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2728 books match the query 'Education' and 128 start with w

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WPAing in a Pandemic and Beyond

Todd Ruecker

Utah State University Press, 2025

Writing program administrators have a long history of advocating for their students, fellow faculty, and programs. This advocacy includes defending their work against other entities that seek to dictate the work, challenging institutional policies that define student success in a narrow way or create untenable conditions for writing faculty workloads, and making antiracism a central part of writing programs. The COVID-19 pandemic undoubtedly created a variety of additional challenges for those working in education at all levels. WPAs suddenly had to navigate new public health mandates alongside student and instructor fears as well as pressures by administrations and publics to teach in person.

The chapters in this collection include a variety of voices who have been involved in writing program administration in recent years to reflect on the work done in this moment of crisis. Through both short vignettes and longer chapters, this book explores the complicated interactions between WPA work and navigating times of crisis to provide insights for moving forward. Authors explore a variety of topics including professional development, curricular change, advocating in the face of intransigent administrations and others, caring for students, and taking time for self-care. Pointing to specific actions for continued advocacy, WPAing in a Pandemic and Beyond will be of great interest to WPAs and writing studies scholars.

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Wad-Ja-Get?

The Grading Game in American Education, 50th Anniversary Edition

Howard Kirschenbaum, Rodney Napier, and Sidney B. Simon; With a new introduction by Professor Barry Fishman

Michigan Publishing Services, 2020

Grades and grading are an accepted part of modern education. But why? Why do we accept a system that is more focused on ranking students than on learning? Why do we accept the negative effects of standard grading approaches, including turning students off from learning, increasing stress, creating winners and losers, and perpetuating racial and economic inequality? Why do we accept these things when there are better alternatives?

Wad-Ja-Get? is a unique discussion of grading and its effects on students. The book was written by three education professors who have had first-hand contact with the problems of grading in all its forms. Written in the form of a novel, the topic is explored through the eyes of students, teachers, and parents in one high school embroiled in a controversy around grading. Possible alternatives to the grading system are examined in detail and the research on grading is summarized in an appendix. This 50th anniversary edition of the book includes a new introduction by Professor Barry Fishman, updating the research and setting the original book in the context of today’s educational and societal challenges. Wad-Ja-Get? remains timely five decades after its original publication, and will be inspiring to students, parents, educators, and policymakers.

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Wake

Why the Battle over Diverse Public Schools Still Matters

Karey Alison Harwood

Rutgers University Press, 2024

The Wake County Public School System was once described as a beacon of hope for American school districts. It was both academically successful and successfully integrated. It accomplished these goals through the hard work of teachers and administrators, and through a student assignment policy that made sure no school in the countywide district became a high poverty school. Although most students attended their closest school, the “diversity policy” modified where some students were assigned to make sure no school had more than 40% of its students qualifying for free or reduced-price lunch or more than 25% performing below grade level. When the school board election of 2009 swept into office a majority who favored “neighborhood schools,” the diversity policy that had governed student assignment for years was eliminated. Wake: Why the Battle Over Diverse Public Schools Still Matters tells the story of the aftermath of that election, including the fierce public debate that ensued during school board meetings and in the pages of the local newspaper, and the groundswell of community support that voted in a pro-diversity school board in 2011. What was at stake in those years was the fundamental direction of the largest school district in North Carolina and the 14th largest in the U.S. Would it maintain a commitment to diverse schools, and if so, how would it balance that commitment with various competing interests and demands? Through hundreds of published opinion articles and several in depth interviews with community leaders, Wake examines the substance of that debate and explores the community’s vision for public education. Wake also explores the importance of knowing the history of a place, including the history of school segregation. Wake County’s example still resonates, and the battle over diverse public schools still matters, because owning responsibility for the problem of segregated schools (or not) will shape the direction of America’s future.

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Walking in Art Education

Ecopedagogical and A/r/tographical Encounters.

Edited by Nicole Rallis, Ken Morimoto, Michele Sorensen, Valerie Triggs, and Rita Irwin

Intellect Books, 2024

This edited collection highlights ways that arts-educators address learning with the land through walking practices across spatial, temporal, and cultural differences.

In Walking in Art Education, authors explore walking and a/r/tography in their local contexts. As a result, the book finds that kinship and relationality are significant themes that permeate across a/r/tographic practices focused on ecopedagogy and learning with the land. These walking practices serve as ecopedagogical moments that attune us to human-land and more-than-human relationships, while also moving us past Western-centric understandings of land and place. More than this, the book situates this work in a/r/tographic practices taking up walking as one method for engagement.

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Wanasema

Conversations with African Writers

Don Burness

Ohio University Press, 1985

There is a tendency to regard African literature as a homogenous product. Certainly it is true that African writers have created a vibrant, modern literature. Nevertheless, they come from specific societies and reflect vastly differing worlds. Wanasema attempts to show some of the many faces of African literature. Dramatists, poets and novelists speak in these pages. They write in French, English, Portuguese, Arabic and indigenous languages. Some are Christian; others are Muslim. A variety of subjects are discussed, including the status of women, history, religion, politics, dress and education. Taken together, the interviews in Wanasema suggest that Western students of Africa would do well to learn the languages of Africa. They suggest, too, taht there is a need to investigate further the relationship between Islamic North Africa and Sub-Saharan Africa, and finally, that oral literature continues to be a vast marketplace for scholars. This book should interest African Studies specialists, of course, but also those whose concerns include literature, history and contemporary events in the non-Western world generally.

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Wannabe U

Inside the Corporate University

Gaye Tuchman

University of Chicago Press, 2009

Based on years of observation at a large state university, Wannabe U tracks the dispiriting consequences of trading in traditional educational values for loyalty to the market. Aping their boardroom idols, the new corporate administrators at such universities wander from job to job and reductively view the students there as future workers in need of training. Obsessed with measurable successes, they stress auditing and accountability, which leads to policies of surveillance and control dubiously cloaked in the guise of scientific administration. In this eye-opening exposé of the modern university, Tuchman paints a candid portrait of the corporatization of higher education and its impact on students and faculty.

Like the best campus novelists, Tuchman entertains with her acidly witty observations of backstage power dynamics and faculty politics, but ultimately Wannabe U is a hard-hitting account of how higher education’s misguided pursuit of success fails us all.

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Wasted Education

How We Fail Our Graduates in Science, Technology, Engineering, and Math

John D. Skrentny

University of Chicago Press, 2023

An urgent reality check for America’s blinkered fixation on STEM education.

We live in an era of STEM obsession. Not only do tech companies dominate American enterprise and economic growth while complaining of STEM shortages, but we also need scientific solutions to impending crises. As a society, we have poured enormous resources—including billions of dollars—into cultivating young minds for well-paid STEM careers. Yet despite it all, we are facing a worker exodus, with as many as 70% of STEM graduates opting out of STEM work. Sociologist John D. Skrentny investigates why, and the answer, he shows, is simple: the failure of STEM jobs.

Wasted Education reveals how STEM work drives away bright graduates as a result of “burn and churn” management practices, lack of job security, constant training for a neverending stream of new—and often socially harmful—technologies, and the exclusion of women, people of color, and older workers. Wasted Education shows that if we have any hope of improving the return on our STEM education investments, we have to change the way we’re treating the workers on whom our future depends.

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Wasted Education

How We Fail Our Graduates in Science, Technology, Engineering, and Math

John D. Skrentny

University of Chicago Press, 2023

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

An urgent reality check for America’s blinkered fixation on STEM education.

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We Are All Equal

Student Culture and Identity at a Mexican Secondary School, 1988–1998

Bradley A. U. Levinson

Duke University Press, 2001

We Are All Equal is the first full-length ethnography of a Mexican secondary school available in English. Bradley A. U. Levinson observes student life at a provincial Mexican junior high, often drawing on poignant and illuminating interviews, to study how the the school’s powerful emphasis on equality, solidarity, and group unity dissuades the formation of polarized peer groups and affects students’ eventual life trajectories.
Exploring how students develop a cultural “game of equality” that enables them to identify—across typical class and social boundaries—with their peers, the school, and the nation, Levinson considers such issues as the organizational and discursive resources that students draw on to maintain this culture. He also engages cultural studies, media studies, and globalization theory to examine the impact of television, music, and homelife on the students and thereby better comprehend—and problematize—the educational project of the state. Finding that an ethic of solidarity is sometimes used to condemn students defined as different or uncooperative and that little attention is paid to accommodating the varied backgrounds of the students—including their connection to indigenous, peasant, or working class identities—Levinson reveals that their “schooled identity” often collapses in the context of migration to the United States or economic crisis in Mexico. Finally, he extends his study to trace whether the cultural game is reinforced or eroded after graduation as well as its influence relative to the forces of family, traditional gender roles, church, and global youth culture.
We Are All Equal will be of particular interest to educators, sociologists, Latin Americanists, and anthropologists.

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We Are Not Dreamers

Undocumented Scholars Theorize Undocumented Life in the United States

Leisy J. Abrego and Genevieve Negrón-Gonzales, editors

Duke University Press, 2020

The widely recognized “Dreamer narrative” celebrates the educational and economic achievements of undocumented youth to justify a path to citizenship. While a well-intentioned, strategic tactic to garner political support of undocumented youth, it has promoted the idea that access to citizenship and rights should be granted only to a select group of “deserving” immigrants. The contributors to We Are Not Dreamers—themselves currently or formerly undocumented—poignantly counter the Dreamer narrative by grappling with the nuances of undocumented life in this country. Theorizing those excluded from the Dreamer category—academically struggling students, transgender activists, and queer undocumented parents—the contributors call for an expansive articulation of immigrant rights and justice that recognizes the full humanity of undocumented immigrants while granting full and unconditional rights. Illuminating how various institutions reproduce and benefit from exclusionary narratives, this volume articulates the dangers of the Dreamer narrative and envisions a different way forward.

Contributors. Leisy J. Abrego, Gabrielle Cabrera, Gabriela Garcia Cruz, Lucía León, Katy Joseline Maldonado Dominguez, Grecia Mondragón, Gabriela Monico, Genevieve Negrón-Gonzales, Maria Liliana Ramirez, Joel Sati, Audrey Silvestre, Carolina Valdivia

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We Fight To Win

Inequality and the Politics of Youth Activism

Hava Rachel Gordon

Rutgers University Press, 2009

In an adult-dominated society, teenagers are often shut out of participation in politics. We Fight to Win offers a compelling account of young people's attempts to get involved in community politics, and documents the battles waged to form youth movements and create social change in schools and neighborhoods.

Hava Rachel Gordon compares the struggles and successes of two very different youth movements: a mostly white, middle-class youth activist network in Portland, Oregon, and a working-class network of minority youth in Oakland, California. She examines how these young activists navigate schools, families, community organizations, and the mainstream media, and employ a variety of strategies to make their voices heard on some of today's most pressing issuesùwar, school funding, the environmental crisis, the prison industrial complex, standardized testing, corporate accountability, and educational reform. We Fight to Win is one of the first books to focus on adolescence and political action and deftly explore the ways that the politics of youth activism are structured by age inequality as well as race, class, and gender.

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We Made Uranium!

And Other True Stories from the University of Chicago's Extraordinary Scavenger Hunt

Edited by Leila Sales

University of Chicago Press, 2018

Item #176: A fire drill. No, not an exercise in which occupants of a building practice leaving the building safely. A drill which safely emits a bit of fire, the approximate shape and size of a drill bit.

Item #74: Enter a lecture class in street clothes. Receive loud phone call. Shout “I NEED TO GO, THE CITY NEEDS ME!” Remove street clothes to reveal superhero apparel. Run out for the good of the land.

Item #293: Hypnotizing a chicken seems easy, but if the Wikipedia article on the practice is to be believed, debate on the optimal method is heated. Do some trials on a real chicken and submit a report . . . for science of course.

Item #234: A walking, working, people-powered but preferably wind-powered Strandbeest.

Item #188: Fattest cat. Points per pound.

The University of Chicago’s annual Scavenger Hunt (or “Scav”) is one of the most storied college traditions in America. Every year, teams of hundreds of competitors scramble over four days to complete roughly 350 challenges. The tasks range from moments of silliness to 1,000-mile road trips, and they call on participants to fully embrace the absurd. For students it is a rite of passage, and for the surrounding community it is a chance to glimpse the lighter side of a notoriously serious university.

We Made Uranium! shares the stories behind Scav, told by participants and judges from the hunt’s more than thirty-year history. The twenty-three essays range from the shockingly successful (a genuine, if minuscule, nuclear reaction created in a dorm room) to the endearing failures (it’s hard to build a carwash for a train), and all the chicken hypnotisms and permanent tattoos in between. Taken together, they show how a scavenger hunt once meant for blowing off steam before finals has grown into one of the most outrageous annual traditions at any university. The tales told here are absurd, uplifting, hilarious, and thought-provoking—and they are all one hundred percent true.

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We Make the Road by Walking

Conversations on Education and Social Change

Myles Horton

Temple University Press, 1990

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Weaving a Fabric of Unity

Conversations on Education and Development

Haleh Arbab

West Virginia University Press, 2024

Weaving a Fabric of Unity shares the story of FUNDAEC (the Foundation for the Application and Teaching of Science), a non-governmental organization found in Cali, Colombia in 1974, and highlights five decades of stories, learning, and insight from key individuals central to shaping its evolution. The book outlines FUNDAEC’s unique conceptual and methodological approach, which is focused on the releasing of human potentialities and the integration of theory and practice so that a population may carry out action and research related to its social, economic, and cultural life. Weaving a Fabric of Unity brings the reader on the journey of how the organization created one of Latin America’s most innovative curricula in rural development. It shares how FUNDAEC’s focus on raising up individuals and communities dedicated to the promotion of community wellbeing supported its efforts to organically scale over the last few decades. The program now reaches hundreds of thousands of students across Colombia, and is being adopted in over a dozen countries to support diverse populations working towards the collective realization of a dignified future.

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West Virginia University

Symbol of Unity in a Sectionalized State

William T. Doherty, Jr

West Virginia University Press, 2013

First published in 1982, West Virginia University: Symbol of Unity in a Sectionalize State details the history of WVU from before its inception as the Agricultural College of West Virginia in 1867 to its expansion and development in the 1980s. This comprehensive history includes an index of people, places and events; photographs and illustrations; and in-depth descriptions of campuses, buildings, colleges, and academic and sports programs. A joint effort between William T Doherty, Jr., a Professor Emeritus History at WVU and Festus P. Summers, the first University Librarian who passed away before this project was complete, this new edition once again grants access to the diverse and complex elements which shaped the institution.

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What Are the Arts and Sciences?

A Guide for the Curious

Edited by Dan Rockmore

Dartmouth College Press, 2017

What constitutes the study of philosophy or physics? What exactly does an anthropologist do, or a geologist or historian? In short, what are the arts and sciences? While many of us have been to college and many aspire to go, we may still wonder just what the various disciplines represent and how they interact. What are their origins, methods, applications, and unique challenges? What kind of people elect to go into each of these fields, and what are the big issues that motivate them? Curious to explore these questions himself, Dartmouth College professor and mathematician Dan Rockmore asked his colleagues to explain their fields and what it is that they do. The result is an accessible, entertaining, and enlightening survey of the ideas and subjects that contribute to a liberal education. The book offers a doorway to the arts and sciences for anyone intrigued by the vast world of ideas.

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What Do You Think, Mr. Ramirez?

The American Revolution in Education

Geoffrey Galt Harpham

University of Chicago Press, 2017

Geoffrey Galt Harpham’s book takes its title from a telling anecdote. A few years ago Harpham met a Cuban immigrant on a college campus, who told of arriving, penniless and undocumented, in the 1960s and eventually earning a GED and making his way to a community college. In a literature course one day, the professor asked him, “Mr. Ramirez, what do you think?” The question, said Ramirez, changed his life because “it was the first time anyone had asked me that.” Realizing that his opinion had value set him on a course that led to his becoming a distinguished professor.
That, says Harpham, was the midcentury promise of American education, the deep current of commitment and aspiration that undergirded the educational system that was built in the postwar years, and is under extended assault today. The United States was founded, he argues, on the idea that interpreting its foundational documents was the highest calling of opinion, and for a brief moment at midcentury, the country turned to English teachers as the people best positioned to train students to thrive as interpreters—which is to say as citizens of a democracy. Tracing the roots of that belief in the humanities through American history, Harpham builds a strong case that, even in very different contemporary circumstances, the emphasis on social and cultural knowledge that animated the midcentury university is a resource that we can, and should, draw on today.

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What Does It Mean to Be Human?

Elizabeth Minnich

Temple University Press, 2027

What does it mean to be human? It has long been a tantalizing question for religious figures, scientists, political leaders, artists, and autocrats, among others. Noted philosopher Elizabeth Minnich claims, “There are no answers to such a question (although we all have favored responses).”

In What Does It Mean to Be Human?, Minnich invites us to reclaim our freedom from the dangerously distorted rationales for supremacism. She explores how the simplest mistakes in responses to “what does it mean to be human?” have enabled deadly historical errors, totalizing regimes, colonialisms, genocides, and enslavement. Paying close attention to the languages, logics, and nonsense of authoritative pronouncements, Minnich considers ways of thinking that affect and reflect meaning. She offers a fresh understanding of how mistakenly limited definitions of “human being” can be.

What Does It Mean to Be Human? emerges from Minnich’s ongoing effort to find, think through, and dissolve past mistakes that keep resurfacing to disastrous effect.

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What Employers Want

Job Prospects for Less-Educated Workers

Harry J. Holzer

Russell Sage Foundation, 1996

A very important contribution to the field of labor economics, and in particular to the understanding of the labor market forworkers with relatively low skill levels. I think we have the sense that the market looks bad, but haven't been clear on how bad it is, or how it got that way. What Employers Want provides some of the answers and identifies the important questions. It is essential reading. —Jeffrey S. Zax, University of Colorado at Boulder The substantial deterioration in employment and earnings among the nation's less-educated workers, especially minorities and younger males in the nation's big cities, has been tentatively ascribed to a variety of causes: an increase in required job skills, the movement of companies from the cities to the suburbs, and a rising unwillingness to hire minority job seekers. What Employers Want is the first book to replace conjecture about today's job market with first-hand information gleaned from employers about who gets hired. Drawn from asurvey of over 3,000 employers in four major metropolitan areas—Los Angeles, Boston, Atlanta, and Detroit—this volume provides a wealth of data on what jobs are available to the less-educated, in what industries, what skills they require, where they are located, what they pay, and how they are filled. The evidence points to a dramatic surge in suburban, white-collar jobs. The manufacturing industry—once a steady employer of blue-collar workers—has been eclipsed by the expanding retail trade and service industries, where the vast majority of jobs are in clerical, managerial, or sales positions. Since manufacturing establishments have been the most likely employers to move from the central cities to the suburbs, the shortage of jobs for low-skill urban workers is particularly acute. In the central cities, the problem is compounded and available jobs remain vacant because employers increasingly require greater cognitive and social skills as well as specific job-related experience. Holzer reveals the extent to which minorities are routinely excluded by employer recruitment and screening practices that rely heavily on testing, informal referrals, and stable work histories. The inaccessible location and discriminatory hiring patterns of suburban employers further limit the hiring of black males in particular, while earnings, especially for minority females, remain low. Proponents of welfare reform often assume that stricter work requirements and shorter eligibility periods will effectively channel welfare recipients toward steady employment and off federal subsidies. What Employers Want directly challenges this premise and demonstrates that only concerted efforts to close the gap between urban employers and inner city residents can produce healthy levels of employment in the nation's cities. Professor Holzer outlines the measures that will benecessary—targeted education and training programs, improved transportation and job placement, heightened enforcement of antidiscrimination laws, and aggressive job creation strategies. Repairing urban labor markets will not be easy. This book shows why. A Volume in the Multi-City Study of Urban Inequality

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What Error Correction Can(not) Accomplish for Second Language Writers

Dispelling Myths, Discussing Options

Dana R. Ferris

University of Michigan Press, 2018

This book looks at aspects of L2 research that influence error correction, finding that second language acquisition takes time and that second language writers' texts differ from those written by native English speakers. Using this research, Dana R. Ferris dispels the myth that diligent teacher correction and student editing can lead to perfect, error-free texts. In clear and simple terms, Ferris makes six suggestions for things teachers can do in the classroom regarding error correction and provides samples. Other issues regarding the expectations of students and others—such as in timed (high-stakes) situations—as it relates to "perfect" papers are examined. The book closes by addressing the basic principles of developing students' language skills in second language/ESL writing classes.

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What Every College Student Should Know

How to Find the Best Teachers and Learn the Most from Them

Lepore, Ernie

Rutgers University Press, 2002

Students do months of research before choosing just the right college, but once theyre on campus, how many of them actually research the professors who are teaching their classes? To optimize your college education you need to find your schools best teachers but how?

What Every College Student Should Know is a guide to discovering the best teachers at your school and learning everything you can from them. Here, the unique writing combination of a professor and a student provides you with perspectives from both sides of the equation. You'll learn:

- What questions to ask in selecting an instructor
- How to evaluate professors based on the first class sessions
- What to look for in a syllabus and grading policies
- How to identify a professors teaching style and how to adapt to it

Even the most outgoing students can expect only limited contact with their professors in the classroom, so the authors also provide tactics to take full advantage of meetings outside regular class time, such as:

- Advice on how to review your exam or paper with your professor
- Ways to build a relationship with a teacher and get invaluable feedback on your work
- Tips on how to get the best recommendations from proffessors

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What Every ESL Student Should Know

A Guide to College and University Academic Success

Kathy Ochoa Flores

University of Michigan Press, 2008

This book teaches English language learners about language learning and classroom expectations. It is a compilation of advice, experiences, suggestions, strategies, and learning theories collected over many years of teaching this population.

What Every ESL Student Should Know was written to help English language learners be successful in community college and college classrooms—specifically, how to prepare students for expectations and behavior within the classroom and how to help them to be good students, how to participate in class, what to expect from the class, and what to do to learn English. Learning strategies and language theories are presented in brief.

This text is ideal for orientations or pre-college workshops for international or

immigrant students.

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What Every Science Student Should Know

Justin L. Bauer, Yoo Jung Kim, Andrew H. Zureick, and Daniel K. Lee

University of Chicago Press, 2016

“I am often amazed at how much more capability and enthusiasm for science there is among elementary school youngsters than among college students. . . . We must understand and circumvent this dangerous discouragement. No one can predict where the future leaders of science will come from.”—Carl Sagan

In 2012, the White House put out a call to increase the number of STEM graduates by one million. Since then, hundreds of thousands of science students have started down the path toward a STEM career. Yet, of these budding scientists, more than half of all college students planning to study science or medicine leave the field during their academic careers.

What Every Science Student Should Know is the perfect personal mentor for any aspiring scientist. Like an experienced lab partner or frank advisor, the book points out the pitfalls while providing encouragement. Chapters cover the entire college experience, including choosing a major, mastering study skills, doing scientific research, finding a job, and, most important, how to foster and keep a love of science.

This guide is a distillation of the authors’ own experiences as recent science graduates, bolstered by years of research and interviews with successful scientists and other science students. The authorial team includes former editors-in-chief of the prestigious Dartmouth Undergraduate Journal of Science. All have weathered the ups and downs of undergrad life—and all are still pursuing STEM careers. Forthright and empowering, What Every Science Student Should Know is brimming with insider advice on how to excel as both a student and a scientist.

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What Happened to Notre Dame?

Charles E. Rice

St. Augustine's Press, 2009

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What Is Education?

Philip W. Jackson

University of Chicago Press, 2011

One day in 1938, John Dewey addressed a room of professional educators and urged them to take up the task of “finding out just what education is.” Reading this lecture in the late 1940s, Philip W. Jackson took Dewey’s charge to heart and spent the next sixty years contemplating his words. The stimulating result of a lifetime of thinking about educating, What Is Education? is a profound philosophical exploration of how we transmit knowledge in human society and how we think about accomplishing that vital task.

Most contemporary approaches to education follow a strictly empirical track, aiming to discover pragmatic solutions for teachers and school administrators. Jackson argues that we need to learn not just how to improve on current practices but also how to think about what education means—in short, we need to answer Dewey by constantly rethinking education from the ground up. Guiding us through the many facets of Dewey’s comments, Jackson also calls on Hegel, Kant, and Paul Tillich to shed light on how a society does, can, and should transmit truth and knowledge to successive generations. Teasing out the implications in these thinkers’ works ultimately leads Jackson to the conclusion that education is at root a moral enterprise.

At a time when schools increasingly serve as a battleground for ideological contests, What Is Education? is a stirring call to refocus our minds on what is for Jackson the fundamental goal of education: making students as well as teachers—and therefore everyone—better people.

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What Is Research?

Edited by Peter Miller

Bard Graduate Center, 2021

Research underlies nearly every aspect of our culture, with expansive investment poured into it and its significance acknowledged by governments, industries, and academic institutions around the world. Yet the idea, practice, and social life of research have not been a subject of study. Of the 164 million items in the catalog of the Library of Congress, only forty-three fall into the category of “Research—History.” To begin the task of understanding research as a concept and practice, Bard Graduate Center gathered a group of artists, scientists, and humanists—all recipients of MacArthur “genius” grants—for three evenings of discussion moderated by Peter N. Miller, who is also a MacArthur Fellow.

What is Research? includes conversations with theater director Annie Dorsen, biomedical researcher Elodie Ghedin, sculptor Tom Joyce, physicist Hideo Mabuchi, poet Campbell McGrath, photographer and filmmaker An-My Lê, neuroscientist Sheila Nirenberg, geochemist Terry Plank, and historian Marina Rustow, all of whom grapple with questions about the nature of research from their varied perspectives.

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What Should Schools Teach?

Disciplines, Subjects and the Pursuit of Truth

Edited by Alka Sehgal Cuthbert and Alex Standish

University College London, 2021

A robust rationale on what schools should teach and how.

The design of school curricula involves deep thought about the nature of knowledge and its value to learners and society. Such a serious responsibility raises a number of questions: What is knowledge for? What knowledge is important for children to learn? How do we decide what knowledge matters in each school subject? The blurring of distinctions between pedagogy and curriculum, as well as that between experience and knowledge, has resulted in a confusing message for teachers about the part that each plays in the education of children. This book aims to dispel confusion through a robust rationale for what schools should teach, offering key understanding to teachers of the relationship between knowledge and their own pedagogy. This second edition includes new chapters on chemistry, drama, music, and religious education, as well as an updated chapter on biology. A revised introduction reflects on the emerging discourse around decolonizing the curriculum and on the relationship between the knowledge that children encounter at school and in their homes.

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What We Are Becoming

Developments in Undergraduate Writing Majors

Greg Giberson and Thomas A. Moriarty

Utah State University Press, 2010

Greg Giberson and Tom Moriarty have collected a rich volume that offers a state-of-the-field look at the question of the undergraduate writing major, a vital issue for compositionists as the discipline continues to evolve. What We Are Becoming provides an indispensable resource for departments and WPAs who are building undergraduate majors.
Contributors to the volume address a range of vital questions for undergraduate programs, including such issues as the competition for majors within departments, the job market for undergraduates, varying focuses and curricula of such majors, and the formation of them in departments separate from English. Other chapters discuss the importance of flexibility, consider arguments for a rhetorical or civic discourse core for the writing major, address the relationship between rhetoric and composition majors, and review the role of multiliteracies in the major.
The field of composition has not come to a consensus on the shape, content, or focus of the undergradutate major. But as individual programs develop and refine their curricula, one thing has become clear: we must think about them in ways that go beyond our particular circumstances, theorize them in ways that secure their place on our campuses and in our discipline for years to come. What We Are Becoming is an effort to do just that.

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What We Hold in Trust

Rediscovering the Purpose of Catholic Higher Education

Don Briel

Catholic University of America Press, 2021

The specific concern in What We Hold in Trust comes to this: the Catholic university that sees its principal purpose in terms of the active life, of career, and of changing the world, undermines the contemplative and more deep-rooted purpose of the university. If a university adopts the language of technical and social change as its main and exclusive purpose, it will weaken the deeper roots of the university’s liberal arts and Catholic mission. The language of the activist, of changing the world through social justice, equality and inclusion, or of the technician through market-oriented incentives, plays an important role in university life. We need to change the world for the better and universities play an important role, but both the activist and technician will be co-opted by our age of hyper-activity and technocratic organizations if there is not first a contemplative outlook on the world that receives reality rather than constructs it. To address this need for roots What We Hold in Trust unfolds in four chapters that will demonstrate how essential it is for the faculty, administrators, and trustees of Catholic universities to think philosophically and theologically (Chapter One), historically (Chapter Two) and institutionally (Chapters Three and Four). What we desperately need today are leaders in Catholic universities who understand the roots of the institutions they serve, who can wisely order the goods of the university, who know what is primary and what is secondary, and who can distinguish fads and slogans from authentic reform. We need leaders who are in touch with their history and have a love for tradition, and in particular for the Catholic tradition. Without this vision, our universities may grow in size, but shrink in purpose. They may be richer but not wiser.

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What We Really Value

Beyond Rubrics in Teaching and Assessing Writing

Bob Broad

Utah State University Press, 2003

What We Really Value traces the origins of traditional rubrics within the theoretical and historical circumstances out of which they emerged, then holds rubrics up for critical scrutiny in the context of contemporary developments in the field. As an alternative to the generic character and decontextualized function of scoring guides, he offers dynamic criteria mapping, a form of qualitative inquiry by which writing programs (as well as individual instructors) can portray their rhetorical values with more ethical integrity and more pedagogical utility than rubrics allow.

To illustrate the complex and indispensable insights this method can provide, Broad details findings from his study of eighty-nine distinct and substantial criteria for evaluation at work in the introductory composition program at "City University." These chapters are filled with the voices of composition instructors debating and reflecting on the nature, interplay, and relative importance of the many criteria by which they judged students' texts. Broad concludes his book with specific strategies that can help writing instructors and programs to discover, negotiate, map, and express a more robust truth about what they value in their students' rhetorical performances.

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What We Teach When We Teach DH

Digital Humanities in the Classroom

Brian Croxall

University of Minnesota Press, 2023

Exploring how DH shapes and is in turn shaped by the classroom

How has the field of digital humanities (DH) changed as it has moved from the corners of academic research into the classroom? And how has our DH praxis evolved through interactions with our students? This timely volume explores how DH is taught and what that reveals about the field of DH. While institutions are formally integrating DH into the curriculum and granting degrees, many instructors are still almost as new to DH as their students. As colleagues continue to ask what digital humanities is, we have the opportunity to answer them in terms of how we teach DH.

The contributors to What We Teach When We Teach DH represent a wide range of disciplines, including literary and cultural studies, history, art history, philosophy, and library science. Their essays are organized around four critical topics at the heart of DH pedagogy: teachers, students, classrooms, and collaborations. This book highlights how DH can transform learning across a vast array of curricular structures, institutions, and education levels, from high schools and small liberal arts colleges to research-intensive institutions and postgraduate professional development programs.

Contributors: Kathi Inman Berens, Portland State U; Jing Chen, Nanjing U; Lauren Coats, Louisiana State U; Scott Cohen, Stonehill College; Laquana Cooke, West Chester U; Rebecca Frost Davis, St. Edward’s U; Catherine DeRose; Quinn Dombrowski, Stanford U; Andrew Famiglietti, West Chester U; Jonathan D. Fitzgerald, Regis College; Emily Gilliland Grover, Notre Dame de Sion High School; Gabriel Hankins, Clemson U; Katherine D. Harris, San José State U; Jacob Heil, Davidson College; Elizabeth Hopwood, Loyola U Chicago; Hannah L. Jacobs, Duke U; Alix Keener, Stanford U; Alison Langmead, U of Pittsburgh; Sheila Liming, Champlain College; Emily McGinn, Princeton U; Nirmala Menon, Indian Institute of Technology; James O’Sullivan, U College Cork; Harvey Quamen, U of Alberta; Lisa Marie Rhody, CUNY Graduate Center; Kyle Roberts, Congregational Library and Archives; W. Russell Robinson, Alabama State U; Chelcie Juliet Rowell, Tufts U; Dibyadyuti Roy, U of Leeds; Asiel Sepúlveda, Simmons U; Andie Silva, York College, CUNY; Victoria Szabo, Duke U; Lik Hang Tsui, City U of Hong Kong; Annette Vee, U of Pittsburgh; Brandon Walsh, U of Virginia; Kalle Westerling, The British Library; Kathryn Wymer, North Carolina Central U; Claudia E. Zapata, UCLA; Benjun Zhu, Peking U.

Retail e-book files for this title are screen-reader friendly.

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What Work Is

Robert Bruno

University of Illinois Press, 2024

A distinctive exploration of how workers see work

For more than twenty years, Robert Bruno has taught labor history and labor studies to union members from a wide range of occupations and demographic groups. In the class, he asked his students to finish the question “Work is—?” in six words or less. The thousands of responses he collected provide some of the rich source material behind What Work Is. Bruno draws on the thoughts and feelings experienced by workers in the present day to analyze how we might design a future of work. He breaks down perceptions of work into five categories: work and time; the space workers occupy; the impact of work on our lives; the sense of purpose that motivates workers; and the people we work for, in all senses of the term.

Far-seeing and sympathetic, What Work Is merges personal experiences with research, poetry, and other diverse sources to illuminate workers’ lives in the present and envision what work could be in the future.

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What Would It Take to Make an Ed School Great?

Voices from an Unfinished Revolution

John Schwille

Michigan State University Press, 2023

This book brings new life to the long-standing debate in the United States over whether teacher education, K–12 teaching, and the role that universities play in this work can be revolutionized so that they are less subject to self-defeating conventions and orthodoxy, to the benefit of all the nation’s children. Author John Schwille reexamines the ambitious reform agenda that Michigan State University teacher education leaders brought to the national table in the 1980s and 1990s. This attempted revolution mobilized unprecedented resources to the struggle to transform teaching and learning of subject matter. Conveying this history through the words of the teachers and scholars responsible for it, Schwille shows that a great deal was achieved, but many of the lessons learned continue to be ignored.

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What is Arts Research?

Gabriel Harp

A2RU Intervals, 2018

Seven facets of arts and design-driven research to span new ways of knowing, acting, experiencing, and inspiring the mission of the research university.

Diverse experiences, academic trajectories, and disciplinary backgrounds drive our understanding and interpretations of research, creative practice, and academic values. Despite its long and richly textured history, arts research is still relatively new to many academic departments and disciplines. For most practitioners, arts research is neither a formalized nor a codified process; it can take many paths. And because it can mean different things to different people, defining ‘arts research’ is a spectacular opportunity to create shared awareness, understanding and practice.

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What is Research?

Gabriel Harp

A2RU Intervals, 2018

Eight epistemologies to characterize research that spans traditional activities and new practices — shaping how people will come to understand the world in the century ahead.

Because faculty and students have so many wide-ranging experiences, academic trajectories, and disciplinary backgrounds, they don’t necessarily have the same set of concepts in mind when it comes to talking about research, what it means, or how it’s done. For many, “research” is an abstract, culturally constructed concept. With many different definitions and experiences, it can be critical to build a shared foundation for understanding — especially when issues of “what counts” as knowledge, tenure and promotion, and research process are at stake.

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What's Next?

Jim Agutter

A2RU Intervals, 2018

What's Next? is a decision support tool and set of cards designed to facilitate personal research planning, as well as team-based or mentor-mentee dialogue around needs and expectations. What’s Next? helps unlock assumptions and build connections between scholarly and research interests, passions, skills, needs, and outcomes. Play encourages “thinking big” about new opportunities and for scholarship and creative research.

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When Diversity Drops

Race, Religion, and Affirmative Action in Higher Education

Park, Julie J.

Rutgers University Press, 2013

Julie J. Park examines how losing racial diversity in a university affects the everyday lives of its students. She uses a student organization, the InterVarsity Christian Fellowship (IVCF) at “California University,” as a case study to show how reductions in racial diversity impact the ability of students to sustain multiethnic communities.

The story documents IVCF’s evolution from a predominantly white group that rarely addressed race to the most racially diverse campus fellowship at the university. However, its ability to maintain its multiethnic membership was severely hampered by the drop in black enrollment at California University following the passage of Proposition 209, a statewide affirmative action ban.

Park demonstrates how the friendships that students have—or do not have—across racial lines are not just a matter of personal preference or choice; they take place in the contexts that are inevitably shaped by the demographic conditions of the university. She contends that a strong organizational commitment to diversity, while essential, cannot sustain racially diverse student subcultures. Her work makes a critical contribution to our understanding of race and inequality in collegiate life and is a valuable resource for educators and researchers interested in the influence of racial politics on students’ lives.

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When Middle-Class Parents Choose Urban Schools

Class, Race, and the Challenge of Equity in Public Education

Linn Posey-Maddox

University of Chicago Press, 2014

In recent decades a growing number of middle-class parents have considered sending their children to—and often end up becoming active in—urban public schools. Their presence can bring long-needed material resources to such schools, but, as Linn Posey-Maddox shows in this study, it can also introduce new class and race tensions, and even exacerbate inequalities. Sensitively navigating the pros and cons of middle-class transformation, When Middle-Class Parents Choose Urban Schools asks whether it is possible for our urban public schools to have both financial security and equitable diversity.

Drawing on in-depth research at an urban elementary school, Posey-Maddox examines parents’ efforts to support the school through their outreach, marketing, and volunteerism. She shows that when middle-class parents engage in urban school communities, they can bring a host of positive benefits, including new educational opportunities and greater diversity. But their involvement can also unintentionally marginalize less-affluent parents and diminish low-income students’ access to the improving schools. In response, Posey-Maddox argues that school reform efforts, which usually equate improvement with rising test scores and increased enrollment, need to have more equity-focused policies in place to ensure that low-income families also benefit from—and participate in—school change.

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When Students Have Power

Negotiating Authority in a Critical Pedagogy

Ira Shor

University of Chicago Press, 1996

What happens when teachers share power with students? In this profound book, Ira Shor—the inventor of critical pedagogy in the United States—relates the story of an experiment that nearly went out of control.

Shor provides the reader with a reenactment of one semester that shows what really can happen when one applies the theory and democratizes the classroom. This is the story of one class in which Shor tried to fully share with his students control of the curriculum and of the classroom. After twenty years of practicing critical teaching, he unexpectedly found himself faced with a student uprising that threatened the very possibility of learning. How Shor resolves these problems, while remaining true to his commitment to power-sharing and radical pedagogy, is the crux of the book. Unconventional in both form and substance, this deeply personal work weaves together student voices and thick descriptions of classroom experience with pedagogical theory to illuminate the power relations that must be negotiated if true learning is to take place.

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When Will the Joy Come?

Black Women in the Ivory Tower

Edited by Robin Phylisia Chapdelaine, Michelle Dionne Thompson, and Abena Ampofoa Asare

University of Massachusetts Press, 2023

How do Black women in higher education create, experience, and understand joy? What sustains them? While scholars have long documented sexism, racism, and classism in the academy, one topic has been conspicuously absent from the literature—how Black women academics have found joy in the midst of adversity. Moving beyond questions of resilience, labor for others, and coping, When Will the Joy Come? focuses on the journeys of over thirty Black women at various stages of their careers.

Joy is a mixture of well-being, pleasure, alignment, and purpose that can be elusive for Black women scholars. With racial reckoning and a global pandemic as context, this volume brings together honest and vital essays that ponder how Black women balance fatigue and frustrations in the halls of the ivory tower, and explore where, when, and if joy enters their lives. By carefully contemplating the emotional, physical, and material consequences of their labor, this collection demonstrates that joy is a tactical and strategic component of Black women’s struggle.

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When the Light Is Fire

Maasai Schoolgirls in Contemporary Kenya

Heather D. Switzer

University of Illinois Press, 2018

A host of international organizations promotes the belief that education will empower Kenya's Maasai girls. Yet the ideas that animate their campaigns often arise from presumptions that reduce the girls themselves to helpless victims of gender-related forms of oppression.

Heather D. Switzer's interviews with over one hundred Kenyan Maasai schoolgirls challenge the widespread view of education as a silver bullet solution to global poverty. In their own voices, the girls offer incisive insights into their commitments, aspirations, and desires. Switzer weaves this ethnographic material into an astute analysis of historical literature, education and development documents, and theoretical literature. Maasai schoolgirls express a particular knowledge about themselves and provocative hopes for their futures. Yet, as Switzer shows, new opportunities force them to face, and navigate, new vulnerabilities and insecurities within a society that is itself in flux.

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Where We Start

A Practical Guide to Technical Communication Program Administration

K. Alex Ilyasova

Utah State University Press, 2026

Providing practical, pragmatic guidance for current and aspiring administrators, Where We Start is the first book in technical communication that professionalizes administrativework and practices, offering practical advice on curricular, undergraduate, and graduate program development.

Where We Start teaches by example with each chapter combining personal knowledge with published research to direct readers toward their own practices. Some ofthe most experienced program leaders in technical communication share strategies for program design, curriculum development, assessment, inclusivity, and external partnerships. The collection is divided into three main sections: Programmatic Development and Planning, which focuses on the foundational aspects of strategic planning, curriculum development, and programmatic assessment; Developing Differently, which highlights approaches to inclusivity, diversity, and unconventional career paths in program administration; and Building Beyond, which discusses strategies for expanding technical communication programs through partnerships with industry and international institutions.

A resource for administrators as well as graduate students and early-career faculty looking to understand the intricacies of program management, Where We Start fills a critical gap, offering insights from a uniquely technical communication perspective, where programmatic resources are scarce.

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