BiblioVault - Books about Study and teaching

Japanese Studies of Modern China

A Bibliographical Guide to Historical and Social-Science Research on the 19th and 20th Centuries

John King Fairbank, Masataka Banno, and Sumiko Yamamoto

Harvard University Press, 1971

The present volume is a supplement, equal in size and scope, to the volume published in 1955, Japanese Studies of Modern China, by John K. Fairbank, Masataka Banno, and Sumiko Yamamoto. Summaries and critical evaluations of more than one thousand books and articles are arranged by topics. There is a comprehensive general index and a special character index to establish the correct readings of the names of Japanese authors.

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Japan's Prospect

Douglas Gilbert Haring

Harvard University Press, 1975

Jewish Education

Ari Y Kelman

Rutgers University Press, 2024

Most writing about Jewish education has been preoccupied with two questions: What ought to be taught? And what is the best way to teach it? Ari Y Kelman upends these conventional approaches by asking a different question: How do people learn to engage in Jewish life? This book, by centering learning, provides an innovative way of approaching the questions that are central to Jewish education specifically and to religious education more generally.

At the heart of Jewish Education is an innovative alphabetical primer of Jewish educational values, qualities, frameworks, catalysts, and technologies which explore the historical ways in which Jewish communities have produced and transmitted knowledge. The book examines the tension between Jewish education and Jewish Studies to argue that shifting the locus of inquiry from “what people ought to know” to “how do people learn” can provide an understanding of Jewish education that both draws on historical precedent and points to the future of Jewish knowledge.

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Jim Crow Sociology

The Black and Southern Roots of American Sociology

Earl Wright

University of Cincinnati Press, 2020

Jim Crow Sociology: The Black and Southern Roots of American Sociology is an extraordinary new volume that examines the origin, development, and significance of Black Sociology through the accomplishments of early African American sociologists at Historically Black Colleges and Universities (HBCUs) such as Atlanta University, Tuskegee Institute, Fisk University, and Howard University. Black Sociology is a concept that weaponizes the discipline for that which is “right and good” and prioritizes scholar-activist inspired research directed at impacting real world conditions of African Americans.

Guided by this approach, this book debunks the idea that the sociology practiced by early African Americans does not exemplify scholarly excellence. Instead, Earl Wright demonstrates that Tuskegee Institute, under the leadership of Booker T. Washington, established the first applied program of rural sociology. Fisk University, first under the guidance of George Edmund Haynes then Charles S. Johnson, developed one of the earliest and most impactful programs of applied urban sociology. Wright extends our understanding of W. E. B. Du Bois’s Atlanta Sociological Laboratory with an articulation of the contributions of women to the first American school of sociology. Jim Crow Sociology forces contemporary scholars to grapple with who are and who are not included in the disciplinary canon. Specifically, this book forces us to ask why early African American sociologists and HBCUs are not canonized. What makes this book most consequential is that it provides evidence supporting the proposition that sociology began in earnest in the United States as a Black and southern enterprise.

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Josef Albers, Late Modernism, and Pedagogic Form

Jeffrey Saletnik

University of Chicago Press, 2022

An incisive analysis of the pedagogy of influential artist and teacher Josef Albers.

An extraordinary teacher whose influence continues today, Josef Albers helped shape the Bauhaus school in Germany and established the art and design programs at Black Mountain College in North Carolina and Yale University. His books about color theory have informed generations, and his artworks are included in the canon of high-modernist non-representational art. The pedagogy Albers developed was a dynamic approach to teaching that transcended the modernist agendas and cultivated a material way of thinking among his students.

With this book, Jeffrey Saletnik explores the origins of Albers’s teaching practices and their significance in conveying attitudes about form, material, and sensory understanding to artists Eva Hesse and Richard Serra. He demonstrates how pedagogy is a framework that establishes the possibility for artistic discourse and how the methods through which artists learn are manifested in their individual practices. Tracing through lines from Albers’s training in German educational traditions to his influence on American postwar art, Josef Albers, Late Modernism, and Pedagogic Form positions Albers’s pedagogy as central to the life of modernism.

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Joseph Smith

History, Methods, and Memory

Ronald O. Barney

University of Utah Press, 2020

The study of Joseph Smith and his writings have long been shaped by the polemical atmosphere that surrounds Smith’s claims to divine authorship. Even after a half-century of serious scholarship devoted to Smith, fundamental questions remain about how to best interpret features of his life and writing. Smith’s own History of Joseph Smith (edited and revised at the beginning of the twentieth century by B. H. Roberts) created an enduring image that influenced Mormon theology, doctrine, and polity for generations. With new historical documents now available, however, a reappraisal of Smith and the origins of Mormonism is necessary.

Ronald O. Barney, a former editor of the Joseph Smith Papers, applies new interpretations to Smith in history and memory, re-examining both his writings and contemporary accounts of him. The book explores the best methodologies for appraising the historical record, including a review of Smith’s world and its contextual background, an analysis of his foundational experiences, and a characterization of Smith as a man and prophet. Though the premise of re-evaluation may be unsettling to traditionalists, a modern reconsideration of the historical record’s entire range of sources is necessary to fashion a strategy for evaluating Smith and his enduring but complex legacy.

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Journal Writing in Second Language Education

Christine Pearson Casanave

University of Michigan Press, 2011

Journal writing is not new--journals have been around for centuries. More recently, journals have been viewed as a means of scaffolding reflective teaching and encouraging reflectivity in research processes. As a result, some educators may ask, “What more do we need to know?” Those likely to raise this question are probably not thinking of the explosive growth of reflective writing enabled by social networking on the Web, the blogs and other interactive e-vehicles for reflection on experiences in our literate, “real,” and virtual lives This revisiting of journal writing from a 21st century perspective, informed by relevant earlier literature, is what Christine Pearson Casanave guides readers through in this first book-length treatment of the use of journal writing in the contexts of language learning, pre and in-service teaching, and research.

Casanave has put together existing ideas that haven't been put together before and has done it not as an edited collection, but as a single-authored book. She has done it in a way that will be especially accessible to teachers in language teacher education programs and to practicing teachers and researchers of writing in both second and foreign language settings, and in a way that will inspire all of us to think about, not just do, journal writing.

Those who have never attempted to use journals in their classes and own lives, as well as others who have used it with mixed results, will probably be tempted to try it in at least some of the venues Casanave provides guidance for. Those already committed to journal writing will very likely find in this book new reasons for expanding and enhancing their use of journals.

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Judaism's Theological Voice

The Melody of the Talmud

Jacob Neusner

University of Chicago Press, 1995

Distinguished historian of Judaism Jacob Neusner here ventures for the first time into constructive theology. Taking the everyday life of contemporary Judaism as his beginning, Neusner asks when in the life of the living faith of the Torah does Israel, the holy community, meet God? Where does the meeting take place? What is the medium of the encounter?

In his attempt to answer these questions, Neusner sets forth the character and the form of the Torah as sung theology. Israel, the holy community, meets God in the synagogue, while at prayer, and in the yeshiva, when studying the Torah—at the moment in each setting when the Torah is received. In both circumstances people do not read but sing out its words. With the written part of the Torah sung in the synagogue, and the oral part declaimed in centers of sacred learning, music provides the medium for Judaism's theological voice.

Neusner identifies a reciprocal exchange between the holy community Israel and God: Israel sings to God when the Torah is studied, and God sings to Israel when the Torah is declaimed. Through the metaphor of music, Neusner offers an account of how he believes those faithful to the Torah meet God in the Torah, and how they should listen to the melody of God's self-revelation. The result is an original theological reflection that will interest all students of Judaism.

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