2728 books match the query 'Education' and 68 start with h

cover of Hacking the Academy: New Approaches to Scholarship and Teaching from Digital Humanities

Hacking the Academy

New Approaches to Scholarship and Teaching from Digital Humanities

Daniel J. Cohen and Tom Scheinfeldt, Editors

University of Michigan Press, 2013

On May 21, 2010, Daniel J. Cohen and Tom Scheinfeldt posted the following provocative questions online:

“Can an algorithm edit a journal? Can a library exist without books? Can students build and manage their own learning management platforms? Can a conference be held without a program? Can Twitter replace a scholarly society?”

As recently as the mid-2000s, questions like these would have been unthinkable. But today serious scholars are asking whether the institutions of the academy as they have existed for decades, even centuries, aren’t becoming obsolete. Every aspect of scholarly infrastructure is being questioned, and even more importantly, being hacked. Sympathetic scholars of traditionally disparate disciplines are canceling their association memberships and building their own networks on Facebook and Twitter. Journals are being compiled automatically from self-published blog posts. Newly minted PhDs are forgoing the tenure track for alternative academic careers that blur the lines between research, teaching, and service. Graduate students are looking beyond the categories of the traditional CV and building expansive professional identities and popular followings through social media. Educational technologists are “punking” established technology vendors by rolling out their own open source infrastructure.

Here, in Hacking the Academy, Daniel J. Cohen and Tom Scheinfeldt have gathered a sampling of the answers to their initial questions from scores of engaged academics who care deeply about higher education. These are the responses from a wide array of scholars, presenting their thoughts and approaches with a vibrant intensity, as they explore and contribute to ongoing efforts to rebuild scholarly infrastructure for a new millennium.

[more]
cover of Handbook for In-Service Training in Human Services

Handbook for In-Service Training in Human Services

William Crimando

Southern Illinois University Press, 1988

A practical "how-to" workbook that outlines a plan for the design and implementation of staff in-service training programs for human service agencies and facilities.

Crimando and Riggar have made every effort to guarantee the usefulness of this text to practitioners, instructors, and students. This is a working book designed to assist trainers as they acquire the knowledge and skills needed to provide thorough, systematic in-service training that will enhance human service endeavors.

The authors have organized the nineteen chapters into four parts that treat significant steps in the training-program design process. These include analyzing problems that require training solutions; developing a proposal; writing a plan of action for training; and evaluating a program. Each of the chapters combines text, examples, exercises, and supplementary readings to foster a full appreciation of the process involved. Even those topics frequently overlooked or disregarded are included: budgeting program time and financial resources, obtaining administrative commitment, and transferring and maintaining skills in the work setting.

[more]
cover of Handbook for Management of Human Service Agencies

Handbook for Management of Human Service Agencies

T.F. Riggar and R.E. Matkin

Southern Illinois University Press, 1986

A basic guide for individuals responsible for developing and/or operating comprehensive or specialized human service programs.

Drawing on more than a decade of classroom experience and development and incorporating standards from the Commission on Accreditation of Rehabilitation Facilities (1985 Edition), Riggar and Matkin have created a management tool that is as practical for human service providers as it is for students. Here is the fundamental management knowledge required to establish or manage all types of human service programs and facilities.

The text is organized into 23 sections that describe tasks ranging from con­structing mission statements and admis­sion criteria to developing start-up budgets and allocating space for both di­rect and indirect services. Each section provides definitions and guidelines, prac­tical examples, exercises, and selected references. While the focus is on the prac­tices of the private not-for-profit sector, those working in a profit-oriented setting will find many of the sections and ex­ercises to be valuable aids for developing, operating, and maintaining successful programs.

[more]
cover of Handbook of Engaged Scholarship: Contemporary Landscapes, Future Directions: Volume 1: Institutional Change

Handbook of Engaged Scholarship

Contemporary Landscapes, Future Directions: Volume 1: Institutional Change

Hiram E. Fitzgerald

Michigan State University Press, 2010

In the preface to the Handbook of Engaged Scholarship, Hiram Fitzgerald observes that the Kellogg Commission's challenge to higher education to engage with communities was a significant catalyst for action. At Michigan State University, the response was the development of "engaged scholarship," a distinctive, scholarly approach to campus-community partnerships.
     Engaged scholars recognize that community based scholarship is founded on an underpinning of mutual respect and recognition that community knowledge is valid and that sustainability is an integral part of the partnership agenda.
     In this two-volume collection, contributors capture the rich diversity of institutions and partnerships that characterize the contemporary landscape and the future of engaged scholarship. Volume One addresses such issues as the application of engaged scholarship across types of colleges and universities and the current state of the movement. Volume Two contains essays on such topics as current typologies, measuring effectiveness and accreditation, community-campus partnership development, national organizational models, and the future landscape.

[more]
cover of Handbook of Engaged Scholarship: Contemporary Landscapes, Future Directions: Volume 2: Community-Campus Partnerships

Handbook of Engaged Scholarship

Contemporary Landscapes, Future Directions: Volume 2: Community-Campus Partnerships

Hiram E. Fitzgerald

Michigan State University Press, 2010

In the preface to the Handbook of Engaged Scholarship, Hiram Fitzgerald observes that the Kellogg Commission's challenge to higher education to engage with communities was a significant catalyst for action. At Michigan State University, the response was the development of "engaged scholarship," a distinctive, scholarly approach to campus-community partnerships.
Engaged scholars recognize that community based scholarship is founded on an underpinning of mutual respect and recognition that community knowledge is valid and that sustainability is an integral part of the partnership agenda.
In this two-volume collection, contributors capture the rich diversity of institutions and partnerships that characterize the contemporary landscape and the future of engaged scholarship. Volume One addresses such issues as the application of engaged scholarship across types of colleges and universities and the current state of the movement. Volume Two contains essays on such topics as current typologies, measuring effectiveness and accreditation, community-campus partnership development, national organizational models, and the future landscape.

[more]
cover of Handwriting of the Twentieth Century

Handwriting of the Twentieth Century

Rosemary Sassoon

Intellect Books, 2007

As letter-writing has fallen by the wayside, the art of lavish yet legible handwriting is no longer being taught to schoolchildren or employed in daily life—much to the dismay of those who receive hastily scrawled love notes or try to decipher a doctor’s prescription. In an age when script manuals for students are disappearing at a rapid rate and writing samples are ephemeral, Rosemary Sassoon’s Handwriting of the Twentieth Century provides the first historical record of teaching the skill of writing in the last 100 years.

In addition to illustrating the techniques used by handwriting instructors and documenting the ever-changing views of script stylists, this volume probes the development and manufacture of writing equipment as well as useful examples for today’s teachers of writing. Handwriting of the Twentieth Century is a delightful, comprehensive account of our constant quest for fluent and clear handwritten script.
 
“...excellent and comprehensive illustrated book—which takes us through not only what happened in the United Kingdom, but brings in information about other English speaking countries such as America and Australia as well as European scripts, providing samples and explanations that are valuable as a reference. . . . The book's well-written Epilogue merits a section being printed—It couldn't be put better by a graphologist!”—Elaine Quigley, Graphologist
 
 
[more]
cover of Happening Pedagogy: Allan Kaprow's Experiments in Instruction

Happening Pedagogy

Allan Kaprow's Experiments in Instruction

Emily Ruth Capper

University of Chicago Press, 2026

How Allan Kaprow’s happenings fused modernist pedagogy with an emerging college culture.
 
In Happening Pedagogy, art historian Emily Ruth Capper argues that Allan Kaprow’s famed invention of the happening brought together experimental traditions of modernist pedagogy with emerging forms of American undergraduate student culture—from hazing rituals to campus protests. Capper traces Kaprow’s trajectory from 1947 to 1968, following him through the classrooms of three of his instructors who were prominent figures in postwar American art—painter Hans Hofmann, art historian Meyer Schapiro, and composer John Cage—and across his own classrooms at institutions including Rutgers and Stony Brook University. Although Kaprow’s teachers were educated in the distinct disciplines of studio art, art history, and music, all three designed their classrooms to cultivate student creativity and critical reflection through forms of social exchange.
 
Capper shows that Kaprow transformed these modernist classrooms into new pedagogical environments that he developed within the novel context of the suburban state university. Drawing on archival sources, she describes how Kaprow engaged the culture and creative work of middle-class college students, whose rituals he took seriously as an avant-garde vernacular. In this way, Kaprow’s happenings represent a critical extension of modernism as a social practice of sensory attunement, experimentation, and philosophical critique. Through Kaprow’s work, modernist pedagogy became an artistic medium in itself, and his participation-based creative practices helped define the broad resurgence of the American neo-avant-garde after 1960.

[more]
cover of Happiness and Wisdom: Augustine's Early Theology of Education

Happiness and Wisdom

Augustine's Early Theology of Education

Ryan N. S. Topping

Catholic University of America Press, 2012

Happiness and Wisdom contributes to ongoing debates about the nature of Augustine's early development, and argues that Augustine's vision of the soul's ascent through the liberal arts is an attractive and basically coherent view of learning, which, while not wholly novel, surpasses both classical and earlier patristic renderings of the aims of education.
[more]
cover of Harker's One-Room Schoolhouses: Visions of an Iowa Icon

Harker's One-Room Schoolhouses

Visions of an Iowa Icon

Paul Theobald

University of Iowa Press, 2008

In Harker’s Barns documentary photographer Michael Harker captured the glory and the decay of one of rural America’s most elemental icons. Now in Harker’s One-Room Schoolhouses he brings another rural American icon back to life. His stark and stunning photographs of these small, neat buildings—once the social and educational center of rural life, now either abandoned or restored to an artificial quaintness—encapsulate the dramatic transformations that have overtaken the Iowa countryside.
      Michael Harker’s goal is to record Iowa’s historically significant architecture before it disappears forever. From Coon Center School no. 5 in Albert City to Pleasant Valley School in Kalona, North River School in Winterset to Douglas Center School in Sioux Rapids, and Iowa’s first school to Grant Wood’s first school, he has achieved this goal on a grand scale in Harker’s One-Room Schoolhouses.
      Educational historian Paul Theobald tells the story of the rise and fall of Iowa’s one-room schools, whose numbers fell from close to 15,000 in 1918 to only 1,100 in 1960, all of which had ceased to function as schools by 1980. Moving from the state-wide story to the personal, he introduces us to George Coleman, son of a local farmer and school board director, who kept a sparse diary between December 1869 and June 1870.  Young George’s words reveal the intimate way in which one-room schools interacted with the local community, including the local economic scene. Theobald ends by suggesting that these one-room relics of the past may again prove useful.
[more]
cover of Harlem vs. Columbia University: Black Student Power in the Late 1960s

Harlem vs. Columbia University

Black Student Power in the Late 1960s

Stefan M. Bradley

University of Illinois Press, 2012

In 1968–69, Columbia University became the site for a collision of American social movements. Black Power, student power, antiwar, New Left, and Civil Rights movements all clashed with local and state politics when an alliance of black students and residents of Harlem and Morningside Heights openly protested the school's ill-conceived plan to build a large, private gymnasium in the small green park that separates the elite university from Harlem. Railing against the university's expansion policy, protesters occupied administration buildings and met violent opposition from both fellow students and the police. In this dynamic book, Stefan M. Bradley describes the impact of Black Power ideology on the Students' Afro-American Society (SAS) at Columbia. While white students--led by Mark Rudd and Students for a Democratic Society (SDS)--sought to radicalize the student body and restructure the university, black students focused on stopping the construction of the gym in Morningside Park. Through separate, militant action, black students and the black community stood up to the power of an Ivy League institution and stopped it from trampling over its relatively poor and powerless neighbors. Comparing the events at Columbia with similar events at Harvard, Cornell, Yale, and the University of Pennsylvania, Bradley locates this dramatic story within the context of the Black Power movement and the heightened youth activism of the 1960s. Harnessing the Civil Rights movement's spirit of civil disobedience and the Black Power movement's rhetoric and methodology, African American students were able to establish an identity for themselves on campus while representing the surrounding black community of Harlem. In doing so, Columbia's black students influenced their white peers on campus, re-energized the community's protest efforts, and eventually forced the university to share its power.
[more]
cover of Harry Burns Hutchins and the University of Michigan

Harry Burns Hutchins and the University of Michigan

Shirley W. Smith

University of Michigan Press, 1951

Harry Burns Hutchins and the University of Michigan
[more]
cover of Have a Little Faith: Religion, Democracy, and the American Public School

Have a Little Faith

Religion, Democracy, and the American Public School

Benjamin Justice and Colin Macleod

University of Chicago Press, 2016

It isn’t just in recent arguments over the teaching of intelligent design or reciting the pledge of allegiance that religion and education have butted heads: since their beginnings nearly two centuries ago, public schools have been embroiled in heated controversies over religion’s place  in the education system of a pluralistic nation. In this book, Benjamin Justice and Colin Macleod take up this rich and significant history of conflict with renewed clarity and astonishing breadth. Moving from the American Revolution to the present—from the common schools of the nineteenth century to the charter schools of the twenty-first—they offer one of the most comprehensive assessments of religion and education in America that has ever been published.

From Bible readings and school prayer to teaching evolution and cultivating religious tolerance, Justice and Macleod consider the key issues and colorful characters that have shaped the way American schools have attempted to negotiate religious pluralism in a politically legitimate fashion. While schools and educational policies have not always advanced tolerance and understanding, Justice and Macleod point to the many efforts Americans have made to find a place for religion in public schools that both acknowledges the importance of faith to so many citizens and respects democratic ideals that insist upon a reasonable separation of church and state. Finally, they apply the lessons of history and political philosophy to an analysis of three critical areas of religious controversy in public education today: student-led religious observances in extracurricular activities, the tensions between freedom of expression and the need for inclusive environments, and the shift from democratic control of schools to loosely regulated charter and voucher programs.

Altogether Justice and Macleod show how the interpretation of educational history through the lens of contemporary democratic theory offers both a richer understanding of past disputes and new ways of addressing contemporary challenges.
 
[more]
cover of Head Masters: Phrenology, Secular Education, and Nineteenth-Century Social Thought

Head Masters

Phrenology, Secular Education, and Nineteenth-Century Social Thought

Stephen Tomlinson

University of Alabama Press, 2005

Contributes to a better understanding of Horace Mann and the educational reform movement he advanced

Head Masters challenges the assumption that phrenology—the study of the conformation of the skull as it relates to mental faculties and character—played only a minor and somewhat anecdotal role in the development of education. Stephen Tomlinson asserts instead that phrenology was a scientifically respectable theory of human nature, perhaps the first solid physiological psychology. He shows that the first phrenologists were among the most prominent scientists and intellectuals of their day, and that the concept was eagerly embraced by leading members of the New England medical community.

Following its progression from European theorists Franz-Joseph Gall, Johan Gasper Spurzheim, and George Combe to Americans Horace Mann and Samuel Gridley Howe, Tomlinson traces the origins of phrenological theory and examines how its basic principles of human classification, inheritance, and development provided a foundation for the progressive practices advocated by middle-class reformers such as Combe and Mann. He also elucidates the ways in which class, race, and gender stereotypes permeated 19th century thought and how popular views of nature, mind, and society supported a secular curriculum favoring the use of disciplinary practices based on physiology.

This study ultimately offers a reconsideration of the ideas and theories that motivated education reformers such as Mann and Howe, and a reassessment of Combe, who, though hardly known by contemporary scholars, emerges as one of the most important and influential educators of the 19th century.
[more]
cover of Head, Heart, and Hand: John Brown University and Modern Evangelical Higher Education

Head, Heart, and Hand

John Brown University and Modern Evangelical Higher Education

Rick Ostrander

University of Arkansas Press, 2018

Traveling evangelist John Brown believed that conventional colleges had become elitist and morally suspect, so he founded a small utopian college in 1919 to better combine evangelical Christianity and higher education. Historian Rick Ostrander places John Brown University in the long tradition of Christian education, but he also shows that evangelicalism had largely separated from mainstream higher education by the twentieth century. This engaging and objective history explores how John Brown University has adapted to modern American culture while maintaining its evangelical character. Brown set out to educate the poor, rural children of the Ozarks who had no other opportunity for schooling. He wanted to instill in them not only religious zeal but also his conception of what constituted significant work, namely manual labor. His concern with practical work is evident today in programs for broadcasting, engineering, teacher education, and business. His sons made academic excellence an institutional priority and gradually transformed the school into an accredited, respected liberal arts college. Head, Heart, and Hand deftly connects the story of John Brown University to the larger currents of American education and religion.
[more]
cover of Health Extension: Community-Based Healthcare and the Future of Cooperative Extension

Health Extension

Community-Based Healthcare and the Future of Cooperative Extension

Cheryl L. Eschbach

Michigan State University Press, 2024

Health Extension: Community-Based Healthcare and the Future of Cooperative Extension explores innovation in extension health programs, engaged scholarship promoting research-based information in communities, and the evaluation and documentation of community programs and their impacts. This volume provides land-grant and university-based colleagues up-to-date information on using the Cooperative Extension System (CES) for community engagement in healthcare while also familiarizing those outside CES and the academy with a roadmap for improvement. The contributions of a diverse array of scholars challenge the status quo in extension programs by characterizing the introspection, understanding, creativity, partnerships, and leadership that will be required to improve lives and communities  in the twenty-first century. This perspective underscores the role of CES as foundational to the future of Health Extension and offers an alternative to approaches that utilize the CES as a model without the accompanying advantages of history, community embeddedness, and sustainability.
[more]
cover of Health Humanities Reader

Health Humanities Reader

Jones, Therese

Rutgers University Press, 2014

Over the past forty years, the health humanities, previously called the medical humanities, has emerged as one of the most exciting fields for interdisciplinary scholarship, advancing humanistic inquiry into bioethics, human rights, health care, and the uses of technology. It has also helped inspire medical practitioners to engage in deeper reflection about the human elements of their practice.

In Health Humanities Reader, editors Therese Jones, Delese Wear, and Lester D. Friedman have assembled fifty-four leading scholars, educators, artists, and clinicians to survey the rich body of work that has already emerged from the field—and to imagine fresh approaches to the health humanities in these original essays. The collection’s contributors reflect the extraordinary diversity of the field, including scholars from the disciplines of disability studies, history, literature, nursing, religion, narrative medicine, philosophy, bioethics, medicine, and the social sciences. 

With warmth and humor, critical acumen and ethical insight, Health Humanities Reader truly humanizes the field of medicine. Its accessible language and broad scope offers something for everyone from the experienced medical professional to a reader interested in health and illness.
[more]
cover of Hebrew Infusion: Language and Community at American Jewish Summer Camps

Hebrew Infusion

Language and Community at American Jewish Summer Camps

Sarah Bunin Benor, Jonathan B. Krasner, and Sharon Avni

Rutgers University Press, 2019

Winner of the 2020 National Jewish Book Award in Education and Jewish Identity

Each summer, tens of thousands of American Jews attend residential camps, where they may see Hebrew signs, sing and dance to Hebrew songs, and hear a camp-specific hybrid language register called Camp Hebraized English, as in: “Let’s hear some ruach (spirit) in this chadar ochel (dining hall)!” Using historical and sociolinguistic methods, this book explains how camp directors and staff came to infuse Hebrew in creative ways and how their rationales and practices have evolved from the early 20th century to today.  Some Jewish leaders worry that Camp Hebraized English impedes Hebrew acquisition, while others recognize its power to strengthen campers’ bonds with Israel, Judaism, and the Jewish people. Hebrew Infusion explores these conflicting ideologies, showing how hybrid language can serve a formative role in fostering religious, diasporic communities. The insightful analysis and engaging descriptions of camp life will appeal to anyone interested in language, education, or American Jewish culture.
[more]
cover of Her Oxford

Her Oxford

Judy G. Batson

Vanderbilt University Press, 2008

For over six centuries, the University of Oxford had been an exclusively male bastion of privilege and opportunity. Few dreamed this could change. Yet, in 1879, twenty-one pioneering women quietly entered two recently established residence halls in Oxford in the hope of attending lectures and pursuing a course of study. More women soon followed and, by 1893, there were five women's societies, each with its own principal, staff, and identity. Only eighty years after women first appeared in Oxford, the five residential societies were granted full status as colleges of the University-self-governing entities with all the rights and obligations of the men's colleges-and women students constituted 16 percent of the undergraduate population. Though still a distinct minority, women had gained full access to the rich resources, opportunities, and challenges of the University.

Her Oxford looks at the people and the political and social forces that produced this dramatic transformation. Drawing on a vast array of biographies, histories, obituaries, and archives, Batson traces not only the institutional struggles over privileges and disciplinary rules for women, but also the rich texture of everyday life-women's amateur theatricals, debating societies, sports, and college escapades (Dorothy Sayers is the subject of quite a few). She tells the stories of women's active roles in two war efforts and in the suffrage movement.

An unusual feature of the book is the set of 120 biographical profiles of women who attended Oxford between 1879 and 1960. They constitute a Who's Who of women scientists, anthropologists, psychotherapists, educators, novelists, and social reformers in the English-speaking world.

[more]
cover of Heritage and Hate: Old South Rhetoric at Southern Universities

Heritage and Hate

Old South Rhetoric at Southern Universities

Stephen M. Monroe

University of Alabama Press, 2021

How southern universities continue to wrestle with the words and symbols that embody and perpetuate Old South traditions

The US South is a rhetorical landscape that pulsates with division, a place where words and symbols rooted in a deeply problematic past litter the ground and contaminate the soil. Stephen M. Monroe’s provocative study focuses on predominantly white southern universities where Old South rhetoric still reverberates, where rebel flags cast a shadow over attempts at racial harmony, school cheers to reinforce racial barriers, and student yearbooks to create and protect an oppressive culture of exclusion. Across the region, in college towns like Oxford, Mississippi; Athens, Georgia; and Tuscaloosa, Alabama—communities remain locked in a difficult, recursive, and inherently rhetorical struggle that wrestles with this troubling legacy.

Words, images, and symbols are not merely passive artifacts of southern history, Monroe argues, but formative agents that influence human behavior and shape historical events. Drawing on research from many disciplines, including rhetoric, southern studies, history, sociology, and African American studies, Monroe develops the concept of confederate rhetoric: the collection of Old South words and symbols that have been and remain central to the identity conflicts of the South. He charts examples of such rhetoric at work in southern universities from Reconstruction to the present day.

Tracing the long life and legacy of Old South words and symbols at southern universities, this book provides close and nuanced analysis of the rhetorical conflicts that have resulted at places like the University of Mississippi and the University of Missouri. Some conflicts erupted during the civil rights movement, when the first African American students sought admission to all-white southern universities and colleges, and others are brewing now, as African Americans (and their progressive white peers) begin to cement genuine agency and voice in these communities. Tensions have been, and remain, high.

Ultimately, Monroe offers hope and optimism, contending that if words and symbols can be used to damage and divide, then words and symbols can also be used to heal and unify. Racist rhetoric can be replaced by antiracist rhetoric. The old South can become new. While resisting naïve or facile arguments, Heritage and Hate ultimately finds the promise of progress within the tremendous power of language.

[more]
cover of Hidden Inequities in Labor-Based Contract Grading

Hidden Inequities in Labor-Based Contract Grading

Ellen C. Carillo

Utah State University Press, 2021

Current Arguments in Composition Series

The Hidden Inequities in Labor-Based Contract Grading intervenes in the increasingly popular practice of labor-based grading by expanding the scope of this assessment practice to include students who are disabled and multiply marginalized. Through the lens of disability studies, the book critiques the assumption that labor is a neutral measure by which to assess students and explores how labor-based grading contracts put certain groups of students at a disadvantage. Ellen C. Carillo offers engagement-based grading contracts as an alternative that would provide a more equitable assessment model for students of color, those with disabilities, and students who are multiply marginalized.
 
This short book explores the history of labor-based grading contracts, reviews the scholarship on this assessment tool, highlights the ways in which it normalizes labor as an unbiased tool, and demonstrates how to extend the conversation in new and generative ways both in research and in classrooms. Carillo encourages instructors to reflect on their assessment practices by demonstrating how even assessment methods that are designed through a social-justice lens may unintentionally privilege some students over others.
 

[more]
cover of Hidden Tuition: An Insider's Guide to College Pricing and Financial Aid

Hidden Tuition

An Insider's Guide to College Pricing and Financial Aid

Phillip B. Levine

University of Chicago Press, 2026

The secret economics of maximizing college financial aid (and why it’s not as miserable as you think).

In the college admissions process, a terrifying unknown looms large: How much is this really going to cost? For prospective students and their families, there’s no easy answer. While college prices continue to rise, so do their promises of financial aid for qualified students. But who qualifies? And for how much? How can this monumental life decision be so utterly impossible to understand?

Hidden Tuition is an insider’s guide for navigating college financial aid to maximum effect and with (relatively) minimal pain. Economist and financial-aid expert Phillip B. Levine draws on his unique experience—including years of research in higher-education finance and work alongside admissions and financial-aid departments—to help readers first identify, then minimize, what they’ll actually pay for different types of colleges based on their circumstances. With expertise, clarity, and the warmth of someone who’s been through it, Levine details how students can find the hidden tuition costs in the opaque landscape of college pricing and financial aid. He explores topics that include:

  • Why college’s “sticker prices” are rarely what students pay—and how some actual prices are even going down
  • The best, worst, and most surprising deals for students with different financial resources
  • How to navigate financial aid for divorced and multi-residence households
  • Who really benefits from early decision
  • How the nature of scholarships and merit-based aid is often framed in misleading ways
  • The pros and cons of college savings accounts
  • When and how to get started on college financing
  • Why all student loans aren't the same (or aren't all that bad)

Debunking common myths and offering practical guidance for both families and individual students, Hidden Tuition makes a maddeningly imperfect process more manageable—and gives students a clearer path through one of life’s biggest financial decisions towards collegiate success.

[more]
cover of High-Stakes Schooling: What We Can Learn from Japan's Experiences with Testing, Accountability, and Education Reform

High-Stakes Schooling

What We Can Learn from Japan's Experiences with Testing, Accountability, and Education Reform

Christopher Bjork

University of Chicago Press, 2015

If there is one thing that describes the trajectory of American education, it is this: more high-stakes testing. In the United States, the debates surrounding this trajectory can be so fierce that it feels like we are in uncharted waters. As Christopher Bjork reminds us in this study, however, we are not the first to make testing so central to education: Japan has been doing it for decades. Drawing on Japan’s experiences with testing, overtesting, and recent reforms to relax educational pressures, he sheds light on the best path forward for US schools.
           
Bjork asks a variety of important questions related to testing and reform: Does testing overburden students? Does it impede innovation and encourage conformity? Can a system anchored by examination be reshaped to nurture creativity and curiosity? How should any reforms be implemented by teachers? Each chapter explores questions like these with careful attention to the actual effects policies have had on schools in Japan and other Asian settings, and each draws direct parallels to issues that US schools currently face. Offering a wake-up call for American education, Bjork ultimately cautions that the accountability-driven practice of standardized testing might very well exacerbate the precise problems it is trying to solve. 
[more]
cover of Higher Education amid the COVID-19 Pandemic: Supporting Teaching and Learning through Turbulent Times

Higher Education amid the COVID-19 Pandemic

Supporting Teaching and Learning through Turbulent Times

Jessica Ostrow Michel

Rutgers University Press, 2024

The outbreak of COVID-19 caused unprecedented upheaval as countries across the globe raced to curb the already catastrophic spread of the disease while also planning for changes in every sector of society. In particular, the pandemic had a major effect on U.S. higher education, with most institutions pivoting to online teaching and forcing instructors and students adapt to a “new normal.” With so much uncertainty abounding, Higher Education amid the COVID-19 Pandemic documents first-hand experiences from faculty and students in order to help navigate the path to supporting teaching and learning in the wake of such turbulent times, and beyond. The essays in this volume contextualize the setting of higher education as the outbreak occurred, explore how faculty and students adapted their work-life (im)balance as they transitioned to distance learning, describe teaching and learning across institution types (such as community college, tribal college, historically black college and university), provide strategies for adjusting teaching based on discipline (such as art, biology, education), and look at emerging trends in the future of the professoriate. With essays from a diverse range of experts, this volume will serve as a comprehensive guide to many affected higher education communities.
[more]
cover of Higher Education and Democracy: Essays on Service-Learning and Civic Engagement

Higher Education and Democracy

Essays on Service-Learning and Civic Engagement

Edited by John Saltmarsh and Edward Zlotkowski

Temple University Press, 2011

Higher Education and Democracy is a collection of essays written over the last ten years on how civic engagement in higher education works to achieve what authors John Saltmarsh and Edward Zlotkowsi consider to be the academic and civic purposes of higher education. These include creating new modes of teaching and learning, fostering participation in American democracy, the development and respect for community and civic institutions, and encouraging the constant renewal all of these dimensions of American life.

Organized chronologically, the twenty-two essays in this volume provide "signposts" along the road in the journey of fulfilling the civic purposes of higher education. For the authors, service-learning is positioned as centrally important to the primary academic systems and structures of higher education, departments, disciplines, curriculum, and programs that are central to the faculty domain. Progressing from the general and the contextual to specific practices embodied in ever larger academic units, the authors conclude with observations on the future of the civic engagement movement.

[more]
cover of Higher Education and the American Dream: Success and Its Discontents

Higher Education and the American Dream

Success and Its Discontents

Marvin Lazerson

Central European University Press, 2007

Marvin Lazerson (professor at the Central European University and the University of Pennsylvania) considers the successes of higher education in the USA and how this has also bred discontent. He traces the development of higher education from the last half of the twentieth century, and considers why the expansion occurred, how it became an industry, and the increasing role of education in job attainment, as well as problems like rising costs, debates about the economic worth of higher education, and the decline in its civic, moral, and intellectual purposes. He also discusses changes in governance to a more business-like model, the managerial imperatives colleges face, changes to curriculum and research, and reform.
[more]
cover of Higher Education and the State in Latin America: Private Challenges to Public Dominance

Higher Education and the State in Latin America

Private Challenges to Public Dominance

Daniel C. Levy

University of Chicago Press, 1986

Latin America higher education has undergone an astonishing transformation in recent years, highlighted by the private sector's growth from 3 to 34 percent of the region's total enrollment. In this provocative work Daniel Levy examines the sources, characteristics, and consequences of the development and considers the privatization of higher education within the broader context of state-society relationships.

Levy shows how specific national circumstances cause variations and identifies three basic private-public patterns: one in which the private and public sectors are relatively similar and those in which one sector or the other is dominant. These patterns are analyzed in depth in case studies of Chile, Mexico, and Brazil. For each sector, Levy investigates origins and growth, and then who pays, who rules, and whose interests are served.

In addition to providing a wealth of information, Levy offers incisive analyses of the nature of public and private institutions. Finally, he explores the implications of his findings for concepts such as autonomy, corporatism, and privatization. His multifaceted study is a major contribution to the literature on Latin American studies, comparative politics, and higher education.
[more]
cover of Higher Ground: Ethics and Leadership in the Modern University

Higher Ground

Ethics and Leadership in the Modern University

Nannerl O. Keohane

Duke University Press, 2006

Nannerl O. Keohane is one of the most widely respected leaders in higher education. A political theorist who served as President of Wellesley College and Duke University, she has firsthand knowledge of the challenges facing modern universities: rising costs, the temptations of “corporatization,” consumerist students, nomadic faculty members, and a bewildering wave of new technologies. Her views on these issues and on the role and future of higher education are captured in Higher Ground, a collection of speeches and essays that she wrote over a twenty-year period.

Keohane regards colleges and universities as intergenerational partnerships in learning and discovery, whose compelling purposes include not only teaching and research but also service to society. Their mission is to equip students with a moral education, not simply preparation for a career or professional school.

But the modern era has presented universities and their leadership with unprecedented new challenges. Keohane worries about access to education in a world of rising costs and increasing economic inequality, and about threats to academic freedom and expressions of opinion on campus. She considers diversity as a key educational tool in our increasingly pluralistic campuses, ponders the impact of information technologies on the university’s core mission, and explores the challenges facing universities as they become more “global” institutions, serving far-flung constituencies while at the same time contributing to the cities and towns that are their institutional homes.

Reflecting on the role of contemporary university leaders, Keohane asserts that while they have many problems to grapple with, they will find creative ways of dealing with them, just as their predecessors have done.

[more]
cover of Hip-Hop Civics: Connected Learning in the Rap Classroom

Hip-Hop Civics

Connected Learning in the Rap Classroom

Jabari M. Evans

University of Michigan Press, 2025

In Hip-Hop Civics, Jabari Evans demonstrates how Hip-Hop can be deployed in revamping formal civic education for Black and Brown youth. Based on an original ethnographic study of a Hip-Hop-based education program, the Songwriting and Production Program (SWP) administered by the Foundation of Music in two of Chicago’s lowest performing public schools, Evans argues that Hip-Hop culture is central to students’ lives and can be used as a vehicle for students to engage in civic practices and extract critical lessons about mainstream media, relational currency, identity development, and race/racism within the classroom. Through a compelling exploration of the SWP program, Evans contends that Hip-Hop should be part of formal education spaces and instruction, a conclusion he reaches through his understanding of how Hip-Hop impacted his own life, and by witnessing students discuss, write, and produce Hip-Hop music as part of the SWP program. 
 
[more]
cover of Historical Thinking

Historical Thinking

Sam Wineburg

Temple University Press, 2001

Since ancient times, the pundits have lamented young people's lack of historical knowledge and warned that ignorance of the past surely condemns humanity to repeating its mistakes. In the contemporary United States, this dire outlook drives a contentious debate about what key events, nations, and people are essential for history students. Sam Wineburg says that we are asking the wrong questions. This book demolishes the conventional notion that there is one true history and one best way to teach it.

Although most of us think of history -- and learn it -- as a conglomeration of facts, dates, and key figures, for professional historians it is a way of knowing, a method for developing and understanding about the relationships of peoples and events in the past. A cognitive psychologist, Wineburg has been engaged in studying what is intrinsic to historical thinking, how it might be taught, and why most students still adhere to the "one damned thing after another" concept of history.

Whether he is comparing how students and historians interpret documentary evidence or analyzing children's drawings, Wineburg's essays offer "rough maps of how ordinary people think about the past and use it to understand the present." Arguing that we all absorb lessons about history in many settings -- in kitchen table conversations, at the movies, or on the world-wide web, for instance -- these essays acknowledge the role of collective memory in filtering what we learn in school and shaping our historical thinking.
[more]
cover of History Repeating Itself: The Republication of Children's Historical Literature and the Christian Right

History Repeating Itself

The Republication of Children's Historical Literature and the Christian Right

Gregory M. Pfitzer

University of Massachusetts Press, 2014

Recently publishers on the Christian Right have been reprinting nineteenth-century children's history books and marketing them to parents as “anchor texts” for homeschool instruction. Why, Gregory M. Pfitzer asks, would books written more than 150 years ago be presumed suitable for educating twenty-first-century children? The answer, he proposes, is that promoters of these recycled works believe that history as a discipline took a wrong turn in the early twentieth century, when progressive educators introduced social studies methodologies into public school history classrooms, foisting upon unsuspecting and vulnerable children ideologically distorted history books. 

In History Repeating Itself, Pfitzer tests these assertions by scrutinizing and contextualizing the original nineteenth-century texts on which these republications are based. He focuses on how the writers borrowed from one another to produce works that were similar in many ways yet differed markedly in terms of pedagogical strategy and philosophy of history. Pfitzer demonstrates that far from being non-ideological, these works were rooted in intense contemporary debates over changing conceptions of childhood. 

Pfitzer argues that the repurposing of antiquated texts reveals a misplaced resistance to the idea of a contested past. He also raises essential philosophical questions about how and why curricular decisions are shaped by the “past we choose to remember” on behalf of our children.

[more]
cover of History and Philosophy of the Humanities: An Introduction

History and Philosophy of the Humanities

An Introduction

Michiel Leezenberg

Amsterdam University Press, 2018

The humanities include disciplines as diverse as literary theory, linguistics, history, film studies, theology, and philosophy. Do these various fields of study have anything in common, which distinguishes them from e.g. physics or sociology? The tripartite division between the natural sciences, the social sciences and the humanities may seem self-evident, but it has arisen only in the course of the 19th century, and has been contested ever since.History and Philosophy of the Humanities: An Introduction presents a reasoned overview of the conceptual and historical backgrounds of the humanities. In four sections, it discusses:- The most influential views on scientific knowledge from Aristotle to Thomas Kuhn;- The birth of the modern humanities;- The various methodological schools and conceptual issues in the humanities;- Some themes that set the agenda for current debates in the humanities: critiques of modernity; gender, sexuality and identity; and post-colonialism.Thus, it provides students in the various disciplines of the humanities with a comprehensive understanding of the backgrounds of their field, its relation with other disciplines, and the state of the art in the humanities at large. Intended readership: advanced undergraduate and graduate students.
[more]
cover of History and Philosophy of the Humanities: An Introduction

History and Philosophy of the Humanities

An Introduction

Michiel Leezenberg

Amsterdam University Press, 2019

The humanities include disciplines as diverse as literary theory, linguistics, history, film studies, theology, and philosophy. Do these various fields of study have anything in common that distinguishes them from, say, physics or sociology? The tripartite division between the natural sciences, the social sciences and the humanities may seem self-evident, but it only arose during the course of the 19th century and is still contested today.

'History and Philosophy of the Humanities: An Introduction' presents a reasoned overview of the conceptual and historical backgrounds of the humanities. In four sections, it discusses:
- the most influential views on scientific knowledge from Aristotle to Thomas Kuhn;
- the birth of the modern humanities and its relation to the natural and social sciences;
- the various methodological schools and conceptual issues in the humanities;
- several themes that set the agenda for current debates in the humanities: critiques of modernity; gender, sexuality and identity; and postcolonialism.

Thus, it provides students in the humanities with a comprehensive understanding of the backgrounds of their own discipline, its relation to other disciplines, and the state of the art of the humanities at large.
[more]
cover of History and the Climate Crisis: Environmental History in the Classroom

History and the Climate Crisis

Environmental History in the Classroom

Kate Hawkey

University College London, 2023

A case for including an environmental focus in the secondary school history curriculum by locating its arguments within established historiographical and revisionist debates.

History education has a key contribution to make in developing a deeper understanding of the current environmental crisis, but its role is too often overlooked. When embedded in the school curriculum, environmental history adds crucial layers of knowledge to the learning from other subjects and can enable students to make their own informed contributions to one of the most pressing concerns of the twenty-first century.

History and the Climate Crisis provides much-needed environmental knowledge, an area that is new for most history teachers. The author considers the disciplinary and pedagogical challenges and demonstrates how including an environmental focus can strengthen students’ disciplinary knowledge. She also builds her argument through many examples and offers practical strategies for use in classrooms, including developed inquiries suitable for the secondary history curriculum. The book focuses on environmental history within a strong subject-bound curriculum and will be relevant to teachers, academics, and policymakers in the United Kingdom and internationally.
 
[more]
cover of History in My Life: A Memoir of Three Eras

History in My Life

A Memoir of Three Eras

Ivan T. Berend is Distinguished Research Professor at the History Department of the University of California Los Angeles.

Central European University Press, 2009

Ivan T. Berend is Distinguished Professor at the University of California Los Angeles, Director of the European Studies Program. He was one of the masterminds of regime change in Hungary. He made a career in Hungary as a university professor, Rector of the University of Economics (1973–79), and President of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences (1985–90). He was President of the International Committee of Historical Sciences (1995–2000), and Vice-President of the International Economic History Association (1986–1994). His research interests are the complex economic, social, ideological, and cultural history of Central and Eastern Europe in the 19th–20th century; economic modernization; problems of European backwardness; transition from state socialism to capitalism. He published and 26 books and more than 120 studies.

Before he became a professor at UCLA, Ivan Berend had survived five regime changes and two revolutions in Hungary, had been in prison and German concentration camp in 1944–45.

His memoir offers an interesting case study, a subjective addition to the “objective” historical works on Central and Eastern European state socialism. It describes the hard choices of intellectuals in a dictatorial state: 1. remain in isolation, concentrate on scholarly works, and exclude politics in your personal life; 2. be in opposition, criticize and unveil the regime, accept discrimination and exclusion; 3. remain within the establishment and work for reforming the country using legal possibilities to criticize the regime and to achieve changes from within.

Berend’s book raises basic historical questions and debates, compares East European and American higher education systems, and presents an eyewitness’ insights on life in the United States.

[more]
cover of History of the University of Alabama: Volume One, 1818-1902

History of the University of Alabama

Volume One, 1818-1902

James Benson Sellers

University of Alabama Press, 1953

The definitive and authorized history of the University of Alabama's birth and first century

Step into the rich heritage of one of America’s most storied institutions with the History of the University of Alabama, Volume One 1818 – 1902 by James Sellers. This definitive volume captures the legends, triumphs, and traditions that shaped the Capstone’s first century. From its earliest days on the frontier to its rise as a modern research university, Sellers weaves a narrative that celebrates the people, places, and pivotal moments that define the University of Alabama’s proud legacy.

Among the most dramatic chapters is the interruption of campus life during the closing days of the Civil War, when Union troops burned the university to the ground—a devastating blow that tested resilience and sparked a remarkable rebirth. Through vivid storytelling and meticulous research, Sellers honors the people and milestones that built the Crimson legacy.

Beautifully written and meticulously researched, this book is perfect as a gift for alumni, fans, and collectors. Whether displayed on a coffee table or shared with a fellow member of the Crimson Tide family, this book is more than history. It’s a tribute to the spirit of Alabama. Own the legend. Share the legacy. Celebrate the spirit of the Capstone for generations to come.

[more]
cover of History's Babel: Scholarship, Professionalization, and the Historical Enterprise in the United States, 1880 - 1940

History's Babel

Scholarship, Professionalization, and the Historical Enterprise in the United States, 1880 - 1940

Robert B. Townsend

University of Chicago Press, 2012

From the late nineteenth century until World War II, competing spheres of professional identity and practice redrew the field of history, establishing fundamental differences between the roles of university historians, archivists, staff at historical societies, history teachers, and others.
 
In History’s Babel, Robert B. Townsend takes us from the beginning of this professional shift—when the work of history included not just original research, but also teaching and the gathering of historical materials—to a state of microprofessionalization that continues to define the field today. Drawing on extensive research among the records of the American Historical Association and a multitude of other sources, Townsend traces the slow fragmentation of the field from 1880 to the divisions of the 1940s manifest today in the diverse professions of academia, teaching, and public history. By revealing how the founders of the contemporary historical enterprise envisioned the future of the discipline, he offers insight into our own historical moment and the way the discipline has adapted and changed over time. Townsend’s work will be of interest not only to historians but to all who care about how the professions of history emerged, how they might go forward, and the public role they still can play.
[more]
cover of Holistic Shakespeare: An Experiential Learning Approach

Holistic Shakespeare

An Experiential Learning Approach

Debra Charlton

Intellect Books, 2012

Shakespeare’s plays are staples of the classroom. Yet too often they are taught as antiquated works of literature with little reference to their theatrical life and enduringhuman themes. Applying the methodologies of the holistic education model to the study of four Shakespearean plays— Othello,The Tempest, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, and Measure for Measure—Holistic Shakespeare offers lively theater-based activities to complement traditional analytical exercises. In keeping with the aims of holistic education, each play is studied in relation to a particular social or ethical topic addressed in the work.
 
Despite abundant scholarly works in the field of Shakespeare studies, few texts combine analytical and creative learning methodologies—and none before has specifically applied the principles of holistic education to the topic. Accessible to both teachers and learners, this book will be an essential tool for making Shakespeare come to life in the classroom.
[more]
cover of Holocaust Education: Contemporary Challenges and Controversies

Holocaust Education

Contemporary Challenges and Controversies

Edited by Stuart Foster, Andy Pearce, and Alice Pettigrew

University College London, 2020

How do you teach children about the horrifying and systematic violence of the Holocaust? Especially when the very thing that makes it challenging—its intense and complex cruelty—also makes it so necessary to be taught?
 
Teaching and learning about the Holocaust is central to school curriculums across the globe. But the history of the Holocaust remains controversial and can render teaching it daunting, even to the most experienced instructors. Drawing on landmark research into teaching practices and students’ knowledge, Holocaust Education provides unique insights about classroom learning. It sheds light on key challenges in Holocaust education, including the impact of misconceptions and misinformation, the dilemma posed by images of atrocity, and how to approach teaching in ethnically diverse environments. Overviews of the most significant debates in Holocaust education provide wider context for the classroom evidence. Holocaust Education offers a vital guide, leading readers through some of the most vexed areas of Holocaust challenges and controversies for teachers, researchers, and policymakers.
 
[more]
cover of Home Work: Gender, Child Labor, and Education for Girls in Urban America, 1870–1930

Home Work

Gender, Child Labor, and Education for Girls in Urban America, 1870–1930

Ruby Oram

University of Chicago Press, 2025

How reforms to girlhood education in the Progressive Era cemented inequalities of gender, race, and class in urban school systems.
 
In Home Work, historian Ruby Oram tells the story of how middle-class, white women reformers lobbied the state to implement various public education reforms to shape the lives of girls and women in industrial cities between 1870 and 1930. Women such as Jane Addams and Florence Kelley used education reform to target working-class communities and advocate for their middle-class ideals of girlhood and femininity, which could vary depending on the racial or socio-economic backgrounds of the girls. For example, reformers generally encouraged white girls to care for their future families, while pushing Black girls toward becoming domestic workers in others’ homes. Using Chicago as a case study, Oram also explores how many of the reforms sought by white women were in response to evolving anxieties about immigration, health, and sexual delinquency.

An illuminating addition to the history of urban education in America, Home Work enriches our understanding of educational inequality in twentieth-century schools.
 
[more]
cover of Homeschooling: The History and Philosophy of a Controversial Practice

Homeschooling

The History and Philosophy of a Controversial Practice

James G. Dwyer and Shawn F. Peters

University of Chicago Press, 2019

In Homeschooling: The History and Philosophy of a Controversial Practice, James G. Dwyer and Shawn F. Peters examine homeschooling’s history, its methods, and the fundamental questions at the root of the heated debate over whether and how the state should oversee and regulate it. The authors trace the evolution of homeschooling and the law relating to it from before America’s founding to the present day. In the process they analyze the many arguments made for and against it, and set them in the context of larger questions about school and education. They then tackle the question of regulation, and they do so within a rigorous moral framework, one that is constructed from a clear-eyed assessment of what rights and duties children, parents, and the state each possess. Viewing the question through that lens allows Dwyer and Peters to even-handedly evaluate the competing arguments and ultimately generate policy prescriptions. Homeschooling is the definitive study of a vexed question, one that ultimately affects all citizens, regardless of their educational background.
 
[more]
cover of Homeschooling: The History and Philosophy of a Controversial Practice

Homeschooling

The History and Philosophy of a Controversial Practice

James G. Dwyer and Shawn F. Peters

University of Chicago Press, 2019

This is an auto-narrated audiobook edition of this book.

In Homeschooling: The History and Philosophy of a Controversial Practice, James G. Dwyer and Shawn F. Peters examine homeschooling’s history, its methods, and the fundamental questions at the root of the heated debate over whether and how the state should oversee and regulate it. The authors trace the evolution of homeschooling and the law relating to it from before America’s founding to the present day. In the process they analyze the many arguments made for and against it, and set them in the context of larger questions about school and education. They then tackle the question of regulation, and they do so within a rigorous moral framework, one that is constructed from a clear-eyed assessment of what rights and duties children, parents, and the state each possess. Viewing the question through that lens allows Dwyer and Peters to even-handedly evaluate the competing arguments and ultimately generate policy prescriptions. Homeschooling is the definitive study of a vexed question, one that ultimately affects all citizens, regardless of their educational background.
 
[more]
[more]
cover of How Alex Bloom Built Radical Democratic Secondary Education in Post-war London

How Alex Bloom Built Radical Democratic Secondary Education in Post-war London

Michael Fielding

University College London, 2026

The true story behind a school that pioneered progressive education in post-Second World War Britain and inspired the famous film To Sir, With Love.

Alex Bloom (1895–1955) was a remarkable school leader whose reputation in his lifetime extended far beyond the UK. Against all odds, in the bomb-damaged remains of London’s East End immediately after the Second World War, he established a school that championed equality, democracy, diversity, and creativity. That school—St George-in-the-East Secondary Modern on Cable Street—is known to many as the inspiration for the novel and film To Sir, With Love, but its significance for education goes far deeper. An explicit affirmation of Bloom’s progressive values and aspirations, it had no punishments or rewards, no prizes or failures, and no set curriculum. It became a beacon for radical democratic schooling, achieving an astonishing international reputation and a lasting legacy.

Based on primary research with former teachers and pupils of St George-in-the-East, How Alex Bloom Built Radical Democratic Secondary Education in Post-war London recounts the story of the school’s founding, pedagogy, and democratic inclusivity. Through the book’s own narrative, and in short contributions from some of today’s leading educators, it examines Bloom’s contemporary and subsequent influence on education in the UK and further afield. Most of all, this book reveals Bloom’s extraordinary dedication and commitment to his staff, his pupils, and their community, exemplifying the importance of engaging with the school’s contemporary realities.

[more]
cover of How Humans Learn: The Science and Stories behind Effective College Teaching

How Humans Learn

The Science and Stories behind Effective College Teaching

Joshua R. Eyler

West Virginia University Press, 2018

Even on good days, teaching is a challenging profession. One way to make the job of college instructors easier, however, is to know more about the ways students learn. How Humans Learn aims to do just that by peering behind the curtain and surveying research in fields as diverse as developmental psychology, anthropology, and cognitive neuroscience for insight into the science behind learning.

The result is a story that ranges from investigations of the evolutionary record to studies of infants discovering the world for the first time, and from a look into how our brains respond to fear to a reckoning with the importance of gestures and language. Joshua R. Eyler identifies five broad themes running through recent scientific inquiry—curiosity, sociality, emotion, authenticity, and failure—devoting a chapter to each and providing practical takeaways for busy teachers. He also interviews and observes college instructors across the country, placing theoretical insight in dialogue with classroom experience.

[more]
cover of How Myths about Language Affect Education: What Every Teacher Should Know

How Myths about Language Affect Education

What Every Teacher Should Know

David Johnson

University of Michigan Press, 2013

How Myths about Language Affect Education: What Every Teacher Should Know clarifies some of the most common misconceptions about language, particularly those that affect teachers and the decisions they make when they teach English language learners. The chapters in this book address myths about language in general, about first and second language acquisition, about language and society, and about language and thinking. Each chapter concludes with activities for teachers that give examples, exercises, or simple questions that relate directly to teachers' everyday dealings with ELLs and language.

How Myths about Language Affect Education is not intended to be a complete introduction to linguistics; it does not contain information on phonetics or complex syntactic explanations, and technical jargon is kept to a minimum. The aim of this book is not to settle language issues but rather to highlight popular misconceptions and the ways that they influence debates regarding language and affect language policies in and out of the classroom.
[more]
cover of How Policies Make Interest Groups: Governments, Unions, and American Education

How Policies Make Interest Groups

Governments, Unions, and American Education

Michael T. Hartney

University of Chicago Press, 2022

A critical, revelatory examination of teachers unions' rise and influence in American politics.

As most American labor organizations struggle for survival and relevance in the twenty-first century, teachers unions appear to be an exception. Despite being all but nonexistent until the 1960s, these unions are maintaining members, assets—and political influence. As the COVID-19 epidemic has illustrated, today’s teachers unions are something greater than mere labor organizations: they are primary influencers of American education policy. How Policies Make Interest Groups examines the rise of these unions to their current place of influence in American politics.  
 
Michael Hartney details how state and local governments adopted a new system of labor relations that subsidized—and in turn, strengthened—the power of teachers unions as interest groups in American politics. In doing so, governments created a force in American politics: an entrenched, subsidized machine for membership recruitment, political fundraising, and electoral mobilization efforts that have informed elections and policymaking ever since. Backed by original quantitative research from across the American educational landscape, Hartney shows how American education policymaking and labor relations have combined to create some of the very voter blocs to which it currently answers. How Policies Make Interest Groups is trenchant, essential reading for anyone seeking to understand why some voices in American politics mean more than others. 
[more]
cover of How Schools Meet Students' Needs: Inequality, School Reform, and Caring Labor

How Schools Meet Students' Needs

Inequality, School Reform, and Caring Labor

Katie Kerstetter

Rutgers University Press, 2023

Meeting students’ basic needs – including ensuring they have access to nutritious meals and a sense of belonging and connection to school – can positively influence students’ academic performance. Recognizing this connection, schools provide resources in the form of school meals programs, school nurses, and school guidance counselors. However, these resources are not always available to students and are not always prioritized in school reform policies, which tend to focus more narrowly on academic learning. This book is about the balancing act that schools and their teachers undertake to respond to the social, emotional, and material needs of their students in the context of standardized testing and accountability policies. Drawing on conversations with teachers and classroom observations in two elementary schools, How Schools Meet Students’ Needs explores the factors that both enable and constrain teachers in their efforts to meet students’ needs and the consequences of how schools organize this work on teachers’ labor and students’ learning.
 
[more]
cover of How Schools Really Matter: Why Our Assumption about Schools and Inequality Is Mostly Wrong

How Schools Really Matter

Why Our Assumption about Schools and Inequality Is Mostly Wrong

Douglas B. Downey

University of Chicago Press, 2020

Most of us assume that public schools in America are unequal—that the quality of the education varies with the location of the school and that as a result, children learn more in the schools that serve mostly rich, white kids than in the schools serving mostly poor, black kids. But it turns out that this common assumption is misplaced. As Douglas B. Downey shows in How Schools Really Matter, achievement gaps have very little to do with what goes on in our schools. Not only do schools not exacerbate inequality in skills, they actually help to level the playing field. The real sources of achievement gaps are elsewhere.

A close look at the testing data in seasonal patterns bears this out. It turns out that achievement gaps in reading skills between high- and low-income children are nearly entirely formed prior to kindergarten, and schools do more to reduce them than increase them. And when gaps do increase, they tend to do so during summers, not during school periods. So why do both liberal and conservative politicians strongly advocate for school reform, arguing that the poor quality of schools serving disadvantaged children is an important contributor to inequality? It’s because discussing the broader social and economic reforms necessary for really reducing inequality has become too challenging and polarizing—it’s just easier to talk about fixing schools. Of course, there are differences that schools can make, and Downey outlines the kinds of reforms that make sense given what we know about inequality outside of schools, including more school exposure, increased standardization, and better and fairer school and teacher measurements.
​
How Schools Really Matter offers a firm rebuke to those who find nothing but fault in our schools, which are doing a much better than job than we give them credit for. It should also be a call to arms for educators and policymakers: the bottom line is that if we are serious about reducing inequality, we are going to have to fight some battles that are bigger than school reform—battles against the social inequality that is reflected within, rather than generated by—our public school system.
[more]
cover of How Schools Really Matter: Why Our Assumption about Schools and Inequality Is Mostly Wrong

How Schools Really Matter

Why Our Assumption about Schools and Inequality Is Mostly Wrong

Douglas B. Downey

University of Chicago Press, 2020

This is an auto-narrated audiobook version of this book. 

Most of us assume that public schools in America are unequal—that the quality of the education varies with the location of the school and that as a result, children learn more in the schools that serve mostly rich, white kids than in the schools serving mostly poor, black kids. But it turns out that this common assumption is misplaced. As Douglas B. Downey shows in How Schools Really Matter, achievement gaps have very little to do with what goes on in our schools. Not only do schools not exacerbate inequality in skills, they actually help to level the playing field. The real sources of achievement gaps are elsewhere.

A close look at the testing data in seasonal patterns bears this out. It turns out that achievement gaps in reading skills between high- and low-income children are nearly entirely formed prior to kindergarten, and schools do more to reduce them than increase them. And when gaps do increase, they tend to do so during summers, not during school periods. So why do both liberal and conservative politicians strongly advocate for school reform, arguing that the poor quality of schools serving disadvantaged children is an important contributor to inequality? It’s because discussing the broader social and economic reforms necessary for really reducing inequality has become too challenging and polarizing—it’s just easier to talk about fixing schools. Of course, there are differences that schools can make, and Downey outlines the kinds of reforms that make sense given what we know about inequality outside of schools, including more school exposure, increased standardization, and better and fairer school and teacher measurements.
​
How Schools Really Matter offers a firm rebuke to those who find nothing but fault in our schools, which are doing a much better than job than we give them credit for. It should also be a call to arms for educators and policymakers: the bottom line is that if we are serious about reducing inequality, we are going to have to fight some battles that are bigger than school reform—battles against the social inequality that is reflected within, rather than generated by—our public school system.
[more]
cover of How Schools Work

How Schools Work

Rebecca Barr and Robert Dreeben

University of Chicago Press, 1988

As budgets tighten for school districts, a sound understanding of just how teaching and administration translate into student learning becomes increasingly important. Rebecca Barr, a researcher of classroom instruction and reading skill development, and Robert Dreeben, a sociologist of education who analyzes the structure of organizations, combine their expertise to explore the social organization of schools and classrooms, the division of labor, and the allocation of key resources.

Viewing schools as part of a social organization with a hierarchy of levels—district, school, classroom, instructional group, and students—avoids the common pitfalls of lumping together any and all possible influences on student learning without regard to the actual processes of the classroom. Barr and Dreeben systematically explain how instructional groups originate, form, and change over time. Focusing on first grade reading instruction, their study shows that individual reading aptitude actually has little direct relation to group reading achievement and virtually none to the coverage of reading materials once the mean aptitude of groups is taken into consideration. Individual aptitude, they argue, is rather the basis on which teachers form reading groups that are given different instructional treatment. It is these differences in group treatment, they contend, that explain substantial differences in learning curricular material.
[more]