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

How the policies of elite colleges allow racially themed parties to continue by perpetuating the status quo.
 
On a cold February evening, a group of students at Bowdoin College, an elite and historically white liberal arts college in Maine, gathered to drink tequila at a party referred to as “not not a fiesta.” By noon the next day, Instagram videos of students sporting miniature sombreros had spread like wildfire through campus. Over the next few weeks, national media outlets would broadcast the embarrassing fallout. But the frequency with which similar parties recur on campuses across the United States begs the question: what, if anything, do undergraduates learn about race and racism from these encounters?

Drawing on interviews and archival research, Yet Another Costume Party Debacle shows us how colleges both contest and reproduce racialized systems of power. Sociologist Ingrid A. Nelson juxtaposes how students and administrators discuss race with how they behave in the aftermath of racially charged campus controversies. Nelson spoke in-depth with students and other key players in several controversial parties—“Cracksgiving,” a “gangster party,” and the “not not a fiesta” tequila party—at Bowdoin. The college’s administrative response failed to encourage productive dialogue or address larger questions about race on campus. Nelson shows how the underlying campus structures at elite liberal arts colleges foster an environment that is ripe for racially charged incidents; we shouldn’t be surprised when we read about yet another costume party debacle. Nelson advises how we can take charge of diversity on our campuses by changing the systems that bring students together and drive them apart.
 

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

A compelling history of the learning style concept and how it was shaped by shifting ideas in psychology, anthropology, and education.
 
The widely embraced notion that we all process information in one of three distinct modes—visual, auditory, or kinesthetic—has informed educational practices for decades. In recent years, however, numerous studies have questioned the effectiveness of aligning instruction with the alleged learning styles of individual students. So, why is it still commonplace in the literature on beneficial teaching at all levels of education?

In You Are Not a Kinesthetic Learner: The Troubled History of a Dangerous Idea, historian Thomas Fallace traces the origins, evolution, and history of the learning style idea, demonstrating its relationship to a legacy of unequal education for children of color. Fallace argues that the research supporting the learning style idea was problematic from its inception in the 1910s and that it was used to label and justify a diminished curriculum for many Black and Latine students, whose cultural differences were perceived as weaknesses. In recent years, numerous empirical studies have not found the approach to be effective. This fascinating history clearly shows the danger of sorting and labeling students with permanent style identities and makes a strong case for removing learning styles as the basis for any educators’ instructional toolkit.

The first book-length history of learning styles, You Are Not a Kinesthetic Learner encourages us all to consider the research, be open to future developments and updates, and question even our most intuitive assumptions.