New Books in 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. 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 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. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/education

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. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/education

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. 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 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 [email protected]. Listener feedback is 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

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 [email protected]. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/education

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 [email protected]. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/education

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 [email protected] 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 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). Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/education

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. 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, 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. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/education

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 [email protected]. Listener feedback is 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

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 [email protected]. 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 [email protected] 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 [email protected] 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

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 [email protected] 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 [email protected] 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 [email protected] 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 [email protected] 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 [email protected] 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 [email protected]. 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