front cover of Back in School
Back in School
How Student Parents Are Transforming College and Family
A. Fiona Pearson
Rutgers University Press, 2019
Fifty years ago, students who were parents were a rarity in college classrooms, but by the beginning of the twenty-first century, over a quarter of all undergraduate students were parents. In Back in School, A. Fiona Pearson explores how these student parents navigate cultural norms and institutional resources, forging pathways as they journey to become better parents and successful students. Back in School examines how policy makers, professors, college administrators, counselors, and social workers provide or deny access to child care, tutoring, financial aid, or other campus- or community-based resources. Pearson further explores how social norms and governmental and organizational policies influence access to these resources and student parents’ experiences on campus and at home.
[more]

front cover of Bankers in the Ivory Tower
Bankers in the Ivory Tower
The Troubling Rise of Financiers in US Higher Education
Charlie Eaton
University of Chicago Press, 2022
Exposes the intimate relationship between big finance and higher education inequality in America.

Elite colleges have long played a crucial role in maintaining social and class status in America while public universities have offered a major stepping-stone to new economic opportunities. However, as Charlie Eaton reveals in Bankers in the Ivory Tower, finance has played a central role in the widening inequality in recent decades, both in American higher education and in American society at large.

With federal and state funding falling short, the US higher education system has become increasingly dependent on financial markets and the financiers that mediate them. Beginning in the 1980s, the government, colleges, students, and their families took on multiple new roles as financial investors, borrowers, and brokers. The turn to finance, however, has yielded wildly unequal results. At the top, ties to Wall Street help the most elite private schools achieve the greatest endowment growth through hedge fund investments and the support of wealthy donors. At the bottom, takeovers by private equity transform for-profit colleges into predatory organizations that leave disadvantaged students with massive loan debt and few educational benefits. And in the middle, public universities are squeezed between incentives to increase tuition and pressures to maintain access and affordability. Eaton chronicles these transformations, making clear for the first time just how tight the links are between powerful financiers and America’s unequal system of higher education.
[more]

front cover of Basic Principles of Curriculum and Instruction
Basic Principles of Curriculum and Instruction
Ralph W. Tyler
University of Chicago Press, 2013
In 1949, a small book had a big impact on education. In just over one hundred pages, Ralph W. Tyler presented the concept that curriculum should be dynamic, a program under constant evaluation and revision. Curriculum had always been thought of as a static, set program, and in an era preoccupied with student testing, he offered the innovative idea that teachers and administrators should spend as much time evaluating their plans as they do assessing their students.

Since then, Basic Principles of Curriculum and Instruction has been a standard reference for anyone working with curriculum development. Although not a strict how-to guide, the book shows how educators can critically approach curriculum planning, studying progress and retooling when needed. Its four sections focus on setting objectives, selecting learning experiences, organizing instruction, and evaluating progress. Readers will come away with a firm understanding of how to formulate educational objectives and how to analyze and adjust their plans so that students meet the objectives. Tyler also explains that curriculum planning is a continuous, cyclical process, an instrument of education that needs to be fine-tuned.

This emphasis on thoughtful evaluation has kept Basic Principles of Curriculum and Instruction a relevant, trusted companion for over sixty years. And with school districts across the nation working feverishly to align their curriculum with Common Core standards, Tyler's straightforward recommendations are sound and effective tools for educators working to create a curriculum that integrates national objectives with their students' needs.
[more]

front cover of Basic Principles of Curriculum and Instruction
Basic Principles of Curriculum and Instruction
Ralph W. Tyler
University of Chicago Press, 2013
This is an auto-narrated audiobook version of this book.

In 1949, a small book had a big impact on education. In just over one hundred pages, Ralph W. Tyler presented the concept that curriculum should be dynamic, a program under constant evaluation and revision. Curriculum had always been thought of as a static, set program, and in an era preoccupied with student testing, he offered the innovative idea that teachers and administrators should spend as much time evaluating their plans as they do assessing their students.

Since then, Basic Principles of Curriculum and Instruction has been a standard reference for anyone working with curriculum development. Although not a strict how-to guide, the book shows how educators can critically approach curriculum planning, studying progress and retooling when needed. Its four sections focus on setting objectives, selecting learning experiences, organizing instruction, and evaluating progress. Readers will come away with a firm understanding of how to formulate educational objectives and how to analyze and adjust their plans so that students meet the objectives. Tyler also explains that curriculum planning is a continuous, cyclical process, an instrument of education that needs to be fine-tuned.

This emphasis on thoughtful evaluation has kept Basic Principles of Curriculum and Instruction a relevant, trusted companion for over sixty years. And with school districts across the nation working feverishly to align their curriculum with Common Core standards, Tyler's straightforward recommendations are sound and effective tools for educators working to create a curriculum that integrates national objectives with their students' needs.
[more]

front cover of Basic Principles of Curriculum and Instruction
Basic Principles of Curriculum and Instruction
Ralph W. Tyler
University of Chicago Press, 1969
What educational purposes should the school seek to attain, and what educational experiences can be provided that are likely to achieve these purposes? Rather than literally answering these questions of curriculum and instruction, Tyler develops a rationale for studying them, and suggests procedures for formulating answers and evaluating programs of study. Quite simply, his book outlines one way of viewing an instructional program as a functioning instrument of education.

The four sections of the book deal with ways of formulating, organizing, and evaluating the educational objectives that have been chosen for the curriculum. Tyler emphasizes the fact that curriculum planning is a continuous cyclical process, involving constand replanning, redevelopment, and reappraisal. Substitution of such an integrated view of an instructional program for hit-or-miss judgment as the basis for curriculum development cannot but result in an increasingly effective curriculum.
[more]

logo for Harvard University Press
Battling Corruption in America’s Public Schools
Lydia G. Segal
Harvard University Press

“In the early 1990s, after getting a law degree from Harvard, Segal worked for the Manhattan district attorney. She led dozens of investigations in the aftermath of accusations that school jobs in New York City were being sold for sex and cash…Segal thinks the cause of rampant corruption is not bad people but a lousy system that overcentralizes decision-making.”—Forbes

“Anyone who is interested in school reform—this means anyone who pays taxes, is a parent or guardian of a child attending school, and/or who works toward a goal of establishing an education system that puts children first—must read this book.”—ParentAdvocates.org

“Segal proposes a number of sensible reforms: creating an independent Inspector General’s office in all big-city school districts, privatizing custodial and repair services, decentralizing various purchasing decisions.”—Wall Street Journal

Drawing on ten years of undercover work and research in four major school districts, Lydia Segal reveals how systemic waste and fraud siphon millions of dollars from urban classrooms. Segal shows how money is lost in systems that focus on process rather than on results, and how regulations established to curb waste and fraud provide perverse incentives for new forms of both. Calling for renewed powers for principals and a streamlining of oversight, Segal offers a bold, far-reaching plan to reclaim our schools.

[more]

front cover of Bearing the Torch
Bearing the Torch
The University of Tennessee, 1794–2010
T.R.C. Hutton
University of Tennessee Press, 2022

Bearing the Torch stands as a comprehensive history of the University of Tennessee, replete with anecdotes and vignettes of interest to anyone interested in UT, from the administrators and chancellors to students and alums, and even to the Vols fans whose familiarity with the school comes mainly from the sports page. It is also a biography of a school whose history reflects that of its state and its nation. The institution that began as Blount College in 1794 in a frontier village called Knoxville exemplifies the relationship between education and American history.

This is the first scholarly history of UT since 1984. T. R. C. Hutton not only provides a much-needed update, but also seeks to present a social history of the university, fully integrating historical context and showing how the volume’s central “character”—the university itself—reflects historical themes and concerns. For example, Hutton shows how the school’s development was hampered in the early nineteenth century by stingy state funding (a theme that also appears in subsequent decades) and Jacksonian fears that publicly funded higher education equaled elite privilege. The institution nearly disappeared as the Civil War raged in a divided region, but then it flourished thanks to policies that never could have happened without the war. In the twentieth century, students embraced dramatic social changes as the university wrestled with race, gender, and other important issues. In the Cold War era, UT became a successful research institution and entered into a deep partnership with Oak Ridge National Laboratories that persists to this day. All the while UT athletics experienced the highs of national championships and the lows of lawsuits and losing seasons. UT is a university with a universe of historical experiences.

The University of Tennessee’s story has always been defined by inclusion and exclusion, and the school has triumphed when it practiced the former and failed when it took part in the latter. Bearing the Torch traces that ongoing process, richly detailing the University’s contributions to what one president, Joseph Estabrook, called the “diffusion of knowledge among the people.”

[more]

front cover of Becoming a Bilingual Family
Becoming a Bilingual Family
Help Your Kids Learn Spanish (and Learn Spanish Yourself in the Process)
By Stephen Marks and Jeffrey Marks
University of Texas Press, 2013

Would you like your children to grow up bilingual, even if you aren’t yet? Then speak to your kids in Spanish as you learn the language along with them. Becoming a Bilingual Family gives English-speaking parents the tools to start speaking Spanish with their kids in their earliest years, when children are most receptive to learning languages. It teaches the vocabulary and idioms for speaking to children in Spanish and offers practical, proven ways to create a language-learning environment at home.

The first part of the book introduces parents to many resources—books, audio books, music, television, computer programs, childcare workers, school, and friends—that can help you establish a home environment conducive to the acquisition of Spanish. The second part is a Spanish phrasebook that takes you through all the typical activities that parents and children share, from getting up in the morning to going to bed at night. Few, if any, other Spanish study aids provide this much vocabulary and guidance for talking to small children about common daily activities. The authors also include a quick course in Spanish pronunciation and enough grammar to get a parent started. Spanish-language resources, kids’ names in Spanish, and an easy-to-use index and glossary complete the book.

Take the Markses’ advice and start talking to your kids in Spanish, even if it’s not perfect. You’ll learn the language together and share the excitement of discovering the peoples and cultures that make up the Spanish-speaking world.

[more]

front cover of Becoming a Historian
Becoming a Historian
An Informal Guide
Edited by Penelope J. Corfield and Tim Hitchcock
University of London Press, 2022
An accessible guide to completing research projects and building a career as a practicing historian.

Writing history is both an art and a craft. This handbook is designed as an instructional guide to support students, independent scholars, and more. Becoming a Historian guides prospective historians on how best to participate in this vibrant community of scholars. This friendly guide will teach readers how to design research projects, how to differentiate between quantitative and qualitative research methodologies, and how to follow a project through to a positive conclusion. Becoming a Historian is also frank about the pains and pleasures of sticking with a long-term project. Finally, this guide explains how to present original research to wider audiences, including the appropriate use of social media, the art of public lecturing, and strategies for publication.

Written by esteemed historians Penelope J. Corfield and Tim Hitchcock, who bring more than forty years of collective experience to the project, Becoming a Historian explodes the myths and systems that can make the world of research seem intimidating. Instead, this guide offers step-by-step advice designed to make it easier to join this community of scholarship.
[more]

front cover of Becoming a Scholar
Becoming a Scholar
Cross-Cultural Reflections on Identity and Agency in an Education Doctorate
Edited by Maria Savva and Lynn P. Nygaard
University College London, 2021
A window into the lives of nine non-traditional doctoral students and their journeys to become scholars.

This book provides a window into the lives of nine non-traditional doctoral students. As mature, part-time, international students enrolled in a professional doctorate program, the students reflect on the transformation process of becoming scholars, as their narratives provide breadth and depth to themes that represent a diverse cross-section of cultures, identities, and communities. The volume brings the “human face” behind the doctoral journey to the forefront, as the narratives draw much-needed attention to the personal journey that inevitably parallels and intersects with the academic journey. Although the narratives are drawn from a professional doctor-in-education program based in the United Kingdom, the struggles will resonate with a much wider range of doctoral students and academics, sparking lively discussion, debate, and reflection. A must-read for students preparing to embark on the doctoral journey, this book will be essential reading for leaders of doctoral programs who wish to equip students with important knowledge about the challenges ahead.
 
[more]

logo for Intellect Books
Becoming Designers
Education and Influence
Stuart Mealing
Intellect Books, 2000

Design Research is an area that is both current and growing, but texts on the subjects are in short supply. This book is a response to the vitality of discussion within journals and at conferences, and it intends to place Design Research in its rightful place at the heart of studio-based education and practice.

Offering a valuable context within which to understand the educational needs and aspirations of the designer, Becoming Designers is also a vital resource for students in this field, whose access to books on the subject is currently very limited.

[more]

front cover of Becoming Historians
Becoming Historians
Edited by James M. Banner, Jr. and John R. Gillis
University of Chicago Press, 2009

In this unique collection, the memoirs of eleven historians provide a fascinating portrait of a formative generation of scholars. Born around the time of World War II, these influential historians came of age just before the upheavals of the 1960s and ’70s and helped to transform both their discipline and the broader world of American higher education. The self-inventions they thoughtfully chronicle led, in many cases, to the invention of new fields—including women’s and gender history, social history, and public history—that cleared paths in the academy and made the study of the past more capacious and broadly relevant. In these stories—skillfully compiled and introduced by James Banner and John Gillis—aspiring historians will find inspiration and guidance, experienced scholars will see reflections of their own dilemmas and struggles, and all readers will discover a rare account of how today’s seasoned historians embarked on their intellectual journeys.

[more]

front cover of Becoming Mead
Becoming Mead
The Social Process of Academic Knowledge
Daniel R. Huebner
University of Chicago Press, 2014
George Herbert Mead is a foundational figure in sociology, best known for his book Mind, Self, and Society, which was put together after his death from course notes taken by stenographers and students and from unpublished manuscripts. Mead, however, never taught a course primarily housed in a sociology department, and he wrote about a wide variety of topics far outside of the concerns for which he is predominantly remembered—including experimental and comparative psychology, the history of science, and relativity theory.  In short, he is known in a discipline in which he did not teach for a book he did not write.

In Becoming Mead, Daniel R. Huebner traces the ways in which knowledge has been produced by and about the famed American philosopher. Instead of treating Mead’s problematic reputation as a separate topic of study from his intellectual biography, Huebner considers both biography and reputation as social processes of knowledge production. He uses Mead as a case study and provides fresh new answers to critical questions in the social sciences, such as how authors come to be considered canonical in particular disciplines, how academics understand and use others’ works in their research, and how claims to authority and knowledge are made in scholarship. Becoming Mead provides a novel take on the history of sociology, placing it in critical dialogue with cultural sociology and the sociology of knowledge and intellectuals.
[more]

logo for University of Chicago Press
Becoming Readers in a Complex Society
Edited by Alan C. Purves and Olive Niles
University of Chicago Press, 1984

front cover of Becoming Rwandan
Becoming Rwandan
Education, Reconciliation, and the Making of a Post-Genocide Citizen
S. Garnett Russell
Rutgers University Press, 2020
In the aftermath of the genocide, the Rwandan government has attempted to use the education system in order to sustain peace and shape a new generation of Rwandans. Their hope is to create a generation focused on a unified and patriotic future rather than the ethnically divisive past. Yet, the government’s efforts to manipulate global models around citizenship, human rights, and reconciliation to serve its national goals have had mixed results, with new tensions emerging across social groups. Becoming Rwandan argues that although the Rwandan government utilizes global discourses in national policy documents, the way in which teachers and students engage with these global models distorts the intention of the government, resulting in unintended consequences and undermining a sustainable peace.
[more]

front cover of Before March Madness
Before March Madness
The Wars for the Soul of College Basketball
Kurt Edward Kemper
University of Illinois Press, 2020
Big money NCAA basketball had its origins in a many-sided conflict of visions and agendas. On one side stood large schools focused on a commercialized game that privileged wins and profits. Opposing them was a tenuous alliance of liberal arts colleges, historically black colleges, and regional state universities, and the competing interests of the NAIA, each with distinct interests of their own.

Kurt Edward Kemper tells the dramatic story of the clashes that shook college basketball at mid-century—and how the repercussions continue to influence college sports to the present day. Taking readers inside the competing factions, he details why historically black colleges and regional schools came to embrace commercialization. As he shows, the NCAA's strategy of co-opting its opponents gave each group just enough just enough to play along—while the victory of the big-time athletics model handed the organization the power to seize control of college sports.

An innovative history of an overlooked era, Before March Madness looks at how promises, power, and money laid the groundwork for an American sports institution.

[more]

front cover of Before Shaughnessy
Before Shaughnessy
Basic Writing at Yale and Harvard, 1920-1960
Kelly Ritter
Southern Illinois University Press, 2009

In Before Shaughnessy: Basic Writing at Yale and Harvard, 1920–1960, Kelly Ritter uses materials from the archives at Harvard and Yale and contemporary theories of writing instruction to reconsider the definition of basic writing and basic writers within a socio-historical context. Ritter challenges the association of basic writing with only poorly funded institutions and poorly prepared students.

Using Yale and Harvard as two sample case studies, Ritter shows that basic writing courses were alive and well, even in the Ivy League, in the early twentieth century.  She argues not only that basic writers exist across institutional types and diverse student populations, but that the prevalence of these writers has existed far more historically than we generally acknowledge.

Uncovering this forgotten history of basic writing at elite institutions, Ritter contends that the politics and problems of the identification and the definition of basic writers and basic writing began long before the work of Mina Shaughnessy in Errors and Expectations and the rise of open admissions. Indeed, she illustrates how the problems and politics have been with us since the advent of English A at Harvard and the heightened consumer-based policies that resulted in the new admissions criteria of the early twentieth-century American university. In order to recognize this long-standing reality of basic writing, we must now reconsider whether the nearly standardized, nationalized definition of “basic” is any longer a beneficial one for the positive growth and democratic development of our first-year writing programs and students.

 

 

[more]

front cover of Before the Dissertation
Before the Dissertation
A Textual Mentor for Doctoral Students at Early Stages of a Research Project
Christine Pearson Casanave
University of Michigan Press, 2014

“This very readable book is what every graduate student needs as they start a program. I wish my own MA and PhD students, during my 40 years of supervising, could have been demystified by having Casanave's ‘textual mentor' as a companion."

                                                                                        --Merrill Swain, Professor Emerita, OISE, University of Toronto

 “Before the Dissertation is an insightful, relevant, and accessible resource for doctoral students at any stage. Full of reflections and advice not found in other books, it serves as an indispensable guide for students and their supervisors. And the dispelling of myths is a superb idea!”

                                                                                                --Robert Kohls, PhD candidate, University of Toronto

 

Before the Dissertation concerns issues to consider before students start writing, indeed before they commit to a major high-stakes dissertation project, whether qualitative or quantitative or something in between. It is especially relevant for students who wish to do projects that involve a lengthy research period (which can add to stress), and that also involve reading, data collection, and writing in more than one language. From the earliest stages of doctoral work, even before the proposal stage, and during intermediate stages of preparation for a project as well, there are things to think about and discuss with friends, family, and advisers such as: Why do you want to pursue a doctoral degree? Do you fully understand what you are getting into? How will you manage to develop an appropriate topic? What will your role be in your project and what languages will you use with multilingual participants? How might you engage with reading, people, and personal writing at early stages in ways that will contribute to your project's development? How much attention should you pay to quality-of-life issues?

Before the Dissertation speaks to an audience in the social sciences, but in particular to doctoral students who have experience with and interest in international, multilingual, as well as native English speaking students and settings and who wish to investigate topics in (second) language and multicultural-transcultural education. Athough appropriate for use in English-dominant doctoral programs throughout the world, the book will relate more closely to students in the North American educational system than to ones, for example, in the British system. The main audience for this book is thus doctoral students who are first or second/additional users of English, who are interested in pursuing topics in one of the social sciences, including education and multilingual inquiry, and who may just be finishing course work in an English-dominant university and are wondering what might happen next.

                                                                                               

[more]

front cover of Begin Here
Begin Here
The Forgotten Conditions of Teaching and Learning
Jacques Barzun
University of Chicago Press, 1991
In this powerful, eloquent, and timely book, Jacques Barzun offers guidance for resolving the crisis in America's schools and colleges. Drawing on a lifetime of distinguished teaching, he issues a clear call to action for improving what goes on in America's classrooms. The result is an extraordinarily fresh, sensible, and practical program for better schools.

"It is difficult to imagine a more pungent, perceptive or eloquent commentary on contemporary American education than this collection of 15 pieces by Jacques Barzun."—Jonathan Yardley, Washington Post Book World

"Mr. Barzun's style is elegant, distinctive, philosophically consistent and much better-humored than that of many contemporary invective-hurlers."—David Alexander, New York Times Book Review
[more]

front cover of Behind the Academic Curtain
Behind the Academic Curtain
How to Find Success and Happiness with a PhD
Frank F. Furstenberg
University of Chicago Press, 2013
More people than ever are going to graduate school to seek a PhD these days. When they get there, they discover a bewildering environment: a rapid immersion in their discipline, a keen competition for resources, and uncertain options for their future, whether inside or outside of academia. Life with a PhD can begin to resemble an unsolvable maze. In Behind the Academic Curtain, Frank F. Furstenberg offers a clear and user-friendly map to this maze. Drawing on decades of experience in academia, he provides a comprehensive, empirically grounded, and, most important of all, practical guide to academic life.

While the greatest anxieties for PhD candidates and postgrads are often centered on getting that tenure-track dream job, each stage of an academic career poses a series of distinctive problems. Furstenberg divides these stages into five chapters that cover the entire trajectory of an academic life, including how to make use of a PhD outside of academia. From finding the right job to earning tenure, from managing teaching loads to conducting research, from working on committees to easing into retirement, he illuminates all the challenges and opportunities an academic can expect to encounter. Each chapter is designed for easy consultation, with copious signposts, helpful suggestions, and a bevy of questions that all academics should ask themselves throughout their career, whether at a major university, junior college, or a nonacademic organization. An honest and up-to-date portrayal of how this life really works, Behind the Academic Curtain is an essential companion for any scholar, at any stage of his or her career.
[more]

front cover of Being a Presence for Students
Being a Presence for Students
Teaching as a Lived Defense of Liberal Education
Jeff Frank
Lever Press, 2019
This book offers a lived defense of liberal education. How does a college professor, on a daily basis, help students feel the value of liberal education and get the most from that education? We answer this question, as professors, each day in the classroom. John William Miller, a philosophy professor at Williams College from 1924-1960 and someone noted for his exceptional teaching, developed one form that this lived defense can take. Though Miller published very little while he was alive, the archives at Williams College hold unpublished notes and essays of this master teacher. In this book, Jeff Frank offers an extended commentary on one of these unpublished essays where Miller develops his thinking on liberal education. Frank refines the idea that presence is central to liberal education and offers suggestions for how professors can become an educative presence for students. The goal of this book is an invitation to other professors who value liberal education to think with Miller about how to foster their own lived defense of liberal education, each day, in their own classrooms. The tone of the book is meant to be invitational, at times even conversational, and the book concludes with some direct suggestions for how professors can live their own defense of liberal education.
[more]

front cover of A Belfast Girl
A Belfast Girl
A 1960s American folk music legend weaves stories of a girlhood on “the singing streets” of Ireland, marriage in Scotland, and arrival in America
Maggi Kerr Peirce
Parkhurst Brothers, Inc., 2013

A 1960s American folk music legend weaves stories of a girlhood on “the singing streets” of Ireland, marriage in Scotland, and arrival in America

[more]

front cover of The Benderly Boys and American Jewish Education
The Benderly Boys and American Jewish Education
Jonathan B. Krasner
Brandeis University Press, 2011
Samson Benderly inaugurated the first Bureau of Jewish Education in 1910 amid a hodgepodge of congregational schools, khayders, community Talmud Torahs, and private tutors. Drawing on the theories of Johann Pestalozzi, Herbert Spencer, and John Dewey, and deriving inspiration from cultural Zionism, Benderly sought to modernize Jewish education by professionalizing the field, creating an immigrant-based, progressive supplementary school model, and spreading the mantra of community responsibility for Jewish education. With philanthropist Jacob Schiff and influential laymen financing his plans, Benderly realized that his best hope for transforming the educational landscape nationwide was to train a younger generation of teachers, principals, and bureau leaders. These young men became known collectively as the “Benderly Boys,” who, from the 1920s to the 1970s, were the dominant force in Jewish education—both formal and informal—in the United States.
[more]

front cover of Bernard Daly's Promise
Bernard Daly's Promise
The Enduring Legacy of a Place-based Scholarship
Sam Stern
Oregon State University Press, 2022
Published in cooperation with the Dr. Daly Project Association

Bernard Daly escaped the Irish Famine and with his family emigrated to America, where he became the town doctor in Lakeview, Oregon, and then a state legislator, Oregon Agricultural College regent, county judge, rancher, and banker. When he died in 1920, his estate, valued at about a million dollars, established a college scholarship for the youth of Lake County, ensuring that most of them could attend college.

It’s hard to imagine a place more distant from higher education than Lake County in south central Oregon, a county about the size of New Jersey with a population under eight thousand. When the Bernard Daly scholarship was first awarded in 1922, less than two percent of America’s youth went to college, and the percentage was even lower in Lake County.

Today, Lake County students are much more likely to go to college, graduate in four years without debt, go on to graduate school, have successful careers, and contribute to the larger community—all because of a scholarship established a hundred years ago by an immigrant who sought a better life, not only for himself but also for others.

Drawing on more than a hundred personal interviews, an extensive web-based survey, and archival materials, Bernard Daly’s Promise offers unique insights into the benefits of higher education and how it might best be supported—questions that we are struggling with today.
[more]

front cover of The Best of the Best
The Best of the Best
Becoming Elite at an American Boarding School
Rubén A. Gaztambide-Fernández
Harvard University Press, 2009

For two years, Rubén Gaztambide-Fernández shared the life of what he calls the “Weston School,” an elite New England boarding school. He sat in on classes, ate meals in the dining halls, cheered at sporting events, hung out in dorms while students baked cookies or celebrated birthdays. And through it all, observing the experiences of a diverse group of students, conducting interviews and focus groups, he developed a nuanced portrait of how these students make sense of their extraordinary good fortune in attending the school.

Vividly describing the pastoral landscape and graceful buildings, the rich variety of classes and activities, and the official and unofficial rules that define the school, The Best of the Best reveals a small world of deeply ambitious, intensely pressured students. Some are on scholarship, others have never met a public school student, but all feel they have earned their place as a “Westonian” by being smart and working hard. Weston is a family, they declare, with a niche for everyone, but the hierarchy of coolness—the way in which class, race, sexism, and good looks can determine one’s place—is well known.

For Gaztambide-Fernández, Weston is daunting yet strikingly bucolic, inspiring but frustratingly incurious, and sometimes—especially for young women—a gilded cage for a gilded age. “Would you send your daughter here?” one girl asks him, and seeing his hesitation asks, “Because you love her?”

[more]

front cover of The Best School in Jerusalem
The Best School in Jerusalem
Annie Landau’s School for Girls, 1900–1960
Laura S. Schor
Brandeis University Press, 2013
Annie Edith (Hannah Judith) Landau (1873–1945), born in London to immigrant parents and educated as a teacher, moved to Jerusalem in 1899 to teach English at the Anglo-Jewish Association’s Evelina de Rothschild School for Girls. A year later she became its principal, a post she held for forty-five years. As a member of Jerusalem’s educated elite, Landau had considerable influence on the city’s cultural and social life, often hosting parties that included British Mandatory officials, Jewish dignitaries, Arab leaders, and important visitors. Her school, which provided girls of different backgrounds with both a Jewish and a secular education, was immensely popular and often had to reject candidates, for lack of space. A biography of both an extraordinary woman and a thriving institution, this book offers a lens through which to view the struggles of the nascent Zionist movement, World War I, poverty and unemployment in the Yishuv, and the relations between the religious and secular sectors and between Arabs and Jews, as well as Landau’s own dual loyalties to the British and to the evolving Jewish community.
[more]

front cover of The Best Weapon for Peace
The Best Weapon for Peace
Maria Montessori, Education, and Children's Rights
Erica Moretti
University of Wisconsin Press, 2022
The Italian educator and physician Maria Montessori (1870–1952) is best known for the teaching method that bears her name. She was also a lifelong pacifist, although historians tend to consider her writings on this topic as secondary to her pedagogy. In The Best Weapon for Peace, Erica Moretti reframes Montessori’s pacifism as the foundation for her educational activism, emphasizing her vision of the classroom as a gateway to reshaping society. Montessori education offers a child-centered learning environment that cultivates students’ development as peaceful, curious, and resilient adults opposed to war and invested in societal reform.
 
Using newly discovered primary sources, Moretti examines Montessori’s lifelong pacifist work, including her ultimately unsuccessful push for the creation of the White Cross, a humanitarian organization for war-affected children. Moretti shows that Montessori’s educational theories and practices would come to define chilren’s rights once adopted by influential international organizations, including the United Nations. She uncovers the significance of Montessori’s evolving philosophy of peace and early childhood education within broader conversations about internationalism and humanitarianism.
 
[more]

front cover of Between / Beyond / Hybrid
Between / Beyond / Hybrid
New Essays on Transdisciplinarity
Edited by Hartmut von Sass
Diaphanes, 2019
For years now, academics worldwide have been pushing for more interdisciplinarity and transdisciplinarity. Yet for all that, the very concept of transdisciplinarity has proved remarkably tough to define, let alone to enact. This book brings together prominent voices from the debate on transdisciplinarity in a manner that is itself transdisciplinary: scholars present papers from their own discipline, and those are followed by critical replies from different disciplines. The result is a vivid debate, new insights, and a growing confidence that there is something to be gained by approaching a topic from the outside and bringing new approaches to bear. 
 
[more]

logo for Georgetown University Press
Between Freedom and Equality
The History of an African American Family in Washington, DC
Barbara Boyle Torrey and Clara Myrick Green
Georgetown University Press, 2023

An original history of six generations of an African American family living in Washington, DC

Between Freedom and Equality begins with the life of Capt. George Pointer, an enslaved African who purchased his freedom in 1793 while working for George Washington’s Potomac Company. It follows the lives of six generations of his descendants as they lived and worked on the banks of the Potomac, in the port of Georgetown, and in a rural corner of the nation’s capital. By tracing the story of one family and their experiences, Between Freedom and Equality offers a moving and inspiring look at the challenges that free African Americans have faced in Washington, DC, since the district’s founding.

The story begins with an 1829 letter from Pointer that is preserved today in the National Archives. Inspired by Pointer’s letter, authors Barbara Boyle Torrey and Clara Myrick Green began researching this remarkable man who was a boat captain and supervisory engineer for the Potomac canal system. What they discovered about the lives of Pointer and his family provides unique insight across two centuries of Washington, DC, history.

The Pointer family faced many challenges—the fragility of freedom in a slaveholding society, racism, wars, floods, and epidemics—but their refuge was the small farm they purchased in what is now Chevy Chase. However, in the early twentieth century, the DC government used eminent domain to force the sale of their farm and replaced it with an all-white school. Between Freedom and Equality grants Pointer and his descendants their long-overdue place in American history.

This book includes a foreword by historian Maurice Jackson exploring the significance of the Pointer family’s unique history in the capital. In another very personal foreword, James Fisher, an eighth-generation descendant of George Pointer, shares his complex emotions when he learned about his ancestors. Also featured in this important history is a facsimile and transcription of George Pointer’s original letter and a family tree.

Royalties from the sale of the book will go to Historic Chevy Chase DC (HCCDC), which has established a fund for promoting the legacy of George Pointer and his descendants.

[more]

front cover of Between Talk And Teaching
Between Talk And Teaching
Reconsidering the Writing Conference
Laurel Johnson Black
Utah State University Press, 1998

The teacher-student conference is standard in the repertoire of teachers at all levels. Because it's a one-to-one encounter, teachers work hard to make it comfortable; but because it's a pedagogical moment, they hope that learning occurs in the encounter, too. The literature in this area often suggests that a conference is a conversation, but this doesn't account for a teacher's need to use it pedagogically. Laurel Johnson Black's new book explores the conflicting meanings and relations embedded in conferencing and offers a new theoretical understanding of the conference along with practical approaches to conferencing more effectively with students.

Analyzing taped conferences of several different teachers and students, Black considers the influence that power, gender, and culture can have on a conference. She draws on sociolinguistic theory, as well as critical theory in composition and rhetoric, to build an understanding of the writing conference as an encounter somewhere between conversation and the classroom. She finds neither the conversation model nor versions of the master-apprentice model satisfactory. Her approach is humane, student-centered, and progressive, but it does not ignore the valid pedagogical purposes a teacher might have in conferencing. Between Talk and Teaching will be a valuable addition to the professional library of writing teachers and writing program administrators.

[more]

logo for Harvard University Press
Beyond Bias
Perspectives on Classrooms
Jean V. Carew and Sara Lawrence Lightfoot
Harvard University Press, 1979

The teacher's role is utterly unique. Assigned at random to a group of children who think, learn, and interrelate in complex, subtle, and individual ways, he or she is expected to transmit specific educational material uniformly in a set amount of time. Appropriately, this book on classroom dynamics is also unique. By applying eclectic methodological strategies to the study of teacher–student interactions, it gets beyond the biases that underlie more traditional analyses of classroom life.

Carew and Lightfoot devise and implement diverse methods for describing, recording, and interpreting classroom processes, and then synthesize their findings for each of the four classrooms studied. Fascinating stories emerge of how the four teachers, each with limited resources of time, space, energy, and emotion, distribute their attention among their students. Over time, patterns develop. Some are patterns of positive discrimination, in which the teachers recognize and respond to individual children's needs; and others are patterns of negative discrimination, in which the teachers reveal particular biases on such grounds as race and sex. Consciously or not, the teachers display their individuality in terms of values, motivations, reasoning, and behavior.

The original and thorough approach of Beyond Bias reveals teachers in their many facets, from what makes them most effective to what leaves them most vulnerable. All professionals and researchers concerned with the educational process will find immense value in Carew and Lightfoot's careful analysis of what a teacher is and enlightened synthesis of what a teacher should be and can be.

[more]

front cover of Beyond College For All
Beyond College For All
Career Paths for the Forgotten Half
James E. Rosenbaum
Russell Sage Foundation, 2001
In a society where everyone is supposed to go to college, the problems facing high school graduates who do not continue their education are often forgotten. Many cannot find jobs, and those who do are often stuck in low-wage, dead-end positions. Meanwhile employers complain that high school graduates lack the necessary skills for today's workplace. Beyond College for All focuses on this crisis in the American labor market. Around the world, author James E. Rosenbaum finds, employers view high school graduates as valuable workers. Why not here? Rosenbaum reports on new studies of the interaction between employers and high schools in the United States. He concludes that each fails to communicate its needs to the other, leading to a predictable array of problems for young people in the years after graduation. High schools caught up in the college-for-all myth, provide little job advice or preparation, leading students to make unrealistic plans and hampering both students who do not go to college and those who start college but do not finish. Employers say they care about academic skills, but then do not consider grades when deciding whom to hire. Faced with few incentives to achieve, many students lapse into precisely the kinds of habits employers deplore, doing as little as possible in high school and developing poor attitudes. Rosenbaum contrasts the situation in the United States with that of two other industrialized nations-Japan and Germany-which have formal systems for aiding young people who are looking for employment. Virtually all Japanese high school graduates obtain work, and in Germany, eighteen-year-olds routinely hold responsible jobs. While the American system lacks such formal linkages, Rosenbaum uncovers an encouraging hidden system that helps many high school graduates find work. He shows that some American teachers, particularly vocational teachers, create informal networks with employers to guide students into the labor market. Enterprising employers have figures out how to use these networks to meet their labor needs, while students themselves can take steps to increase their ability to land desirable jobs. Beyond College for All suggests new policies based on such practices. Rosenbaum presents a compelling case that the problems faced by American high school graduates and employers can be solved if young people, employers, and high schools build upon existing informal networks to create formal paths for students to enter the world of work. A Volume in the American Sociological Association's Rose Series in Sociology
[more]

front cover of Beyond Convention
Beyond Convention
Genre Innovation in Academic Writing
Christine M. Tardy
University of Michigan Press, 2016
“Reading this book did more than just make me more aware of something I already, somewhat subconsciously, was doing, however. It pushed my thinking about if, when, and how writing teachers should encourage students to push genre boundaries and to innovate.”
---Foreword by Dana R. Ferris, author of Treatment of Error and Teaching College Writing to Diverse Student Populations
 
This book attempts to engage directly with the complexities and tensions in genre from both theoretical and pedagogical perspectives. While struggling with questions of why, when, and how different writers can manipulate conventions, Tardy became interested in related research into voice and identity in academic writing and then began to consider the ways that genre can be a valuable tool that allows writing students and teachers to explore expected conventions and transformative innovations. For Tardy, genres aren’t “fixed,” and she argues also that neither genre constraints nor innovations are objective—that they can be accepted or rejected depending on the context.
 
Beyond Convention considers a range of learning and teaching settings, including first-year undergraduate writing, undergraduate writing in the disciplines, and the advanced academic writing of graduate students and professionals. It is intended for those interested in the complexities of written communication, whether their interests are grounded in genre theory, academic discourse, discourse analysis, or writing instruction. With its attentiveness to context, discipline, and community, it offers a resource for those interested in English for Academic Purposes, English for Specific Purposes, and Writing in the Disciplines. At its heart, this is a book for teachers and teacher educators.
[more]

front cover of Beyond Education
Beyond Education
Radical Studying for Another World
Eli Meyerhoff
University of Minnesota Press, 2019

A bold call to deromanticize education and reframe universities as terrains of struggle between alternative modes of studying and world-making  


Higher education is at an impasse. Black Lives Matter and #MeToo show that racism and sexism remain pervasive on campus, while student and faculty movements fight to reverse increased tuition, student debt, corporatization, and adjunctification. Commentators typically frame these issues as crises for an otherwise optimal mode of intellectual and professional development. In Beyond Education, Eli Meyerhoff instead sees this impasse as inherent to universities, as sites of intersecting political struggles over resources for studying.

Meyerhoff argues that the predominant mode of study, education, is only one among many alternatives and that it must be deromanticized in order to recognize it as a colonial-capitalist institution. He traces how key elements of education—the vertical trajectory of individualized development, its role in preparing people to participate in governance through a pedagogical mode of accounting, and dichotomous figures of educational waste (the “dropout”) and value (the “graduate”)—emerged from histories of struggles in opposition to alternative modes of study bound up with different modes of world-making.

Through interviews with participants in contemporary university struggles and embedded research with an anarchist free university, Beyond Education paves new avenues for achieving the aims of an “alter-university” movement to put novel modes of study into practice. Taking inspiration from Black Lives Matter, Occupy Wall Street, and Indigenous resurgence projects, it charts a new course for movements within, against, and beyond the university as we know it.

[more]

front cover of Beyond Little Rock
Beyond Little Rock
The Origins and Legacies of the Central High Crisis
John A. Kirk
University of Arkansas Press, 2007
Based on extensive archival work, private paper collections, and oral history, this book includes eight of John Kirk’s essays, two of which have never been published before. Together, these essays locate the dramatic events of the crisis within the larger story of the African American struggle for freedom and equality in Arkansas. Examining key episodes in state history from before the New Deal to the present, Kirk covers a wide range of topics that include the historiography of the school crisis; the impact of the New Deal; early African American politics and mass mobilization; race, gender, and the civil rights movement; the role of white liberals in the struggle; and the intersections of race and city planning policy. Kirk unearths many previously neglected individuals, organizations, and episodes, and provides a thought-provoking analytical framework for understanding them.
[more]

front cover of Beyond Machismo
Beyond Machismo
Intersectional Latino Masculinities
By Aída Hurtado and Mrinal Sinha
University of Texas Press, 2016

Long considered a pervasive value of Latino cultures both south and north of the US border, machismo—a hypermasculinity that obliterates any other possible influences on men’s attitudes and behavior—is still used to define Latino men and boys in the larger social narrative. Yet a closer look reveals young, educated Latino men who are going beyond machismo to a deeper understanding of women’s experiences and a commitment to ending gender oppression. This new Latino manhood is the subject of Beyond Machismo.

Applying and expanding the concept of intersectionality developed by Chicana feminists, Aída Hurtado and Mrinal Sinha explain how the influences of race, class, ethnicity, sexuality, and gender shape Latinos’ views of manhood, masculinity, and gender issues in Latino communities and their acceptance or rejection of feminism. In particular, the authors show how encountering Chicana feminist writings in college, as well as witnessing the horrors of sexist oppression in the United States and Latin America, propels young Latino men to a feminist consciousness. By focusing on young, high-achieving Latinos, Beyond Machismo elucidates this social group’s internal diversity, thereby providing a more nuanced understanding of the processes by which Latino men can overcome structural obstacles, form coalitions across lines of difference, and contribute to movements for social justice.

[more]

front cover of Beyond Productivity
Beyond Productivity
Embodied, Situated, and (Un)Balanced Faculty Writing Processes
Kim Hensley Owens
Utah State University Press, 2023
In Beyond Productivity, a wide range of contributors share honest narratives of the sometimes-impossible conditions that scholars face when completing writing projects. The essays provide backstage views of the authors' varying approaches to moving forward when the desire to produce wanes, when deciding a project is not working, when working within and around and redefining academic productivity expectations, and when writing with ever-changing bodies that do not always function as expected. 

This collection positions scholarly writers' ways of writing as a form of flexible, evolving knowledge. By exhibiting what is lost and gained through successive rounds of transformation and adaptation over time, the contributors offer a sustainable understanding and practice of process—one that looks beyond productivity as the primary measure of success. Each presents a fluid understanding of the writing process, illustrating its deeply personal nature and revealing how fragmented and disjointed methods and experiences can highlight what is precious about writing. 

Beyond Productivity determines anew the use and value of scholarly writing and the processes that produce it, both within and beyond the context of the losses, constraints, and adaptations associated with the COVID-19 pandemic. 
 
[more]

front cover of Beyond Test Scores
Beyond Test Scores
A Better Way to Measure School Quality
Jack Schneider
Harvard University Press, 2017

When it comes to sizing up America’s public schools, test scores are the go-to metric of state policy makers and anxious parents looking to place their children in the “best” schools. Yet ample research indicates that standardized tests are a poor way to measure a school’s performance. It is time—indeed past time—to rethink this system, Jack Schneider says.

Beyond Test Scores reframes current debates over school quality by offering new approaches to educational data that can push us past our unproductive fixation on test scores. Using the highly diverse urban school district of Somerville, Massachusetts, as a case study, Schneider and his research team developed a new framework to more fairly and comprehensively assess educational effectiveness. And by adopting a wide range of measures aligned with that framework, they were able to more accurately capture a broader array of school strengths and weaknesses. Their new data not only provided parents, educators, and administrators with a clearer picture of school performance, but also challenged misconceptions about what makes a good school.

With better data, Schneider shows, stakeholders at the federal, state, and local levels can undo the damage of present accountability systems and build greater capacity in our schools. Policy makers, administrators, and school leaders can better identify where assistance is needed. Educators can engage in more evidence-based decision making. And parents can make better-informed choices for their children. Perhaps most importantly, better data can facilitate communication among all these groups, allowing them to take collective action toward shared, concrete goals.

[more]

logo for Intellect Books
Beyond Text
Learning through Arts-Based Research
Edited by Jeff Adams and Allan Owens
Intellect Books, 2021
A transnational, intercultural, and interdisciplinary discussion of arts-based practices

This collection explores a variety of art forms across different professional contexts, focusing on the ways educational practitioners and leaders from different cultures, disciplines, and organizations practice arts-based research. Beyond Text builds on a multi-year research study wherein participants used the arts to study topics of mutual interest. The project facilitated long-term conversations about arts-based practices among a large and diverse group: twenty-eight people from eight different organizations and with a range of experience levels, across six countries. 

This vibrant collection takes the study further, discussing the significant effect arts-based practices can have on research across a range of international contexts. The academic and educational practices explored in the volume go beyond text to give rise to profound questions about the nature of research and education.
[more]

front cover of Beyond the Ivory Tower
Beyond the Ivory Tower
Social Responsibilities of the Modern University
Derek Bok
Harvard University Press, 1982
Derek Bok examines the complex ethical and social issues facing modern universities today, and suggests approaches that will allow the academic institution both to serve society and to continue its primary mission of teaching and research.
[more]

front cover of Beyond the Schoolhouse Gate
Beyond the Schoolhouse Gate
Free Speech and the Inculcation of Values
Robert Wheeler Lane
Temple University Press, 1995
Outstanding Academic Title, Choice, 1995 "What makes Lane's approach unique is that he weaves together different perspectives on the nature of school into a very colorful but informative and lucid tapestry that seeks the outer limits of free expression within the boundaries of the school context, always with an eye toward promoting the goal of inculcation of values, a worthy end for students and school officials alike." --Samuel M. Davis, Allen Post Professor of Law, University of Georgia *In a 1969 landmark case, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that the suspension of student for protesting the Vietnam War violated the First Amendment. *In 1972, the U.S. court of appeals upheld the suspension of black high school students for protesting the playing of "Dixie" at a pep rally. *In 1986, a U.S. district court ruled that the suspension of a student for directing a vulgar gesture at one of his school teachers in a fast-food restaurant was unconstitutional. On what grounds do public school students merit First Amendment protection? These three examples illustrate the broad range of litigation that has attempted to answer this question. Robert Wheeler Lane reviews the obstacles of this important issue and suggests a mix of protection and autonomy for students. Pulling together evidence about the aims of public education, the changing legal status of children, and the values underlying freedom of expression, Lane debates the relationship between constitutional litigation and the dual pursuits of academic excellence and classroom order. Ultimately, utilizing both lower court and Supreme Court decisions, he finds that independent student expression deserves considerable constitutional protection; student expression assisted by school officials (such as school-funded student newspapers) should be subject to some control; and nonstudent expression (such as a school's selection of library books) should be left largely to the school's discretion. His conclusions suggest that in forging First Amendment protection for public school students, strongly held positions need not be extreme.
[more]

front cover of Beyond Timbuktu
Beyond Timbuktu
An Intellectual History of Muslim West Africa
Ousmane Oumar Kane
Harvard University Press, 2016

Renowned for its madrassas and archives of rare Arabic manuscripts, Timbuktu is famous as a great center of Muslim learning from Islam’s Golden Age. Yet Timbuktu is not unique. It was one among many scholarly centers to exist in precolonial West Africa. Beyond Timbuktu charts the rise of Muslim learning in West Africa from the beginning of Islam to the present day, examining the shifting contexts that have influenced the production and dissemination of Islamic knowledge—and shaped the sometimes conflicting interpretations of Muslim intellectuals—over the course of centuries.

Highlighting the significant breadth and versatility of the Muslim intellectual tradition in sub-Saharan Africa, Ousmane Kane corrects lingering misconceptions in both the West and the Middle East that Africa’s Muslim heritage represents a minor thread in Islam’s larger tapestry. West African Muslims have never been isolated. To the contrary, their connection with Muslims worldwide is robust and longstanding. The Sahara was not an insuperable barrier but a bridge that allowed the Arabo-Berbers of the North to sustain relations with West African Muslims through trade, diplomacy, and intellectual and spiritual exchange.

The West African tradition of Islamic learning has grown in tandem with the spread of Arabic literacy, making Arabic the most widely spoken language in Africa today. In the postcolonial period, dramatic transformations in West African education, together with the rise of media technologies and the ever-evolving public roles of African Muslim intellectuals, continue to spread knowledge of Islam throughout the continent.

[more]

front cover of Beyond Winning
Beyond Winning
National Scholarship Competitions and the Student Experience
Suzanne McCray
University of Arkansas Press, 2005
Each year thousands of students apply for competitive national and international scholarships such as the Rhodes, Marshall, Gates Cambridge, and Fulbright. The competition for these awards is intense, and students look to scholarship advisors for support. Many universities have created an office or designated part of an office to assist these students, which has provided greater access for students who may not have applied previously or successfully. It has also increased the competition. The twelve essays in this collection from the 2003 National Association of Fellowships Advisors Conference held at the University of Denver. Essays by the heads of the Rhodes, Marshall, Gates, and Truman Scholarship foundations provide a sense of the philosophy and direction of their programs. The essays provide information on new initiatives, insights into the history and significance of the programs, and insider tips for application and interview preparation. Other essays focus on the advising and application process from successful advisors at various universities, how the U.K. higher educational system differs from that in the United States, and the key issue of ethics in the application process. All the essays demonstrate that the scholarship application experience itself is a valuable one that is more about learning and service than it is about winning.
[more]

front cover of The Biden School and the Engaged University of Delaware, 1961-2021
The Biden School and the Engaged University of Delaware, 1961-2021
Daniel Rich
University of Delaware Press, 2023
This book reviews the history of the Joseph R. Biden, Jr. School of Public Policy and Administration from 1961 to 2021. The focus is on the school’s accomplishments over its first sixty years, how they were achieved, and why they are significant. The analysis describes the challenges and opportunities that shaped the school’s development and its emergence as one of the nation’s leading public affairs schools. What began in 1961 as an experimental program supported by a single external grant emerged six decades later as one of the nation’s leading comprehensive schools of public affairs. That transformation unfolded during one of the most dynamic periods in the history of higher education when the public purpose of universities was expanded. The history of the Biden School is a story of institutional innovation, perseverance, adaptation, and resilience.
[more]

front cover of Big Digital Humanities
Big Digital Humanities
Imagining a Meeting Place for the Humanities and the Digital
Patrik Svensson
University of Michigan Press, 2016
Big Digital Humanities has its origins in a series of seminal articles Patrik Svensson published in the Digital Humanities Quarterly between 2009 and 2012. As these articles were coming out, enthusiasm around Digital Humanities was acquiring a great deal of momentum and significant disagreement about what did or didn’t “count” as Digital Humanities work. Svensson’s articles provided a widely sought after omnibus of Digital Humanities history, practice, and theory. They were informative and knowledgeable and tended to foreground reportage and explanation rather than utopianism or territorial contentiousness. In revising his original work for book publication, Svensson has responded to both subsequent feedback and new developments.
 
Svensson’s own unique perspective and special stake in the Digital Humanities conversation comes from his role as director of the HUMlab at Umeå University. HUMlab is a unique collaborative space and Digital Humanities center, which officially opened its doors in 2000. According to its own official description, the HUMlab is an open, creative studio environment where “students, researchers, artists, entrepreneurs and international guests come together to engage in dialogue, experiment with technology, take on challenges and move scholarship forward.” It is this last element “moving scholarship forward” that Svensson argues is the real opportunity in what he terms the “big digital humanities,” or digital humanities as practiced in collaborative spaces like the HUMlab, and he is uniquely positioned to take an account of this evolving dimension of Digital Humanities practice.
 

[more]

front cover of Bilingual Deaf and Hearing Families
Bilingual Deaf and Hearing Families
Narrative Interviews
Barbara Bodner-Johnson
Gallaudet University Press, 2012

This study emphasizes the importance of family support for deaf members, particularly through the use of both American Sign Language (ASL) and spoken and/or written English. Research has shown how these factors influence such areas as a child’s development, performance in school, and relationships with brothers and sisters. In this volume, authors Barbara Bodner-Johnson and Beth S. Benedict concentrate on the vital, positive effects of bilingualism and how families that share their experiences with other families can enhance all of their children’s achievement and enrichment.

       Bilingual Deaf and Hearing Families: Narrative Interviews describes the experiences of ten families who have at least one deaf family member. In five of the families, the parents are hearing and they have a deaf child; two of the children in these families have cochlear implants. In three families, both the parents and children are deaf. In one family, the parents are deaf and their daughter is hearing; and in one family, the parents and one child are deaf and they all have cochlear implants, and the deaf child’s twin is hearing.

       The interviews were conducted in the families’ homes using set topics and questions. The family discussions cover a wide range of subjects: cochlear implants, where they live, their thoughts about family relationships, how they participate in the Deaf community, how they arrive at certain decisions, their children’s friendships, and the goals and resiliencies they have as a family.

[more]

front cover of The Birth of Head Start
The Birth of Head Start
Preschool Education Policies in the Kennedy and Johnson Administrations
Maris A. Vinovskis
University of Chicago Press, 2005
One of the most popular and enduring legacies of President Lyndon B. Johnson's Great Society programs, Project Head Start continues to support young children of low-income families-close to one million annually-by providing a range of developmental and educational services. Yet as Head Start reaches its fortieth anniversary, debates over the function and scope of this federal program persist. Although the program's importance is unquestioned across party lines, the direction of its future—whether toward a greater focus on school readiness and literacy or the continuation of a holistic approach-remains a point of contention.

Policymakers proposing to reform Head Start often invoke its origins to justify their position, but until now no comprehensive political history of the program has existed. Maris A. Vinovskis here provides an in-depth look at the nation's largest and best known—yet politically challenged—early education program. The Birth of Head Start sets the record straight on the program's intended aims, documenting key decisions made during its formative years. While previous accounts of Head Start have neglected the contributions of important participants such as federal education officials and members of Congress, Vinovskis's history is the first to consider the relationship between politics and policymaking and how this interaction has shaped the program. This thorough and incisive book will be essential for policymakers and legislators interested in prekindergarten education and will inform future discussions on early intervention services for disadvantaged children.
[more]

front cover of Bitter Milk
Bitter Milk
Women and Teaching
Madeleine R. Grumet
University of Massachusetts Press, 1988
The text is arranged in a pattern that mirrors Grumet's argument that women who teach make this passage between the so-called public and private worlds daily and that is also what we teach children to do. The chapters go back and forth between the experience of domesticity and the experience of teaching, between being with one's own children and being with the children of others, between being the child of one's own mother and the teacher of another mother's child, between feeling and form, family and colleagues.

The first and last chapters address the familial relations that fall under the category of reproduction, a frame designed to emphasize the relations of reproduction and their importance to educational theory. The chapters closest to this margin are those that address women's work in schools, and the juxtaposition is chosen to accentuate the dialectical relation of our public and private meanings. The middle chapters are the ones most directly concerned with curriculum, that provisional ground that Grumet is naming as our mediating space, the place where we can heal. The fundamental argument of this text is that knowledge evolves in human relationships.
[more]

front cover of Bitters in the Honey
Bitters in the Honey
Tales of Hope and Disappointment across Divides of Race and Time
Beth Roy
University of Arkansas Press, 1999
he story of what happened at Little Rock's Central High School in September of 1957 is one with which most Americans are familiar. Indeed, the image of Central High's massive double staircase—and of nine black teenagers climbing that staircase, clutching their schoolbooks, surrounded by National Guardsmen with fixed bayonets—has become wedded in the American consciousness to the history of the civil-rights struggle in this country. The world saw the drama at Central High as a cautionary tale about power and race. Drawing on oral histories, Beth Roy tells the story of Central High from a fresh angle. Her interviews with white alumni of Central High investigate the reasons behind their resistance to desegregation. The alumni, now near retirement age, discuss their lives since Central High and their present insecurities and resentments. The stories tell of the shaping of white identities in the latter half of the twentieth century, of dissatisfaction, even anger, that still lingers after forty years. Our country has not moved beyond matters of race: we have not left intolerance behind. To do so, Roy believes, we must stop demonizing people whose actions, historical or current, we do not fully understand. This elegantly written treatment of the Central High crisis is unique among studies done to date. It will help readers to better comprehend the complexity of racism, not only as it was evidenced at Central High in 1957, but as it continues to impact our lives today.
[more]

front cover of Black and Smart
Black and Smart
How Black High-Achieving Women Experience College
Adrianne Musu Davis
Rutgers University Press, 2023
Even academically talented students face challenges in college. For high-achieving Black women, their racial, gender, and academic identities intensify those issues. Inside the classroom, they are spotlighted and feel forced to be representatives for their identity groups. In campus life, they are isolated and face microaggressions from peers. Using intersectionality as a theoretical framework, Davis addresses the significance of the various identities of high-achieving Black women in college individually and collectively, revealing the ways institutional oppression functions at historically white institutions and in social interactions on and off campus. Based on interviews with collegiate Black women in honors communities, Black and Smart analyzes the experiences of academically talented Black undergraduate women navigating their social and academic lives at urban historically white institutions and offers strategies for creating more inclusive academic and social environments for talented undergraduates.
 
[more]

front cover of Black Boys Apart
Black Boys Apart
Racial Uplift and Respectability in All-Male Public Schools
Freeden Blume Oeur
University of Minnesota Press, 2018

How neoliberalism and the politics of respectability are transforming African American manhood

While single-sex public schools face much criticism, many Black communities see in them a great promise: that they can remedy a crisis for their young men. Black Boys Apart reveals triumphs, hope, and heartbreak at two all-male schools, a public high school and a charter high school, drawing on Freeden Blume Oeur’s ethnographic work. We meet young men who felt their schools empowered and emasculated them, parents who were frustrated with co-ed schools, teachers who helped pave the road to college, and administrators who saw in Black male academies the advantages of privatizing education.
 
While the two schools have distinctive histories and ultimately charted different paths, they were both shaped by the convergence of neoliberal ideologies and a politics of Black respectability. As Blume Oeur reveals, all-boys education is less a school reform initiative and instead joins a legacy of efforts to reform Black manhood during periods of stark racial inequality. Black male academies join long-standing attempts to achieve racial uplift in Black communities, but in ways that elevate exceptional young men and aggravate divisions within those communities.
 
Black Boys Apart shows all-boys schools to be an odd mix of democratic empowerment and market imperatives, racial segregation and intentional sex separation, strict discipline and loving care. Challenging narratives that endorse these schools for nurturing individual resilience in young Black men, this perceptive and penetrating ethnography argues for a holistic approach in which Black communities and their allies promote a collective resilience.
 
 

[more]

front cover of Black Deaf Students
Black Deaf Students
A Model for Educational Success
Carolyn E. Williamson
Gallaudet University Press, 2007

Contemporary research has identified resilience — the ability to rebound and learn despite obstacles and adversities — as a key element to success in school. Black Deaf Students: A Model for Educational Success searches out ways to develop, reinforce, and alter the factors that encourage resilience in African American deaf and hard of hearing students. To find the individual characteristics and outside influences that foster educational achievement, author Carolyn E. Williamson conducted extensive interviews with nine African American deaf and hard of hearing adults who succeeded in high school and postsecondary programs.

       Until now, the majority of studies of African American deaf and hard of hearing students concentrated upon their underachievement. The only success stories available involved high-achieving African American hearing students. To create an effective model in Black Deaf Students, Williamson focuses on the factors that contributed to her subjects’ successes in postsecondary programs, what they viewed as obstacles and how they overcame them, and their recommendations for facilitating graduation from postsecondary programs. Her work gives “voice” to a group rarely heard in research, which enables readers to view them as a heterogeneous rather than homogeneous group. Their stories provide vital information for parents, school personnel, community stakeholders, and those enrolled in education and mental health preparation programs. In addition, the insights about how these adults succeeded can be useful in facilitating positive outcomes for students who are going into two-year colleges, vocational training, and work settings.

[more]

front cover of Black Education in Alabama, 1865-1901
Black Education in Alabama, 1865-1901
Robert G. Sherer
University of Alabama Press, 2005
Explains and describes the development of black private and public, elementary, secondary, normal, and collegiate education in Alabama from emancipation to 1901

The study of education in Alabama is especially important in understanding black education throughout the United States since the most famous black school, Booker T. Washington's Tuskegee Institute, is located in Alabama and began as a state teachers’ training school. A history of black education in Alabama provides a test case of the frequently assumed dominance of Booker T. Washington and his plan of "industrial'' or vocational training in black education.
 
[more]

front cover of A Black Intellectual's Odyssey
A Black Intellectual's Odyssey
From a Pennsylvania Milltown to the Ivy League
Martin Kilson
Duke University Press, 2021
In 1969, Martin Kilson became the first tenured African American professor at Harvard University, where he taught African and African American politics for over thirty years. In A Black Intellectual's Odyssey, Kilson takes readers on a fascinating journey from his upbringing in the small Pennsylvania milltown of Ambler to his experiences attending Lincoln University—the country's oldest HBCU—to pursuing graduate study at Harvard before spending his entire career there as a faculty member. This is as much a story of his travels from the racist margins of twentieth-century America to one of the nation's most prestigious institutions as it is a portrait of the places that shaped him.

He gives a sweeping sociological tour of Ambler as a multiethnic, working-class company town while sketching the social, economic, and racial elements that marked everyday life. From narrating the area's history of persistent racism and the racial politics in the integrated schools to describing the Black church's role in buttressing the town's small Black community, Kilson vividly renders his experience of northern small-town life during the 1930s and 1940s.

At Lincoln University, Kilson's liberal political views coalesced as he became active in the local NAACP chapter. While at Lincoln and during his graduate work at Harvard, Kilson observed how class, political, and racial dynamics influenced his peers' political engagement, diverse career paths, and relationships with white people. As a young professor, Kilson made a point of assisting Harvard's African American students in adapting to life at a white institution.

Throughout his career, Kilson engaged in pioneering scholarship while mentoring countless students. A Black Intellectual's Odyssey features contributions from three of his students: a foreword by Cornel West and an afterword by Stefano Harney and Fred Moten.
[more]

front cover of Black Power on Campus
Black Power on Campus
The University of Illinois, 1965-75
Joy Ann Williamson
University of Illinois Press, 2003
Joy Ann Williamson charts the evolution of black consciousness on predominately white American campuses during the critical period between the mid-1960s and mid-1970s, with the Black student movement at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign serving as an illuminating microcosm of similar movements across the country.

Drawing on student publications of the late 1960s and early 1970s, as well as interviews with student activists, former administrators, and faculty, Williamson discusses the emergence of Black Power ideology, what constituted "blackness," and notions of self-advancement versus racial solidarity. Promoting an understanding of the role of black youth in protest movements, Black Power on Campus is an important contribution to the literature on African American liberation movements and the reform of American higher education.

[more]

front cover of Black Space
Black Space
Negotiating Race, Diversity, and Belonging in the Ivory Tower
Sherry L. Deckman
Rutgers University Press, 2022
Protests against racial injustice and anti-Blackness have swept across elite colleges and universities in recent years, exposing systemic racism and raising questions about what it means for Black students to belong at these institutions. In Black Space, Sherry L. Deckman takes us into the lives of the members of the Kuumba Singers, a Black student organization at Harvard with racially diverse members, and a self-proclaimed safe space for anyone but particularly Black students. Uniquely focusing on Black students in an elite space where they are the majority, Deckman provides a case study in how colleges and universities might reimagine safe spaces. Through rich description and sharing moments in students’ everyday lives, Deckman demonstrates the possibilities and challenges Black students face as they navigate campus culture and the refuge they find in this organization. This work illuminates ways administrators, faculty, student affairs staff, and indeed, students themselves, might productively address issues of difference and anti-Blackness for the purpose of fostering critically inclusive campus environments.
 
[more]

front cover of The Black Struggle for Public Schooling in Nineteenth-Century Illinois
The Black Struggle for Public Schooling in Nineteenth-Century Illinois
Robert L. McCaul
Southern Illinois University Press, 1987

In the pre-Civil War and Civil War periods the Illinois black code deprived blacks of suffrage and court rights, and the Illinois Free Schools Act kept most black children out of public schooling. But, as McCaul documents, they did not sit idly by. They applied the concepts of “bargaining power” (rewarding, punishing, and dialectical) and the American ideal of “community” to participate in winning two major victories during this era.

By the use of dialectical power, exerted mainly via John Jones’ tract, The Black Laws of Illinois, they helped secure the repeal of the state’s black code; by means of punishing power, mainly through boycotts and ‘‘invasions,’’ they exerted pressures that brought a cancellation of the Chicago public school policy of racial segregation.

McCaul makes clear that the blacks’ struggle for school rights is but one of a number of such struggles waged by disadvantaged groups (women, senior citizens, ethnics, and immigrants). He postulates a “stage’’ pattern for the history of the black struggle—a pattern of efforts by federal and state courts to change laws and constitutions, followed by efforts to entice, force, or persuade local authorities to comply with the laws and constitutional articles and with the decrees of the courts.

[more]

front cover of Black Students in the Ivory Tower
Black Students in the Ivory Tower
African American Student Activism at the University of Pennsylvania, 1967-1990
Wayne C. Glasker
University of Massachusetts Press, 2002
In the late 1960s and early 1970s, the number of African American undergraduates at the University of Pennsylvania grew dramatically. This book describes the circumstances surrounding the university's decision to increase its black enrollment and the consequences that followed. Focusing on the role of black student activism, Wayne C. Glasker traces the trajectory of controversy and debate over such issues as assimilation, integration, black nationalism, and cultural pluralism on a single university campus.

Glasker begins his study in the late 1960s, when the university's expansion into a predominantly black Philadelphia neighborhood precipitated a massive sit-in and protest. In response, Penn accelerated the process of admitting more black students, doubling the number of black matriculants by September 1969. Many came from inner city public high schools with backgrounds, ideas, and interests far different from those of the affluent middle- and upper-class white students who constituted the majority of the undergraduate population. As a result, the next decade was marked by recurrent tension and conflict, as black students at Penn rejected assimilation and agitated successfully for the creation of a variety of institutions that recognized their needs. These included an Afro-American studies program, a residence for students interested in black culture, and a Black Student League. Following a 1978 sit-in, they won a demand for an Inter-cultural Center and formed the United Minorities Council, and in 1986 they joined with white activists to press the university to divest its holdings from companies doing business in South Africa.

Throughout the book Glasker interweaves two parallel stories: that of an Ivy League university wrestling with questions of diversity, compensatory education, and the meaning of merit and qualification; and that of black students grappling with issues of assimilation, separatism, and cultural pluralism. In the end, he argues, the students sought to preserve their own distinctive ethnic culture, identity, and heritage while pursuing economic upward mobility. Rather than separatism, they aspired to a form of biculturalism that involved economic empowerment without cultural assimilation.
[more]

front cover of Black Studies, Rap, and the Academy
Black Studies, Rap, and the Academy
Houston A. Baker Jr.
University of Chicago Press, 1993
In this explosive book, Houston Baker takes stock of the current state of Black Studies in the university and outlines its responsibilities to the newest form of black urban expression—rap. A frank, polemical essay, Black Studies, Rap, and the Academy is an uninhibited defense of Black Studies and an extended commentary on the importance of rap. Written in the midst of the political correctness wars and in the aftermath of the Los Angeles riots, Baker's meditation on the academy and black urban expression has generated much controversy and comment from both ends of the political spectrum.
[more]

front cover of The Blackboard and the Bottom Line
The Blackboard and the Bottom Line
Why Schools Can't Be Businesses
Larry Cuban
Harvard University Press, 2007

"Ford Motor Company would not have survived the competition had it not been for an emphasis on results. We must view education the same way," the U.S. Secretary of Education declared in 2003. But is he right? In this provocative new book, Larry Cuban takes aim at the alluring cliché that schools should be more businesslike, and shows that in its long history in business-minded America, no one has shown that a business model can be successfully applied to education.

In this straight-talking book, one of the most distinguished scholars in education charts the Gilded Age beginnings of the influential view that American schools should be organized to meet the needs of American businesses, and run according to principles of cost-efficiency, bottom-line thinking, and customer satisfaction.

Not only are schools by their nature not businesslike, Cuban argues, but the attempt to run them along business lines leads to dangerous over-standardization--of tests, and of goals for our children. Why should we think that there is such a thing as one best school? Is "college for all" achievable--or even desirable? Even if it were possible, do we really want schools to operate as bootcamps for a workforce? Cuban suggests that the best business-inspired improvement for American education would be more consistent and sustained on-the-job worker training, tailored for the job to be done, and business leaders' encouragement--and adoption--of an ethic of civic engagement and public service.

[more]

front cover of Blacked Out
Blacked Out
Dilemmas of Race, Identity, and Success at Capital High
Signithia Fordham
University of Chicago Press, 1996
This innovative portrait of student life in an urban high school focuses on the academic success of African-American students, exploring the symbolic role of academic achievement within the Black community and investigating the price students pay for attaining it. Signithia Fordham's richly detailed ethnography reveals a deeply rooted cultural system that favors egalitarianism and group cohesion over the individualistic, competitive demands of academic success and sheds new light on the sources of academic performance. She also details the ways in which the achievements of sucessful African-Americans are "blacked out" of the public imagination and negative images are reflected onto black adolescents. A self-proclaimed "native" anthropologist, she chronicles the struggle of African-American students to construct an identity suitable to themselves, their peers, and their families within an arena of colliding ideals. This long-overdue contribution is of crucial importance to educators, policymakers, and ethnographers.
[more]

front cover of Blaming Teachers
Blaming Teachers
Professionalization Policies and the Failure of Reform in American History
Diana D'Amico Pawlewicz
Rutgers University Press, 2020
Winner of the 2021 Society of Professors of Education Outstanding Book Award

Historically, Americans of all stripes have concurred that teachers were essential to the success of the public schools and nation. However, they have also concurred that public school teachers were to blame for the failures of the schools and identified professionalization as a panacea.
 
In Blaming Teachers, Diana D'Amico Pawlewicz reveals that historical professionalization reforms subverted public school teachers’ professional legitimacy. Superficially, professionalism connotes authority, expertise, and status. Professionalization for teachers never unfolded this way; rather, it was a policy process fueled by blame where others identified teachers’ shortcomings. Policymakers, school leaders, and others understood professionalization measures for teachers as efficient ways to bolster the growing bureaucratic order of the public schools through regulation and standardization. Beginning in the mid-nineteenth century with the rise of municipal public school systems and reaching into the 1980s, Blaming Teachers traces the history of professionalization policies and the discourses of blame that sustained them.
[more]

front cover of Blockchain Foundations
Blockchain Foundations
For the Internet of Value
Mary C. Lacity
Epic Books, 2020
While there are many books on blockchains, this guide focuses on blockchain applications for business. The target audience is business students, professionals, and managers who want to learn about the overall blockchain landscape — the investments, the size of markets, major players and the global reach — as well as the potential business value of blockchain applications and the challenges that must be overcome to achieve that value. We present use cases and derive action principles for building enterprise blockchain capabilities. Readers will learn enough about the underlying technologies to speak intelligently to technology experts in the space, as the guide also covers the blockchain protocols, code bases and provides a glossary of terms. We use this guide as the textbook for our undergraduate and graduate Blockchain Fundamentals course at the University of Arkansas. Other professors interested in adopting this guide for instructional purposes are welcome to contact the author for supporting instructional materials.
[more]

front cover of Blow Up the Humanities
Blow Up the Humanities
Toby Miller
Temple University Press, 2012

A short, sharp, and provocative book, Blow Up the Humanities has esteemed scholar Toby Miller declaring that there are two humanities in the United States. One is the venerable, powerful humanities of private universities; the other is the humanities of state schools, which focus mainly on job prospects. There is a class division between the two—both in terms of faculty research and student background—and it must end.

Miller critically lays waste to the system. He examines scholarly publishing as well as media and cultural studies to show how to restructure the humanities by studying popular cultural phenomena, like video games. Miller ultimately insists that these two humanities must merge in order to survive and succeed in producing an aware and concerned citizenry.

[more]

logo for Temple University Press
Body Factory
Exploiting University Athletes' Healthcare for Profit in the Training Room
Kaitlin Pericak
Temple University Press, 2025

front cover of Boo-Tickle Tales
Boo-Tickle Tales
Not-So-Scary Stories for Ages 4-9
Lynette Ford & Sherry Norfolk
Parkhurst Brothers, Inc., 2016

 The attraction of scary stories begins very early in childhood, but the fortitude to be truly scared comes later. So where are the scary stories for young children? Educators and storytellers, Ford and Norfolk deliver a silly and gently spooky collection of jumps, laughs, interactive moments, and mostly happy endings to satisfy the curious-for-creepy Pre-K through Grade 4 set. Their weirdly funny and gently scary collection of adapted folktales, original stories, and verses will delight those who enjoy being surprised more than being scared. 

This book is for: 

Parents, grandparents, and other mentors who work with children developmentally aged 4 to 9 

Educators, librarians and others serving young listeners, who like silly and creepy stories, but may not like very scary material 

Audiences ages 4-9, who like creepy but not-too-scary stories. 

Twelve pen-and-ink drawings based on folktale motifs complement the fanciful tone of the book.

[more]

front cover of The Boundaries of Pluralism
The Boundaries of Pluralism
The World of the University of Michigan’s Jewish Students from 1897 to 1945
Andrei S. Markovits & Kenneth Garner
Michigan Publishing Services, 2020
This is a highly original and intriguing book which should attract a good deal of interest. It is based on exhaustive, quite remarkable archival research and includes a sophisticated prosopographical analysis of Jewish enrollment over several decades. Most intriguing, the book unearths hitherto unknown information about the growing influence on University policy of the famously anti-Semitic Henry Ford and figures in Ford’s orbit. Despite the contentious nature of their research topic, the authors maintain a consistently detached, non-judgmental, yet intellectually incisive perspective. The result is an entirely credible, well written, often quite exciting chronicle of a minority, most of whose families had been in America for only one or two generations, striving to define themselves, and the response of the Gentile community to those aspirations. Given the centrality of immigration politics in the US and Europe at the present moment, this story has wide contemporary relevance.
Victor Lieberman,
 Raoul Wallenberg Distinguished University Professor of History, 
University of Michigan
 
This is a deeply researched and strikingly original study of Jewish students at an important place in an important time. Its focus on both the lives of the students and their institutional situation yields deep insight and new, subtle understandings of the complicated interactions of Jewish identity and anti-semitism in a state which, in those years, was the virtual capital of the latter and at a university which struggled with both. Required reading for anyone interested in this topic.
Terrence J. McDonald,
 Arthur F. Thurnau Professor, University of Michigan,
 and Director, Bentley Historical Library
[more]

front cover of The Boy on the Beach
The Boy on the Beach
Building Community through Play
Vivian Gussin Paley
University of Chicago Press, 2010

Four-year-old Eli plays alone at the shore, inventing dramas out of sand and water. He is Builder, Fireman, Protector, and Scout, overcoming waves and conquering monsters. Enter Marianne and doll, Mother and Baby, eager to redefine Eli as a good father and homesteader. Their separate visions intertwine in a search for a common ground on which howling wolves and butterfly sisters can learn to understand and need one another.

What can the richly imagined, impressively adaptable fantasy world of these children tell us about childhood, development, education, and even life itself? For fifty years, teacher and writer Vivian Gussin Paley has been exploring the imagery, language, and lore of young children, asking the questions they ask of themselves.

In The Boy on the Beach she continues to do so, going deeper into the mystery of play as she follows Eli and Marianne through the kindergarten year, finding more answers and more questions. How does their teacher, Mrs. Olson, manage to honor and utilize the genius of play to create an all-inclusive community in which boys and girls like each other and listen to each other’s stories? Why is Paley’s fellow teacher Yu-ching in Taiwan certain that her children pretend to be kittens in order to become necessary to the group? And why do teachers in London see their childrens’ role-playing as the natural end to loneliness in the school community?

Rich with the words of children and teachers themselves, The Boy on the Beach is vintage Paley, a wise and provocative appreciation of the importance of play and enduring curiosity about the nature of childhood and the imagination.

[more]

front cover of The Boy Who Would Be a Helicopter
The Boy Who Would Be a Helicopter
Vivian Gussin Paley
Harvard University Press, 1991

How does a teacher begin to appreciate and tap the rich creative resources of the fantasy world of children? What social functions do story playing and storytelling serve in the preschool classroom? And how can the child who is trapped in private fantasies be brought into the richly imaginative social play that surrounds him?

The Boy Who Would Be a Helicopter focuses on the challenge posed by the isolated child to teachers and classmates alike in the unique community of the classroom. It is the dramatic story of Jason—the loner and outsider—and of his ultimate triumph and homecoming into the society of his classmates. As we follow Jason’s struggle, we see that the classroom is indeed the crucible within which the young discover themselves and learn to confront new problems in their daily experience.

Vivian Paley recreates the stage upon which children emerge as natural and ingenious storytellers. She supplements these real-life vignettes with brilliant insights into the teaching process, offering detailed discussions about control, authority, and the misuse of punishment in the preschool classroom. She shows a more effective and natural dynamic of limit-setting that emerges in the control children exert over their own fantasies. And here for the first time the author introduces a triumvirate of teachers (Paley herself and two apprentices) who reflect on the meaning of events unfolding before them.

[more]

front cover of Boys and Girls
Boys and Girls
Superheroes in the Doll Corner
Vivian Gussin Paley
University of Chicago Press, 2014
With the publication of Boys and Girls in 1984, Vivian Gussin Paley took readers inside a kindergarten classroom to show them how boys and girls play—and how, by playing and fantasizing in different ways, they work through complicated notions of gender roles and identity. The children’s own conversations, stories, playacting, and scuffles are interwoven with Paley’s observations and accounts of her vain attempts to alter their stereotyped play. Thirty years later, the superheroes and princesses are still here, but their doll corners and block areas are fast disappearing from our kindergartens. This new edition of Paley’s classic book reignites issues that are more important than ever for a new generation of students, parents, and teachers.
[more]

front cover of Boys and Girls
Boys and Girls
Superheroes in the Doll Corner
Vivian Gussin Paley
University of Chicago Press, 1984
"Paley has a sharp ear for the rhythm and inflections of childhood. Her vignettes give us a revealing glimpse into children's inner lives, and her discussion of her own discomfort with boy's play and approval of that of girls raises and important issue."—Carole Wade, Psychology Today

"I will admit my biases up front: having a three-year old daughter of my own made it impossible for this book to be anything but fun to read. I dare anyone who enjoys children not to enjoy this story about stories, this narrative about narratives."—Jerry Powell, Winterthur Portfolio
[more]

front cover of Boys at Home
Boys at Home
Discipline, Masculinity, and “The Boy-Problem” in Nineteenth-Century American Literature
Ken Parille
University of Tennessee Press, 2009

In this groundbreaking book, Ken Parille seeks to do for nineteenth-century boys what the past three decades of scholarship have done for girls: show how the complexities of the fiction and educational materials written about them reflect the lives they lived. While most studies of nineteenth-century boyhood have focused on post-Civil War male novelists, Parille explores a broader archive of writings by male and female authors, extending from 1830-1885.

Boys at Home offers a series of arguments about five pedagogical modes: play-adventure, corporal punishment, sympathy, shame, and reading. The first chapter demonstrates that, rather than encouraging boys to escape the bonds of domesticity, scenes of play in boys’ novels reproduce values associated with the home. Chapter 2 argues that debates about corporal punishment are crucial sources for the culture’s ideas about gender difference and pedagogical practice. In chapter 3, “The Medicine of Sympathy,” Parille examines the affective nature of mother-daughter and mother-son bonds, emphasizing the special difficulties that “boy-nature” posed for women. The fourth chapter uses boys’ conduct literature and Louisa May Alcott’s Little Women – the preeminent chronicle of girlhood in the century – to investigate not only Alcott’s fictional representations of shame-centered discipline but also pervasive cultural narratives about what it means to “be a man.” Focusing on works by Lydia Sigourney and Francis Forrester, the final chapter considers arguments about the effects that fictional, historical, and biographical narratives had on a boy’s sense of himself and his masculinity.

Boys at Home is an important contribution to the emerging field of masculinity studies. In addition, this provocative volume brings new insight to the study of childhood, women’s writing, and American culture.

Ken Parille is assistant professor of English at East Carolina University. His articles have appeared in Children’s Literature, Tulsa Studies in Women’s Literature, Papers on Language and Literature, and Children’s Literature Association Quarterly.


 

[more]

front cover of Brave New Words
Brave New Words
How Literature Will Save the Planet
Ammons, Elizabeth
University of Iowa Press, 2010

The activist tradition in American literature has long testified to the power of words to change people and the power of people to change the world, yet in recent years many professional humanists have chosen to distract themselves with a postmodern fundamentalism of indeterminacy and instability rather than engage with social and political issues. Throughout her bold and provocative call to action, Elizabeth Ammons argues that the responsibility now facing humanists is urgent: inside and outside academic settings, they need to revive the liberal arts as a progressive cultural force that offers workable ideas and inspiration in the real-world struggle to achieve social and environmental justice.
      Brave New Words challenges present and future literary scholars and teachers to look beyond mere literary critique toward the concrete issue of social change and how to achieve it. Calling for a profound realignment of thought and spirit in the service of positive social change, Ammons argues for the continued importance of multiculturalism in the twenty-first century despite attacks on the concept from both right and left. Concentrating on activist U.S. writers—from ecocritics to feminists to those dedicated to exposing race and class biases, from Jim Wallis and Cornel West to Winona LaDuke and Paula Moya and many others—she calls for all humanists to link their work to the progressive literature of the last half century, to insist on activism in the service of positive change as part of their mission, and to teach the power of hope and action to their students.
      As Ammons clearly demonstrates, much of American literature was written to expose injustice and motivate readers to work for social transformation. She challenges today’s academic humanists to address the issues of hope and purpose by creating a practical activist pedagogy that gives students the knowledge to connect their theoretical learning to the outside world. By relying on the transformative power of literature and replacing nihilism and powerlessness with conviction and faith, the liberal arts can offer practical, useful inspiration to everyone seeking to create a better world.

[more]

front cover of Breaking New Ground for SLIFE
Breaking New Ground for SLIFE
The Mutually Adaptive Learning Paradigm
Andrea DeCapua and Helaine W. Marshall
University of Michigan Press, 2023

In its second edition, Breaking New Ground for SLIFE builds on its model for supporting students who are new to English and may have experienced a disruption in their schooling. The practices presented in this book emerge from the belief that education for students with limited or interrupted formal education, also known as SLIFE, should not be remedial but should build on the students’ prior learning experiences and existing areas of knowledge. This second edition has been significantly updated, informed by recent research in the field, feedback from teachers, and new scholarly treatments of the topic. Breaking New Ground for SLIFE, second edition, explores the MALP approach, highlights how technology can be incorporated into classroom activities, and includes actual MALP projects implemented by MALP-trained teachers of both young and adolescent learners. In addition, the authors provide a newly revised MALP Teacher Planning Checklist.

By reading Breaking New Ground for SLIFE, educators will:

- Further develop their understanding of the needs of students with limited or interrupted formal education (SLIFE)
- ​Learn about the Mutually Adaptive Learning Paradigm (MALP) and how to integrate it into their classrooms
- Discover and learn about the MALP instructional approach and how to use it to develop a project-based curriculum using examples from teachers in the field
[more]

logo for Harvard University Press
Breaking the Bonds of Corruption
From Academic Dishonesty to Informal Business Practices in Post-Soviet Ukraine
Elena Denisova-Schmidt
Harvard University Press
In Breaking the Bonds of Corruption, Elena Denisova-Schmidt takes a broad view of corruption and its prevalence in global societies, using the case of Ukraine to examine practices that are considered corrupt in historical, social, and economic perspectives. She investigates corrupt behavior in higher education, both in Ukraine and internationally, as well as reliance on corruption in Ukrainian business. For both areas, the author relies on studies and polling that she and her colleagues administered at a number of Ukrainian universities and with Ukrainian businesses. This is the first English-language book dedicated to examining corruption as a widespread social phenomenon in post-Soviet Ukraine and makes an important contribution to the maturing study of informal practices in Ukraine and the region.
[more]

logo for Harvard University Press
Breaking the Bonds of Corruption
From Academic Dishonesty to Informal Business Practices in Post-Soviet Ukraine
Elena Denisova-Schmidt
Harvard University Press
In Breaking the Bonds of Corruption, Elena Denisova-Schmidt takes a broad view of corruption and its prevalence in global societies, using the case of Ukraine to examine practices that are considered corrupt in historical, social, and economic perspectives. She investigates corrupt behavior in higher education, both in Ukraine and internationally, as well as reliance on corruption in Ukrainian business. For both areas, the author relies on studies and polling that she and her colleagues administered at a number of Ukrainian universities and with Ukrainian businesses. This is the first English-language book dedicated to examining corruption as a widespread social phenomenon in post-Soviet Ukraine and makes an important contribution to the maturing study of informal practices in Ukraine and the region.
[more]

front cover of Brian Simon and the Struggle for Education
Brian Simon and the Struggle for Education
Gary McCulloch, Antonio Canales, and Hsiao-Yuh Ku
University College London, 2023
The first full-length study of the life and career of Brian Simon (1915–2002), a leading Marxist intellectual and historian of education in twentieth-century Britain.

Using documentary sources that have only recently become publicly available, this book reveals the remarkably broad range of Brian Simon’s life as a student, soldier, schoolteacher, Communist Party activist, educational academic, campaigner, and reformer. In a sympathetic biography that retains critical distance, the authors analyze Simon’s contribution to Marxism and the Communist Party, explore the influence of both on his work as a historian of education, and trace the significance of his Marxist beliefs, political associations, and historical approaches to the cause of educational reform.

In so doing, they consider the full nature and limitations of Simon’s achievements in his struggle for education. Unlike many Marxist scholars, he remained loyal to the Communist Party in the 1950s, which damaged his reputation as a public intellectual. Nevertheless, his support for comprehensive education helped to promote egalitarian educational reforms in Britain, although he was later unable to provide sufficient resistance to the 1988 Education Reform Act and to a decline in the position of comprehensive schools.

In all this, the significance of Simon’s family, and especially his relationship with his wife Joan, is brought to the fore. Joan and Brian forged a formidable sixty-year partnership in politics and the Communist Party as well as in life, a partnership that lasted until Brian’s death in January 2002. 
 
[more]

front cover of Bricks and Mortar
Bricks and Mortar
The Making of a Real Education at the Stanford Online High School
Jeffrey Scarborough and Raymond Ravaglia
CSLI, 2014
The rise of online learning is rapidly transforming how and what teachers teach, and even who—or what—teachers are. In the midst of these changes, the characteristics that have historically defined a high-quality education are easily lost. Not only content knowledge, but also ways of thinking and habits of mind are the hallmarks of the well-educated individual, and these latter qualities are not so easily acquired online. Or are they?

This volume shows how a group of online-learning believers built the best high school in the world without laying a single brick: the Stanford Online High School (SOHS). By chronicling SOHS’s distinctive approach to curriculum, gifted education, and school community over SOHS’s first seven years, Bricks and Mortar makes the case that the dynamic use of technology and the best traditional methodologies in education are not, in fact, mutually exclusive. Indeed, while SOHS has redefined what is possible online, a great education is ultimately the product of an interactive community of teachers and students.
[more]

front cover of A Bridge of Stories
A Bridge of Stories
Risking it All to Connect Classrooms and Culture
Kristin Pedemonti
Parkhurst Brothers, Inc., 2017

“With openhearted generosity, Kristin shares not only the story of her amazing journey but complete lesson plans and valuable tips on inter-cultural work. She deepens our understanding of the culture and legends of Belize all the while imparting courage and a can-do philosophy that could truly change the world. Read and be inspired!”

—Diane Edgecomb, author of A Fire in My Heart: Kurdish Tales

[more]

logo for University of Chicago Press
Bridges to Knowledge
Foreign Students in Comparative Perspective
Elinor G. Barber, Philip G. Altbach, and Robert G. Myers
University of Chicago Press, 1984

front cover of Bridging Liberalism and Multiculturalism in American Education
Bridging Liberalism and Multiculturalism in American Education
Rob Reich
University of Chicago Press, 2002
What should the civic purposes of education be in a liberal and diverse society? Is there a tension between cultivating citizenship and respecting social diversity? What are the boundaries of parental and state authority over education?

Linking political theory with educational history and policy, Rob Reich offers provocative new answers to these questions. He develops a liberal theory of multicultural education in which the leading goal is the cultivation of individual autonomy in children. Reich draws out the policy implications of his theory through one of the first sustained considerations of homeschooling in American education. He also evaluates three of the most prominent trends in contemporary school reform—vouchers, charter schools, and the small school movement—and provides pedagogical recommendations that sharply challenge the reigning wisdom of many multicultural educators.

Written in clear and accessible language, this book will be of interest to political theorists, philosophers, educators, educational policymakers, and teachers.
[more]

front cover of Bridging Scholarship and Activism
Bridging Scholarship and Activism
Reflections from the Frontlines of Collaborative Research
Bernd Reiter
Michigan State University Press, 2015
This timely book brings together activist scholars from a number of disciplines (political science, geography, sociology, anthropology, and communications) to provide new insights into a growing trend in publicly engaged research and scholarship. Bridging Scholarship and Activism creatively redefines what constitutes activism without limiting it to a narrow range of practices. Acknowledging that the current conjuncture of neoliberal globalization has created constraints on as well as possibilities for activist scholarly engagement, the book argues that racism and its intersections with gender and class oppression are salient forces to be interrogated and confronted in the predicaments and struggles activist scholarship targets. The book’s ultimate goal is to create a decolonized and democratized forum in which activist scholars from the Global South converse and cross-fertilize ideas and projects with their counterparts from the United States and other North Atlantic metropolitan-based academy. The coeditors and contributors attempt to decenter hegemonic knowledge and to create some of the necessary (if not sufficient) conditions for a more pluriversal (rather than orthodox “universal”) context for producing enabling knowledge, without the naiveté and romanticism that has characterized earlier projects in critical and radical social science.

CONTENTS:
Introduction, Ulrich Oslender and Bernd Reiter
Part One. The Promises and Pitfalls of Collaborative Research
  • Of Academic Embeddedness: Communities of Choice and How to Make Sense of Activism and Research Abroad, Bernd Reiter
  • New Shapes of Revolution, Gustavo Esteva
  • The Accidental Activist Scholar: A Memoir on Reactive Boundary and Identity Work for Social Change within the Academy, Rob Benford
  • Leaving the Field: How to Write about Disappointment and Frustration in Collaborative Research, Ulrich Oslender
  • Invisible Heroes, Eshe Lewis
Part Two. Negotiating Racialized and Gendered Positionalities
  • El Muntuen America, Manuel Zapata Olivella
  • Activism as History Making: The Collective and the Personal in Collaborative Research with the Process of Black Communities in Colombia, Arturo Escobar
  • Out of Bounds: Negotiating Researcher Positionality in Brazil, Elizabeth Hordge-Freeman
  • Between Soapboxes and Shadows: Activism, Theory, and the Politics of Life and Death in Salvador, Bahia, Brazil, Christen A. Smith
  • State Violence and the Ethnographic Encounter: Feminist Research and Racial Embodiment, Keisha-Khan Y. Perry
  • The Challenges Resulting from Combining Scientific Production and Social-Political Activism in the Brazilian Academy, Fernando Conceição
  • The Challenge of Doing Applied/Activist Anti-Racist Anthropology in Revolutionary Cuba, Gayle L. McGarrity
  • Conclusion, Ulrich Oslender and Bernd Reiter
  • About the Authors
[more]

front cover of Bridging the Gap
Bridging the Gap
Perspectives on Nationally Competitive Scholarships
Suzanne McCray
University of Arkansas Press, 2019
Thousands of college students across the country apply each year for nationally and internationally competitive scholarships and grants. Different awards target different interests, career goals, and student qualifications. Advising students on how to choose the right award that will help launch them on their career path requires a nuanced understanding of scholarship opportunities. Bridging the Gap: Perspectives on Nationally Competitive Scholarships provides key information from scholarship foundations and seasoned advice from campus advisors critically important for the faculty and staff who support students applying for these awards. This book will be a great resource for anyone advising students.
[more]

front cover of Bridging the Gaps
Bridging the Gaps
College Pathways to Career Success
James E. Rosenbaum
Russell Sage Foundation, 2017
College-for-all has become the new American dream. Most high school students today express a desire to attend college, and 90% of on-time high school graduates enroll in higher education in the eight years following high school. Yet, degree completion rates remain low for non-traditional students—students who are older, low-income, or have poor academic achievement—even at community colleges that endeavor to serve them. What can colleges do to reduce dropouts? In Bridging the Gaps, education scholars James Rosenbaum, Caitlin Ahearn, and Janet Rosenbaum argue that when institutions focus only on bachelor’s degrees and traditional college procedures, they ignore other pathways to educational and career success. Using multiple longitudinal studies, the authors evaluate the shortcomings and successes of community colleges and investigate how these institutions can promote alternatives to BAs and traditional college procedures to increase graduation rates and improve job payoffs.
 
The authors find that sub-baccalaureate credentials—associate degrees and college certificates—can improve employment outcomes. Young adults who complete these credentials have higher employment rates, earnings, autonomy, career opportunities, and job satisfaction than those who enroll but do not complete credentials. Sub-BA credentials can be completed at community college in less time than bachelor’s degrees, making them an affordable option for many low-income students.
 
Bridging the Gaps shows that when community colleges overemphasize bachelor’s degrees, they tend to funnel resources into remedial programs, and try to get low-performing students on track for a BA. Yet, remedial programs have inconsistent success rates and can create unrealistic expectations, leading struggling students to drop out before completing any degree. The authors show that colleges can devise procedures that reduce remedial placements and help students discover unseen abilities, attain valued credentials, get good jobs, and progress on degree ladders to higher credentials.
 
To turn college-for-all into a reality, community college students must be aware of their multiple credential and career options. Bridging the Gaps shows how colleges can create new pathways for non-traditional students to achieve success in their schooling and careers.
 
[more]

front cover of A Brief Quadrivium
A Brief Quadrivium
Peter Ulrickson
Catholic University of America Press, 2023
Mathematics holds a central place in the traditional liberal arts. The four mathematical disciplines of the quadrivium-arithmetic, geometry, music, and astronomy-reveal their enduring significance in this work, which offers the first unified, textbook treatment of these four subjects. Drawing on fundamental sources including Euclid, Boethius, and Ptolemy, this presentation respects the proper character of each discipline while revealing the relations among these liberal arts, as well as their connections to later mathematical and scientific developments. This book makes the quadrivium newly accessible in a number of ways. First, the careful choice of material from ancient sources means that students receive a faithful, integral impression of the classical quadrivium without being burdened or confused by an unwieldy mass of scattered results. Second, the terminology and symbols that are used convey the real insights of older mathematical approaches without introducing needless archaism. Finally, and perhaps most importantly, the book is filled with hundreds of exercises. Mathematics must be learned actively, and the exercises structured to complement the text, and proportioned to the powers of a learner to offer a clear path by which students make quadrivial knowledge their own. Many readers can profit from this introduction to the quadrivium. Students in high school will acquire a sense of the nature of mathematical proof and become confident in using mathematical language. College students can discover that mathematics is more than procedure, while also gaining insight into an intellectual current that influenced authors they are already reading: authors such as Plato, Aristotle, Augustine, Thomas Aquinas, and Dante. All will find a practical way to grasp a body of knowledge that, if long neglected, is never out of date.
[more]

logo for University of Chicago Press
Bright College Years
Inside the American College Today
Anne Matthews
University of Chicago Press, 1998
As the price of higher education escalates and the number of Americans seeking a college degree steadily rises, it is now more important then ever to think about higher education in a different way. In Bright College Years, Anne Matthews paints a provocative yet evenhanded portrait of the American campus. With each chapter dedicated to sections of the academic year, Matthews puts students, professors, and administrators under the magnifying glass. She conducts her investigation in four-year universities all across the country, from enormous state schools like the University of Texas to specialized colleges like Cal Tech. Bright College Years is a fascinating look at the changing face of the American university that will be of interest to prospective students, their parents, and anyone interested in higher education.

"Matthews writes with sympathy and substantial understanding of the dilemmas colleges face these days."—Tara Fitzpatrick, Chicago Tribune

"A wide-ranging, well-written and lively account of contemporary academia."—Christian Wiman, Dallas Morning News

"Notable Book of the Year." New York Times

"An eye-opening, startling exposé;. . . . Matthews' energetic and well-written report provides a dismal yet concise insider portrait of college life."—Booklist
[more]

front cover of Bringing Montessori to America
Bringing Montessori to America
S. S. McClure, Maria Montessori, and the Campaign to Publicize Montessori Education
Gerald L. Gutek and Patricia A. Gutek
University of Alabama Press, 2016
2016 Choice Outstanding Academic Title!

Tells the little known story of the collaboration and clash between the indomitable educator Maria Montessori and the American publisher S. S. McClure over the launch of Montessori education in the United States
 
Born on the Adriatic, Montessori first entered the world stage in 1906 as the innovator of a revolutionary teaching method that creates an environment where children learn at their own pace and initiate skills like reading and writing in a spontaneous way. As her school in Rome swiftly attracted attention, curiosity, and followers, Montessori recruited disciples whom she immersed in a rigorous and detailed teacher-training regimen of her own creation.
 
McClure was an Irish-born media baron of America’s Gilded Age, best known as the founder and publisher of McClure’s Magazine. Against the backdrop of Theodore Roosevelt’s Bull Moose insurgency, the brilliant and mercurial McClure used his flagship publication as a vehicle to advance Progressive Party causes. After meeting in 1910, McClure and Montessori embarked on a five-year collaboration to introduce Montessori’s innovative teaching style in the United States.
 
Gerald and Patricia Gutek trace the dramatic arc of the partnership between the Italian teacher and American publisher united by a vision of educational change in the United States. After her triumphal lecture tour in 1913, Montessori, secure in her trust of her American partner, gave McClure her power of attorney and returned to Italy. The surge in popularity of Montessori education in America, however, deeply concerned Montessori, who had heretofore exerted total control over her method, apparatus, schools, and teacher training. The American entrepreneurial spirit, along with a desire to disseminate the Montessori method quickly, led to major conflicts between the Italian educator and American businesspeople, particularly McClure. Feeling betrayed, Montessori ended her relationship with her erstwhile collaborator.
 
Gutek and Gutek describe the fascinating story of this first wave of Montessori education in the United States, which did not sustain itself during Montessori’s lifetime. It would not be until the 1950s that Montessori education was revived with the successful establishment of Montessori academies throughout the United States.
[more]

logo for Harvard University Press
The British Academics
A. H. Halsey and M. A. Trow
Harvard University Press, 1971
How have academic men in Britain adapted themselves and their institutions to the changes in British society over the past century, and how are they meeting the rapid expansion of the university system that began in the 1960s? What have been the changes in the power and status of British academics and of the English “idea of the university” over these years, and what are the effects on British universities and university teachers of Britain's current move toward mass higher education? Two of today's finest sociologists of education answer these and other questions in a lively and insightful portrait of the changing function of the university in industrial society. Both authors are also students of the American educational system, and a comparative perspective is evident throughout.
[more]

front cover of Broke
Broke
The Racial Consequences of Underfunding Public Universities
Laura T. Hamilton and Kelly Nielsen
University of Chicago Press, 2021
Public research universities were previously able to provide excellent education to white families thanks to healthy government funding. However, that funding has all but dried up in recent decades as historically underrepresented students have gained greater access, and now less prestigious public universities face major economic challenges.

In Broke, Laura T. Hamilton and Kelly Nielsen examine virtually all aspects of campus life to show how the new economic order in public universities, particularly at two campuses in the renowned University of California system, affects students. For most of the twentieth century, they show, less affluent families of color paid with their taxes for wealthy white students to attend universities where their own offspring were not welcome. That changed as a subset of public research universities, some quite old, opted for a “new” approach, making racially and economically marginalized youth the lifeblood of the university. These new universities, however, have been particularly hard hit by austerity. To survive, they’ve had to adapt, finding new ways to secure funding and trim costs—but ultimately it’s their students who pay the price, in decreased services and inadequate infrastructure.

The rise of new universities is a reminder that a world-class education for all is possible. Broke shows us how far we are from that ideal and sets out a path for how we could get there.
[more]

front cover of The Broken Compass
The Broken Compass
Parental Involvement with Children's Education
Keith Robinson and Angel L. Harris
Harvard University Press, 2014

It seems like common sense that children do better when parents are actively involved in their schooling. But how well does the evidence stack up? The Broken Compass puts this question to the test in the most thorough scientific investigation to date of how parents across socioeconomic and ethnic groups contribute to the academic performance of K-12 children. The study's surprising discovery is that no clear connection exists between parental involvement and improved student performance.

Keith Robinson and Angel Harris assessed over sixty measures of parental participation, at home and in school. Some of the associations they found between socioeconomic status and educational involvement were consistent with past studies. Yet other results ran contrary to previous research and popular perceptions. It is not the case that Hispanic and African American parents are less concerned with education than other ethnic groups--or that "tiger parenting" among Asian Americans gets the desired results. In fact, many low-income parents across a wide spectrum want to be involved in their children's school lives, but they often receive little support from the school system. And for immigrant families, language barriers only worsen the problem.

While Robinson and Harris do not wish to discourage parents' interest, they believe that the time has come to seriously reconsider whether greater parental involvement can make much of a dent in the basic problems facing their children's education today. This provocative study challenges some of our most cherished beliefs about the role of family in educational success.

[more]

front cover of Brotherhood University
Brotherhood University
Black Men's Friendships and the Transition to Adulthood
Brandon A. Jackson
Rutgers University Press, 2024
How do young Black men navigate the transition to adulthood in an era of labor market precarity, an increasing emphasis on personal independence, and gendered racism? In Brotherhood University, Brandon A. Jackson utilizes longitudinal qualitative data to examine the role of emotions and social support among a group of young Black men as they navigate a “structural double bind” as college students and into early adulthood. While prevailing stereotypes portray young Black men as emotionally aloof, Jackson finds that the men invested in an emotion culture characterized by vulnerability, loyalty, and trust, which created a system of mutual social support, or brotherhood, among the group as they navigated college, prepared for the labor market, and experienced romantic relationships. Ten years later, as they managed the early stages of their careers and considered marriage and child-rearing, the men continued to depend on the emotional vulnerability and close relationships they forged in their college years.
 
[more]

logo for University of Chicago Press
Brothers in Grief
The Hidden Toll of Gun Violence on Black Boys and Their Schools
Nora Gross
University of Chicago Press
A heartbreaking account of grief, Black boyhood, and how we can support young people as they navigate loss.
 
JahSun, a dependable, much-loved senior at Boys’ Prep was just hitting his stride in the fall of 2017. He had finally earned a starting position on the varsity football team and was already weighing two college acceptances. Then, over Thanksgiving, tragedy struck. An altercation at his older sister’s home escalated into violence, killing the unarmed teenager in a hail of bullets. JahSun’s untimely death overwhelmed his entire community, sending his family, friends, and school into seemingly insurmountable grief. Worse yet, that spring two additional Boys’ Prep students would be shot to death in their neighborhood. JahSun and his peers are not alone in suffering the toll of gun violence, as every year in the United States teenagers die by gunfire in epidemic numbers, with Black boys most deeply affected.

Brothers in Grief closely attends to the neglected victims of youth gun violence: the suffering friends and classmates who must cope, mostly out of public view, with lasting grief and hidden anguish. Set at an ambitious urban high school for boys during the heartbreaking year following the death of JahSun, the book chronicles the consequences of untimely death on Black teen boys and on a school community struggling to recover. Sociologist Nora Gross tells the story of students attempting to grapple with unthinkable loss, inviting readers in to observe how they move through their days at school and on social media in the aftermath of their friends’ and classmates’ deaths. Gross highlights the discrepancy between their school’s educational mission and teachers’ and administrators’ fraught attempts to care for students’ emotional wellbeing. In the end, the school did not provide adequate space for grief, making it more difficult for students to heal, reengage with school, and imagine hopeful futures. Even so, supportive relationships deepened among students and formed across generations, offering promising examples of productive efforts to channel student grief into positive community change.

A searing testimony of our collective failure to understand the inner lives of our children in crisis, Brothers in Grief invites us all to wrestle with the hidden costs of gun violence on racial and educational inequity.
 
[more]

logo for University of Minnesota Press
Building a Curriculum for General Education
A Description of the General College Program
Ivol Spafford
University of Minnesota Press, 1943

Building a Curriculum for General Education was first published in 1943. Minnesota Archive Editions uses digital technology to make long-unavailable books once again accessible, and are published unaltered from the original University of Minnesota Press editions.

[more]

front cover of Building a New Educational State
Building a New Educational State
Foundations, Schools, and the American South
Joan Malczewski
University of Chicago Press, 2016
Building a New Educational State examines the dynamic process of black education reform during the Jim Crow era in North Carolina and Mississippi. Through extensive archival research, Joan Malczewski explores the initiatives of foundations and reformers at the top, the impact of their work at the state and local level, and the agency of southerners—including those in rural black communities—to demonstrate the importance of schooling to political development in the South. Along the way, Malczewski challenges us to reevaluate the relationships among political actors involved in education reform.
            Malczewski presents foundation leaders as self-conscious state builders and policy entrepreneurs who aimed to promote national ideals through a public system of education—efforts they believed were especially critical in the South. Black education was an important component of this national agenda. Through extensive efforts to create a more centralized and standard system of public education aimed at bringing isolated and rural black schools into the public system, schools became important places for expanding the capacity of state and local governance. Schooling provided opportunities to reorganize local communities and augment black agency in the process. When foundations realized they could not unilaterally impose their educational vision on the South, particularly in black communities, they began to collaborate with locals, thereby opening political opportunity in rural areas. Unfortunately, while foundations were effective at developing the institutional configurations necessary for education reform, they were less successful at implementing local programs consistently due to each state’s distinctive political and institutional context.
[more]

front cover of Building Bridges, Crossing Borders
Building Bridges, Crossing Borders
One Young Deaf Woman’s Education
Ann Darby Getty
Gallaudet University Press, 2014
Kyler Daniels was born in 1988 with a profound bilateral hearing loss. Her deafness went undetected for a year since newborn screening for hearing loss was not yet available. Kyler benefited, however, from the great support of her family and a string of excellent professionals in deaf education, including Ann Darby Getty, the author of this shared, experiential story.

       As soon as they realized that their daughter was deaf, Kyler’s parents, who were hearing, immediately began to learn sign language. They also engaged Darby, a parent/infant educator employed by the state school for the deaf, to work with Kyler. From the age of 13 months until Kyler’s college graduation 22 years later, Darby was involved in her education and development.

       Despite living in a rural area, Kyler enjoyed an array of services, including parent/infant education, sign language interaction/modeling, speech and language therapy, and also a cochlear implant. At the same time that she developed her speech skills, sign language continued to be a critically important facet of her communication. In grade school, she learned with other deaf students, while in high school, she worked successfully in mainstream classrooms with interpreters and notetakers. As a college graduate, gifted artist, and veterinarian’s assistant today, Kyler exemplifies how a balanced approach to deaf education, using all resources at hand, can achieve remarkable results. Her story serves as a model for parents of other deaf children and the professionals who work with them.
[more]

front cover of Building Drexel
Building Drexel
The University and Its City 1891-2016
Richardson Dilworth
Temple University Press, 2016

Published in conjunction with Drexel University’s 125th anniversary, Building Drexel chronicles the founding of the university by Anthony J. Drexel through to the present day. The editors and contributors create a prismatic discussion of the university and its evolution.

Richly illustrated chapters cover the architectural history of notable Drexel buildings; the role of Drexel in Philadelphia’s modern history; its Greek life; sports—particularly Drexel’s history in the Big 5; and each of the university’s schools and colleges. There is a history of the medical college and law school, plus the creation of new schools such as those of biomedical engineering, science and health systems.

Building Drexel also documents the civil rights history of Drexel and its urban planning history in relation to the racially diverse Powelton Village and Mantua neighborhoods it borders. This commemorative volume shows the development of the university both in the city and in the world.

Contributors include: Lloyd Ackert, Cordelia Frances Biddle, Paula Marantz Cohen, Donna Marie De Carolis, Roger Dennis, Gloria Donnelly, Kevin D. Egan, Alissa Falcone, David Fenske, John A. Fry, Stephen F. Gambescia, Marla J. Gold, Charles Haas, Kathy Harvatt, Daniel Johnson, Jeannine Keefer, Larry Keiser, Michael Kelley, Jason Ludwig, Jonson Miller, Julie Mostov, Danuta A. Nitecki, Anthony M. Noce, Steven J. Peitzman, David Raizman, Tiago Saraiva, Amy E. Slaton, Nathaniel Stanton, Virginia Theerman, Laura Valenti, James Wolfinger, Eric A. Zillmer, and the editors.

[more]

front cover of Building Internationalized Spaces
Building Internationalized Spaces
Second Language Perspectives on Developing Language and Cultural Exchange Programs in Higher Education
Edited by Matthew Allen, Estela Ene, and Kyle McIntosh
University of Michigan Press, 2022
This book provides case studies from several higher education contexts to represent the diverse ways that L2 specialists can build up programs and courses that contribute to their institutions' internationalization by promoting language and cultural exchange. 

This volume contributes to emerging interdisciplinary conversations in higher education about how to refine internationalization in terms of praxis and how to coordinate curricular and pedagogical efforts to achieve meaningful learning outcomes for all students. The chapters provide suggestions for how L2 specialists can reframe their work in their individual programs to help internationalize the entire university in ways that lead to improved learning outcomes for students at different points in their degree programs, including: 
  • Orientation programs (early arrival on campus, before classes start)
  • Language Center contexts (support during studies)
  • Volunteer programs for International Teaching Assistants (ITA) and undergraduate students
  • Graduate-level writing support structures
  • Instructional design (virtual learning spaces)
  • Virtual Partner programs (co-curricular) 
  • Intercultural composition (placement, interdisciplinary collaborations)
[more]

front cover of Building Momentum
Building Momentum
A Decade of Construction, Renovation, and Renewal across the University of Illinois System
University of Illinois. Foreword by Timothy J. Killeen
University of Illinois Press, 2023
A detailed look at the expansion and renewal taking place on the three U of I campuses

The University of Illinois System’s universities have undergone a dramatic transformation. This lavishly illustrated volume showcases the major capital projects and renovations dedicated to keeping facilities on the cutting edge while at the same time preserving history at the universities in Urbana-Champaign, Chicago, and Springfield. Fueled by an ambitious capital initiative launched in 2018, these essential and forward-looking changes include more than 500 projects valued at $4 billion over 10 years. The initiative harnesses a mix of innovative funding programs like public-private partnerships, thoughtful use of capital reserves and bonding authority, and generous state funding.

Covering completed and ongoing projects, Building Momentum offers a one- or two-page feature on each undertaking that covers its history and purpose while providing specific details about its unit, campus, architect, square footage or renovation size, budget, and LEED or other certifications. More than 100 architectural drawings and commissioned and historical photographs round out the descriptions.

[more]

front cover of Building Womanist Coalitions
Building Womanist Coalitions
Writing and Teaching in the Spirit of Love
Edited by Gary L. Lemons
University of Illinois Press, 2019
Over the last generation, the womanist idea--and the tradition blooming around it--has emerged as an important response to separatism, domination, and oppression. Gary L. Lemons gathers a diverse group of writers to discuss their scholarly and personal experiences with the womanist spirit of women of color feminisms. Feminist and womanist-identified educators, students, performers, and poets model the powerful ways that crossing borders of race, gender, class, sexuality, and nation-state affiliation(s) expands one's existence. At the same time, they bear witness to how the self-liberating theory and practice of women of color feminism changes one's life. Throughout, the essayists come together to promote an unwavering vein of activist comradeship capable of building political alliances dedicated to liberty and social justice. Contributors: M. Jacqui Alexander, Dora Arreola, Andrea Assaf, Kendra N. Bryant, Rudolph P. Byrd, Atika Chaudhary, Paul T. Corrigan, Fanni V. Green, Beverly Guy-Sheftall, Susan Hoeller, Ylce Irizarry, M. Thandabantu Iverson, Gary L. Lemons, Layli Maparyan, and Erica C. Sutherlin
[more]

front cover of Bullying
Bullying
The Social Destruction of Self
Laura Martocci
Temple University Press, 2015
In her forceful social history, Bullying, Laura Martocci explores the “bully culture” that has claimed national attention since the late 1990s. 
 
Moving beyond the identification of aggressive behaviors to an analysis of how and why we have arrived at a culture that thrives on humiliation, she critiques the social forces that gave rise to, and help maintain, bullying. Martocci’s analysis of gossip, laughter, stereotyping, and competition—dynamics that foment bullying and prompt responses of shame, violence, and depression—is positioned within a larger social narrative: the means by which we negotiate damaged social bonds and the role that bystanders play in the possibility of atonement, forgiveness, and redemption.  
 
Martocci’s fresh perspective on bullying positions shame as pivotal. She urges us to acknowledge the pain and confusion caused by social disgrace; to understand its social, psychological, and neurological nature; and to address it through narratives of loss, grief, and redemption—cultural supports that are already in place. 
[more]


Send via email Share on Facebook Share on Twitter