New Books in Education

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,...

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 organiza...

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...

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...

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...

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% bl...

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 toget...

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 que...

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 understanding...

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 v...

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 Scho...

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 scien...

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 wi...

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...

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...

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 Pr...

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 wome...

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...

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 L...

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 ca...

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 Com...

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 wh...

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-Frie...

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 hi...

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'Brie...