits: in the era of growth, they generously supported higher education; today, through neglect or wilful action, they have allowed government support for higher education to dwindle. Federal Pell grants, for example, used to pay for a good chunk of tuition at a four-year state university; now they pay for only a fraction of that cost. States used to give their universities generous support; now these universities are expected to pay much of their own way, usually through increases in tuition.
Mettler points out that for-profit universities have stepped into the breach. They are, she says, innovative, and that’s good. But, according to Mettler, they offer an inferior product at inflated prices, effectively taking tuition dollars away from better and in some cases comparably priced state institutions. And, because they receive a very large proportion of their income from Federal and State tuition grants and loans, they are effectively subsidized by the taxpayer.
Listen into our fascinating discussion. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/education
Sherry Lee Mueller and Mark Overmann are the authors of Working World: Careers in International Education, Exchange, and Development (Georgetown University Press 2014). Dr. Mueller has decades of international education experience, including past experience at Institute of International Education (IIE), the National Council for International Visitors (now Global Ties U.S.), and in the Fulbright Program. She is currently an Adjunct Professorial Lecturer at American University’s School of International Service. Mr. Overmann also has a considerable background in the field and is now Deputy Director of Alliance for International Cultural Exchange.
This book provides tips, tools, and perspectives on the wide field of international education, exchange, and development. Through personal experience and extensive interviews of leading experts in various stages of their career, the authors provide successful road maps and building blocks for “idealists” looking to begin a career or to those who wish for a mid-career change (p. 1). Ranging from “identifying your cause” (p. 13), to tips for successfully networking, and a comprehensive guide to all the relevant organizations in the field, this book offers an impressive insight into a diverse and growing field. This is also the second edition of the book and newer innovations (social media) or landscape changes (economic downturn) have been added throughout the book, along with the timeless career advice. Dr. Mueller joins the New Books in Education podcast for the interview. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/education
Gita Steiner-Khamsi and Florian Waldow are the editors of Policy Borrowing and Lending: World Yearbook of Education 2012 (Routledge, 2012). Dr. Steiner-Khamsi is professor of Comparative and International Education at Teachers College, Columbia University. Dr. Waldow is professor of Comparative and International Education at Humboldt University in Berlin.
This monograph provides a collection of articles that chronicle policy borrowing, also known as travelling reforms. These policies move across the world, jumping from one country or sector to the next. While the book covers a wide-array of subjects and topics (from a social network analysis of Chinese Republican Era to Japanese domestic policy concerns with PISA results), it has a strong focusing theme, tying each article together through the idea of moving policy and their origins. This book is a staple for international and comparative education, but the fields of history, economics, public policy, and political science are all relied upon throughout the various articles. Dr. Steiner-Khamsi joins the New Books in Education podcast for the interview. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/education
[Re-published with permission from Inspired by Math] Sue VanHattum is a math professor, blogger, mother, author/editor, and fundraiser. She’s a real powerhouse of motivation for making math fun and accessible to more of our young folks. Sue has teamed up with a number of writers to compile a book, Playing With Math, which she is producing in partnership withMaria Droujkova in a community sponsored publication model.
Sue and I shared a delightful chat about what math is, what the book is about, and how we can all get more inspired to engage in math with our kids. And, Sue sprinkles the conversation with some interesting open-ended math problems. Think part coffee table conversation part math circle. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/education
David C. Berliner, Gene V. Glass, and associates are the authors of 50 Myths and Lies That Threaten America’s Public Schools: The Real Crisis in Education (Teachers College Press, 2014). Dr. Berliner is Regents’ Professor of Education Emeritus at Arizona State University. Gene V Glass is a senior researcher at the National Education Policy Center and professor at the University of Colorado. The associate authors are comprised of leading Ph.D. students and candidates selected by Dr. Berliner and Dr. Class for this book.
In the book, Dr. Berliner, Dr. Glass, and the other writing associates attempt to expose common myths and lies that are present in the current political and educational landscape. While grounding their writing in academic research, the authors’ wrote a book aimed to be assessable to administrators, teachers, government officials, and the common (non-academic) person. The result is an extensive and yet easy-to-read book, broken into small sections that all pack a powerful punch. The authors do not hold back criticism from those they consider to be purveyors of myths or lies–such as Michelle Rhee, Michael Bloomberg, and Tony Bennett. From properly interpreting American student rankings on international testing like PISA and TIMSS, to questioning the success of the charter school movement, and showing why young students should not be held back, this book uncovers all of these myths and more. Dr. Berliner joins the podcast to discuss this book and also a few other recent events in education. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/education
Dr. Amy Stambach is the author of Confucius and Crisis in American Universities: Culture, Capital, and Diplomacy in U.S. Public Higher Education (Routledge, 2014). Dr. Stambach is a lecturer in Comparative and International Education at University of Oxford.
Dr. Stambach’s book, a part of the Education in Global Context series, offers an ethnographic look at the partnership between American universities and the Confucius Institutes, the Chinese government funded language and cultural teaching centers. Drawing on student, faculty, and administrator interviews, personal experience, and institutional document review, the author provides an in-depth insight and analysis of the often-maligned relationship between these institutions.
In the book, it is argued that American universities turn to ventures such as the Confucius Institutes on the grounds that US congressional cuts to higher education can be offset by funding from China. Dr. Stambach also introduces the term “eduplomacy” in this book, which she defines as “diplomatic uses of education to advance the political and economic interests of competing… groups” (p. 3).
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Robert A. Rhoads, Xiaoyang Wang, Xiaoguang Shi, Yongcai Chang are the authors of China’s Rising Research Universities: A New Era of Global Ambition (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2014). Dr. Rhoads is the Director, Globalization and Higher Education Research Center at UCLA. Dr. Wang is Director of the Higher Education Institute at Tsinghua University. Dr. Shi is Director of the Center for International Higher Education Research in the Graduate School of Education at Peking University. Dr. Chang is Professor of Comparative Education and Cultural Anthropology and Psychology in the School of Education at Minzu University.
In this book, the authors explore the Chinese universities system, keying on research institutions and professor experience in this rapidly changing higher education environment. While the book provides an overview and history of the entire Chinese higher education sector, the research focuses on four universities–Tsinghua University, Peking University, Renmin University, and Minzu University. Beginning in the late 90s, the Chinese government began a concerted effort to create “world-class” universities by pumping funding into a select group of universities, through Project 211 and Project 985. All of the listed institutions were included in the funding projects, which have led to wide reform and transformations. Extensive faculty interviews were conducted at the four universities, providing an insight into the change, pressures, and culture at each institution. Dr. Rhoads joins the podcast to talk about this collaborative project. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/education
Kevin Dougherty and Vikash Reddy are the authors of Performance Funding for Higher Education: What Are the Mechanisms What Are the Impacts (Jossey-Bass, 2013). Dr. Dougherty is Associate Professor of Higher Education and Education Policy at Teachers College-Columbia University and Mr. Reddy is a Senior Research Assistant at the Community College Research Center.
In their book, the authors explore past research on performance funding in higher education, a practice where state governments tie university or college budget allocation to certain indictors–like graduation rates, remedial education, or drop out rates. This kind of funding has been around since the late 70s, but has not really taken off in the national discussion, even as around 25 states have some kind of performance funding for their higher education system. Dougherty and Reddy chronicle an expansive of past research on performance funding, dating back to 1979. The book provides a sprawling landscape, yet a concise explanation, of the discourse in the higher education sector for this type of budgetary reform policy. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/education
Benjamin A. Elman‘s new book explores the civil examination process and the history of state exam curricula in late imperial China. Civil Examinations and Meritocracy in Late Imperial China (Harvard UP, 2013) is organized into three major sections that collectively provide a careful, deeply researched, and elegantly written account of the Ming and Qing exam systems. Part I looks at the construction of “Way Learning” from its Southern Song institutionalization as a form of mainstream classicism through its emergence as political orthodoxy during the early Ming. Part II considers the consequences (both positive and unintended) after 1450 of an empire full of well-trained civil exam failures, and Part III traces the many ways that the civil exams were transformed in response to changing times. There are gripping stories along the way, from a history of early Ming exam curricula that’s traced in blood, to the examination dreams of a rising cult figure who would launch the Taiping Rebellion. Though set in late imperial China, Elman’s narrative also has wide-ranging implications for thinking about education and examinations today. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/education
In this episode, I sit down with Karen G. Weiss, associate professor in the Department of Sociology and Anthropology at West Virginia University, to talk about her book, Party School: Crime, Campus, and Community (Northeastern University Press, 2013). We discuss the subculture of the “party university,” and how such an environment normalizes and encourages extreme binge drinking and reckless partying. We talk about how extreme partying harms students as well as the larger community, and why students willingly put themselves (and others) at risk for victimization. We discuss why the party subculture appears so resistant to change, and why efforts from university personnel and law enforcement often appear futile. We also explore possible ways to transform the party subculture and address the problems it causes.
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Nicholas Hartlep is the author of The Model Minority Stereotype: Demystifying Asian American Success (Information Age, 2013). Dr. Hartlep is an Assistant Professor of Educational Foundations at Illinois State University
Dr. Hartlep’s book, The Model Minority Stereotype, is a sourcebook of annotated bibliographies that offers summaries and sometimes critiques of Asian American scholarship dealing with the model minority stereotype. As the stereotype has continued to be a heated political and social issue among Asian Americans scholars, activists and people, it can be difficult to decipher the thousands of articles, chapters and theses written about it. By framing his project through an aggressive and forward-thinking lens, Dr. Hartlep traces the diverse history and themes pervading model minority scholarship, revealing their presumptions and contributions to the general field. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/education
Germany embarked on the age of imperialism a bit later than other global powers, and the German experience of empire was much shorter-lived than that of Britain or France or Portugal. Nonetheless, empire was fundamental, Jeff Bowersox argues, to Germans’ self-understanding and sense of place in the world in an era marked by sweeping changes, including rapid industrialization and economic growth; the rise of an urban proletariat in ever-expanding cities; and the emergence of mass consumer culture and mass politics. Indeed, Bowersox notes, a linkage between German identity and empire long outlasted the German Empire itself. Raising Germans in the Age of Empire: Youth and Colonial Culture, 1871-1914 (Oxford University Press, 2013) looks specifically at youth in this context, and at how young Germans encountered their nation’s overseas empire through a variety of media from the founding of the German nation-state to the eve of World War One.
Germany was not only a brand-new country in this period, as Bowersox points out, it was also a decidedly youthful one: in the first decade of the twentieth century, four in five Germans were under the age of 45. Raising Germans in the Age of Empire looks at how a nation of young people experienced exotic places, at least imaginatively, through material culture, mass education, and social movements like Scouting. The book uses truly fascinating sources–toys, games, school books, cartoons, among many others–to make new and engaging arguments about the German experience of colonialism in the age of European imperialism.
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During the 1924-25 school year, John Scopes was filling in for the regular biology teacher at Rhea County Central High School in Dayton, Tennessee. The final exam was coming up, and he assigned reading from George W. Hunter’s 1914 textbook A Civic Biology to prepare students for the test. What followed has become one of the most well-known accounts in the history of science and one of the most famous trials of twentieth-century America.
In Trying Biology: The Scopes Trial, Textbooks, and the Anti-Evolution Movement in American Schools (University of Chicago Press, 2013), Adam R. Shapiro urges us to look beyond the rubrics of “science” and “religion” to understand how the Scopes trial became such an important event in the histories of both. The story begins with a pair of Pinkerton detectives spying on a pair of textbook salesmen in the Edwards Hotel in Jackson, Mississippi. Shapiro brings us from that hotel room into a series of classrooms, boardrooms, and courtrooms while exploring the battle over textbook reform in the twentieth-century US. Based on a close reading of high school curricular materials around the discipline of botany, with special attention to the emergence of “civic botany” as a pedagogical field, Shapiro’s book uses the debates over pedagogy, evolution, and the textbook industry to explore a number of issues that are of central importance to the history of science: the construction of authorship, the histories of reading practices, the co-emergence of economies and technologies, and the ways that urban and rural localities shape the nature of sciences and their publics. It is a gripping, moving, and enlightening story. Enjoy! Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/education
On the day you were born, you arrived with your own unique biology and into your own unique social and cultural context. It would have been impossible to predict on that day how your life would unfold, or exactly the person you would become in the future. Why? Because there are so many complex and interrelated factors in the development of each and every human being. In his new book, The Human Spark: The Science of Human Development (Basic Books, 2013) world-renowned psychology professor Jerome Kagan tackles some of the most fascinating and important questions about what makes a human a human, and how we become who we are over the course of our lives. He draws from his decades of experience in developmental psychology, as well biology, neuroscience, and even literature and biographies, to inform his nuanced and big-picture view. And never one to shy away from critical thinking, Kagan also provides thoughtful remarks on the limitations of psychology as a field of research. If you want to listen to a person with an amazing mind and decades of experience talk about psychology, this is the interview for you! Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/education
One of the basic rules of human behavior is that people generally want to do what their peers do. If your friends like jazz, you’ll probably like jazz. If your friends want to go to the movies, you’ll probably want to go to the movies. If your friends enjoy comic books, you’ll probably enjoy comic books.
The force of peer pressure is likely strongest in high school, but college is not far behind. In their eye-opening book Paying for the Party: How College Maintains Inequality (Harvard UP, 2013), Elizabeth A. Armstrong and Laura T. Hamilton examine how peer groups and the pressure they create move college students into specific tracks. Though students’ aspirations at the time of entry matter to some extent, the peer groups they join matter much more in terms of outcomes, that is, how they do during their college experience. College students mold themselves to the expectations of their groups. Armstrong and Hamilton also note a distinctive class element in the process of peer group formation and entry. Not everyone gets to belong to any group. Listen in and find out how these groups–which, it should be said,are largely hidden from administrators and professors–maintain socio-economic inequality. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/education
You know you are not going to get the same old story about progressive literacies and education from Carmen Kynard, who ends the introduction to her book with a saying from her grandmother: “Whenever someone did something that seemed contradictory enough to make them untrustworthy, my grandmother simply called it runnin’ with the rabbits but huntin’ with the dogs.” Kynard persuasively illustrates throughout her book the extent to which progressive and liberal educationalists hold up progress toward truly liberatory education for African Americans and Latinos because they seek to please both rabbits and dogs in the 21st Century.
In her own words, Kynard begins with this critique: “American schools and universities, through their scholarship and instructional designs, have often upheld a racial status quo alongside a rhetoric of dismantling it. These [are] not the workings of contradictory and confused individuals merely locked within their space and time. My grandmother understood that such contradictions happen inside of a totemic system. And once she pointed out that someone or something was runnin with the rabbits and huntin with the dogs, the expectation was that I would question the process and work to achieve an alternative awareness, ideological approach, and set of cultural practices” (19).
Kynard is not taking the easy road. She looking calling out the racial double-tongue that characterizes the current educational discourse on cultural relevant teaching and learning. This is why a book such as this, which traces the histories, legacies, and influences of black protest movements (mostly student lead) on education and literacy is a must read now.
Please listen in as I discuss this book with Kynard. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/education
“School was a place that devalued who we are as Indigenous people,” says Noelani Goodyear-Kapua. These were institutions — at least since white settlers deposed the Indigenous government in the late 19th century — that Native students “tolerated and survived…experienced more as a carceral space than a place of learning.”
So she and her community decided to start their own.
Founded in 1999, the HKM Public Charter School in Honolulu enacts a host of educational practices that Goodyear-Kapua labels “sovereign pedagogies.” From the “land-based literacies” of their Papa Lo’i agricultural project to Olelo language classes, HKM signaled a “radical departure from the fences, walls, and bell schedules that kept young people cut off from their ‘aina and other storehouses of ancestral knowledge.”
Now an associate professor of political science at the University of Hawai’i at Manoa,Goodyear-Kapua tells the inspiring story of HKM in The Seeds We Planted: Portraits of a Native Hawaiian Charter School (University of Minnesota Press, 2013). No simple tale of triumph, Goodyear-Kapua explores the tensions and contradictions of fostering sovereign education in a settler colonial context and appropriating elements of the neocolonial/neoliberal charter school movement for anti-colonial ends. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/education
Over the last several months, I’ve had the pleasure to have a number of political scientists who study education policy on the podcast. Jesse Rhodes, Jeff Henig, and Sarah Reckhow have brought their new books that have focused mainly on the K-12 education system. Andrew Karch offers something different.
Karch has written Early Start: Preschool Politics in the United States (University of Michigan Press, 2013), a deep narrative history and assessment of the policy development behind early childhood education policy. Karch is associate professor of political science at the University of Minnesota and has focused much of his research agenda on state policy and federalism. In his new book, he weaves together theories from the study of public policy with an intricate story of early childhood education. The tactical lessons advocates could learn from this book make it a must-read inside and outside of the academy. Ideas like venue shopping and coalition building animate many of the critical junctures studied in the book. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/education
The history of modern China is bound up with that of student politics. In Behind the Gate: Inventing Students in Beijing (Columbia University Press, 2010), Fabio Lanza offers a masterfully researched, elegantly written, and thoughtful consideration of the emergence of “students” as a category in twentieth-century China. Urging us to move away from a kind of historical view that takes the trans-historical existence of categories (like “students”), places (like cities or universities), and communities for granted, Lanza argues that it was only after and as a result of the May Fourth Movement and the events of 1919 that “students” emerged as a coherent notion connected with the specific spaces of the city of Beijing, Beijing University, and Tiananmen Square. The parts of the book successively introduce different sorts of space that were both produced by and helped generate the history that unfolds here, including everyday lived spaces, intellectual spaces, and political and social spaces. Lanza argues that new forms of everyday, lived practice in these spaces allowed student activism to emerge in the gaps where politics was separated from the state, and that the category of “students” as a signifier of a politics outside the state ended only with the government intervention ending the Red Guards in the late 1960s. In the course of this wonderfully readable history, we are offered glimpses into the classrooms and dorms of Beijing University, the bodily practices of early Beida students, and the streets of early twentieth-century Beijing. Enjoy! Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/education
Christopher Tienken and Donald Orlich are authors of the provocative new book, The School Reform Landscape: Fraud, Myth, and Lies (Rowman and Littlefield 2013). Dr. Tienken is an assistant professor in the College of Education and Human Services at Seton Hall University, and is also currently the editor of the American Association of School Administrators Journal of Scholarship and Practice and the Kappa Delta Pi Record. Dr. Orlich is professor emeritus of education and science instruction at Washington State University, Pullman. Their new book is an unabashed critique of nearly five decades of school reform and the questionable assertions and arguments made by many advocates for standardization, nationalization, and corporatization of public schools. They refer to the famed “Sputnik” moment of the 1950s as a manufactured crisis that Bon Jovi might call a “vagabond king wearing a Styrofoam crown”. They call A Nation at Risk, the landmark study of educational performance in US schools, “an intellectually vapid and data challenged piece of propaganda” and the current federal law, No Child Left Behind, “Stalinist-inspired”. Deep down, this book is a critique of the neoliberal theory of government applied to education. Tienken and Orlich argue that standardization, testing, and charter schools have been foisted upon local school in deference to neoliberalism, rather than in service of students. They suggest that better policies can better improve education.
A few highlights from the podcast interview.
On Sputnik and Bon Jovi: “Bon Jovi and Sambora have a song off the album, These Days, and the song is called These Days, and in that song they use phrase “vagabond king wearing a Styrofoam crown”. And I heard that phrase and it struck me: yes, that really sums up Sputnik in one phrase, Sputnik is the really the genesis of the school bashing and the current school reform movement. Everyone refers to it as if it was a meaningful event in terms of school reform.”
On A Nation at Risk: “When you read A Nation at Risk, we challenge anyone to go ahead and find the actual data to support the claims and conclusions they draw.”
On federal education policy: “Under Obama and the Republicans in terms of the Common Core State Standards and new national testing initiatives, so really for the first time in this country’s history, curriculum is being determined by a small group of elites far away from your kids’ and my kids’ schools. That is problematic culturally but also educationally.” Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/education
Most people think that professors are more liberal, and some much more liberal, than ordinary folk. As Neil Gross shows in his eye-opening Why are Professors Liberal and Why do Conservatives Care? (Harvard UP, 2013), “most people” are right: academia is much more left-leaning than any other major profession in the U.S . But why is this so? As Gross points out, there are a lot of “folk” explanations out there, but none of them holds much water. Gross looks the data (a lot of which he collected himself) and searches for a more compelling explanation. It’s surprising: the fact that most college students think professors are liberal (which is true) makes those among them who are conservative think they will not be welcomed in the profession (which, as it turns out, may not be true). By analogy, men don’t generally become nurses because they think of nursing as a “female” profession. Just so, conservatives don’t become professors because they think of academia as a “liberal” profession. But does it matter that academia is liberal? Listen in and find out. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/education
Jeffrey Henig is the author of The End of Exceptionalism in American Education: The Changing Politics of School Reform (Harvard Education Press, 2013). Henig is Professor of Political Science and Education at Teacher’s College and Professor of Political Science at Columbia University. In his book, he explains that much scholarship and commentary on school reform has been segmented and sporadic, overly focused on particular reforms, and thereby unable to fully explain the larger arcs of reforms overtime. The thesis of the book is that the shift from education governance based in single-sector institutions, such as elected school boards, to broad-based institutions, such as mayor controlled school systems, has not received the attention it deserves. In this way, the book fits neatly with previous books featured here by Jesse Rhodes and Sarah Reckhow. Henig goes about unpacking this change, the winners and losers, and the possible direction of future school reform. The book is deeply rooted in the political science literature, but also speaks to issues of public management, education policy, and social movements. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/education
Sarah Reckhow is the author of Follow the Money: How Foundation Dollars Change Public School Politics (Oxford University Press 2013). Reckhow is an Assistant Professor of Political Science at Michigan State University. Her book probes significant questions about the role of philanthropic foundations in education reform. Through in-depth case studies of New York City and Los Angeles, Reckhow demonstrates how a particular view of school reform has been funded by major foundations such as Gates and Eli Broad. Emphasizing new types of schools, particularly charter schools, and reforms focused around a business-oriented view of school management, foundations have reshaped education in these two cities. Yet differences in governance that exist between the two cities also have resulted in a different role for funders and funding. Reckhow weaves together this story with novel data collection and excellent interviews. The book should be read by scholars in public policy, education, and nonprofit studies. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/education
In his book Free to Learn: Why Unleashing the Instinct to Play Will Make Our Children Happier, More Self-Reliant, and Better Students for Life (Basic Books, 2013), Peter Gray proposes the following big idea: we shouldn’t force children to learn, rather we should allow them to play and learn by themselves. This, of course, is a radical proposal. But Peter points out that the play-and-learn-along-the-way style of education was practiced by humans for over 99% our history: hunter-gatherers did not have schools, but children in them somehow managed to learn everything they needed to be good members of their bands. Peter says we should take a page out of their book and points to a school that has done just that: The Sudbury Valley School.
(BTW: Peter has some very thoughtful things to say about the way standard schools actually promote bullying and are powerless to prevent it or remedy it once it’s happened. Listen in.) Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/education
In their book Mismatch: How Affirmative Action Hurts Students It’s Intended to Help, and Why Universities Won’t Admit It (Basic Books, 2012), Richard Sander and Stuart Taylor, Jr. present the following big idea: race preferences in higher education harm those preferred. Their argument is interesting in that it is not premised on the idea that racial preferences are unfair. Rather, they crunch the numbers and show that when good minority students are placed among elite students at elite schools, they often fail; when they are placed among other good students at good schools, they do much better. Students, they say, need to be “matched” with students at their level, not “mismatched” (or, rather, overmatched) with students far above their level. Both Sanders and Taylor are very much in favor of Affirmative Action, though they would like to see it reformed. Listen in and see how. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/education
In Creating Room to Read: A Story of Hope in the Battle for Global Literacy (Viking Press, 2013), John Wood presents this big idea: you can change the world if want to. The nice thing about John’s book is that he doesn’t tell you the “theory” of world-changing (though he does discuss “social entrepreneurship”), he tells you how he did using his own experience. John saw that a lot of people around the world couldn’t read and created an organization to teach them. This involved building a dedicated team, fund-raising, finding out what his clients–illiterate, impoverished children–wanted, and giving it to them in a flexible way. John’s “Room to Read” has built thousands of libraries around the world and taught hundred of thousands of children to read. That’s something. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/education
According to the Marriam-Webster dictionary, an “enigma” can be defined as “something hard to understand or explain.” What is it that is so enigmatic about education? Aren’t schools there to teach information, and expand people’s minds? What’s so mysterious about that?
In Christian J. Churchill and Gerald E. Levy’s new book, The Enigmatic Academy: Class, Bureaucracy, and Religion in American Education (Temple University Press, 2012) the authors, both educators, describe a tremendous paradox within the educational system in the United States. Despite the secular redemption that people search in educational institutions, and the free spirit associated with the liberal arts, schools actually reinforce the status quo, by training upper-class students for positions of authority while leading lower-class students in a direction which serve the purposes of higher social classes. Most people view education as the way to achieve social mobility, and while this is not entirely false on an individual level, the educational system concomitantly teaches students to develop a bureaucratic character, reinforcing existing social and ideological structures instead of challenging them. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/education
Colin Calloway is one of the leading historians of Native American history today and an award- winning author. Calloway is the John Kimball, Jr. 1943 Professor of History at Dartmouth College in Hanover, New Hanover, and has been part of the institution for several decades. He has published a textbook, First Peoples: A Documentary Survey of American Indian History (Bedford/St. Martin’s), which has a fourth edition published in 2012.
Not surprisingly, he has also published a fascinating new work entitled Indian History of an American Institution: Native Americans and Dartmouth (Dartmouth College Press, 2010). When we think about the history of Indian education, we may think about the broad legacy of educating Native Americans at boarding schools from the late-nineteenth to the twentieth century, or more specifically about the Carlisle Indian Industrial School in Pennsylvania, or Native American educational program that existed at Hampton University, the historically black college in Virginia. However, Calloway covers a much older legacy of Native American education rooted in the eighteenth-century, and continues to the present-day at Dartmouth College.
As an alumna of the College, I was always fascinated by the “Indian history” at this institution. Some current ways the college pays homage to its original mission include recruiting Native American students, supporting academic and student resources, such as the Native American Studies department, and the Native American Program which hosts college-wide events, such as the upcoming 40th annual Pow Wow held in May. Calloway’s book provides greater insight into understanding how the shadows of Dartmouth’s complicated colonial history of Native American education are viewed today. Listen in to learn more about this fascinating study. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/education
Many parents are interested in learning about how their children develop, and pretty much all parents want to do a good job with their kids. So, often they turn to parenting books. Unfortunately, many books for parents do not present the developmental research accurately, probably because the authors of those books are trying to find a way to sell more books. Parents can be left feeling confused and anxious that they aren’t doing things the “right” way, and often the more books they read the more confused and anxious they feel! That is why the book Welcome to Your Child’s Brain: How the Mind Grows from Conception to College (Bloomsbury, 2011), by Sandra Aamodt and Sam Wang, is refreshing. Aamodt and Wang present child development in an accessible, balanced, and reassuring way that is true to the current research about child development. The book covers everything from infant learning, to language development, to sleep, to social development, all the way from the prenatal phase through adolescence. This work is will interest those who want to know more about the neuroscience of child development, as well as parents who just want to understand their children better and learn a few reasonable tips. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/education
Jesse Rhodes‘ book An Education in Politics: The Origin and Evolution of No Child Left Behind (Cornell University Press, 2012). The book synthesizes nearly forty years of US political history. It tells the story of the development and passage of the No Child Left Behind law by George W. Bush. The book builds on political science theories of political entrepreneurship, institutionalism, and incrementalism to narrate the debate about education reform. Rhodes captures the people, the organizations, and the institutions that have defined education policy since the 1980s. The book is accessible, thorough, and a must read for scholars of education politics and policy. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/education
During this week of the 4th of July, it’s appropriate to mark America’s national holiday with a podcast about that most American of sports: college football. As past guests on the podcast have explained, widely followed, revenue-generating sports teams affiliated with universities are a distinctive feature of American sports culture, and college football has long been regarded as the one sport that best demonstrates American values. For outsiders, a useful analogy to understand American college football’s popularity and cultural importance might be European football. Like the soccer clubs of Europe, many college football teams date back to the 19th century, with long-standing rivalries and traditions. The teams have unbreakable connections to particular localities, unlike American professional franchises that are sold, bought, and moved. Generations of supporters attend Saturday games at storied grounds. Dressed in team colors, they sing songs and perform other time-honored rituals. And like European football, American college football is still fundamentally regional in organization. Teams compete in various leagues, planted in specific parts of the country, with the top teams in the table advancing to national games. College football fans tend to identify with the teams of their own regional league, arguing vigorously that “our” brand of football is better than “theirs.” Of course, American college football teams are also like European soccer clubs in that they bring in a lot of money, from tickets, television, and branded merchandise. According to one estimate, the top programs in American college football–if they could ever be sold–would be worth as much as clubs like Manchester City, Inter Milan, and Olympique Lyon.
But of course, these teams can’t be sold. Even though they draw hundreds of thousands of spectators in the fall season, millions of television viewers, and tens of millions of dollars in revenue, college football teams are the property of institutions of higher education, many of which are public, taxpayer-funded entities. Other nations have sports teams affiliated with universities. But only in the United States have college athletics become such a prominent part of the sports landscape. The history of how this curious system emerged is surprising.
In his book The Rise of Gridiron University: Higher Education’s Uneasy Alliance with Big-Time Football (University Press of Kansas, 2012), Brian Ingrassia shows that the early history of American football and the early history of the American university were intertwined. As universities developed, and faculties and administrators sought to give them a public face, they saw football as a means of gaining the allegiance of people who would likely never visit a lecture hall or laboratory. They argued that football was beneficial to players and spectators alike. There were critics who warned of the dangers of football, and for a brief time in the early 20thcentury some West Coast schools even adopted rugby as an alternative. But by the Twenties and Thirties college football was firmly established and hugely popular across the country. Snobby academics today will grumble about the scourge of big-time college football. However, Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/education
Anyone who’s turned on the television in the past several decades is familiar with the ubiquitous before-and-after picture. On the left, your present state: undesirable, out of shape, balding perhaps. Add ingredient X – maybe a fad diet or a hair transplant – and the picture on the right shows your new and improved future. While this visual juxtaposition might seem harmless enough – save for the whole manipulative advertising thing – it has a rather more nefarious history in the United States, bound intimately, like so much, with the question of race.
The before-and-after pictures were a favorite of Richard Henry Pratt, founder of the pioneering Carlisle Indian School, where in the late 19th and early 20th century, Native American children from the recently pacified West were brought thousands of miles to a military base outside Harrisburg, Pennsylvania. Haggard by the exhausting and traumatic train ride, Pratt’s photographer would snap the “before” picture, using props and bad lighting to emphasize the alleged “savagery” of the newly arrived children. Months later, once the students were fitted in contemporary Euroamerican fashion, their hair cut short, and illuminated by soft-lighting, the “after” photo was snapped. These dual images – attesting to the supposedly civilizing effects of the boarding school – were distributed to government elites and the American public, proof that the indigenous population of the continent could be molded in the image of the white settler.
In his impressive new book, The Art of Americanization at the Carlisle Indian School (University of New Mexico Press, 2011) Hayes Peter Mauro brings to bear his considerable skills as an art historian and critical theorist to deconstruct the visual culture produced at Carlisle. Placing them squarely in the context of triumphalist American myths and the popular pseudo-science of race, Mauro uses these photographs to ask powerful questions and arrive at some unsettling answers. It is a fascinating work, illuminating not only the troubling culture of the federal assimilation project, but the power of the image to mold both the observer and the observed. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/education
In her new book The Faculty Lounges: And Other Reasons Why You Won’t Get The College Education You Pay For (Ivan R. Dee, 2011), Naomi Schaefer Riley, former Wall Street Journal editor and affiliate scholar at the Institute for American Values, critically examines the tenure system. She believes “tenure . . . is eroding American education from the inside out” and places too much emphasis on research and not enough on teaching. In our interview, we talked about why tenure does not help students get a better education, why faculty donations went 8:1 in favor of Barack Obama in the 2008 election, and how much the government spends to subsidize academic articles. Read all about it, and more, in Riley’s provocative new book.
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In his new book, Teaching America: The Case for Civic Education (Rowman & Littlefield Education, 2011), David Feith, Chairman of the Civic Education Initiative and assistant editor at The Wall Street Journal, worked with some of America’s top education experts to address the problem of widespread civic illiteracy. Feith assembled 23 different educational experts, including a former Education Secretary, Supreme Court Justice, and two Senators, to address the question of how to improve civic education in the U.S. The result is a thorough analysis of civic illiteracy and its causes, as well as a host of suggestions for how to fix the problem.
In our interview, we talked about how Feith came up with the idea to promote civic education in his college dorm room, whether U.S. schools have the capacity to impart the type of education necessary to do the job, and what the Tea Party and Occupy Wall Street movements can tell us about the state of civic education in America. Read all about it, and more, in Feith’s eye-opening new book.
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Despite its focus on education, Sally Ninham‘s recent book, A Cohort of Pioneers: Australian Postgraduate Students and American PostgraduateDegrees, 1949-1964 (Connor Court Publishing, 2011), covers a lot of ground: the waning of Australian-British ties, the rise of Australian identity, post-war Australian-US relations, and much more. The book is also personal: it details her own family’s experiences as young professionals studying in the United States after the Second World War. The discovery of a cache of family letters led her to consider how and why Australians went to study in the United States, and how the experience transformed Australia’s own higher education system and politics in subsequent decades. For the Australian students, American education opened the prospect of an Australia less dependent upon the United Kingdom. For the United States, then fighting the Cold War, Australian students opened the prospect of closer ties to Australia, an important ally. The book, which is built on an impressive body of oral history interviews, personal letters, and memoirs, is both an important cultural document and a very readable intellectual history. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/education
In his new book, The Agony of Masculinity: Race, Gender, and Education in the Age of the “New” Racism and Patriarchy (Peter Lang, 2010), Pierre Orelus analyzes the “heartfelt stories of fifty men of African descent who vary in age, social class, family status, sexual orientation, ethnicity, nationality, and ability” (1). One of the purposes of the book is to allow black men to share how they both perpetuate and are negatively impacted by heteronormativity, that is, the oppression of women and other men on the basis of how well they perform heterosexuality.
During my interview with Pierre, I was surprised that he labeled some of the men as closeted bisexuals and homosexuals simply because they did not disclose their sexualities to him. This was surprising since the book itself seeks to undo heteronormativity, which enforces the requirement to announce a heterosexual identity. This announcement is made both by how a man performs his masculinity, and in his actual sex life. Since the bedroom is private (we don’t know who people actually have sex with), one is supposed to feel unrestrained in disclosing his sexual practice by stating that he is heterosexual. If a man doesn’t make this pronouncement, he is deemed non-normative (otherwise, it’s assumed that he would proudly proclaim his straightness). What’s more, Orelus gives the men the choice to remain silent regarding their sexuality, yet when some take the option, it is read as a fear of coming out. This may be an instance when Orelus himself perpetuates the exact crisis he hopes to end.
This isn’t a criticism of this good book. Orelus begins by placing himself as a subject of analysis. He states that he has his own ongoing personal struggle with patriarchy, a fact often brought to his attention by his wife. It’s this experience he shares with other black men that prompted him to write the book. Please, listen in to our discussion of it. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/education
Colleges and universities have a reputation for being radical places where tenured radicals teach radical ideas. Don’t believe it. Consider this: the set of academic departments that one finds in most “colleges of liberal arts and sciences”–history, chemistry, sociology, physics, and so on–has remained remarkably stable for many decades. How, exactly, is that “radical?”
Yet as Mikaila Lemonik Arthur shows in her enlightening book Student Activism and Curricular Change in Higher Education (Ashgate, 2011), some curricular changes have occurred, particularly in the humanities and social sciences. When I went to college in the 1980s, interdisciplinary minors and majors such as Women’s’ Studies, Asian-American Studies, and Queer Studies (the three cases Lemonik Arthur analyses) were in their infancy. Now the first is nearly ubiquitous, the second is growing rapidly, and the third is gaining steam.
How did these new “identity studies” disciplines succeed in finding a place at the already-full academic table despite the residence of many stakeholders? Lemonik Arthur’s answer is complicated, but suggests that the deans are more nimble that we–or rather I–thought. Beginning in the late 1960s, they saw rising demand for courses in these emerging disciplines, some of which was signaled by waves of student activism. They responded by increasing the supply, albeit slowly. The first institutions to do so were of lessor status. Once they showed that the “identity studies” courses were viable in terms of enrollment and didn’t harm (and in fact helped) recruitment and fund-raising efforts, the more prestigious schools followed. Their status rose and the money began to flow. These two developments, in turn, allowed the “identity studies” disciplines to institutionalize, that is, to secure places among (actually, between) departments and in course catalogue.
This is a fascinating study of how even authoritarian institutions (like most colleges and universities!) can sometimes prove responsive to their clients. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/education
What can judges do to change society? Fifty-seven years ago, the Supreme Court resolved to find out: the unanimous ruling they issued in Brown v. Board of Education threw the weight of the Constitution fully behind the aspiration of social equality among the races. The possibilities of law as an engine of social justice seem to be encapsulated in the story of the decision — and in the many decades of resistance to its enforcement.
Today, there are those who argue that the Court failed in its goal, since actual racial mixing in U.S. schools has declined steadily over the last 35 years. But in her new book, In Brown’s Wake: Legacies of America’s Educational Landmark (Oxford UP, 2011), Harvard Law School Dean Martha Minow argues that the legacy of Brown should be viewed in a larger context. Neither a self-executing mandate for racial equality nor a futile rhetorical exercise, the decision was destined to become a lodestar for a wide variety of reformers in all areas of American society — and beyond.
In a series of case studies, Dean Minow’s book reveals how Brown, the milestone in American jurisprudence, took on meanings the judges never envisioned, in the hands of advocates who, in 1954, nobody could have expected. Whatever else it was, the decision was that vital ingredient to be coupled with any kind of action: an idea whose time had come. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/education
Corruption in big-time college sports recently claimed another victim: Ohio State football coach Jim Tressel. Once regarded as a paragon of integrity, Tressel is now seen as one more example of a coach who recruited star players and built a successful program with the benefit of illegal gifts from boosters. Whether the result of Tressel’s deliberate disregard of rules or his neglect as coach, the scandal at Ohio State reminds us again that big-time college sports is deeply flawed.
Big-time college sports, meaning major-conference football and men’s basketball, has its defenders and opponents. Some insist that it benefits both student athletes and the universities for which they play. Others mock the idea of the amateur “student-athletes” and view the programs themselves as for-profit enterprises that rake in tens of millions of dollars in television, ticket, and merchandise revenue. Both sides in the debate, and anyone who has a serious interest in college sports, will find much that is revealing and startling in Charles Clotfelter‘s book Big-Time Sports in American Universities (Cambridge University Press, 2011). The Z. Smith Reynolds Professor of Public Policy and Professor of Economics and Law at Duke University, Charlie easily combines the rigorous approach of a respected scholar with a knack for easy-to-understand explanation. Both experts and sports fans (and expert sports fans) will learn a lot about the economics of big-time college athletics from this book.
Charlie investigates some of the basic justifications for multi-million-dollar programs–for example, that they pay for non-revenue-generating college sports, or that they increase student enrollments–to see if they bring the benefits their supporters claim. He also exposes the troubled finances at the foundation of most major programs, and the networks of influence that university leaders cultivate through access to luxury boxes and prime seats. And he offers an economic rationale for why coaches like Jim Tressel are led to break the rules.
As he says in the interview, Charlie remains a fan of college sports. But he also calls for an honest acknowledgement of what big-time college sports really is: a lucrative entertainment business that is connected with higher education in a distant, but mutually dependent, relationship. That, he says, is the first step toward any reform. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/education
In his new book, Failing Liberty 101: How We Are Leaving Young Americans Unprepared for Citizenship in a Free Society, (Hoover Institution Press, 2011) William Damon, a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution, argues that we are failing to prepare today’s young people to be responsible American citizens. Damon, who is also the director of the Stanford Center on Adolescence, shows that our disregard of civic and moral virtue as an educational priority is having a tangible effect on the attitudes, understanding, and behavior of large portions of the youth in our country today. In our interview, we discuss Howard Zinn, Michael Barone, political correctness, and the status of the American Dream. Read all about it, and more, in Damon’s thought-provoking new book.
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I fear that most people think that “history” is “the past” and that the one and the other live in books. But it just ain’t so. History is a story we tell about the past, or rather some small portion of it. The past itself is gone and cannot, outside science fiction, be revisited. And the histories in books are neither dead nor alive. They are zombies, endlessly repeating themselves, never having a new thought, never responding to anything you say. (Plato, by the way, is good on this subject.) In point of fact the only place that histories really live is in the minds of historians in the act of creation. In this context, the story is far from dead. Indeed, it hasn’t even been born. As historians read, research, and think, they make histories like a carpenter makes a table. Readers rarely get to see the historical craftsmen at their benches. All they see is the result.
[pullquote]As historians read, research, and think, they make histories like a carpenter makes a table. Readers rarely get to see the historical craftsmen at their benches. All they see is the result.[/pullquote]
Today we’ll have the opportunity to look into the history workshop with Abbott (“Tom”) Gleason. Tom has worked in academic history for nearly half a century. He has been everywhere, done everything, and faced every challenge a working historian can. And now he’s written a terrific memoir about his path, and that of historians of his generation in general: A Liberal Education (TidePool Press, 2010). I came away from the book with a renewed appreciation of the hold Zeitgeist has on historians and their work. Tom was raised in a cultural milieu (the liberal WASP establishment) that has now largely vanished. That peculiar, specific context had a powerful impact (by his own admission, both positive and negative) on his historical opinions and writing. It was interesting for me to see how Tom, as a conflicted, thoughtful son of privilege, negotiated Harvard of the 1950s, academia in the 1960s, and the rise (and relative decline) of the Russian studies industry in the post war decades. With eyes wide open, he recognizes the limitations of his Cold-War scholarly cohort, the ways in which he and his colleagues saw some things while being oblivious to others. Sometimes they got Russia right; sometimes they didn’t. But they were always on a quest to find the historical truth. Tom’s memoir shows just how difficult that truth is to find.
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I was a little kid during the Vietnam War. It was on the news all the time, and besides my uncle was fighting there. I followed it closely, or as closely as a little kid can. I never thought for a moment that “we” could lose. “We” were a great country run by good people; “they” were a little country run by bad people. I spent my time building models of American tanks, planes, and ships. I read a lot of “Sergeant Rock” and watched re-runs of “Combat.” My friends and I played “war” everyday after school. Given all this, you’ll understand that I was bewildered when “we” pulled out of Vietnam. How could “we” lose the war when “we” were bigger, better, and righter? It made no sense. All this came to mind as I read Andrew Donson terrific book Youth in the Fatherless Land: War Pedagogy, Nationalism, and Authority in Germany, 1914-1918 (Harvard UP, 2010). As Andrew points out, German children were taught that their nation was great, their cause was just, and their victory inevitable. Their heads were full of heroic tales of soldiers sacrificing themselves for the good of Germany, and they longed to fight for the Vaterland themselves. So when things began to come apart in 1917, Germany’s young people were deeply disappointed. They would not “get their chance.” Rather, they would suffer hunger, humiliation, and defeat. They had hard questions for their mothers, fathers, and the authorities. How could it happen? Who is at fault? And, most importantly, what should we do? As we know, they answered this final question in different and, as it turned out, radical ways.
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The vast majority of historians write history. Perhaps that’s good, as one should stick to what one knows. But there are historians who braves the waters of social and political criticism. One thinks of Arthur Schelsinger Jr., Richard Hofstadter, Christopher Lasch, Robert Conquest, Richard Pipes, Eric Hobsbawm, E. P. Thompson, and more recently Tony Judt, Sean Wilentz and Victor Davis Hanson. Today I had the good fortune to speak with a historian who is virtually sure to enter the top rank of historian-public intellectuals, John H. Summers. Indeed, he already has. He’s published numerous probing essays on academic life, anarchism, the Left, sex scandals, anti-Americanism, the fate of newspapers, and, of course, many of the great American public intellectuals (he’s at work on a biography of C. Wright Mills). Summers does what all critics worth their salt do: comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable. Just read his remarkably insightful “All the Priviledged Must Have Prizes” about his experience teaching at Harvard. (Also, read the comments attending article, where current Harvard students unwittingly prove Summers’ main points). We must be grateful, then, that the folks at the Davis Group Press have elected to publish a collection of Summers’ finely crafted essays in Every Fury on Earth (2008). The book is challenging, thought-provoking, and courageous. John H. Summers does not blink. You will agree with some of the things he says, and you will disagree with others. That, of course, is the fun of it.
BTW: If you have a relative or friend who is an academic, this book would make a perfect holiday gift. If you are an academic, indulge yourself and buy it.
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When you were in college, did you visit the health center? I did, several times. Did you ever wonder why there was a student health center? I didn’t. It seemed like a part of the college scenery, something that had “always” been there. Far from it, as Heather Prescott shows in her fascinating new book Student Bodies. The Influence of Student Health Services in American Society & Medicine (University of Michigan Press, 2007). Believe it or not, many very smart folks used to believe that college could hurt you, especially (though not exclusively) if you were a woman. And it wasn’t just that you could catch a nasty cold. Too much thinking, these folks said, might weaken the body and lead to a decline in fertility. That wouldn’t be good for the “race.” So some forward-thinking people began to consider ways in which the health of America’s sons and daughters might be protected while they studied. The result was a kind of early experiment in universal health care. In some ways it succeeded and in others it failed. But in either case it holds lessons for us (Americans, that is) as we think about how to fix our broken national health care system. We should thank Heather for teaching these lessons to us.
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