2728 books match the query 'Education' and 116 start with p

cover of Please Touch: A History of the First Four Children's Museums in the United States (1899–1965)

Please Touch

A History of the First Four Children's Museums in the United States (1899–1965)

Jessie Swigger

University of Massachusetts Press, 2026

The Innovation and influence of the first children’s museums in the US

When it opened in 1899, the Brooklyn Children’s Museum greeted visitors with a new experience. Rather than carefully ensconcing artifacts and curios behind protective glass, the staff took the unusual step of moving the objects out of their cases and into the hands of the children, inviting them to “please touch.” Born out of the reformist spirit of the Progressive Era, the museum represented a new kind of institution, one whose primary purpose was not to collect, preserve, and display objects but rather to educate a specific audience. Over the next twenty-five years, three other children’s museums opened with a similar mission and approach: the Boston Children’s Museum (1913), the Detroit Children’s Museum (1917), and The Children’s Museum of Indianapolis (1925).

At a time when most museums were led by men, women played a critical role in overseeing this first wave of children’s museums. As the number of children’s museums grew, women rose to prominence in the museum profession at large, advocating for new ways for institutions to interact with and serve their audiences. By 1965, the children’s museum movement had succeeded in demonstrating rich rewards and had influenced all types of museums and continues to do so to this day.

Drawing on archival materials, newspaper accounts, and the writings of museum workers and professionals, Please Touch carefully chronicles the early histories of these four seminal children’s museums. Jessie Swigger provides thorough institutional histories of each and connects them to broader currents in education, such as the Progressive education movement, and to key events in early- to mid-twentieth-century US history, including immigration, the Great Depression, World Wars I and II, and the Cold War. She also demonstrates how these institutions were fundamentally shaped by women’s leadership, and how they challenged and expanded the definition of museums and pressed museum practices in new directions.
 
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cover of Point of Reckoning: The Fight for Racial Justice at Duke University

Point of Reckoning

The Fight for Racial Justice at Duke University

Theodore D. Segal

Duke University Press, 2021

On the morning of February 13, 1969, members of Duke University's Afro-American Society barricaded themselves inside the Allen administration building. That evening, police were summoned to clear the building, firing tear gas at students in the melee that followed. When it was over, nearly twenty people were taken to the hospital, and many more injured. In Point of Reckoning, Theodore D. Segal narrates the contested fight for racial justice at Duke from the enrollment of the first Black undergraduates in 1963 to the events that led to the Allen Building takeover and beyond. Segal shows that Duke's first Black students quickly recognized that the university was unwilling to acknowledge their presence or fully address its segregationist past. By exposing the tortuous dynamics that played out as racial progress stalled at Duke, Segal tells both a local and national story about the challenges that historically white colleges and universities throughout the country have faced and continue to face.
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cover of Point of View and the Emotional Arc of Stories: A handbook for writers and storytellers

Point of View and the Emotional Arc of Stories

A handbook for writers and storytellers

Loren Niemi & Nancy Donoval

Parkhurst Brothers, Inc., 2020

A creative writing manual for high school to adult aged writers and storytellers, this volume includes the authors' philosophy regarding story creation and pointers especially related to the variety of choices regarding point of view available to writers and other story-creators or refiners.
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cover of Point of View: Talks on Education

Point of View

Talks on Education

Edward H. Levi

University of Chicago Press, 2007

Edward H. Levi served the University of Chicago for most of his professional life, as a professor, dean of the law school, provost, and eventually president. Gathered here are fourteen talks he delivered between 1963 and 1969 that include such topics as the role of the university; the purposes of undergraduate and liberal education, professional training, and graduate research; the relations between the university and its surroundings; and the causes of student unrest. Throughout these talks, the reader will find expressions of Levi’s essential belief that “the university must stand for reason and for persuasion by reasoning.”
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cover of Poison in the Ivy: Race Relations and the Reproduction of Inequality on Elite College Campuses

Poison in the Ivy

Race Relations and the Reproduction of Inequality on Elite College Campuses

Byrd, W. Carson

Rutgers University Press, 2017

The world of elite campuses is one of rarified social circles, as well as prestigious educational opportunities. W. Carson Byrd studied twenty-eight of the most selective colleges and universities in the United States to see whether elite students’ social interactions with each other might influence their racial beliefs in a positive way, since many of these graduates will eventually hold leadership positions in society. He found that students at these universities believed in the success of the ‘best and the brightest,’ leading them to situate differences in race and status around issues of merit and individual effort.

Poison in the Ivy challenges popular beliefs about the importance of cross-racial interactions as an antidote to racism in the increasingly diverse United States. He shows that it is the context and framing of such interactions on college campuses that plays an important role in shaping students’ beliefs about race and inequality in everyday life for the future political and professional leaders of the nation. Poison in the Ivy is an eye-opening look at race on elite college campuses, and offers lessons for anyone involved in modern American higher education.  
 
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cover of Police in the Hallways: Discipline in an Urban High School

Police in the Hallways

Discipline in an Urban High School

Kathleen Nolan

University of Minnesota Press, 2011

As zero-tolerance discipline policies have been instituted at high schools across the country, police officers are employed with increasing frequency to enforce behavior codes and maintain order, primarily at poorly performing, racially segregated urban schools. Actions that may once have sent students to the detention hall or resulted in their suspension may now introduce them to the criminal justice system. In Police in the Hallways, Kathleen Nolan explores the impact of policing and punitive disciplinary policies on the students and their educational experience.

Through in-depth interviews with and observations of students, teachers, administrators, and police officers, Nolan offers a rich and nuanced account of daily life at a Bronx high school where police patrol the hallways and security and discipline fall under the jurisdiction of the NYPD. She documents how, as law enforcement officials initiate confrontations with students, small infractions often escalate into “police matters” that can lead to summonses to criminal court, arrest, and confinement in juvenile detention centers.

Nolan follows students from the classroom and the cafeteria to the detention hall, the dean’s office, and the criminal court system, clarifying the increasingly intimate relations between the school and the criminal justice system. Placing this trend within the context of recent social and economic changes, as well as developments within criminal justice and urban school reform, she shows how this police presence has created a culture of control in which penal management overshadows educational innovation.

Police in the Hallways also examines the prevalent forms of oppositional behavior through which students express their frustrations and their deep sense of exclusion. With compassion and clear-eyed analysis, Nolan sounds a warning about this alarming convergence of prison and school cultures and the negative impact that it has on the real lives of low-income students of color—and, in turn, on us all.

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cover of Policy Making in Education

Policy Making in Education

Edited by Ann Lieberman and Milbrey W. McLaughlin

University of Chicago Press, 1982

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cover of Polished: College, Class, and the Burdens of Social Mobility

Polished

College, Class, and the Burdens of Social Mobility

Melissa Osborne

University of Chicago Press, 2024

An illuminating look at the emotional costs of mobility faced by first-generation and low-income college students.
 
While college initiates a major transition in all students’ lives, low-income and first-generation students attending elite schools are often entering entirely new worlds. Amid the financial and academic challenges of adapting to college, their emotional lives, too, undergo a transformation. Surrounded by peers from different classes and cultural backgrounds, they are faced with an impossible choice: turn away from their former lives to blend in or stay true to themselves and remain on the outside.

An ethnography that draws on in-depth interviews with one hundred and fifty first-generation and low-income students across eighteen elite institutions, Polished uncovers the hidden consequences of the promise of social mobility in today’s educational landscape. Sociologist Melissa Osborne reveals how the very support designed to propel first-generation students forward can unexpectedly reshape their identities, often putting them at odds with their peers and families. Without direct institutional support, this emotional journey can lead to alienation, mental health challenges, poor academic outcomes, and difficult choices between upward mobility or maintaining authenticity and community. Whether you're an educator, advocate, or student, Polished provides a powerful perspective on the uncharted challenges of social mobility and personal identity during college.
 
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cover of Polished: College, Class, and the Burdens of Social Mobility

Polished

College, Class, and the Burdens of Social Mobility

Melissa Osborne

University of Chicago Press, 2024

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

An illuminating look at the emotional costs of mobility faced by first-generation and low-income college students.

 
While college initiates a major transition in all students’ lives, low-income and first-generation students attending elite schools are often entering entirely new worlds. Amid the financial and academic challenges of adapting to college, their emotional lives, too, undergo a transformation. Surrounded by peers from different classes and cultural backgrounds, they are faced with an impossible choice: turn away from their former lives to blend in or stay true to themselves and remain on the outside.

An ethnography that draws on in-depth interviews with one hundred and fifty first-generation and low-income students across eighteen elite institutions, Polished uncovers the hidden consequences of the promise of social mobility in today’s educational landscape. Sociologist Melissa Osborne reveals how the very support designed to propel first-generation students forward can unexpectedly reshape their identities, often putting them at odds with their peers and families. Without direct institutional support, this emotional journey can lead to alienation, mental health challenges, poor academic outcomes, and difficult choices between upward mobility or maintaining authenticity and community. Whether you're an educator, advocate, or student, Polished provides a powerful perspective on the uncharted challenges of social mobility and personal identity during college.
 
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cover of Political Literacy in Composition and Rhetoric: Defending Academic Discourse against Postmodern Pluralism

Political Literacy in Composition and Rhetoric

Defending Academic Discourse against Postmodern Pluralism

Donald Lazere

Southern Illinois University Press, 2015

In Political Literacy in Composition and Rhetoric, Donald Lazere calls for revival of NCTE resolutions in the 1970s for teaching the “critical reading, listening, viewing, and thinking skills necessary to enable students to cope with the persuasive techniques in political statements, advertising, entertainment, and news,” and explores the reasons these goals have been eclipsed in composition studies over recent decades.  Obstacles to those goals have included the emphasis in the profession on basic and first year writing at the expense of more advanced study in argumentative rhetoric, and on the privileging of students’ personal writing over critical study of both academic and political discourse.  Lazere further argues that theorists who legitimately champion students’ pluralistic local communities sometimes fail to recognize that liberal education can enable students to grow beyond their home cultures to critical awareness of national and international politics. Finally, he argues that the fixation in recent composition studies on liberally-inclined students and communities “on the margins” has eclipsed attention to the conservative conformity long prevalent in mainstream American society and education. His proposals for curriculum and pedagogy seek to introduce students to a more highly-informed, cogent, and open-ended level of debate between the political left and right.
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cover of Politicians, Judges, and City Schools: Reforming School Finance in New York

Politicians, Judges, and City Schools

Reforming School Finance in New York

Joel S. Berke

Russell Sage Foundation, 1984

During the 1970s, a nationwide school finance reform movement—fueled by litigation challenging the constitutionality of state education funding laws—brought significant changes to the way many states finance their public elementary and secondary school systems. School finance reform poses difficult philosophical questions: what is the meaning of equality in educational opportunity and of equity in the distribution of tax burdens? But it also involves enormous financial complexity (for example, dividing resources among competing special programs) and political risk (such as balancing local control with the need for statewide parity). For those states (like New York) that were slow to make changes a new decade has brought new constraints and complications. Sluggish economic growth, taxpayer revolts, reductions in federal aid, all affect education revenues. And the current concern with educational excellence may obscure the needs of the poor and educationally disadvantaged. This book will provide New York's policy makers and other concerned specialists with a better understanding of the political, economic, and equity issues underlying the school finance reform debate. It details existing inequities, evaluates current financing formulas, and presents options for change. Most important, for all those concerned with education and public policy in New York and elsewhere, it offers a masterful assessment of the trade-offs involved in developing reform programs that balance the conflicting demands of resource equalization, political feasibility, and fiscal responsibility. "Synthesizes the political and fiscal research [on school finance reform] and applies it to the New York Context....A blueprint for how to redesign state school finance....A fine book." —Public Administration Review "This is a book that lucidly discusses the issues in school finance and provides valuable reference material." —American Political Science Review
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cover of Poor Queer Studies: Confronting Elitism in the University

Poor Queer Studies

Confronting Elitism in the University

Matt Brim

Duke University Press, 2020

In Poor Queer Studies Matt Brim shifts queer studies away from its familiar sites of elite education toward poor and working-class people, places, and pedagogies. Brim shows how queer studies also takes place beyond the halls of flagship institutions: in night school; after a three-hour commute; in overflowing classrooms at no-name colleges; with no research budget; without access to decent food; with kids in tow; in a state of homelessness. Drawing on the everyday experiences of teaching and learning queer studies at the College of Staten Island, Brim outlines the ways the field has been driven by the material and intellectual resources of those institutions that neglect and rarely serve poor and minority students. By exploring poor and working-class queer ideas and laying bare the structural and disciplinary mechanisms of inequality that suppress them, Brim jumpstarts a queer-class knowledge project committed to anti-elitist and anti-racist education. Poor Queer Studies is essential for all of those who care about the state of higher education and building a more equitable academy.
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cover of Populism, Education, and Teaching the Manners of Democracy

Populism, Education, and Teaching the Manners of Democracy

Robert V Bullough Jr.

Rutgers University Press, 2027

In an era of intense polarization, misinformation, and challenges to democratic norms, American citizens have become disenchanted with democracy and instead embraced populism and grievance. In Populism, Education, and Teaching the Manners of Democracy Robert V. Bullough Jr. offers readers a range of concepts useful for re-imagining the practice of democratic citizenship, both in the classroom as well as for themselves as citizens. Structured around five democratic manners that Bullough argues teachers, students, and citizens should cultivate, hospitality, attuned listening, voice, reflectivity, and evidential discernment, he argues that democracy is a peculiar and demanding way of life that shares with education the goal of human flourishing. By embracing these five manners, we can counter the current grievance culture and instead promote personal and social growth, reorienting education toward democratic living.

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cover of Post-Crisis Leadership: Resilience, Renewal, and Reinvention in the Aftermath of Disruption

Post-Crisis Leadership

Resilience, Renewal, and Reinvention in the Aftermath of Disruption

Ralph A. Gigliotti

Rutgers University Press, 2025

Given the many pressures facing leaders across higher education, the work of crisis leadership remains an imperative for leaders at all levels. Attention tends to center on strategies for engaging in leadership both prior to and during crisis, often leaving the post-crisis period as an afterthought. This book introduces a research-informed framework for this critical, and often neglected, phase of crisis leadership. With an underlying commitment to values-based, principle-oriented, and people-centered practices, this framework consists of five leadership practices that are recognized as especially critical in the aftermath of crisis: (a) encourage learning, (b) inspire growth, (c) stimulate meaning-making, (d) pursue reinvention, and (e) advance renewal. Communication serves a critical role in each of the various dimensions of post-crisis leadership, and it is a communication orientation that can help to inform the paradoxes, processes, and patterns that arise during these periods of immense tension and, at times, transcendence.
 
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cover of Postmodern Education: Politics, Culture, and Social Criticism

Postmodern Education

Politics, Culture, and Social Criticism

Stanley Aronowitz

University of Minnesota Press, 1991

This book offers and opinionated analysis of today’s polemics surrounding the topic of education and society. Aronowitz and Giroux present a conceptual framework for charting the future directions educational theory and practice might take and continue the debate begun in their previous book, Education Under Siege, which was named one of the most significant books in education by the American Educational Studies Association in 1986.

"In Postmodern Education Aronowitz and Giroux are architects of the imagination, presenting essays of political, social, and cultural criticism aimed at altering the ways we understand the existing social order and act to change the conditions of our lives.” Afterimage
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cover of Potential on the Periphery: College Access from the Ground Up

Potential on the Periphery

College Access from the Ground Up

Omari Scott Simmons

Rutgers University Press, 2019

Even high-performing students sometimes need assistance to transform their high school achievement into a higher education outcome that matches their potential, especially when those students come from vulnerable backgrounds. Without intervention, many of these students, lost in the transition between secondary school and higher education, would not attend selective colleges that provide greater opportunities. Potential on the Periphery profiles the Simmons Memorial Foundation (SMF), a grassroots non-profit organization co-founded by author Omari Scott Simmons, that promotes college access for students in North Carolina and Delaware. Simmons discusses how the organization has helped students secure admission and succeed in college, using this example to contextualize the broader realm of existing education practice, academic theory, and public policy. Using data gleaned from interviews with past student participants in the programs run by the SMF, Simmons illuminates the underlying factors thwarting student achievement, such as inadequate information about college options, limited opportunities for social capital acquisition, financial pressures, self-doubt, and political weakness. Simmons then identifies policy solutions and pragmatic strategies that college access organizations can adopt to address these factors. 
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cover of Power to the Transfer: Critical Race Theory and a Transfer Receptive Culture

Power to the Transfer

Critical Race Theory and a Transfer Receptive Culture

Dimpal Jain

Michigan State University Press, 2020

Currently, U.S. community colleges serve nearly half of all students of color in higher education who, for a multitude of reasons, do not continue their education by transferring to a university. For those students who do transfer, often the responsibility for the application process, retention, graduation, and overall success is placed on them rather than their respective institutions. This book aims to provide direction toward the development and maintenance of a transfer receptive culture, which is defined as an institutional commitment by a university to support transfer students of color. A transfer receptive culture explicitly acknowledges the roles of race and racism in the vertical transfer process from a community college to a university and unapologetically centers transfer as a form of equity in the higher education pipeline. The framework is guided by critical race theory in education, which acknowledges the role of white supremacy and its contemporary and historical role in shaping institutions of higher learning.
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cover of Power, Protest, and the Public Schools: Jewish and African American Struggles in New York City

Power, Protest, and the Public Schools

Jewish and African American Struggles in New York City

Melissa F. Weiner

Rutgers University Press, 2012

Accounts of Jewish immigrants usually describe the role of education in helping youngsters earn a higher social position than their parents. Melissa F. Weiner argues that New York City schools did not serve as pathways to mobility for Jewish or African American students. Instead, at different points in the city's history, politicians and administrators erected similar racial barriers to social advancement by marginalizing and denying resources that other students enjoyed. Power, Protest, and the Public Schools explores how activists, particularly parents and children, responded to inequality; the short-term effects of their involvement; and the long-term benefits that would spearhead future activism. Weiner concludes by considering how today's Hispanic and Arab children face similar inequalities within public schools.
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cover of Powers of the Mind: The Reinvention of Liberal Learning in America

Powers of the Mind

The Reinvention of Liberal Learning in America

Donald N. Levine

University of Chicago Press, 2006

It is one thing to lament the financial pressures put on universities, quite another to face up to the poverty of resources for thinking about what universities should do when they purport to offer a liberal education. In Powers of the Mind, former University of Chicago dean Donald N. Levine enriches those resources by proposing fresh ways to think about liberal learning with ideas more suited to our times. 

He does so by defining basic values of modernity and then considering curricular principles pertinent to them. The principles he favors are powers of the mind—disciplines understood as fields of study defined not by subject matter but by their embodiment of distinct intellectual capacities. To illustrate, Levine draws on his own lifetime of teaching and educational leadership, while providing a marvelous summary of exemplary educational thinkers at the University of Chicago who continue to inspire.  Out of this vital tradition, Powers of the Mind constructs a paradigm for liberal arts today, inclusive of all perspectives and applicable to all settings in the modern world.

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cover of Practical Pronunciation: Pronunciation Strategies in Practice

Practical Pronunciation

Pronunciation Strategies in Practice

DJ Kaiser

University of Michigan Press, 2026

Practical Pronunciation offers an easy-to-follow road map for English learners to incorporate pronunciation into their everyday and professional speaking. With more than two decades of practice and expertise in teaching advanced English pronunciation and public speaking skills, DJ Kaiser guides readers through a series of hands-on strategies that bring pronunciation practice to life. Carefully ordered lessons cover segmentals, word stress, phrase rhythm and melody, the phrase focus syllable, and intonation. Balancing more advanced topics in pronunciation (like stress on compound nouns, intonation on various question types, and using gestures to bring focus to relevant content) with accessible language and practical strategies makes reaching pronunciation goals more attainable. The book includes access to video content and more than 4.5 hours of audio content. Practical Pronunciation is perfect for classroom instruction, small-group tutorials, and one-on-one tutoring sessions, or as a self-study tool for advanced independent learners.

CEFR Level: C1

Key Features
  • A series of 210 audio recordings provides opportunities for learners to listen for key aspects of pronunciation and practice items from the book on their own. 
  • Twenty-nine videos provide short explanations and visual demonstrations of many of the strategies included throughout the book. 
  • Recommendations on ways to integrate digital tools into pronunciation exploration and practice provide learners and teachers with multiple ways to customize pronunciation practice to meet varied professional speaking contexts, academic goals, and personal interests.
  • Practice items and exercises incorporate higher-frequency words from the Corpus of Contemporary American English.
  • A glossary and several quick-reference charts make it easy to look up or clarify key terms and linguistic terminology or to visually review consonant and vowel charts.
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cover of Practice Dialogues: Listening to the Wisdom of Care Work

Practice Dialogues

Listening to the Wisdom of Care Work

Edited by Alice Lesnick

Lever Press, 2026

Attending to the wisdom that emerges through care work, Practice Dialogues uplifts the complexity, creativity, and interconnection of care across fields of endeavor. Written by a collective of practitioners, Practice Dialogues calls readers to learn from, not simply about, care work and those dedicated to it. Recognizing the need to understand care work as practice that furthers people’s survival and thriving, this volume advances a method of research rooted in radical presence, mutual listening, and collaborative writing. Centering care work as and through co-authorship, the essays spotlight fields including medicine, somatic practice, teaching and school leadership, martial arts, organizing, the arts, and family caregiving. In the framing chapters, Practice Dialogues draws on scholarship from education, postcolonial cultural studies, Black studies, Indigenous studies, social work, trauma studies, and critical feminist studies. The volume creates an exchange among scholarship, questions of research methodology, and the ecosystems of care work, pushing the limits of what is possible within and beyond conventional boundaries.
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cover of Practicing Classics: A Memoir

Practicing Classics

A Memoir

Lee T. Pearcy

University of Michigan Press, 2026

Practicing Classics is a memoir about education in America between the end of WWII and the early 21st century. Not only does it consider memory, its truths, and its deceptions, but it also unravels the complexities of class, race, gender, and social positioning in education. Lee Pearcy’s story begins with the 1957 desegregation crisis at Little Rock Central High School and its aftermath, describing how growing up in this environment shaped his academic and personal life.

As he came to study Latin and then Classics, Pearcy’s education intersected with the student disturbances at Columbia University in 1968 and a feminist revolution that brought significant numbers of women into the classical professoriate. He gives a first-hand account of a scandalous episode in the toxic administrative culture that characterized the classics department at the University of Texas in the 1980s. Against the background of these events, he unfolds his own education as a classicist and his development from apprentice to journeyman to confident teacher of Latin and Greek. Practicing Classics will engage readers who care about American education, classical studies, or the ways that choices, chances, and contingencies shaped one man’s life.

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cover of Practicing Transnationalism: American Studies in the Middle East

Practicing Transnationalism

American Studies in the Middle East

Edited Eileen T. Lundy and Edward J. Lundy

University of Texas Press, 2016

Practicing Transnationalism explores the challenges of teaching American studies in the Middle East during a time of tension and conflict between the United States and the region.

In the first decade of the twenty-first century, American studies programs began to spread in the Middle East. During a time of rising anti-American sentiment, ten major programs were established in the region. What impulses propelled universities in the Middle East to establish these centers and programs? What motivated students to take courses and pursue degrees in American studies? In part, American studies programs developed as a way to “know the enemy,” to better understand America’s ubiquitous influence in foreign relations, technology, and culture; however, some programs grew because residents admired the ideals set forth as American, including democracy and free speech.

Practicing Transnationalism investigates these issues and others, using the experiences and research of the editors and contributors, who worked either directly in these programs or as adjunct to them. These scholars seek to understand what American power means to people in the Middle East. They examine the challenge of developing American studies programs in a transnational paradigm, striving to build programs that are separate from and critical of American imperialism without simply becoming anti-American. In the essays, the contributors provide context for how the field of American studies has grown and developed, and they offer views of cultural interactions and classroom situations, demonstrating the problems instructors faced and how they worked to address them.

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cover of Precariously Centered: The Experiences of Contingent Women Writing Center Administrators

Precariously Centered

The Experiences of Contingent Women Writing Center Administrators

Liliana M. Naydan

Utah State University Press, 2026

Precariously Centered confronts the troubling intersection of gender and contingency in administrative writing center work—an intersection that has haunted writing centers for decades. Featuring findings from a groundbreaking qualitative study of a diverse group of contingent women writing center administrators, Liliana M. Naydan, Maggie M. Herb, and Clint Gardner demonstrate that gender and its intersections have personal, professional, disciplinary, and pedagogical consequences in writing centers.

This report on interview-based qualitative research documents the experiences of sixteen writing center administrators—how their working lives are often complicated by the intersection of gender, contingency, and other identities. The authors address precarity, identity-based discrimination, extensive and invisible emotional labor, limited resources, lack of institutional support, and barriers to promotion. The words of these administrators come into conversation with scholarship on identity, feminist theory, and the current labor crisis in higher education and reveal challenges ranging from a dearth of resources to discrimination. Their words also reveal dire disciplinary and pedagogical consequences for our institutions and higher education.

Amid increasingly distressing labor conditions in the early twenty-first century, Precariously Centered addresses how writing center professionals—and all academics—can better address contingency, the corporatization of higher education, and the patriarchy. It emphasizes the value of discourse about working conditions, intersectional solidarity, and organizing for labor justice.

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cover of Premed Prep: Advice from a Medical School Admissions Dean

Premed Prep

Advice from a Medical School Admissions Dean

Sunny Nakae

Rutgers University Press, 2021

If you’re a student hoping to apply to medical school, you might be anxious or stressed about how best to prepare. What classes should you take? What kinds of research, clinical, and volunteer opportunities should you be pursuing? What grades and MCAT scores do you need? How can you stand out among thousands of applicants?
 
Premed Prep answers all these questions and more, with detailed case studies and insider tips that can help premed students authentically prepare and enjoy the journey from the very beginning. Sunny Nakae draws from her many years of experience as a medical school admissions dean to offer wise and compassionate advice that can help premed students of all backgrounds. She also has specific tips for students who are first-generation, minority, non-traditional, and undocumented.
 
Both forthright and supportive, Nakae’s advice is offered in a keep-it-real style that gives premed students a unique window into how admissions committees view and assess them. Premed Prep covers how to approach preparation with a focus on exploration and growth, and how to stop obsessing over med school application checklists. This book will do more than help you get a seat in medical school; it will start you on the process of becoming a successful future physician.
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cover of Prepare to Scare: How to tell scary stories

Prepare to Scare

How to tell scary stories

Elizabeth Ellis

Parkhurst Brothers, Inc., 2021

Prepare to Scareis a handbook edited by Circle of Excellence storyteller, Elizabeth Ellis, with contributions by the A-list of scary story writers and tellers on the American Storytelling Festival Circuit. It is a handbook for adults who tell stories to children or other adults in a variety of settings: storytelling events, schools, aftercare programs, camps, and homes.
 
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cover of Preparing Adult English Learners to Read for College and the Workplace

Preparing Adult English Learners to Read for College and the Workplace

Edited by Kirsten Schaetzel, Joy Kreeft Peyton, and Rebeca Fernández

University of Michigan Press, 2024

The ability to read effectively—to work with a text, understand its meaning, and talk and write about it with, and for, others—is a critical aspect of academic and workplace success. However, many adults who are learning English as a second or additional language do not have the skills needed to be successful and may drop out of college and university programs before they reach their goal. Bringing together a rich collection of topics and authors, this edited volume provides theory, research, and instructional approaches to help adult education ESL practitioners work effectively with adult learners and prepare them to be successful with reading in academic and workplace settings. 

After reading this book, adult ESL practitioners will be able to
  • Prepare adults learning English to apply appropriate reading strategies to a variety of academic and professional contexts and purposes
  • Use instructional strategies, including digital technology, to help struggling and developing readers close gaps in skills and conceptual knowledge
  • Improve reading comprehension through robust vocabulary instruction
  • Enhance reading skills and comprehension through writing instruction that balances sentence-level, discourse, and interactive processes and practices
  • Inspire students to become lifelong readers who engage in extensive reading outside of school and professional contexts
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cover of Preparing Students to Engage in Equitable Community Partnerships: A Handbook

Preparing Students to Engage in Equitable Community Partnerships

A Handbook

Elizabeth A. Tryon

Temple University Press, 2023

When done properly, community engagement in academia can have value for all stakeholders. Authentic experiences are more useful for students; faculty can add new knowledge to the field and their own toolbelts; and communities feel their investment has generated a useful deliverable or even a long-term partnership.

Preparing Students to Engage in Equitable Community Partnerships provides a wealth of valuable resources and activities to help impart ideas of identity, privilege, oppression, bias, and power dynamics to best support students and community in these relationships. Believing that authenticity only comes about in an atmosphere of mutual respect and self-awareness, the authors argue for cultural and intellectual humility.

Each chapter looks at topics and issues through different lenses, complete with underlying theories, and relates those discussions to concrete classroom activities, facilitation strategies, and scholarly frames. In addition, the authors include contributions from a diverse group of practitioners at community colleges, private colleges, historically Black colleges and universities, and minority-serving institutions.

Preparing Students to Engage in Equitable Community Partnerships is a much-needed, comprehensive resource for community-engaged professionals as they prepare students for building relationships when entering a community for learning or research purposes.
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cover of Preparing the Mothers of Tomorrow: Education and Islam in Mandate Palestine

Preparing the Mothers of Tomorrow

Education and Islam in Mandate Palestine

By Ela Greenberg

University of Texas Press, 2009

From the late nineteenth century onward, men and women throughout the Middle East discussed, debated, and negotiated the roles of young girls and women in producing modern nations. In Palestine, girls' education was pivotal to discussions about motherhood. Their education was seen as having the potential to transform the family so that it could meet both modern and nationalist expectations.

Ela Greenberg offers the first study to examine the education of Muslim girls in Palestine from the end of the Ottoman administration through the British colonial rule. Relying upon extensive archival sources, official reports, the Palestinian Arabic press, and interviews, she describes the changes that took place in girls' education during this time. Greenberg describes how local Muslims, often portrayed as indifferent to girls' education, actually responded to the inadequacies of existing government education by sending their daughters to missionary schools despite religious tensions, or by creating their own private nationalist institutions.

Greenberg shows that members of all socioeconomic classes understood the triad of girls' education, modernity, and the nationalist struggle, as educated girls would become the "mothers of tomorrow" who would raise nationalist and modern children. While this was the aim of the various schools in Palestine, not all educated Muslim girls followed this path, as some used their education, even if it was elementary at best, to become teachers, nurses, and activists in women's organizations.

[more]
cover of Preschool in Three Cultures Revisited: China, Japan, and the United States

Preschool in Three Cultures Revisited

China, Japan, and the United States

Joseph Tobin, Yeh Hsueh, and Mayumi Karasawa

University of Chicago Press, 2009

Published twenty years ago, the original Preschool in Three Cultures was a landmark in the study of education: a profoundly enlightening exploration of the different ways preschoolers are taught in China, Japan, and the United States. Here, lead author Joseph Tobin—along with new collaborators Yeh Hsueh and Mayumi Karasawa—revisits his original research to discover how two decades of globalization and sweeping social transformation have affected the way these three cultures educate and care for their youngest pupils. Putting their subjects’ responses into historical perspective, Tobin, Hsueh, and Karasawa analyze the pressures put on schools to evolve and to stay the same, discuss how the teachers adapt to these demands, and examine the patterns and processes of continuity and change in each country.

Featuring nearly one hundred stills from the videotapes, Preschool in Three Cultures Revisited artfully and insightfully illustrates the surprising, illuminating, and at times entertaining experiences of four-year-olds—and their teachers—on both sides of the Pacific.

[more]
cover of Prescribing the Life of the Mind: An Essay on the Purpose of the University, the Aims of Liberal Education, the Competence of Citizens, and the Cultivation of Practical Reason

Prescribing the Life of the Mind

An Essay on the Purpose of the University, the Aims of Liberal Education, the Competence of Citizens, and the Cultivation of Practical Reason

Charles W. Anderson

University of Wisconsin Press, 1996

A distinguished political philosopher with years of experience teaching in undergraduate liberal arts programs, Anderson shows how the ideal of practical reason can reconcile academia’s research aims with public expectations for universities: the preparation of citizens, the training of professionals, the communication of a cultural inheritance. It is not good enough, he contends, to simply say that the university should stick to the great books of the classic tradition, or to denounce this tradition and declare that all important questions are a matter of personal or cultural choice.  By applying the methods of practical reason, instead, teachers and students will think critically about the essential purposes of any human activity and the underlying arguments of any text.
[more]
cover of Presentation of Self in Academic Support Genres: Job Application Statements

Presentation of Self in Academic Support Genres

Job Application Statements

Mohammed Albakry & Clint Bryan

University of Michigan Press, 2025

Applying for an academic job is a complex process that requires applicants to present their credentials, strengths, and values through multiple written documents. These self-promotional writing genres—particularly research, teaching, and diversity statements—carry different purposes and utilize distinct strategies to portray a job seeker as the right match for the hiring institution. Presentation of Self in Academic Support Genres demystifies these high-stakes genres by analyzing authentic texts and real-world examples. It provides insight into the intricacies and challenges of self-presentation in diverse settings and sheds light on an otherwise hidden discourse community and its conventions. It also includes dozens of engaging activities and tasks, some of which are specifically designed for multilingual writers, that guide readers through composing effective job application materials. 

This theoretically grounded but practice-oriented book will be a valuable guide for recent graduates and newly minted PhD holders about to start their careers in higher education and beyond. Readers will gain awareness of job application expectations and best practices, and job seekers interested in pursuing careers beyond the classroom will also learn how to leverage their skills and qualifications for industry jobs. The book will be a great resource in advanced courses on genre-based writing instruction, English for Academic Purposes, and professional communication. In addition, it can be used in graduate professionalization courses, professional seminars, faculty development workshops, or by individuals working independently.
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cover of Preservation Education: Sharing Best Practices and Finding Common Ground

Preservation Education

Sharing Best Practices and Finding Common Ground

Edited by Barry L. Stiefel and Jeremy C. Wells

University Press of New England, 2014

Over the past twenty years, there has been a fundamental shift in the institutional organization of historic preservation education. Historic preservation is the most recent arrival in the collection of built environment disciplines and therefore lacks the pedagogical depth and breadth found in allied endeavors such as architecture and planning. As the first degree programs in preservation only date to the 1970s and the first doctoral programs to the 1990s, new faculty are confronted with pedagogical challenges that are unique to this relatively nascent field. Based on a conference that included educators from around the world, Barry L. Stiefel and Jeremy C. Wells now present a collection that seeks to address fundamental issues of preservation pedagogy, outcome-based education and assessment, and global issues of authenticity and significance in historic preservation. The editors argue that the subject of the analysis has shifted from, “What is the best way to fix a historic building?” to, “What are the best ways for teaching people how to preserve historic properties (and why) according to the various standards that have been established?” This important reconsideration of the state of the field in historic preservation education will appeal to a broad audience across numerous disciplines.
[more]
cover of Presumed Incompetent II: Race, Class, Power, and Resistance of Women in Academia

Presumed Incompetent II

Race, Class, Power, and Resistance of Women in Academia

Yolanda Flores Niemann

Utah State University Press, 2020

The courageous and inspiring personal narratives and empirical studies in Presumed Incompetent II: Race, Class, Power, and Resistance of Women in Academia name formidable obstacles and systemic biases that all women faculty—from diverse intersectional and transnational identities and from tenure track, terminal contract, and administrative positions—encounter in their higher education careers. They provide practical, specific, and insightful guidance to fight back, prevail, and thrive in challenging work environments. This new volume comes at a crucial historical moment as the United States grapples with a resurgence of white supremacy and misogyny at the forefront of our social and political dialogues that continue to permeate the academic world.

Contributors: Marcia Allen Owens, Sarah Amira de la Garza, Sahar Aziz, Jacquelyn Bridgeman, Jamiella Brooks, Lolita Buckner Inniss, Kim Case, Donna Castaneda, Julia Chang, Meredith Clark, Meera Deo, Penelope Espinoza, Yvette Flores, Lynn Fujiwara, Jennifer Gomez, Angela Harris, Dorothy Hines, Rachelle Joplin, Jessica Lavariega Monforti, Cynthia Lee, Yessenia Manzo, Melissa Michelson, Susie E. Nam, Yolanda Flores Niemann, Jodi O’Brien, Amelia Ortega, Laura Padilla, Grace Park, Stacey Patton, Desdamona Rios, Melissa Michal Slocum, Nellie Tran, Rachel Tudor, Pamela Tywman Hoff, Adrien Wing, Jemimah Li Young

[more]
cover of Presumed Incompetent: The Intersections of Race and Class for Women in Academia

Presumed Incompetent

The Intersections of Race and Class for Women in Academia

edited by Gabriella Gutiérrez y Muhs, Yolanda Flores Niemann, Carmen G. González, and Angela P. Harris

Utah State University Press, 2012

Presumed Incompetent is a pathbreaking account of the intersecting roles of race, gender, and class in the working lives of women faculty of color. Through personal narratives and qualitative empirical studies, more than 40 authors expose the daunting challenges faced by academic women of color as they navigate the often hostile terrain of higher education, including hiring, promotion, tenure, and relations with students, colleagues, and administrators. The narratives are filled with wit, wisdom, and concrete recommendations, and provide a window into the struggles of professional women in a racially stratified but increasingly multicultural America.

[more]
cover of Principled University Leadership: Critical Decision-Making in Academia

Principled University Leadership

Critical Decision-Making in Academia

Marc A. Johnson

University of Nevada Press, 2025

Principled University Leadership: Critical Decision-Making in Academia is a personal account by university president Marc A. Johnson that draws on his extensive experience in academic administration. The book delves into four major themes: traits that lead individuals into leadership roles; economic principles influencing university decision-making; practical leadership strategies for fostering institutional progress; and approaches to navigating today’s critical challenges, including DEI and free speech. 

Rooted in Johnson’s small-town origins and passion for civic engagement, this narrative offers unique insights into the path to university leadership and the key decisions leaders face. It is an invaluable resource for aspiring and current academic leaders seeking guidance in navigating the complexities of higher education.
 
[more]
cover of Private Sectors in Higher Education: Structure, Function, and Change in Eight Countries

Private Sectors in Higher Education

Structure, Function, and Change in Eight Countries

Roger L. Geiger

University of Michigan Press, 1986

Private Sectors in Higher Education examines how the tasks of higher education have been divided between public and private institutions, and with what consequences. In doing so, the author analyzes both the comparative structures of educational systems and their social relations. Besides correcting the widespread misperception that private higher education is predominately an American phenomenon, this study should enlarge the range of experience that can be brought to bear on issues currently facing public policy and private higher education. It constitutes the first scholarly treatment of private higher education outside the United States. Case studies of private sectors in seven countries—Belgium, France, Great Britain, Japan, the Netherlands, the Philippines, and Sweden—form the core of this work. This material provides a perspective for probing several underlying rationales for private higher education in the United States. And finally, the author analyzes the issue of government financial support for private higher education. This book should significantly contribute to enlarging the framework of discussion of this question by broadening the understanding of the social and political underpinnings of public/private division in higher education.
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cover of Privilege and Prejudice: The Life of a Black Pioneer

Privilege and Prejudice

The Life of a Black Pioneer

Clifton R. Wharton

Michigan State University Press, 2015

Privilege and Prejudice is a stereotype-defying autobiography. It reveals a Black man whose good fortune in birth and heritage and opportunity of time and place helped him to forge breakthroughs in four separate careers. Clifton R. Wharton Jr. entered Harvard at age 16. The first Black student accepted to the School of Advanced International Studies at Johns Hopkins, he went on to receive a doctorate in economics from the University of Chicago—another first. For twenty-two years he promoted agricultural development in Latin America and Southeast Asia, earning a post as chairman of the Rockefeller Foundation. He again pioneered higher education firsts as president of Michigan State University and chancellor of the sixty-four-campus State University of New York system. As chairman and CEO of TIAA-CREF, he was the first Black CEO of a Fortune 500 company. His commitment to excellence culminated in his appointment as deputy secretary of state during the Clinton administration. A remarkable story of persistence and courage, Privilege and Prejudice also documents the challenges of competing in a society where obstacles, negative expectations, and stereotypical thinking remained stubbornly in place. An absorbing and candid narrative, it describes a most unusual childhood, a remarkable family, and a historic career.
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cover of Producing Excellence: The Making of Virtuosos

Producing Excellence

The Making of Virtuosos

Wagner, Izabela

Rutgers University Press, 2015

Driven by a passion for music, for excellence, and for fame, violin soloists are immersed from early childhood in high-pressure competitions, regular public appearances, and arduous daily practice. An in-depth study of nearly one hundred such children, Producing Excellence illuminates the process these young violinists undergo to become elite international soloists.
 
A musician and a parent of a young violinist, sociologist Izabela Wagner offers an inside look at how her young subjects set out on the long road to becoming a soloist. The remarkable research she conducted—at rehearsals, lessons, and in other educational settings—enabled her to gain deep insight into what distinguishes these talented prodigies and their training. She notes, for instance, the importance of a family culture steeped in the values of the musical world. Indeed, more than half of these students come from a family of professional musicians and were raised in an atmosphere marked by the importance of instrumental practice, the vitality of music as a vocation, and especially the veneration of famous artists. Wagner also highlights the highly structured, rigorous training system of identifying, nurturing, and rewarding talent, even as she underscores the social, economic, and cultural factors that make success in this system possible.
 
Offering an intimate portrait of the students, their parents, and their instructors, Producing Excellence sheds new light on the development of exceptional musical talent, as well as draw much larger conclusions as to “producing prodigy” in other competition-prone areas, such as sports, sciences, the professions, and other arts. Wagner’s insights make this book valuable for academics interested in the study of occupations, and her clear, lively writing is perfect for general readers curious about the ins and outs of training to be a violin soloist.
[more]
cover of Producing Success: The Culture of Personal Advancement in an American High School

Producing Success

The Culture of Personal Advancement in an American High School

Peter Demerath

University of Chicago Press, 2009

Middle- and upper-middle-class students continue to outpace those from less privileged backgrounds. Most attempts to redress this inequality focus on the issue of access to financial resources, but as Producing Success makes clear, the problem goes beyond mere economics. In this eye-opening study, Peter Demerath examines a typical suburban American high school to explain how some students get ahead.

Demerath undertook four years of research at a Midwestern high school to examine the mercilessly competitive culture that drives students to advance. Producing Success reveals the many ways the community’s ideology of achievement plays out: students hone their work ethics and employ various strategies to succeed, from negotiating with teachers to cheating; parents relentlessly push their children while manipulating school policies to help them get ahead; and administrators aid high performers in myriad ways, even naming over forty students “valedictorians.” Yet, as Demerath shows, this unswerving commitment to individual advancement takes its toll, leading to student stress and fatigue, incivility and vandalism, and the alienation of the less successful. Insightful and candid, Producing Success is an often troubling account of the educationally and morally questionable results of the American culture of success.

[more]
cover of Productivity in Higher Education

Productivity in Higher Education

Edited by Caroline M. Hoxby and Kevin Stange

University of Chicago Press, 2019

How do the benefits of higher education compare with its costs, and how does this comparison vary across individuals and institutions? These questions are fundamental to quantifying the productivity of the education sector. The studies in Productivity in Higher Education use rich and novel administrative data, modern econometric methods, and careful institutional analysis to explore productivity issues. The authors examine the returns to undergraduate education, differences in costs by major, the productivity of for-profit schools, the productivity of various types of faculty and of outcomes, the effects of online education on the higher education market, and the ways in which the productivity of different institutions responds to market forces. The analyses recognize five key challenges to assessing productivity in higher education: the potential for multiple student outcomes in terms of skills, earnings, invention, and employment; the fact that colleges and universities are “multiproduct” firms that conduct varied activities across many domains; the fact that students select which school to attend based in part on their aptitude; the difficulty of attributing outcomes to individual institutions when students attend more than one; and the possibility that some of the benefits of higher education may arise from the system as a whole rather than from a single institution. The findings and the approaches illustrated can facilitate decision-making processes in higher education.
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cover of Professing Criticism: Essays on the Organization of Literary Study

Professing Criticism

Essays on the Organization of Literary Study

John Guillory

University of Chicago Press, 2022

A sociological history of literary study—both as a discipline and as a profession.
 
As the humanities in higher education struggle with a labor crisis and with declining enrollments, the travails of literary study are especially profound. No scholar has analyzed the discipline’s contradictions as authoritatively as John Guillory. In this much-anticipated new book, Guillory shows how the study of literature has been organized, both historically and in the modern era, both before and after its professionalization. The traces of this volatile history, he reveals, have solidified into permanent features of the university. Literary study continues to be troubled by the relation between discipline and profession, both in its ambivalence about the literary object and in its anxious embrace of a professionalism that betrays the discipline’s relation to its amateur precursor: criticism. 

In a series of timely essays, Professing Criticism offers an incisive explanation for the perennial churn in literary study, the constant revolutionizing of its methods and objects, and the permanent crisis of its professional identification. It closes with a robust outline of five key rationales for literary study, offering a credible account of the aims of the discipline and a reminder to the professoriate of what they already do, and often do well.
[more]
cover of Professing Literature: An Institutional History

Professing Literature

An Institutional History

Gerald Graff

University of Chicago Press, 1987

[more]
cover of Professing Literature: An Institutional History, Twentieth Anniversary Edition

Professing Literature

An Institutional History, Twentieth Anniversary Edition

Gerald Graff

University of Chicago Press, 2007

Widely considered the standard history of the profession of literary studies, Professing Literature unearths the long-forgotten ideas and debates that created the literature department as we know it today. In a readable and often-amusing narrative, Gerald Graff shows that the heated conflicts of our recent culture wars echo—and often recycle—controversies over how literature should be taught that began more than a century ago.

Updated with a new preface by the author that addresses many of the provocative arguments raised by its initial publication, Professing Literature remains an essential history of literary pedagogy and a critical classic.

“Graff’s history. . . is a pathbreaking investigation showing how our institutions shape literary thought and proposing how they might be changed.”— The Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism
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cover of Professional Communities and the Work of High School Teaching

Professional Communities and the Work of High School Teaching

Milbrey W. McLaughlin and Joan E. Talbert

University of Chicago Press, 2001

American high schools have never been under more pressure to reform: student populations are more diverse than ever, resources are limited, and teachers are expected to teach to high standards for all students. While many reformers look for change at the state or district level, the authors here argue that the most local contexts—schools, departments, and communities—matter the most to how well teachers perform in the classroom and how satisfied they are professionally. Their findings—based on one of the most extensive research projects ever done on secondary teaching—show that departmental cultures play a crucial role in classroom settings and expectations. In the same school, for example, social studies teachers described their students as "apathetic and unwilling to work," while English teachers described the same students as "bright, interesting, and energetic."

With wide-ranging implications for educational practice and policy, this unprecedented look into teacher communities is essential reading for educators, administrators, and all those concerned with U. S. High Schools.
[more]
cover of Professional Identity Crisis: Race, Class, Gender, and Success at Professional Schools

Professional Identity Crisis

Race, Class, Gender, and Success at Professional Schools

Carrie Yang Costello

Vanderbilt University Press, 2006

The fact that women and people of color tend to underperform at professional schools is a source of controversy. Conservatives blame affirmative action, while liberals blame intentional discrimination. The extensive research reported in Professional Identity Crisis belies both conspiracy theories.

The author spent over 400 hours observing how first-year students are socialized in two very different environments, Boalt School of Law and the School of Social Welfare at UC Berkeley, watching how they adapted to different expectations of how to speak, dress, and behave in the classroom.

Costello found that students who were female, of color, disabled, or poor were not underqualified compared with their privileged peers. Nor did the research uncover intentional bigotry. Instead, the disproportionate success of white men can be explained by the fact that they are more likely to acquire appropriate professional identities swiftly, with little inner conflict. Students from less privileged backgrounds, however, suffered from "identity dissonance." For example, Jasmine, a Filipino student from Los Angeles, explained, "In the legal culture you have to adopt a different way of being, a different vocabulary and way to carry yourself . . . That's how I got this far. And when I go home, if I act the way I do here, they won't get it. My cousins and my friends say, 'You're kind of whitewashed.' And when I come back here I have to get back my law style."

[more]
cover of Professionalizing Multimodal Composition

Professionalizing Multimodal Composition

Santosh Khadka

Utah State University Press, 2023

Multimodal composition is becoming increasingly popular in university classrooms as faculty, students, and institutions come to recognize that old and new technologies have enabled, and even demanded, the use of more than one composing mode for communicating, solving problems, and keeping up with the latest discourse. Professionalizing Multimodal Composition embraces and enacts multimodal composition in various writing courses and programs by exploring institutional, programmatic, and individual faculty initiatives for capacity building and human resource development across institutions.
 
Academic leaders, scholars, and faculty who have successfully designed and launched academic programs or faculty development initiatives discuss the theoretical and logistical questions considered in their design, the outcomes they achieved, and how others can emulate them. This exchange of knowledge, insight, experiences, and lessons learned among community members is critical for enabling or inspiring other programs, departments, and institutions to conceive, design, and launch academic programs or faculty development initiatives for their own faculty.
 
The larger goal of professionalizing is to work with teaching faculty to increase their interactional expertise with multimodal composition, and this collection offers a set of models for how faculty can do that at their own institutions and in their own programs.
[more]
cover of Professions: Conversations on the Future of Literary and Cultural Studies

Professions

Conversations on the Future of Literary and Cultural Studies

Edited by Donald E. Hall

University of Illinois Press, 2001

Sometimes playful, always provocative, Professions is a collection of searching and candid conversations--ranging from dialogues to tongue-in-cheek diatribes--on the issues that face literary and cultural critics today.
 
This volume bares professional concerns, relationships, ambitions, and insecurities about working in academe. Professions provides hard-to-get insider information for students contemplating an academic career. It also challenges professional scholars to retrieve the intellectual curiosity that drew them to scholarship in the first place while demonstrating how disagreement on controversial issues can be conducted with respect, good humor, and an open mind.
 
Professions features:
 
Jane Tompkins and Gerald Graff
John McGowan and Regenia Gagnier
James Phelan and James Kincaid
Marjorie Perloff and Robert von Hallberg
Judith Jackson Fossett and Kevin Gaines
Dennis W. Allen and Judith Roof
Niko Pfund, Gordon Hutner, and Martha Banta
Geoffrey Galt Harpham
Donald E. Hall and Susan S. Lanser
J. Hillis Miller, Herbert Lindenberger, Sandra Gilbert, Bonnie Zimmerman, Nellie Y. McKay, and Elaine Marks
 
[more]
cover of Progressive Dystopia: Abolition, Antiblackness, and Schooling in San Francisco

Progressive Dystopia

Abolition, Antiblackness, and Schooling in San Francisco

Savannah Shange

Duke University Press, 2019

San Francisco is the endgame of gentrification, where racialized displacement means that the Black population of the city hovers at just over 3 percent. The Robeson Justice Academy opened to serve the few remaining low-income neighborhoods of the city, with the mission of offering liberatory, social justice--themed education to youth of color. While it features a progressive curriculum including Frantz Fanon and Audre Lorde, the majority Latinx school also has the district's highest suspension rates for Black students. In Progressive Dystopia Savannah Shange explores the potential for reconciling the school's marginalization of Black students with its sincere pursuit of multiracial uplift and solidarity. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork and six years of experience teaching at the school, Shange outlines how the school fails its students and the community because it operates within a space predicated on antiblackness. Seeing San Francisco as a social laboratory for how Black communities survive the end of their worlds, Shange argues for abolition over revolution or progressive reform as the needed path toward Black freedom.
[more]
cover of Promoting Positive Transition Outcomes: Effective Planning for Deaf and Hard of Hearing Young Adults

Promoting Positive Transition Outcomes

Effective Planning for Deaf and Hard of Hearing Young Adults

Pamela Luft

Gallaudet University Press, 2016

Many students struggle with the transition from high school to the next stage of their lives. For deaf and hard of hearing (DHH) students, that struggle can be intensified by barriers and discriminatory attitudes they face in their communities, schools, and workplaces. Though much progress has been made, they are often underemployed and underpaid, and they receive postsecondary training at lower rates than other disability groups. Author Pamela Luft explores the reasons for these statistics and offers strategies and resources that can improve outcomes.

       Promoting Positive Transition Outcomes is the most comprehensive discussion of transition planning and results for DHH students now available. Luft begins with an overview of the historical and current challenges to DHH students and their academic and vocational potential. She explores the importance of forming an identity and building foundational social and problem-solving skills. She then reviews the history of rehabilitation and workforce legislation, which now mandates that every student with an individualized education plan (IEP) have a transition plan in place by the age of 16. Most schools, however, are not equipped to meet the needs of a population as diverse as DHH students. She examines the services that are currently available in high schools and offers recommendations for strengthening transition team planning by reaching out to external experts. The volume concludes with suggestions for creating a framework to address the challenges of transition planning for deaf and hard of hearing students and offers guidance on building effective plans.
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