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Notes from Home weaves a tapestry of personal stories from a group of youth who have experienced family insecurity during childhood. At Rutgers University, the Price Family Fellows Program provides financial, emotional, and academic support for students who seek to steer their own narratives and achieve their dreams through education. Eight graduates of the program now share reflections, photographs, and memories in search of new, often surprising meanings of home and family.
 
Through portraiture, oral history, writing, and family archives, the contributors explore childhood, geography, immigration, education, and family relationships, recovering misunderstood or overlooked moments. In the process of making this work, the group found old family photos, returned to sites of significance, and made new friendships, discovering the transformational potential of this kind of storytelling to reframe hardship, loss, and uncertainty. In the words of one contributor, “I felt like this process was a necessary step that allowed me to acknowledge and comprehend what I was experiencing at the time. It allowed me to create a more coherent understanding that I am who I am because of my past and because I was the one who had control of molding my own, better path.” Each chapter, encompassing one person’s story, is strikingly unique in its vision and approach.

When working-class first-generation students enter college or the professional workplace, they often find themselves immersed in entirely new worlds. They must learn the unwritten rules for how to speak, dress, behave, and interact with new peers and colleagues. While striving to fit in and do well, they risk feeling imposter syndrome, a loss of identity, or broken ties with friends and family. 

Class Cultures and Social Mobility tells the stories of upwardly mobile first-gen graduates who flipped the script and turned their working-class roots into a strength. This accessible and highly engaging book reveals how first-gen graduates overcame hardship while leveraging unique skills—their working-class cultural capital—in college and their professional careers. It demonstrates there needn’t be a choice between economic success and maintaining authenticity to one’s roots—we can balance the competing demands of the two class worlds together. Whether you're an educator, student, working professional, or advocate, this book provides a powerful way to reimagine the transformations that accompany class mobility. 

Although foster youth have college aspirations similar to their peers, fewer than one in ten ultimately complete a two-year or four-year college degree. What are the major factors that influence their chances of succeeding? Climbing a Broken Ladder advances our knowledge of what can be done to improve college outcomes for a student group that has largely remained invisible in higher education. Drawing on data from one of the most extensive studies of young people in foster care, Nathanael J. Okpych examines a wide range of factors that contribute to the chances that foster youth enroll in college, persist in college, and ultimately complete a degree. Okpych also investigates how early trauma affects later college outcomes, as well as the impact of a significant child welfare policy that extends the age limit of foster care. The book concludes with data-driven and concrete recommendations for policy and practice to get more foster youth into and through college.

Today, many states have proposed so-called “Don’t Say Gay” bills that prohibit public school teachers from mentioning LGBTQ topics in the classroom. But a few states, like California, have taken decisive steps in the other direction. They mandate inclusive education that treats LGBTQ history as essential to the curriculum. At once a history of an evolving movement and an activist handbook, Contested Curriculum navigates the rocky path to LGBTQ-inclusive K–12 history education in the United States and recounts the fight for a curriculum that recognizes the value of queer and trans lives.
 
What began in fits and starts in activism and educational materials across the late twentieth century led to the passage of California’s landmark FAIR Education Act in 2011, ensuring that LGBTQ history has a place in the K–12 classroom. Historian Don Romesburg, the lead scholar who worked with advocacy organizations to pass the act, recounts the decades-long struggle to integrate LGBTQ content into history education policy, textbooks, and classrooms. Looking at California and states that followed its lead, he assesses the challenges and opportunities presented by this new way of teaching history. Romesburg’s powerful case for LGBTQ-inclusive education is all the more urgent in this era of anti-gay book bans, regressive legislation, and attempts to diminish the vital role that inclusive and honest history education should play in a democratic nation.

In past studies of the effect of environment and social settings upon the cognitive development of deaf children, results frequently were confounded by conflicting conclusions related to the particpants' varying degrees of hearing loss. Context, Cognition, and Deafness: An Introduction takes an interdisciplinary approach that clarifies these disparate findings by analyzing many methodologies. Editors M. Diane Clark, Marc Marschark, and Michael Karchmer, widely respected scholars in their own right, have assembled work by a varying cast of renowned researchers to elucidate the effects of family, peers, and schools on deaf children. To integrate the often contrasting approaches of clinical and cultural researchers, this sharply focused volume has called upon experts in anthropology, psychology, linguistics, basic visual sensory processes, education, cognition, and neurophysiology to share complementary observations. One of William C. Stokoe's last contributions, "Deafness, Cognition, and Language" leads fluidly into Jeffrey P. Praden's analysis of clinical assessments of deaf people's cognitive abilities. Margaret Wilson expands on the impace of sign language expertise on visual perception. Context, Cognition, and Deafness also shows that theory can intersect practice, as displayed by editor Marschark and Jennifer Lukomski in their research on literacy, cognition, and education. Amy R. Lederberg and Patricia E. Spencer have combined sequential designs in their study of vocabulary learning. Ethan Remmel, Jeffrey G. Bettger, and Amy M. Weinberg explore the theory of mind development. The emotional development of deaf children also received detailed consideration by Colin D. Gray, Judith A. Hosie, Phil A. Russell, and Ellen A. Ormel. Kathryn P. Meadow-Orlans delineates her perspective on the coming of age of deaf children in relation to their education and development. Marschark concludes with insightful impressions on the future of theory and application, an appropriate close to this exceptional, coherent volume. M. Diane Clark is Professor in the Department of Psychology at Shippensburg University in Shippensburg, PA. Marc Marschark is Professor in the Department of Research at the National Technical Institute for the Deaf in Rochester, NY. Michael Karchmer is Professor in the Department of Education Foundations and Research and Director of the Gallaudet Research Institute at Gallaudet University.

Young adults with intellectual disability tell the story of their own experience of higher education

 

How do students with intellectual disability experience higher education? Creating Our Own Lives addresses this question through the eyes of participants themselves. In relating their experiences and aspirations, these student perspectives mount a powerful challenge to assumptions that intellectual disability is best met with protection or segregation.

 

Taken together, the essays expose and contradict the inherently ableist claim that individuals with intellectual disability cannot be reliable storytellers. Instead, their deeply informative stories serve as a corrective narrative. The first of the four sections, “Laying the Foundation: Why Everyone Belongs in College,” focuses on belonging and inclusion; the second, “Opening Up Possibilities: Overcoming Doubt and Uncertainty,” conveys the optimism of this generation of advocates through stories of personal hardship, hopeful perseverance, and triumph over adversity; the third, “Inclusion as Action: Diversifying Student Experiences,” supports the understanding of diverse student experiences in inclusive higher education; and the fourth, “Supporting Growth: Peer Mentoring and Advice,” offers guidance to those reimagining and creating educational spaces.

 

Students with disabilities belong in higher education. Not only does this book serve as an important record of students enrolled in inclusive higher education programs, it is also an unprecedented resource, packed with information and inspiration both for parents seeking opportunities for their children and for individuals with intellectual disability who aspire to attend college.

 

Contributors: Makayla Adkins, Olivia Baist, Brandon Baldwin, George Barham, Marquavious Barnes, Katie Bartlett, Steven Brief, De'Onte Brown, Meghan Brozaitis, Mary Bryant, Gracie Carrol, Taylor Cathey, Maia Chamberlain, Antonio E. Contreras, Kim Dean, Elizabeth Droessler, Katie Ducett, Keiron Dyck, Rachel Gomez, Deriq Graves, Micah Gray, Maggie Guillaume, Cleo Hamilton, Nathan Heald, Joshua R. Hourigan, Hannah Lenae Humes, Courtney Jorgensen, Eilish Kelderman, Kailin Kelderman, Kenneth Kelty, Kaelan Knowles, Karlee Lambert, Kate Lisotta, Rachel Mast, Elise McDaniel, Emma Miller, Jake Miller, Lydia Newnum, Brenna Mantz Nielsen, Carly O’Connell, Nadia Osbey, Stirling Peebles, Breyan Pettaway, Amanda Pilkenton, True Rafferty, Taylor Ruppe, Lawrence Sapp, Tyler Shore, Brianna Silva, Alex Smith, Elliott Smith, Phillandra Smith, Payton Storms, Allen Thomas, Kylie Walter, Stephen Wanser, Sayid Webb, Breana Whittlesey, Luke Wilcox, Adam Wolfond.