New Books in 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 equita...

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 out...

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 a...

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 collec...

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...

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 t...

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 m...

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 la...

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. Boar...

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...

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 produc...

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...

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 Reignit...

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...

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, yo...

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 s...

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 c...

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...

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 risin...

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 orde...

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 ...

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 infor...

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 an...

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...

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...