New Books In Education

Elite colleges have long played a crucial role in maintaining social and class status in America while public universities have offered a major stepping-stone to new economic opportunities. However, as Charlie Eaton reveals in Bankers in the Ivory Tower: The Troubling Rise of Financiers in US Higher Education (U Chicago Press, 2022), finance has played a central role in the widening inequality in recent decades, both in American higher education and in American society at large. With federal and state funding falling short, the US higher education system has become increasingly dependent on financial markets and the financiers that mediate them. Beginning in the 1980s, the government, colleges, students, and their families took on multiple new roles as financial investors, borrowers, and brokers. The turn to finance, however, has yielded wildly unequal results. At the top, ties to Wall Street help the most elite private schools achieve the greatest endowment growth through hedge fund investments and the suppo

Sophie Adelman is the co-founder of Multiverse and The Garden, two companies that are innovating the way people learn and enhance their personal skills. Multiverse offers professional apprenticeships as an alternative to traditional college approaches, and The Garden is launching a platform for building and educating a diverse community of people who share a passion for learning. Sophie’s path to success began with no clear entrepreneurial role model, nor a precise idea of what she wanted to do with her professional life. After studies at Cambridge, Harvard, and Stanford Business School, she worked in a variety of positions in the corporate world, including stints in headhunting, banking, and finance. But along the way, Sophie knew one thing for certain—she wanted to change the world, and she believed that meaningful change could begin at the organisational level. Today, her innovative learning models are levelling the playing field for people and businesses that want access to top-tier educational opportunit

In God, Grades, and Graduation: Religion's Surprising Impact on Academic Success (Oxford University Press, 2022), Ilana M. Horwitz offers a revealing and at times surprising account of how teenagers' religious upbringing influences their educational pathways from high school to college. Religious students orient their life around God so deeply that it alters how they see themselves and how they behave, inside and outside of church. Ilana M. Horwitz is an Assistant Professor and Fields-Rayant Chair of Contemporary Jewish Life at Tulane University. Schneur Zalman Newfield is an Assistant Professor of Sociology at Borough of Manhattan Community College, City University of New York, and the author of Degrees of Separation: Identity Formation While Leaving Ultra-Orthodox Judaism (Temple University Press, 2020). Visit him online at ZalmanNewfield.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/education

Rachel Buurma and Laura Heffernan's The Teaching Archive: A New History for Literary Study (University of Chicago Press, 2020) is an excavation of a discipline through the work of its teachers, the traces of the tremendous and varied labour that went into preparing for and practicing literary study in classrooms from the first decades of the twentieth century to the 1970s. Exploring the teaching papers of scholars and instructors at institutions private and public--prestigious and privileged universities, extension schools, and HBCUs--the authors revisit the work of some of the scholars frequently identified as "founders" of the discipline, including T.S. Eliot, I.A. Richards, Cleanth Brooks. They also show how the work of women and other scholars/teachers neglected as shapers of literary critical methods before the 1960s and 1970s was indeed essential to the development of the ideas and practices at the heart of the discipline.  At once an intellectual and a labor history, the book emphasizes practices, comp

The Prince of Wales College, Achimota School, opened in 1927 north of Accra in the Gold Coast (Ghana). Achimota was to be a ‘model’ school—but a model of what, exactly? And for whom? Shoko Yamada’s book 'Dignity of Labour' for African Leaders: The Formation of Education Policy in the British Colonial Office and Achimota School (Langaa RPCIG, 2018) delves into the multiple discourses and contested politics that resulted in Achimota. Her careful analysis pulls apart the different strands of American and British educational models that influenced Achimota, while also attending to the specificities of Gold Coast politics that shaped the school’s creation. Yamada then tracks how those influences combined, in the context of the 1920s and 1930s Gold Coast, to create an entirely new colonial institution. Elisa Prosperetti is an Assistant Professor in International History at the National Institute of Education in Singapore. Her research focuses on the connected histories of education and development in postcolonial W

In Academic Apartheid: Race and the Criminalization of Failure in an American Suburb (U California Press, 2022), sociologist Sean J. Drake addresses long-standing problems of educational inequality from a nuanced perspective, looking at how race and class intersect to affect modern school segregation. Drawing on more than two years of ethnographic observation and dozens of interviews at two distinct high schools in a racially diverse Southern California suburb, Drake unveils hidden institutional mechanisms that lead to the overt segregation and symbolic criminalization of Black, Latinx, and lower-income students who struggle academically. His work illuminates how institutional definitions of success contribute to school segregation, how institutional actors leverage those definitions to justify inequality, and the ways in which local immigrant groups use their ethnic resources to succeed. Academic Apartheid represents a new way forward for scholars whose work sits at the intersection of education, race and et

The Lost Promise: American Universities in the 1960s (University of Chicago Press, 2021) is a magisterial examination of the turmoil that rocked American universities in the 1960s, with a unique focus on the complex roles played by professors as well as students. The 1950s through the early 1970s are widely seen as American academia’s golden age, when universities—well funded and viewed as essential for national security, economic growth, and social mobility—embraced an egalitarian mission. Swelling in size, schools attracted new types of students and professors, including radicals who challenged their institutions’ calcified traditions. But that halcyon moment soon came to a painful and confusing end, with consequences that still afflict the halls of ivy. In The Lost Promise, Ellen Schrecker—our foremost historian of both the McCarthy era and the modern American university—delivers a far-reaching examination of how and why it happened. Schrecker illuminates how US universities’ explosive growth intersected w

Listen to this interview of Roslyn Petelin, Honorary Associate Professor at the University of Queensland, Australia. We talk about her book How Writing Works: A Field Guide to Effective Writing (Routledge, 2021) writing well and knowing why. Roslyn Petelin : "My book caters for all kinds of writers: student writers, creative writers, technical writers, journalistic writers, corporate writers, all of whom need to be able to write well, write successfully, for either personal or corporate credibility." Contact Daniel at writeyourresearch@gmail.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/education

George Coe is a religious studies, current events, and world history teacher in Fairfax County, Virginia. He runs a popular blog with teaching resources here.  This conversation talks about constitutionality of teaching about religion; how to arrange a semester of teaching high school religious studies, a wide-range of resources that he and I have used to with success in our own classrooms, and a deep dive investigation of a typical religious studies class in a typical United States high school. This is a snapshot of a hardworking teacher doing great work for teenagers in the United States. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/education

In this Pandemic Perspectives Podcast, Ideas Roadshow founder and host Howard Burton talks to renowned cognitive psychologist Stephen Kosslyn about how the COVID-19 pandemic influenced, or didn't influence, our understanding of the learning process. Ideas Roadshow's Pandemic Perspectives Project consists of three distinct, reinforcing elements: a documentary film (Pandemic Perspectives), book (Pandemic Perspectives: A filmmaker's journey in 10 essays) and a series of 24 detailed podcasts with many of the film's expert participants. Visit www.ideasroadshow.com for more details. Howard Burton is the founder of Ideas Roadshow and host of the Ideas Roadshow Podcast. He can be reached at howard@ideasroadshow.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/education

In today’s episode of How To Be Wrong we welcome Adrian Lenardic, who is a professor in the Department of Earth, Environmental and Planetary Sciences at Rice University and an avid scakteboarder. Adrian has an interesting background, having started as a visual arts major at UW Madison before switching to geophysics. He went on to get his PhD in planetary science form UCLA and did his postdoctoral work at UC Berkeley. Our conversation explores the systemic problems in higher education that work against intellectual humility and that tend to have a negative influence on how scholarship operates in the modern university. Quite a bit of our conversation explores the negative impact the business model is having on higher education and particularly on junior faculty and graduate students. John Kaag is Professor and Chair of Philosophy at UMass Lowell and External Professor at the Santa Fe Institute. John W. Traphagan, Ph.D. is Professor and Mitsubishi Heavy Industries Fellow in the Department of Religious Studies a

We continue our discussion with Mark Nordenberg, who shares lessons from his successful 19 year tenure as Chancellor of the University of Pittsburgh and his subsequent career as Director of the Institute of Politics, including his recent stint chairing the Committee charged with making recommendations on Pennsylvania redistricting. David Finegold is the president of Chatham University. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/education

Targets of bullying are often the most vulnerable members of the scientific workforce-they may be low-paid graduate students or postdocs, living in a foreign country, navigating a foreign language and culture, and whose immigration status is tied directly to their employment. They may also have young families, be living paycheck-to-paycheck, and have health insurance and other benefits that depend on a contract position that can be revoked with little to no notice or cause. Finally, targets on the low end of a power differential are not likely to be supported by their institutions, particularly institutions that rely on the big grant earnings brought in by senior "bullies." A Brief Guide to Academic Bullying (Jenny Stanford Publishing, 2021) is a brief guide to the causes of academic bullying and to their solutions. Galina Limorenko is a doctoral candidate in Neuroscience with a focus on biochemistry and molecular biology of neurodegenerative diseases at EPFL in Switzerland. Learn more about your ad choices.

A Guide to Academic Podcasting is a practical guidebook introducing scholars to the multiverse of podcasting. It’s an open-source publication made by Amplify Podcast Network, written by Stacey Copeland and Hannah McGregor. In this conversation, we talked about embodied knowledge, gendered (and racialized) voices, and how new media publishing is transforming the relationships scholars have with the public(s). We entered into the territory of the vulnerable scholar, examined our discomfort with silence, and the spaces of possibilities academics may discover in podcasting. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/education

School shootings and suicides by young victims of bullying have spurred a proliferation of anti-bullying programs, yet most of the research done on school bullying has been from psychologists. The Sociology of Bullying: Power, Status and Aggression Among Adolescents edited by Christopher Donoghue and published by New York University Press in 2022 will be the first volume to present the leading ideas in sociology about bullying among adolescents that moves beyond an individualistic approach and instead offers ideas about how to address bullying as a by-product of social systems, biases, and status hierarchies. Sociologists investigate the impact of social forces on bullying among adolescents, such as inequality, heteronormativity, militarized capitalism, racism, cancel culture, power, and competition. Contributors explore a wide range of key topics, such as how homophobia and gender normativity encourage bullying; how anti-bullying curricula can ultimately lead to more bullying; and how adolescents use bullyin

Millennials in the U.S. have been characterized as uninterested in religion, as defectors from religious institutions, and as agnostic about the role of religious identity in their culture. Amid the rise of so-called "nones," though, there has also been a countervailing trend: an increase in religious piety among some millennial Catholics. The Fellowship of Catholic University Students (FOCUS), which began evangelizing college students on American university campuses in 1998, hires recent college graduates to evangelize college students and promote an attractive and culturally savvy Catholicism. These millennial Catholics have personal relationships with Jesus, attend Mass daily, and know and defend papal teachings, while also being immersed in U.S. popular culture. With their skinny jeans, devotional tattoos, and large-framed glasses, FOCUS missionaries embody a hip, attractive style of Catholicism. They promote a faith that interweaves distinctly Catholic identity with outreach methods of twentieth-century

Games are an established aide in pre-college mathematics education. Meanwhile, innumerable popular books have investigated the mathematics of games. In a new edited volume for the AMS/MAA Classroom Resource Materials Series, topologist and NSF educational program director Mindy Capaldi and contributors join advanced topics with innovative lesson designs in possibly the first book of game-based mathematics education for college curricula. Teaching Mathematics Through Games (MAA Press, 2020) comprises lesson material for the full breadth of coursework taken by math students involving just as diverse and often surprising a breadth of games. I've become interested in how edited collections come about, especially in mathematics, so i took some time at the start to ask Dr. Capaldi about the conception and production of this project. We then discussed a selection of six of the book's seventeen chapters that offer a sense of its scope and a taste of its value. To touch briefly on some chapters we did not discuss: Chr

Even in the midst of a nationwide surge of bias and incidents against them, Asians from coast to coast have quietly assumed mastery of the nation's technical and intellectual machinery and become essential American workers. Yet, they've been forced to do so in the face of policy proposals―written in the name of diversity―excluding them from the upper ranks of the elite. In An Inconvenient Minority: The Attack on Asian American Excellence and the Fight for Meritocracy (Diversion Book, 2021), journalist Kenny Xu traces elite America's longstanding unease about a minority potentially upending them. Leftist agendas, such as eliminating standardized testing, doling out racial advantages to "preferred" minorities, and lumping Asians into "privileged" categories despite their deprived historical experiences have spurred Asian Americans to act. Going beyond the Students for Fair Admission (SFFA) v. Harvard case, Xu unearths the skewed logic rippling countrywide, from Mayor Bill de Blasio's attempted makeover of New Y

Andrew M. Henry is a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of Religion at Boston University and founder of the educational YouTube channel, Religion for Breakfast. Andrew has produced over 50 video lectures on a variety of religious studies topics, used by educators worldwide. You can follow him on twitter @andrewmarkhenry. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/education

We are delighted to present All for One and One for All: Public Seminar Series on Mental Health in Academia and Society. All for One and One for All talks will shine the light on and discuss mental health issues in academia across all levels – from students to faculty, as well as in wider society. Seminars are held online once per month on Wednesdays at 5pm CET/ 11am EST and free for all to attend. Speakers include academics, organisations, and health professionals whose work focuses on mental health. Live Q and A sessions will be held after each talk. For live webinar schedule please visit Lashuel lab website. Follow us on Twitter: @LashuelLab Today’s talk is with Mark Henick, Dr. Hilal Lashuel and Galina Limorenko Join bestselling author and internationally recognized mental health advocate Mark Henick in a conversation on wellbeing across the lifespan. We will explore a broader understanding of mental health, including aspects of how the brain, the mind, and the social environment contribute to building a