BiblioVault - Books about Learn

Anay's Will to Learn

A Woman's Education in the Shadow of the Maquiladoras

By Elaine Hampton with Anay Palomeque de Carrillo

University of Texas Press, 2013

The opening of free trade agreements in the 1980s caused major economic changes in Mexico and the United States. These economic activities spawned dramatic social changes in Mexican society. One young Mexican woman, Anay Palomeque de Carrillo, rode the tumultuous wave of these economic activities from her rural home in tropical southern Mexico to the factories in the harsh desert lands of Ciudad Juárez during the early years of the city’s notorious violence.

During her years as an education professor at the University of Texas at El Paso, author Elaine Hampton researched Mexican education in border factory (maquiladora) communities. On one trip across the border into Ciudad Juárez, she met Anay, who became her guide in uncovering the complexities of a factory laborer’s experiences in these turbulent times.

Hampton here provides an exploration of education in an era of dramatic social and economic upheaval in rural and urban Mexico. This critical ethnographic case study presents Anay’s experiences in a series of narrative essays addressing the economic, social, and political context of her world. This young Mexican woman leads us through Ciudad Juárez in its most violent years, into women’s experiences in the factories, around family and religious commitments as well as personal illness, and on to her achievement of an education through perseverance and creativity.

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Eating to Learn, Learning to Eat

The Origins of School Lunch in the United States

A. R. Ruis

Rutgers University Press, 2017

In Eating to Learn, Learning to Eat, historian A. R. Ruis explores the origins of American school meal initiatives to explain why it was (and, to some extent, has continued to be) so difficult to establish meal programs that satisfy the often competing interests of children, parents, schools, health authorities, politicians, and the food industry. Through careful studies of several key contexts and detailed analysis of the policies and politics that governed the creation of school meal programs, Ruis demonstrates how the early history of school meal program development helps us understand contemporary debates over changes to school lunch policies.

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Every Child Ready for School

Helping Adults Inspire Young Children to Learn

Dorothy Stoltz

American Library Association, 2013

Fighting to Learn

Popular Education and Guerilla War in El Salvador

Hammond, John L

Rutgers University Press, 1998

Popular education played a vital role in the twelve-year guerrilla war against the Salvadoran government. Fighting to Learn is a study of its pedagogy and politics. Inspired by Paulo Freire's literacy work in Brazil in the 1950s, popular education brought literacy to poor rural communities abandoned by the official education system and to peasant combatants in the guerrilla army. Those who had little education taught those who had none. Popular education taught people skills, raised the morale that sustained them in unequal combat, and stimulated the creation of an organizational network to hold them together.

Hammond interviewed more than 100 Salvadoran students and teachers for this book. He recounts their experiences in their own words, vividly conveying how they coped with the hardships of war and organized civilian communities politically to support a guerrilla insurgency. Fighting to Learn tells how poorly educated peasants overcame their sense of inferiority to discover that they could teach each other and work together in a common struggle.

First examining the Christian base communities through which popular education came to El Salvador, Hammond then discusses how guerrilla combatants, political prisoners, and refugees learned. He shows that education was both a pedagogical and a political practice: he discusses the training of completely inexperienced teachers, the linking of basic literacy skills with politics, and the organizing of communities. Fighting to Learn offers both a detailed account of an historical moment and a broad theoretical discussion of the relationship between education, community organizing, and the political process.

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Inequality and American Democracy

What We Know and What We Need to Learn

Lawrence R. Jacobs

Russell Sage Foundation, 2005

In the twentieth century, the United States ended some of its most flagrant inequalities. The "rights revolution" ended statutory prohibitions against women's suffrage and opened the doors of voting booths to African Americans. Yet a more insidious form of inequality has emerged since the 1970s—economic inequality—which appears to have stalled and, in some arenas, reversed progress toward realizing American ideals of democracy. In Inequality and American Democracy, editors Lawrence Jacobs and Theda Skocpol headline a distinguished group of political scientists in assessing whether rising economic inequality now threatens hard-won victories in the long struggle to achieve political equality in the United States. Inequality and American Democracy addresses disparities at all levels of the political and policy-making process. Kay Lehman Scholzman, Benjamin Page, Sidney Verba, and Morris Fiorina demonstrate that political participation is highly unequal and strongly related to social class. They show that while economic inequality and the decreasing reliance on volunteers in political campaigns serve to diminish their voice, middle class and working Americans lag behind the rich even in protest activity, long considered the political weapon of the disadvantaged. Larry Bartels, Hugh Heclo, Rodney Hero, and Lawrence Jacobs marshal evidence that the U.S. political system may be disproportionately responsive to the opinions of wealthy constituents and business. They argue that the rapid growth of interest groups and the increasingly strict party-line voting in Congress imperils efforts at enacting policies that are responsive to the preferences of broad publics and to their interests in legislation that extends economic and social opportunity. Jacob Hacker, Suzanne Mettler, and Dianne Pinderhughes demonstrate the feedbacks of government policy on political participation and inequality. In short supply today are inclusive public policies like the G.I. Bill, Social Security legislation, the War on Poverty, and the Voting Rights Act of 1965 that changed the American political climate, mobilized interest groups, and altered the prospect for initiatives to stem inequality in the last fifty years. Inequality and American Democracy tackles the complex relationships between economic, social, and political inequality with authoritative insight, showcases a new generation of critical studies of American democracy, and highlights an issue of growing concern for the future of our democratic society.

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Laboring to Learn

Women's Literacy and Poverty in the Post-Welfare Era

Lorna Rivera

University of Illinois Press, 2007

The American adult education system has become an alternative for school dropouts, with some state welfare policies requiring teen mothers and women without high school diplomas to participate in adult education programs to receive aid. Currently, low-income women of color are more likely to be enrolled in the lowest levels of adult basic education. Very little has been published about women's experiences in these mandatory programs and whether the programs reproduce the conditions that forced women to drop out in the first place.

Lorna Rivera bridges the gap with this important study, the product of ten years' active ethnographic research with formerly homeless women who participated in adult literacy education classes before and after welfare reform. She draws on rich interviews with organizers and participants in the Adult Learners Program at Project Hope, a women's shelter and community development organization in Boston's Dudley neighborhood, one of the poorest in the city.

Analyzing the web of ideological contradictions regarding "work first" welfare reform policies, Rivera argues that poverty is produced and reproduced when women with low literacy skills are pushed into welfare-to-work programs and denied education. She examines how various discourses about individual choice and self-sufficiency shape the purposes of literacy, how low-income women express a sense of personal responsibility for being poor, and how neoliberal ideologies and practices compromise the goals of critical literacy programs. Throughout this study, the voices and experiences of formerly homeless women challenge cultural stereotypes about poor women, showing in personal and structural terms how social and economic forces shape and restrict opportunities for low-income women of color.

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Listening to Learn

Sharon Grover

American Library Association, 2012

Sir John's Vision

What Do We Know? What Is There to Learn?

Davies

Templeton Press, 2018

In 2017, the year marking the 105th anniversary of the birth of Sir John Templeton, a group of scientists, scholars, and advisors who knew him personally gathered in Lyford Cay in the Bahamas. Their purpose: to discuss how the Foundation that bears his name could best extend his philanthropic vision into the twenty-first century.

This volume is a result of that meeting—a collection of thirteen essays written by experts in fields that most fascinated Sir John. The contributors assess the Foundation’s fidelity to its founder’s intent, chart promising avenues for future grantmaking, and champion Sir John’s contrarian mission of unlocking life’s deepest mysteries.

The members of the John Templeton Foundation are the custodians of Sir John’s vision—bold in its aspiration; humble in its approach—charged with using the tools of science to advance the frontiers of the spirit. May the essays collected here serve as inspiration as we carry that vision forward.

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Watch and Learn

Rhetorical Devices in Classroom Films after 1940

Eef Masson

Amsterdam University Press, 2012

Instructional films of the twentieth century, used to teach, train, inform, or advertise to their viewers, can provide historians and scholars of cinema studies with a wealth of information about both their creators and intended consumers. Watch and Learn focuses on the rhetoric used in these films, particularly the way in which the films used in the classroom relate to their audience, casting them both as film viewers and students. Providing the outline for a new methodology for interpreting and understanding the scripts and visuals of this peculiar brand of cinema, this book approaches the study of instructional films from a novel and illuminating perspective.

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A Well-Tempered Mind

Using Music to Help Children Listen and Learn

Peter Perret and Janet Fox

Dana Press, 2006

A Well-Tempered Mind investigates the intriguing connection between music education and brain development in children. Peter Perret and Janet Fox use the details of an innovative music education program for elementary school students to explore this fascinating relationship. A Well-Tempered Mind describes how the students of Bolton Elementary in Winston-Salem, North Carolina, and a local quintet worked together and then explains the ongoing research that focuses on how music engages the brain’s cognitive capabilities, from memory and language to emotional processing. Music, A Well-Tempered Mind reveals, is a universal language that expands young minds in essential ways.

“The authors put flesh on the feeling shared by all music teachers that the experience of music enhances thought and learning in unexpected directions, well beyond the simple act of enjoying the sound. … It’s exciting and necessary reading for all who are battling to ensure the place of music in the school curriculum."—Times Educational Supplement

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