Results by title

In American Indian Studies, Native PhD graduates share their personal stories about their educational experiences and how doctoral education has shaped their identities, lives, relationships, and careers.

This collection of personal narratives from Native graduates of the University of Arizona’s American Indian Studies (AIS) doctoral program, the first such program of its kind, gifts stories of endurance and resiliency, hardship and struggle, and accomplishment and success. It provides insight into the diverse and dynamic experiences of Native graduate students. The narratives address family and kinship, mentorship, and service and giving back. Essayists share the benefits of having an AIS program at a mainstream academic institution—not just for the students enrolled but also for their communities.

This book offers Native students aspiring to a PhD a realistic picture of what it takes. While each student has their own path to walk, these stories provide the gift of encouragement and serve to empower Native students to reach their educational goals, whether it be in an AIS program or other fields of study.

An unexpected portrait of the first year of school for America’s youngest learners.
 
When we think of kindergarten, many might imagine joyous free play, and a tangle of trucks, dress-up clothes, and blocks, as five-year-olds explore their vivid imaginations and budding social skills. Others might envision a quiet group sitting cross-legged in a circle during story time. Neither of these scenes would be an inaccurate representation of the pivotal year of entry into traditional education in this country. However, neither offers a complete picture of what children do every day in those seemingly transparent, yet actually mysterious, classrooms. What can or should we expect during the first year of school? How are children learning and growing during those hours spent away from their homes?

Susan Engel embarked on finding these answers in American Kindergarten: Dispatches from the First Year of School. Engel toured twenty-nine classrooms across fourteen states, observing each closely, with a special eye toward the ways each classroom’s goals reflect its community. As she made her way across the country, Engel found that on the surface, kindergarten students are similar: good-natured, eager to learn, and deeply affectionate. Their classrooms, too, feature many of the same expectations, routines, and activities. But the differences between the classrooms were striking and often surprising. Over the two years of her classroom visits, Engel identified five promises that teachers and their classrooms make to their students: reading, order, thinking, identity, and love. Engel found that schools differ in how they prioritize and keep the promises they make; some make all five promises, while others emphasize only one or two. The five promises capture a set of values, aspirations, and goals that drive everything that happens in a classroom.

Engaging and incisive, American Kindergarten is the story of the promises our country’s schools make to five-year-old children, and how those promises are kept and sometimes broken. 

This is an audiobook version of this book.

An unexpected portrait of the first year of school for America’s youngest learners.
 
When we think of kindergarten, many might imagine joyous free play, and a tangle of trucks, dress-up clothes, and blocks, as five-year-olds explore their vivid imaginations and budding social skills. Others might envision a quiet group sitting cross-legged in a circle during story time. Neither of these scenes would be an inaccurate representation of the pivotal year of entry into traditional education in this country. However, neither offers a complete picture of what children do every day in those seemingly transparent, yet actually mysterious, classrooms. What can or should we expect during the first year of school? How are children learning and growing during those hours spent away from their homes?

Susan Engel embarked on finding these answers in American Kindergarten: Dispatches from the First Year of School. Engel toured twenty-nine classrooms across fourteen states, observing each closely, with a special eye toward the ways each classroom’s goals reflect its community. As she made her way across the country, Engel found that on the surface, kindergarten students are similar: good-natured, eager to learn, and deeply affectionate. Their classrooms, too, feature many of the same expectations, routines, and activities. But the differences between the classrooms were striking and often surprising. Over the two years of her classroom visits, Engel identified five promises that teachers and their classrooms make to their students: reading, order, thinking, identity, and love. Engel found that schools differ in how they prioritize and keep the promises they make; some make all five promises, while others emphasize only one or two. The five promises capture a set of values, aspirations, and goals that drive everything that happens in a classroom.

Engaging and incisive, American Kindergarten is the story of the promises our country’s schools make to five-year-old children, and how those promises are kept and sometimes broken. 

In celebration of the 200th anniversary of Amherst College, a group of scholars and alumni explore the school’s substantial past in this volume. Amherst in the World tells the story of how an institution that was founded to train Protestant ministers began educating new generations of industrialists, bankers, and political leaders with the decline in missionary ambitions after the Civil War. The contributors trace how what was a largely white school throughout the interwar years begins diversifying its student demographics after World War II and the War in Vietnam. The histories told here illuminate how Amherst has contended with slavery, wars, religion, coeducation, science, curriculum, town and gown relations, governance, and funding during its two centuries of existence. Through Amherst’s engagement with educational improvement in light of these historical undulations, it continually affirms both the vitality and the utility of a liberal arts education.

Contributions by Martha Saxton, Gary J. Kornblith, David W. Wills, Frederick E. Hoxie, Trent Maxey, Nicholas L. Syrett,  Wendy H. Bergoffen, Rick López, Matthew Alexander Randolph, Daniel Levinson Wilk, K. Ian Shin, David S. Reynolds, Jane F. Thrailkill, Julie Dobrow, Richard F. Teichgraeber III, Debby Applegate, Michael E. Jirik, Bruce Laurie, Molly Michelmore, and Christian G. Appy.

An A to W of Academic Literacy is designed for graduate students of all language backgrounds and at any level of study. It is created as a comprehensive reference for graduate students. As a glossary of terms, it can also be used as a supplemental textbook for graduate workshops and seminars and by writing consultants and instructors across the disciplines.
 
The guide includes 65 common academic literacy terms and explores how they relate to genres, writing conventions, and language use. Each entry briefly defines the term, identifies variations and tensions about its use across disciplines, provides examples, and includes reflection questions. An appendix lists further readings for each entry.
 
Unique to this volume are comments featuring the experiences of the graduate students who wrote the entries, comments that bring each entry to life and build a bridge to graduate student readers. 
 

"Hardly a day passes without reference to some scandal, fraud, intellectual or moral failure, or other ill associated with American academic institutions,” writes Sol Gittleman in his bracing new book, An Accidental Triumph. “If American higher education is such a failure, why are students and scholars from all over the world still so eager to secure a place in one of these institutions? Is American higher education a disaster or the envy of the world?”

Gittleman confronts this contradiction in this dynamic mix of history, analysis, and personal reflection. An Accidental Triumph tells the engaging story of how American higher education evolved from a patchwork of seminaries in the early nineteenth century into the world’s leader in research by the middle of the twentieth. Gittleman links this fascinating story to his own fifty-year academic career, which coincided with an explosive rise in enrollment, spurred by the GI Bill, and an unparalleled postwar boom in faculty hiring, prompted by massive new federal support for academic research from organizations such as the National Science Foundation.

Writing with authority, frankness, and unfailing wry good humor, Gittleman surveys the triumphs, tragedies, and tensions of the history of American higher education. Despite the relentless criticism, Gittleman finds good reason to remain optimistic about the future of teaching and research at the college and university level in the United States. 

An Illinois Sampler presents personal accounts from faculty members at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and other contributors about their research and how it enriches and energizes their teaching. Contributors from the humanities, engineering, social and natural sciences, and other disciplines explore how ideas, methods, and materials merge to lead their students down life-changing paths to creativity, discovery, and solutions. Faculty introduce their classes to work conducted from the Illinois prairie to Caribbean coral reefs to African farms, and from densely populated cities to dense computer coding. In so doing they generate an atmosphere where research, teaching, and learning thrive inside a feedback loop of education across disciplines.

Aimed at alumni and prospective students interested in the university's ongoing mission, as well as current faculty and students wishing to stay up to date on the work being done around them, An Illinois Sampler showcases the best, the most ambitious, and the most effective teaching practices developed and nurtured at one of the world's premier research universities.

Contributors are Nancy Abelmann, Flavia C. D. Andrade, Jayadev Athreya, Betty Jo Barrett, Thomas J. Bassett, Hugh Bishop, Antoinette Burton, Lauren A. Denofrio-Corrales, Lizanne DeStefano, Karen Flynn, Bruce W. Fouke, Rebecca Ginsburg, Julie Jordan Gunn, Geoffrey Herman, Laurie Johnson, Kyle T. Mays, Rebecca Nettl-Fiol, Audrey Petty, Anke Pinkert, Raymond Price, Luisa-Maria Rosu, D. Fairchild Ruggles, Carol Spindel, Mark D. Steinberg, William Sullivan, Richard I. Tapping, Bradley Tober, Agniezska Tuszynska, Bryan Wilcox, Kate Williams, Mary-Ann Winkelmes, and Yi Lu.

In Anthropologists Wanted. Why Organizations Need Anthropology the authors present a broad and inspiring survey of anthropologists in the job market. What in fact is anthropology? What skills do anthropologists have? Where do they work? How do they add value in the workplace, according to the people who hire them? And how can anthropologists showcase their qualities to employers? The book contains unique insights for anyone who plans to study, is studying, or has studied anthropology. And for employers interested in why anthropological knowledge is important.

Anthropologists Wanted includes portraits of anthropologists and their diverse occupations, interviews with employers and academic counsellors' answers to frequently asked questions about degree programmes, anthropological skills, and tips to help you land that job.

Almost every educational idea worth a thought has been considered at the University of Illinois, and anything worth trying has been tested. In this history of ideas, Bill Cope and Walter Feinberg chronicle the intellectual lives of education thinkers at the university while tracking the development of educational ideas and practices in general.

Cope and Feinberg draw on conversations, narratives, and archival research that reveal how different generations explored their role in defining and carrying out the College’s multifaceted mission. Their account raises critical questions about the character of learning, the aims of teaching, and the nature of teaching as a profession. At the same time, the authors address issues that range from the role of schools in fostering individual and collective identity to the introduction of computer-mediated and online learning. Cope and Feinberg examine changes in self-understanding about fundamental ideas and chart how the College evolved from its original narrow mission of training children’s schoolteachers to embracing global perspectives.

A wide-ranging portrait of an institution, Arguments for Learning uses the School of Education to tell the stories of thinkers dedicated to the idea that education can change the world for the better.

Despite innumerable, and now infamous, initiatives to improve diversity, equity, and inclusion in the academy, elite institutions continue to hire disproportionately from a small number of top institutions, keeping the US professoriate dominated by straight, white, cisgender men with prestigious degrees. In Aristocratic Inclusion, prabhdeep singh kehal reveals how elites committed to equitable inclusion justify hiring from their own. kehal investigates academic hiring as a process of identifying, verifying, and including fellow scholarly aristocrats. Professors maintain the academic aristocracy by devising and deploying notions of hirability that, though purportedly based on merit, rely on deliberately exclusionary, racist, and sexist standards. These standards privilege candidates who display elite-affiliated academic accomplishments and willingness to maintain elite domination through their academic labor. Through these hirability standards, professors control the pace of change and manicure elite diversity, enabling these aristocrats to justify safeguarding their own status. Turning the conversation from who academia excludes to how academia excludes, kehal shows how professors and prestigious organizations employ cultural norms to create an exclusive social group that perpetuates their own domination.

 Aspiring to Greatness: West Virginia University since World War II chronicles the emergence of WVU as a major land-grant institution. As a continuation of the work of Doherty and Summers in West Virginia University: Symbol of Unity in a Sectionalized State, this book focuses on the modern historical developments that elevated WVU from a small regional institution to one of national prominence. As the only modern history of West Virginia University, this text reaches into the archives of the President’s Office and makes exhaustive use of press accounts and interviews with key individuals to produce a detailed resource for alumni, friends, and supporters of WVU, as well as administrators and specialists in higher education.