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From growing their children, parents grow themselves, learning the lessons their children teach. “Growing up”, then, is as much a developmental process of parenthood as it is of childhood. While countless books have been written about the challenges of parenting, nearly all of them position the parent as instructor and support-giver, the child as learner and in need of direction. But the parent-child relationship is more complicated and reciprocal; over time it transforms in remarkable, surprising ways. As our children grow up, and we grow older, what used to be a one-way flow of instruction and support, from parent to child, becomes instead an exchange. We begin to learn from them. The lessons parents learn from their offspring—voluntarily and involuntarily, with intention and serendipity, often through resistance and struggle—are embedded in their evolving relationships and shaped by the rapidly transforming world around them.
 
With Growing Each Other Up, Macarthur Prize–winning sociologist and educator Sara Lawrence-Lightfoot offers an intimately detailed, emotionally powerful account of that experience. Building her book on a series of in-depth interviews with parents around the country, she offers a counterpoint to the usual parental development literature that mostly concerns the adjustment of parents to their babies’ rhythms and the ways parents weather the storms of their teenage progeny. The focus here is on the lessons emerging adult children, ages 15 to 35, teach their parents. How are our perspectives as parents shaped by our children? What lessons do we take from them and incorporate into our worldviews? Just how much do we learn—often despite our own emotionally fraught resistance—from what they have seen of life that we, perhaps, never experienced? From these parent portraits emerges the shape of an education composed by young adult children—an education built on witness, growing, intimacy, and acceptance.
 
Growing Each Other Up is rich in the voices of actual parents telling their own stories of raising children and their children raising them; watching that fundamental connection shift over time. Parents and children of all ages will recognize themselves in these evocative and moving accounts and look at their own growing up in a revelatory new light.
 

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

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

Spirit mediums of East Africa. Healers and fishermen of the Amazon River Basin. Potters of the American Southwest. People contending with climate change long ago. All share “knowledge in motion,” a process of drawing on experiences past and present while engaging in daily practice in relation to contexts of time, place, and power.

In the last twenty-five years, scholars from a number of disciplines have explored “situated learning,” specifically investigating how learning relates to social reproduction and daily life. In Knowledge in Motion, contributors focus on learning through time and at a variety of scales, particularly as they relate to power and politics, with implications for emergent communities and constellations of practice.

This volume brings together archaeologists, historians, and cultural anthropologists to examine communities engaged in a range of learning practices around the globe, from Africa to the Americas. Contributors draw on the growing interdisciplinary scholarship on situated learning to explore those processes in relation to power and broader forces that shape knowledge during times of turbulent change.

Enriching the diversity of regions and disciplines, Knowledge in Motion focuses on how learning, knowledge transmission, and the emergent qualities of communities and constellations of practice are shaped by changing spheres of interaction or other unstable events and influences. The contributions forge productive theories and methodologies for exploring situated learning and its broad-ranging outcomes.

Explaining change in the behavior of states and other international actors is at the core of the study of international relations. The proficiency with which states respond to changes in the international environment has important consequences for world peace and the world economy as well as domestic politics and well being. One way to understand changes in behavior is to consider whether and how states learn. Key to understanding this is considering how the groups responsible for making decisions learn and make decisions.

Andrew Farkas presents an evolutionary theory of how states adjust their foreign policies in response to international changes. Employing both formal models and computer simulations, Farkas explores the relative efficacy of a wide range of alternative strategies for dealing with unanticipated changes in the international environment, and goes a long way toward reconciling the success of rational choice modeling with criticism from psychological studies of decision making.

Farkas looks at the way small groups charged with making policy decisions work. He explicitly models the process of search and policy selection. He demonstrates how a group of disparate individuals can act as if it were a unitary rational actor and provides the first endogenous account of when and why groups curtail their search for satisfactory policies. Farkas uses the general model to explore the effects of different institutional designs on the decisionmaking process.

This book will be of interest to scholars of international relations, learning models and group processes.

Andrew Farkas is Assistant Professor of Political Science, Rutgers University.

The Educated Mind offers a bold and revitalizing new vision for today's uncertain educational system. Kieran Egan reconceives education, taking into account how we learn. He proposes the use of particular "intellectual tools"—such as language or literacy—that shape how we make sense of the world. These mediating tools generate successive kinds of understanding: somatic, mythic, romantic, philosophical, and ironic. Egan's account concludes with practical proposals for how teaching and curriculum can be changed to reflect the way children learn.

"A carefully argued and readable book. . . . Egan proposes a radical change of approach for the whole process of education. . . . There is much in this book to interest and excite those who discuss, research or deliver education."—Ann Fullick, New Scientist

"A compelling vision for today's uncertain educational system."—Library Journal

"Almost anyone involved at any level or in any part of the education system will find this a fascinating book to read."—Dr. Richard Fox, British Journal of Educational Psychology

"A fascinating and provocative study of cultural and linguistic history, and of how various kinds of understanding that can be distinguished in that history are recapitulated in the developing minds of children."—Jonty Driver, New York Times Book Review