front cover of Academic Interactions
Academic Interactions
Communicating on Campus
Christine B. Feak, Susan M. Reinhart, and Theresa N. Rohlck
University of Michigan Press, 2018

This version of the book matches 9780472033324 except it is not packaged with a DVD. All references to the DVD in the text have been replaced with "videos." Video access sold separately at https://www.press.umich.edu/10057494/videos_to_accompany_academic_interactions

The ability to understand and be understood when communicating with professors and with native speakers is crucial to academic success. Academic Interactions focuses on actual academic speaking events, particularly classroom interactions and office hours, and gives students practice improving the ways that they communicate in a college/university setting.

Academic Interactions addresses skills like using names and names of locations correctly on campus, giving directions, understanding instructors and their expectations, interacting during office hours, participating in class and in seminars, and delivering formal and informal presentations. In addition, advice is provided for communicating via email with professors and working in groups with native speakers (including negotiating tasks in groups).

The text uses transcripts from MICASE (the Michigan Corpus of Academic Spoken English) to ensure that students learn the vocabulary and communication strategies that will be most effective in their academic pursuits. Units also feature language use issues like ellipsis, hedging, and apologies. 

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After Pomp and Circumstance
High School Reunion as an Autobiographical Occasion
Vered Vinitzky-Seroussi
University of Chicago Press, 1998
Menacing, nerve-racking, uncomfortably intrusive, the high school reunion has become a dreaded encounter with past and present for many Americans. It is a moment of both heightened self-awareness and public presentation, insisting that we account for ourselves, not merely to our own satisfaction, but to the satisfaction of others as well. For sociologist Vinitzky-Seroussi, the high school reunion presents an ideal forum in which to explore the ongoing construction of identity in American society, and, perhaps, to ascertain just how we have managed to make sense of our lives, from then to now.

As autobiographical occasions, reunions prompt us to examine our own life narratives, the stories we tell ourselves about who we are and how we have come to be that person. But at the same time, they can threaten the integrity of those very stories, subjecting them to the scrutiny of others whose memories of the past and ourselves may be altogether different from our own. Reunions, then, engender a fragile community held together by the resources of a shared past, yet imperiled by the tensions of competing histories. Inevitably—for both those who attend and those who choose not to—the reunion forces a kind of biographical confrontation, an unavoidable and often pivotal engagement between a carefully constructed personal identity and the socially prevalent standards of success and accomplishment.

Though many see in today's culture the gradual demise of personal identity, Vinitzky-Seroussi's carefully researched study reveals something quite different— After Pomp and Circumstance explores a struggle we all experience: the desire to resolve the tension between public conceptions and internal understandings, to maintain a sense of continuity between past and present lives, and to lay claim to both an integrated self and a unified life history.
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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?”

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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.
 
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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.

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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
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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.
 
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The Child Who Walks Alone
Case Studies of Rejection in the Schools
By Anne and Hart Stilwell
University of Texas Press, 1996

There is an old song that goes, "Look down, look down, that lonesome road, before you travel on." Facing that lonesome road, the adult might travel on. Often, the child can't.

During her twenty-year career as a school social worker, Anne Stilwell worked with two thousand "problem" children. She and her husband, professional writer Hart Stilwell, present here twenty-one factual accounts of children who suffered rejection in the public schools.

Some of the children in these accounts are unusually bright and some are mentally retarded. They are belligerent and destructive or withdrawn. They are from broken homes or happy homes, from the slums or Middle America. They are blacks, Chicanos, and Anglos. There is only one common denominator among these children—tragedy.

Every classroom teacher will gain from this sympathetic evaluation of the problems faced by children in the public schools. No one who reads this book can remain unaware of major areas that call for deep concern on the part of educators and parents. The Stilwells have described school children and their problems and at the same time offered telling portraits of the families of which the youngsters are a part. In the struggle to see that the problem child has a chance to develop and advance within the limits of his or her ability, parents, teachers, administrators, and social workers must work together or all fail. When they fail, the child must walk alone.

The authors' objective in presenting these cases is to show what has happened and does happen, and to encourage others to work for change. A prominent educator describes their account as "an exceptionally worthwhile teaching document—stimulating, touching, well written, and honest."

While this book was originally written in 1972, the issue of rejection in the public schools is, sadly, still timely.

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College Belonging
How First-Year and First-Generation Students Navigate Campus Life
Lisa M. Nunn
Rutgers University Press, 2021
College Belonging reveals how colleges’ and universities’ efforts to foster a sense of belonging in their students are misguided. Colleges bombard new students with the message to “get out there!” and “find your place” by joining student organizations, sports teams, clubs and the like. Nunn shows that this reflects a flawed understanding of what belonging is and how it works. Drawing on the sociological theories of Emile Durkheim, College Belonging shows that belonging is something that members of a community offer to each other. It is something that must be given, like a gift. Individuals cannot simply walk up to a group or community and demand belonging. That’s not how it works. The group must extend a sense of belonging to each and every member. It happens by making a person feel welcome, to feel that their presence matters to the group, that they would be missed if they were gone. This critical insight helps us understand why colleges' push for students simply to “get out there!” does not always work. 
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College Knowledge
101 Tips
David Schoem
University of Michigan Press, 2005
Practical advice on every aspect of campus life for students headed off to college

What educators and students have to say about David Schoem's College Knowledge:

"David Schoem is a devoted teacher. He recognizes the challenges of preparing to be a responsible, compassionate, successful adult in the twenty-first century. He has written a book that can make a meaningful difference in the lives of its readers."
---Jeffrey Lehman, President, Cornell University

"College Knowledge is full of wise, straight-to-the-point guidance for success both in and out of the classroom. Every first-year student should read-a--nd heed---David Schoem's advice. Though written for students, parents of first-year students can learn from it, too!"
---Beverly Daniel Tatum, President, Spelman College

"College Knowledge is a deceptively straightforward guide appropriate for any student entering higher education. As both a parent and an educator, I highly recommend this sage, yet easy-to-digest guide as a must for the college-bound young adult."
---Pamela Horne, Director of Admissions, Michigan State University

"Professor Schoem's insights and encouragement helped me to create many of my most satisfying and lasting experiences during college. This book captures his infectious enthusiasm and will inspire readers to take risks in exploring all that college has to offer."
---Miriam Vogel, former Schoem student
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College Knowledge for the Community College Student
David Schoem and Lynn Dunlap
University of Michigan Press, 2011

Most students arrive at college not fully aware of just how different the college experience is from other prior experiences. The intellectual and social expectations, as well as the rules and regulations, are different, and not just different from high school.

While all college students must learn to negotiate the transition to college, the challenges for those who enroll in community colleges are unique. Many community college students work, and many work full-time. Many also have family responsibilities—children, partners, and aging parents. A majority of community college students are the first in their family to enroll in college. Some students—both from abroad and from the United States--do not speak English fluently. Some students are retired military personnel. and some are seeking to make a career change. This book strives to speak to this diversity as well as to situations specific to today’s U.S. community college students.

 

College Knowledge for the Community College Student is a road map and tour guide for a successful community college experience and education. Tips are based on research and the wisdom and advice of other community college students and are designed to help students learn, succeed, graduate, and have a rewarding and fulfilling community college experience.

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College Knowledge for the Jewish Student
101 Tips
David Schoem
University of Michigan Press, 2010

"Students and parents alike will benefit from reading David Schoem's well-written, lively, and documented guide."
---Elie Wiesel

“This is a wonderful sequel to Schoem’s very successful College Knowledge: 101 Tips. As I read through this new volume, I was constantly struck that the advice offered would help all students who approach the college experience with distinctive cultural backgrounds and commitments. Indeed all prospective college students, and their parents, can benefit from this serious yet delightful, well-written and incisive book of advice. I intend to buy one for each of my grandchildren.”
---Harold Shapiro, former president, Princeton University; former president, University of Michigan

For the individual Jewish student who enters college, it is critical that he or she come intellectually, emotionally, and spiritually prepared for the academic and social experience that awaits. College is a qualitatively different experience than high school, and students’ expectations need to be set appropriately. The transition from high school to college is so significant that it can be difficult for most without some preparation.

College Knowledgefor the Jewish Student: 101 Tips is the perfect guide for students heading off to college with high expectations for learning, academic success, personal growth, and independence. Through lively tips and compelling student stories about life at college, it offers thoughtful, practical information for every Jewish student who wants to make a successful transition.

College Knowledge for the Jewish Student includes tips on the academic aspects of college life, like communicating with faculty, learning what is where on campus, where to go for help with coursework, how to manage one’s time for a balanced experience, etc. In addition, it offers advice on dealing with family, finances, health, and safety, as well as the many social and emotional aspects of this important rite of passage.

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College Unranked
Ending the College Admissions Frenzy
Lloyd Thacker
Harvard University Press

Stressed and sleepless, today's high school students race from school to activities in their most competitive game of all: admission to a top-ranked, prestigious university. But is relying on magazine rankings and a vague sense of "prestige" really the best way to choose a college? Is hiring test prep teachers and consultants really the best way to shape your own education?

In this book, edited by a veteran admissions counselor, a passionate advocate for students, the presidents and admission deans of leading colleges and universities--like Dartmouth, Vanderbilt, Harvard--remind readers that college choice and admission are a matter of fit, not of winning a prize, and that many colleges are "good" in different ways. They call for bold changes in admissions policies and application strategies, to help both colleges and applicants to rediscover what college is really for. It's not just a ticket to financial success, but a once-in-a-lifetime chance to explore new worlds of knowledge.

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Digital Me
Trans Students Exploring Future Possible Selves Online
Z Nicolazzo
Rutgers University Press, 2023
The internet is where trans people have come to become. Creating an identity in digital space can be important for how trans people learn about themselves, their communities, and the possibilities available to them. While the internet and digital space is not the only way of coming to understand oneself in a community, it is a space of liberatory possibility and creativity. There is room to invent what may not yet exist for gender on the edges of what many consider to be “real.” For many, digital life can be the site of play, joy, and connection –even while the internet is not a harm-free space nor universally available. This book seeks to understand the complexities at play in the digital realm and the implications that have for gender, digital life, and higher education.
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Diploma of Whiteness
Race and Social Policy in Brazil, 1917–1945
Jerry Dávila
Duke University Press, 2003
In Brazil, the country with the largest population of African descent in the Americas, the idea of race underwent a dramatic shift in the first half of the twentieth century. Brazilian authorities, who had considered race a biological fact, began to view it as a cultural and environmental condition. Jerry Dávila explores the significance of this transition by looking at the history of the Rio de Janeiro school system between 1917 and 1945. He demonstrates how, in the period between the world wars, the dramatic proliferation of social policy initiatives in Brazil was subtly but powerfully shaped by beliefs that racially mixed and nonwhite Brazilians could be symbolically, if not physically, whitened through changes in culture, habits, and health.
Providing a unique historical perspective on how racial attitudes move from elite discourse into people’s lives, Diploma of Whiteness shows how public schools promoted the idea that whites were inherently fit and those of African or mixed ancestry were necessarily in need of remedial attention. Analyzing primary material—including school system records, teacher journals, photographs, private letters, and unpublished documents—Dávila traces the emergence of racially coded hiring practices and student-tracking policies as well as the development of a social and scientific philosophy of eugenics. He contends that the implementation of the various policies intended to “improve” nonwhites institutionalized subtle barriers to their equitable integration into Brazilian society.
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Dreams of Flight
The Lives of Chinese Women Students in the West
Fran Martin
Duke University Press, 2022
In Dreams of Flight, Fran Martin explores how young Chinese women negotiate competing pressures on their identity while studying abroad. On one hand, unmarried middle-class women in the single-child generations are encouraged to develop themselves as professional human capital through international education, molding themselves into independent, cosmopolitan, career-oriented individuals. On the other, strong neotraditionalist state, social, and familial pressures of the post-Mao era push them back toward marriage and family by age thirty. Martin examines these women’s motivations for studying in Australia and traces their embodied and emotional experiences of urban life, social media worlds, work in low-skilled and professional jobs, romantic relationships, religion, Chinese patriotism, and changed self-understanding after study abroad. Martin illustrates how emerging forms of gender, class, and mobility fundamentally transform the basis of identity for a whole generation of Chinese women.
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Dropping Out
Why Students Drop Out of High School and What Can Be Done About It
Russell W. Rumberger
Harvard University Press, 2012

The vast majority of kids in the developed world finish high school—but not in the United States. More than a million kids drop out every year, around 7,000 a day, and the numbers are rising. Dropping Out offers a comprehensive overview by one of the country’s leading experts, and provides answers to fundamental questions: Who drops out, and why? What happens to them when they do? How can we prevent at-risk kids from short-circuiting their futures?

Students start disengaging long before they get to high school, and the consequences are severe—not just for individuals but for the larger society and economy. Dropouts never catch up with high school graduates on any measure. They are less likely to find work at all, and more likely to live in poverty, commit crimes, and suffer health problems. Even life expectancy for dropouts is shorter by seven years than for those who earn a diploma.

Russell Rumberger advocates targeting the most vulnerable students as far back as the early elementary grades. And he levels sharp criticism at the conventional definition of success as readiness for college. He argues that high schools must offer all students what they need to succeed in the workplace and independent adult life. A more flexible and practical definition of achievement—one in which a high school education does not simply qualify you for more school—can make school make sense to young people. And maybe keep them there.

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Early and School-Age Care in Santa Monica
Current System, Policy Options, and Recommendations
Ashley Pierson
RAND Corporation, 2014
In July 2012, the City of Santa Monica Human Services Division and the Santa Monica–Malibu Unified School District contracted with the RAND Corporation to conduct an assessment of child care programs in Santa Monica. The project sought to assess how well Santa Monica’s early and school-age care programs meet the needs of families. Recommendations for improvement focused on advancing access, quality, service delivery, and financial sustainability.
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Early and School-Age Care in Santa Monica
Current System, Policy Options, and Recommendations: Executive Summary
Ashley Pierson
RAND Corporation, 2014
In July 2012, the City of Santa Monica Human Services Division and the Santa Monica–Malibu Unified School District contracted with the RAND Corporation to conduct an assessment of child care programs in Santa Monica. The project sought to assess how well Santa Monica’s early and school-age care programs meet the needs of families. Recommendations for improvement focused on advancing access, quality, service delivery, and financial sustainability.
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Empowering Men of Color on Campus
Building Student Community in Higher Education
Brooms, Derrick R.
Rutgers University Press, 2018
While recruitment efforts toward men of color have increased at many colleges and universities, their retention and graduation rates still lag behind those of their white peers. Men of color, particularly black and Latino men, face a number of unique challenges in their educational careers that often impact their presence on campus and inhibit their collegiate success. Empowering Men of Color on Campus examines how men of color negotiate college through their engagement in Brothers for United Success (B4US), an institutionally-based male-centered program at a Hispanic Serving Institution. Derrick R. Brooms, Jelisa Clark, and Matthew Smith introduce the concept of educational agency, which is harbored in cultural wealth and demonstrates how ongoing B4US engagement empowers the men’s efforts and abilities to persist in college. They found that the cultural wealth(s) of the community enhanced the students’ educational agency, which bolstered their academic aspirations, academic and social engagement, and personal development. The authors demonstrate how educational agency and cultural wealth can be developed and refined given salient and meaningful immersions, experiences, engagements, and communal connections. 
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The End of Adolescence
The Lost Art of Delaying Adulthood
Nancy E. Hill and Alexis Redding
Harvard University Press, 2021

Is Gen Z resistant to growing up? A leading developmental psychologist and an expert in the college student experience debunk this stereotype and explain how we can better support young adults as they make the transition from adolescence to the rest of their lives.

Experts and the general public are convinced that young people today are trapped in an extended adolescence—coddled, unaccountable, and more reluctant to take on adult responsibilities than previous generations. Nancy Hill and Alexis Redding argue that what is perceived as stalled development is in fact typical. Those reprimanding today’s youth have forgotten that they once balked at the transition to adulthood themselves.

From an abandoned archive of recordings of college students from half a century ago, Hill and Redding discovered that there is nothing new about feeling insecure, questioning identities, and struggling to find purpose. Like many of today’s young adults, those of two generations ago also felt isolated and anxious that the path to success felt fearfully narrow. This earlier cohort, too, worried about whether they could make it on their own.

Yet, among today’s young adults, these developmentally appropriate struggles are seen as evidence of immaturity. If society adopts this jaundiced perspective, it will fail in its mission to prepare young adults for citizenship, family life, and work. Instead, Hill and Redding offer an alternative view of delaying adulthood and identify the benefits of taking additional time to construct a meaningful future. When adults set aside judgment, there is a lot they can do to ensure that young adults get the same developmental chances they had.

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From Single to Serious
Relationships, Gender, and Sexuality on American Evangelical Campuses
Malone, Dana M.
Rutgers University Press, 2018
College students hook up and have sex. That is what many students expect to happen during their time at university—it is part of growing up and navigating the relationship scene on most American campuses today. But what do you do when you’re a student at an evangelical university? Students at these schools must negotiate a barrage of religiously imbued undercurrents that impact how they think about relationships, in addition to how they experience and evaluate them. As they work to form successful unions, students at evangelical colleges balance sacred ideologies of purity, holiness, and godliness, while also dealing with more mainstream notions of popularity, the online world, and the appeal of sexual intimacy. 

In From Single to Serious, Dana M. Malone shines a light on friendship, dating, and, sexuality, in both the ideals and the practical experiences of heterosexual students at U. S. evangelical colleges. She examines the struggles they have in balancing their gendered and religious presentations of self, the expectations of their campus community, and their desire to find meaningful romantic relationships. 
 
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A History of Badger Baseball
The Rise and Fall of America's Pastime at the University of Wisconsin
Steven D. Schmitt
University of Wisconsin Press, 2017
For more than a century, the University of Wisconsin fielded baseball teams. This comprehensive history combines colorful stories from the archives, interviews with former players and coaches, a wealth of historic photographs, and the statistics beloved by fans of the game. The earliest intercollegiate varsity sport at Wisconsin, the baseball team was founded in 1870, less than a decade after the start of the Civil War. It dominated its first league, made an unprecedented trip to Japan in 1909, survived Wisconsin's chilly spring weather, two world wars, and perennial budget crises, producing some of the finest players in Big Ten history—and more than a few major leaguers. Fan traditions included torchlight parades, kazoos, and the student band playing "A Hot Time in the Old Town Tonight" as early as 1901.

There is painful history here, too. African Americans played on Wisconsin's first Big Ten championship team in 1902, including team captain Julian Ware, but there were none on the team between 1904 and 1960. Heartbreaking to many fans was the 1991 decision to discontinue baseball as a varsity sport at the university. Today, Wisconsin is the only member of the Big Ten conference without a men's baseball team.

Appendixes provide details of team records and coaches, All Big Ten and All American selections, Badgers in the major leagues, and Badgers in the amateur free-agent draft.
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How College Works
Daniel F. Chambliss and Christopher G. Takacs
Harvard University Press, 2013

A Chronicle of Higher Education “Top 10 Books on Teaching” Selection
Winner of the Virginia and Warren Stone Prize

Constrained by shrinking budgets, can colleges do more to improve the quality of education? And can students get more out of college without paying higher tuition? Daniel Chambliss and Christopher Takacs conclude that the limited resources of colleges and students need not diminish the undergraduate experience. How College Works reveals the surprisingly decisive role that personal relationships play in determining a student's collegiate success, and puts forward a set of small, inexpensive interventions that yield substantial improvements in educational outcomes.

“The book shares the narrative of the student experience, what happens to students as they move through their educations, all the way from arrival to graduation. This is an important distinction. [Chambliss and Takacs] do not try to measure what students have learned, but what it is like to live through college, and what those experiences mean both during the time at school, as well as going forward.”
—John Warner, Inside Higher Ed

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Intercultural Skills in Action
An International Student's Guide to College and University Life in the U.S.
Darren LaScotte and Bethany Peters
University of Michigan Press, 2021
Despite the increasing diversification of U.S. higher education, without intentional curricular planning by faculty, international students may not experience intercultural interactions due to varying degrees of disinterest, discomfort, or anxiety—and the interactions they do have may be superficial. These challenges could be potentially mitigated by an intentional curriculum that complements and enhances English language instruction, such as Intercultural Skills in Action.

Although traditional ESL/EFL textbooks have primarily introduced cultural topics at a knowledge level only, this textbook is designed to create meaningful opportunities for students to reflect on and practice intercultural skills in ways that are relatable in their daily lives and that can lead to a more satisfying U.S. academic experience.

Each unit opens with a discovery activity that serves as a springboard for the unit and introduces the topic in an engaging way. Chapters feature academic content that expands knowledge of intercultural skills, plus opportunities for students to pause and reflect on how to apply what they are learning to their own intercultural experiences. The activities ask students to respond with short written reflections and practice oral skills through discussion in pairs and small groups. Each unit closes with an activity that requires students to use higher-order thinking skills to create, evaluate, and/or analyze cultural information gathered from college and university settings in the form of surveys, interviews, observations, or internet research and then report on what they have learned. 

The intended audiences for this book are international students studying in IEPs, in university bridge or pathway programs, or at colleges and universities in the United States. It may also be used by new-student orientation programs or by student services offices that provide intercultural training for students, staff, and faculty who work with international students.


 
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Knowing Silence
How Children Talk about Immigration Status in School
Ariana Mangual Figueroa
University of Minnesota Press, 2024

Learning from children about citizenship status and how it shapes their schooling
 

There is a persistent assumption in the field of education that children are largely unaware of their immigration status and its implications. In Knowing Silence, Ariana Mangual Figueroa challenges this “myth of ignorance.” By listening carefully to both the speech and significant silences of six Latina students from mixed-immigration-status families, from elementary school into middle school and beyond, she reveals the complex ways young people understand and negotiate immigration status and its impact on their lives.

 

Providing these children with iPod Touches to record their own conversations, Mangual Figueroa observes when and how they choose to talk about citizenship at home, at school, and in public spaces. Analyzing family conversations about school forms, in-class writing assignments, encounters with the police, and applications for college, she demonstrates that children grapple with the realities of citizenship from an early age. Educators who underestimate children’s knowledge, Mangual Figueroa shows, can marginalize or misunderstand these students and their families.

 

Combining significant empirical findings with reflections on the ethical questions surrounding research and responsibility, Mangual Figueroa models new ways scholars might collaborate with educators, children, and families. With rigorous and innovative ethnographic methodologies, Knowing Silence makes audible the experiences of immigrant-origin students in their own terms, ultimately offering teachers and researchers a crucial framework for understanding citizenship in the contemporary classroom.

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Madison in the Sixties
Stuart D. Levitan
Wisconsin Historical Society Press, 2018
Madison made history in the sixties.

Landmark civil rights laws were passed. Pivotal campus protests were waged. A spring block party turned into a three-night riot. Factor in urban renewal troubles, a bitter battle over efforts to build Frank Lloyd Wright’s Monona Terrace, and the expanding influence of the University of Wisconsin, and the decade assumes legendary status. 

In this first-ever comprehensive narrative of these issues—plus accounts of everything from politics to public schools, construction to crime, and more—Madison historian Stuart D. Levitan chronicles the birth of modern Madison with style and well-researched substance. This heavily illustrated book also features annotated photographs that document the dramatic changes occurring downtown, on campus, and to the Greenbush neighborhood throughout the decade. Madison in the Sixties is an absorbing account of ten years that changed the city forever.
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Making the Most of College
Students Speak Their Minds
Richard J. Light
Harvard University Press, 2001

Why do some students make the most of college, while others struggle and look back on years of missed deadlines and missed opportunities? What choices can students make, and what can teachers and university leaders do, to improve more students’ experiences and help them achieve the most from their time and money? Most important, how is the increasing diversity on campus—cultural, racial, and religious—affecting education? What can students and faculty do to benefit from differences, and even learn from the inevitable moments of misunderstanding and awkwardness?

From his ten years of interviews with Harvard seniors, Richard Light distills encouraging—and surprisingly practical—answers to fundamental questions. How can you choose classes wisely? What’s the best way to study? Why do some professors inspire and others leave you cold? How can you connect what you discover in class to all you’re learning in the rest of life? Light suggests, for instance: studying in pairs or groups can be more productive than studying alone; the first and most important skill to learn is time management; supervised independent research projects and working internships offer the most learning and the greatest challenges; and encounters with students of different religions can be simultaneously the most taxing and most illuminating of all the experiences with a diverse student body.

Filled with practical advice, illuminated with stories of real students’ self-doubts, failures, discoveries, and hopes, Making the Most of College is a handbook for academic and personal success.

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front cover of Mothering by Degrees
Mothering by Degrees
Single Mothers and the Pursuit of Postsecondary Education
Duquaine-Watson, Jillian M.
Rutgers University Press, 2017
Winner of the 2018 AERA Division J Outstanding Publication Award

In Mothering by Degrees, Jillian Duquaine-Watson shows how single mothers pursuing college degrees must navigate a difficult course as they attempt to reconcile their identities as single moms, college students, and in many cases, employees. They also negotiate a balance between what they think a good mother should be, and what society is telling them, and how that affects their choices to go to college, and whether to stay in college or not. 

The first book length study to focus on the lives and experiences of single mothers who are college students, Mothering by Degrees points out how these women are influenced by dominant American ideologies of motherhood, and the institutional parameters of the schools they attend, and argues for increased attention to the specific ways in which the choices, challenges, and opportunities available to mothers are shaped within their specific environments, as well as the ways in which mothers help shape those environments...
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Paying for the Party
How College Maintains Inequality
Elizabeth A. Armstrong and Laura T. Hamilton
Harvard University Press, 2013

Two young women, dormitory mates, embark on their education at a big state university. Five years later, one is earning a good salary at a prestigious accounting firm. With no loans to repay, she lives in a fashionable apartment with her fiancé. The other woman, saddled with burdensome debt and a low GPA, is still struggling to finish her degree in tourism. In an era of skyrocketing tuition and mounting concern over whether college is "worth it," Paying for the Party is an indispensable contribution to the dialogue assessing the state of American higher education. A powerful exposé of unmet obligations and misplaced priorities, it explains in vivid detail why so many leave college with so little to show for it.

Drawing on findings from a five-year interview study, Elizabeth Armstrong and Laura Hamilton bring us to the campus of "MU," a flagship Midwestern public university, where we follow a group of women drawn into a culture of status seeking and sororities. Mapping different pathways available to MU students, the authors demonstrate that the most well-resourced and seductive route is a "party pathway" anchored in the Greek system and facilitated by the administration. This pathway exerts influence over the academic and social experiences of all students, and while it benefits the affluent and well-connected, Armstrong and Hamilton make clear how it seriously disadvantages the majority.

Eye-opening and provocative, Paying for the Party reveals how outcomes can differ so dramatically for those whom universities enroll.

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The People's School
A History of Oregon State University
William Robbins
Oregon State University Press, 2017
The People’s School is a comprehensive history of Oregon State University, placing the institution’s story in the context of state, regional, national, and international history. Rather than organizing the narrative around presidencies, historian William Robbins examines the broader context of events, such as wars and economic depressions, that affected life on the Corvallis campus. Agrarian revolts in the last quarter of the nineteenth century affected every Western state, including Oregon.  The Spanish-American War, the First World War, the Great Depression of the 1930s, and the Second World War disrupted institutional life, influencing enrollment, curricular strategies, and the number of faculty and staff. Peacetime events, such as Oregon’s tax policies, also circumscribed course offerings, hiring and firing, and the allocation of funds to departments, schools, and colleges. 
 
This contextual approach is not to suggest that university presidents are unimportant.  Benjamin Arnold (1872-1892), appointed president of Corvallis College by the Methodist Episcopal Church, South, served well beyond the date (1885) when the State of Oregon assumed control of the agricultural college. Robbins uses central administration records and grassroots sources—local and state newspapers, student publications (The Barometer, The Beaver), and multiple and wide-ranging materials published in the university’s digitized ScholarsArchive@OSU, a source for the scholarly work of faculty, students, and materials related to the institution’s mission and research activities.  Other voices—extracurricular developments, local and state politics, campus reactions to national crises—provide intriguing and striking addendums to the university’s rich history.
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Practice for Life
Making Decisions in College
Lee Cuba, Nancy Jennings, Suzanne Lovett, and Joseph Swingle
Harvard University Press, 2016

From the day they arrive on campus, college students spend four years—or sometimes more—making decisions that shape every aspect of their academic and social lives. Whether choosing a major or a roommate, some students embrace decision-making as an opportunity for growth, while others seek to minimize challenges and avoid risk. Practice for Life builds a compelling case that a liberal arts education offers students a complex, valuable process of self-creation, one that begins in college but continues far beyond graduation.

Sifting data from a five-year study that followed over two hundred students at seven New England liberal arts colleges, the authors uncover what drives undergraduates to become engaged with their education. They found that students do not experience college as having a clear beginning and end but as a continuous series of new beginnings. They start and restart college many times, owing to the rhythms of the academic calendar, the vagaries of student housing allocation, and other factors. This dynamic has drawbacks as well as advantages. Not only students but also parents and faculty place enormous weight on some decisions, such as declaring a major, while overlooking the small but significant choices that shape students' daily experience.

For most undergraduates, deep engagement with their college education is at best episodic rather than sustained. Yet these disruptions in engagement provide students with abundant opportunities for reflection and course-correction as they learn to navigate the future uncertainties of adult life.

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The Privileged Poor
How Elite Colleges Are Failing Disadvantaged Students
Anthony Abraham Jack
Harvard University Press, 2019

An NPR Favorite Book of the Year

“Breaks new ground on social and educational questions of great import.”
Washington Post

“An essential work, humane and candid, that challenges and expands our understanding of the lives of contemporary college students.”
—Paul Tough, author of Helping Children Succeed

“Eye-opening…Brings home the pain and reality of on-campus poverty and puts the blame squarely on elite institutions.”
Washington Post

“Jack’s investigation redirects attention from the matter of access to the matter of inclusion…His book challenges universities to support the diversity they indulge in advertising.”
New Yorker

The Ivy League looks different than it used to. College presidents and deans of admission have opened their doors—and their coffers—to support a more diverse student body. But is it enough just to admit these students? In this bracing exposé, Anthony Jack shows that many students’ struggles continue long after they’ve settled in their dorms. Admission, they quickly learn, is not the same as acceptance. This powerfully argued book documents how university policies and campus culture can exacerbate preexisting inequalities and reveals why some students are harder hit than others.

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Social Class Voices
Student Stories from the University of Michigan Bicentennial
Edited by Dwight Lang and Aubrey Schiavone
Michigan Publishing Services, 2017
In Social Class Voices, forty-five University of Michigan undergraduate students and recent alumni explore the significance of social class in early 21st century America. They openly and honestly show how social class has shaped their lives, their changing identities, and conditions in their home communities. These writers – born to the working poor, working, middle, upper-middle, and upper classes – examine the effects of social class on their families, their kindergarten through high school experiences, as well as their undergraduate years at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor. Using “sociological creative non-fiction” essays, they invite readers to engage, interpret, and imagine the power of social class in a society where economic differences are often overlooked. In exploring their pasts and personal experiences, they write powerful accounts of American college student life. We hear about the insecurities and challenges of growing up in poverty, increasing tensions of being born to the working and middle classes, and comforting certainties of upper-middle and upper class lives. In their stories we see connections between the personal and the social – a key sociological insight.

These writers explore social class heritages at a time when more and more Americans are recognizing economic inequality as a core structural problem facing millions, independent of individual effort and talent. They shed light on what is too often denied both on and off college campuses: social class. By their very nature these types of explorations are political.

In America, where economic differences frequently go unnoticed when discussing inequality, openly writing about one’s personal class experiences can be controversial. These University of Michigan students and alumni have the courage to make public how social class structures American life.
 
 
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Speed Trap
eighty robberies and fifty years
William W. Allen
Parkhurst Brothers, Inc., 2012
“In this personal account that reads like a novel,
 Allen describes the exhilaration of his youthful rule-breaking behavior
as well as the crushing reality that followed.”
– William Stephens, Ph.D.
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front cover of Succeeding as an International Student in the United States and Canada
Succeeding as an International Student in the United States and Canada
Charles Lipson
University of Chicago Press, 2008
Each year, 700,000 students from around the world come to the United States and Canada to study. For many, the experience is as challenging as it is exciting.  Far from home, they must adapt to a new culture, new university system, and in many cases, a new language. The process can be overwhelming, but as Charles Lipson’s Succeeding as an International Student in the United States and Canada assures us, it doesn’t have to be.
            Succeeding is designed to help students navigate the myriad issues they will encounter—from picking a program to landing a campus job. Based on Lipson’s work with international students as well as extensive interviews with faculty and advisers, Succeeding includes practical suggestions for learning English, participating in class, and meeting with instructors. In addition it explains the rules of academic honesty as they are understood in U.S. and Canadian universities.
            Life beyond the classroom is also covered, with handy sections on living on or off campus, obtaining a driver’s license, setting up a bank account, and more. The comprehensive glossary addresses both academic terms and phrases heard while shopping or visiting a doctor. There is even a chapter on the academic calendar and holidays in the United States and Canada.
           Coming to a new country to study should be an exciting venture, not a baffling ordeal. Now, with this trustworthy resource, international students have all the practical information they need to succeed, in and out of the classroom.
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front cover of Teaching and Its Predicaments
Teaching and Its Predicaments
David K. Cohen
Harvard University Press, 2011

Ever since Socrates, teaching has been a difficult and even dangerous profession. Why is good teaching such hard work?

In this provocative, witty, and sometimes rueful book, David K. Cohen writes about the predicaments that teachers face. Like therapists, social workers, and pastors, teachers embark on a mission of human improvement. They aim to deepen knowledge, broaden understanding, sharpen skills, and change behavior. One predicament is that no matter how great their expertise, teachers depend on the cooperation and intelligence of their students, yet there is much that students do not know. To teach responsibly, teachers must cultivate a kind of mental double vision: distancing themselves from their own knowledge to understand students’ thinking, yet using their knowledge to guide their teaching. Another predicament is that although attention to students’ thinking improves the chances of learning, it also increases the uncertainty and complexity of the job.

The circumstances in which teachers and students work make a difference. Teachers and students are better able to manage these predicaments if they have resources—common curricula, intelligent assessments, and teacher education tied to both—that support responsible teaching. Yet for most of U.S. history those resources have been in short supply, and many current accountability policies are little help. With a keen eye for the moment-to-moment challenges, Cohen explores what “responsible teaching” can be, the kind of mind reading it seems to demand, and the complex social resources it requires.

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Videos to Accompany Academic Interactions
Communicating on Campus
Christine B. Feak, Susan M. Reinhart, Theresa N. Rohlck
University of Michigan Press, 2019

The videos on this site are designed to be used with the textbook (9780472033423 or 9780472124770). The book must purchased separately at https://www.press.umich.edu/363197/academic_interactions or via another retailer). Video access is only available through our online platform: https://michelt.ublish.com

The ability to understand and be understood when communicating with professors and with native speakers is crucial to academic success. The Academic Interactions videos focus on actual academic speaking events, particularly classroom interactions and office hours, and give students practice improving the ways that they communicate in a college/university setting.

The Academic Interactions textbook addresses skills like using names and names of locations correctly on campus, giving directions, understanding instructors and their expectations, interacting during office hours, participating in class and in seminars, and delivering formal and informal presentations. In addition, advice is provided for communicating via email with professors and working in groups with native speakers (including negotiating tasks in groups).

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front cover of We Are All Equal
We Are All Equal
Student Culture and Identity at a Mexican Secondary School, 1988–1998
Bradley A. U. Levinson
Duke University Press, 2001
We Are All Equal is the first full-length ethnography of a Mexican secondary school available in English. Bradley A. U. Levinson observes student life at a provincial Mexican junior high, often drawing on poignant and illuminating interviews, to study how the the school’s powerful emphasis on equality, solidarity, and group unity dissuades the formation of polarized peer groups and affects students’ eventual life trajectories.
Exploring how students develop a cultural “game of equality” that enables them to identify—across typical class and social boundaries—with their peers, the school, and the nation, Levinson considers such issues as the organizational and discursive resources that students draw on to maintain this culture. He also engages cultural studies, media studies, and globalization theory to examine the impact of television, music, and homelife on the students and thereby better comprehend—and problematize—the educational project of the state. Finding that an ethic of solidarity is sometimes used to condemn students defined as different or uncooperative and that little attention is paid to accommodating the varied backgrounds of the students—including their connection to indigenous, peasant, or working class identities—Levinson reveals that their “schooled identity” often collapses in the context of migration to the United States or economic crisis in Mexico. Finally, he extends his study to trace whether the cultural game is reinforced or eroded after graduation as well as its influence relative to the forces of family, traditional gender roles, church, and global youth culture.
We Are All Equal will be of particular interest to educators, sociologists, Latin Americanists, and anthropologists.
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front cover of We Fight To Win
We Fight To Win
Inequality and the Politics of Youth Activism
Hava Rachel Gordon
Rutgers University Press, 2009
In an adult-dominated society, teenagers are often shut out of participation in politics. We Fight to Win offers a compelling account of young people's attempts to get involved in community politics, and documents the battles waged to form youth movements and create social change in schools and neighborhoods.

Hava Rachel Gordon compares the struggles and successes of two very different youth movements: a mostly white, middle-class youth activist network in Portland, Oregon, and a working-class network of minority youth in Oakland, California. She examines how these young activists navigate schools, families, community organizations, and the mainstream media, and employ a variety of strategies to make their voices heard on some of today's most pressing issuesùwar, school funding, the environmental crisis, the prison industrial complex, standardized testing, corporate accountability, and educational reform. We Fight to Win is one of the first books to focus on adolescence and political action and deftly explore the ways that the politics of youth activism are structured by age inequality as well as race, class, and gender.

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What Every ESL Student Should Know
A Guide to College and University Academic Success
Kathy Ochoa Flores
University of Michigan Press, 2008

This book teaches English language learners about language learning and classroom expectations. It is a compilation of advice, experiences, suggestions, strategies, and learning theories collected over many years of teaching this population.

What Every ESL Student Should Know was written to help English language learners be successful in community college and college classrooms—specifically, how to prepare students for expectations and behavior within the classroom and how to help them to be good students, how to participate in class, what to expect from the class, and what to do to learn English. Learning strategies and language theories are presented in brief.

This text is ideal for orientations or pre-college workshops for international or
immigrant students.
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front cover of Why Afterschool Matters
Why Afterschool Matters
Nelson, Ingrid A.
Rutgers University Press, 2017
Increasingly, educational researchers and policy-makers are finding that extracurricular programs make a major difference in the lives of disadvantaged youth, helping to reduce the infamous academic attainment gap between white students and their black and Latino peers. Yet studies of these programs typically focus on how they improve the average academic performance of their participants, paying little attention to individual variation.
 
Why Afterschool Matters takes a different approach, closely following ten Mexican American students who attended the same extracurricular program in California, then chronicling its long-term effects on their lives, from eighth grade to early adulthood. Discovering that participation in the program was life-changing for some students, yet had only a minimal impact on others, sociologist Ingrid A. Nelson investigates the factors behind these very different outcomes. Her research reveals that while afterschool initiatives are important, they are only one component in a complex network of school, family, community, and peer interactions that influence the educational achievement of disadvantaged students.
 
Through its detailed case studies of individual students, this book brings to life the challenges marginalized youth en route to college face when navigating the intersections of various home, school, and community spheres. Why Afterschool Matters may focus on a single program, but its findings have major implications for education policy nationwide.
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