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.

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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.
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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
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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.
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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.

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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.
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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.

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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.
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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
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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

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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.
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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.
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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
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