New Books in Higher Education

Listen to Episode No.3 of All We Mean, a Special Focus of this podcast. All We Mean is an ongoing discussion and debate about how we mean and why. The guests on today's episode are Bill Cope and Mary Kalantzis, professors at the University of Illinois, and as well, Kit Nicholls, who is Director of the Cooper Union's Center for Writing and Learning. In this episode of the Focus, our topic is Learning happens where there's meaning.Bill Cope : "At root, what we're talking about in this conversation is some very old values. We wouldn't disagree much with Jean-Jacques Rousseau, we wouldn't disagree much with John Dewey, we wouldn't disagree much with Maria Montessori — if you want to take some of the greats of education — Paulo Freire, we wouldn't want to disagree with. So, we're talking about some old values, but the reality is, The values have not been realized. They might be in small spots of time, for some of us, sometimes, in moments of idealism and extremely hard work. But the question is then, Is there an opportunity for us now with these new media, these digital technologies, to build structures of participation. If our keyword is participation — which is, how to build certain kinds of collaborative, participatory environments — then, can the digital help us do that? Or will the technology make things worse?"Some related links: Common Ground Scholar — Learn and work with meaning!  Here I talk to the authors of the book Syllabus And here's a link to Syllabus Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Demonstrating how learning theories are applicable to a variety of real-world contexts, The Librarian's Guide to Learning Theory: Practical Applications in Library Settings (ALA Editions, 2023) will help library workers better understand how people learn so that they can improve support for instruction on their campuses and in their communities. In this book, Ann Medaille illustrates how libraries support learning in numerous ways, from makerspaces to book clubs, from media facilities to group study spaces, from special events to book displays. Medaille unchains the field of learning theory from its verbose and dense underpinnings to show how libraries can use its concepts and principles to better serve the needs of their users.Through 14 chapters organized around learning topics, including motivation, self-regulation, collaboration, and inquiry, readers will explore succinct overviews of major learning theories drawn from the fields of psychology, education, philosophy, and anthropology, among others. All of these can support reflection on concrete ways to improve library instruction, spaces, services, resources, and technologies. This accessible handbook includes teaching librarian's tips, reflection questions, and suggestions for further reading at the end of each chapter.Jen Hoyer is Technical Services and Electronic Resources Librarian at CUNY New York City College of Technology. Jen edits for Partnership Journal and organizes with the TPS Collective. She is co-author of What Primary Sources Teach: Lessons for Every Classroom and The Social Movement Archive. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Born in rural Michigan during the Jim Crow era, the bold and irrepressible Merze Tate (1905–1996) refused to limit her intellectual ambitions, despite living in what she called a “sex and race discriminating world.” Against all odds, the brilliant and hardworking Tate earned degrees in international relations from Oxford University in 1935 and a doctorate in government from Harvard in 1941. She then joined the faculty of Howard University, where she taught for three decades of her long life spanning the tumultuous twentieth century.Merze Tate: The Global Odyssey of a Black Woman Scholar (Yale UP, 2023) revives and critiques Tate’s prolific and prescient body of scholarship, with topics ranging from nuclear arms limitations to race and imperialism in India, Asia, the Pacific, and Africa. Tate credited her success to other women, Black and white, who helped her realize her dream of becoming a scholar. Her quest for research and adventure took her around the world twice, traveling solo with her cameras.Barbara Savage’s skilled rendering of Tate’s story is built on more than a decade of research. Tate’s life and work challenge provincial approaches to African American and American history, women’s history, the history of education, diplomatic history, and international thought.Omari Averette-Phillips is a History educator based in Southern California. He can be reached at omariaverette@gmail.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Listen to this interview of John Bond, founder and publishing consultant of Riverwinds Consulting. We talk about the breadth of services and resources now on offer to publishing scientists — while the industry only grows broader and broader.John Bond : "The one thing I would say helps specifically the middle-tier author (who'll, by the way, be most reluctant to try this) is this: Feel really comfortable sharing your early work on a more frequent and a wider basis. Because these authors tend to be quite shy about sharing work until they themselves think that it's absolutely perfect. And if we're really talking about the best quality ideas and the best quality work — well, sharing the concept with close ties early on, and then a draft or an outline with colleagues early on, and then the draft of it completely written, and then the final version — to do, so to speak, your own peer review early on, so that you head off rabbit holes you might be going down or poor expression of your ideas — that is really essential. Therefore, feel very comfortable with developing that network of people, in your institution, but most importantly, outside your institution."Of interest:  John Bond is a Publishing Consultant at Riverwinds Consulting. To connect with on a proiect, see his website PublishingFundamentals.com. He is the author of a book series with Rowman & Littlefield including The LIttle Guide to Getting Your Journal Article Published: Simple Steps to Success. For the podcast, the publisher has offered the promotional code 4F23LG to save 30%. The rest of the series is also available. His YouTube channel contains over 100 short videos on academic publishing. Or connect with him on LinkedIn. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Why are college programs offered in some prisons? How are the students selected? Where do the professors come from? What are the logistics of preparing to teach, and to learn, behind the wall? How does the digital divide affect these students?Today’s book is: Education Behind the Wall: Why and How We Teach College in Prison (Brandeis UP, 2022) edited by Mneesha Gellman, which is an edited volume reflecting on different aspects of teaching in prison and different points of view. This book seeks to address some of the major issues faced by faculty who are teaching college classes for incarcerated students. Composed of a series of case studies meant to showcase the strengths and challenges of teaching a range of different disciplines in prison, this volume brings together scholars who articulate some of the best practices for teaching their expertise inside alongside honest reflections on the reality of educational implementation in a constrained environment. The book not only provides essential guidance for faculty interested in developing their own courses to teach in prisons, but also places the work of higher education in prisons in philosophical context with regards to racial, economic, social, and gender-based issues. Rather than solely a how-to handbook, this volume also helps readers think through the trade-offs that happen when teaching inside, and about how to ensure the full integrity of college access for incarcerated students.Our guest is: Dr. Mneesha Gellman, who is the founder and director of the Emerson Prison Initiative, which brings an Emerson College bachelor’s degree pathway to incarcerated students at the Massachusetts Correctional Institution at Concord. Gellman is an associate professor of political science at the Marlboro Institute for Liberal Arts and Interdisciplinary Studies at Emerson College.Our host is: Dr. Christina Gessler, who is the host and producer of the Academic Life podcast. She holds a PhD in history, which she uses to explore what stories we tell and what happens to those we never tell.Listeners may also be interested in: An Academic Life conversation with the director of the Emerson Prison Initiative An Academic Life conversation about The Journal of Higher Education in Prison The Alliance for Higher Ed in Prison Academic Life conversation about racial injustice and the book Hands Up, Don't Shoot Welcome to Academic Life, the podcast for your academic journey—and beyond! Join us to learn from experts inside and outside the academy, and around the world. Missed any of the 175+ Academic Life episodes? You’ll find them all archived here. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

The question of land is largely absent in libraries. Deeply committed to the neoliberal project as a guiding ideology of the profession, libraries exist at once as ahistorical, atheoretical, and landless institutions in their understanding of themselves, their work, and their impact on people.Land in Libraries: Toward a Materialist Conception of Education (Library Juice Press, 2023) seeks to contribute to the growing body of work on libraries and the anthropocene, decolonization, and climate change through writing in theory and practice. This edited volume explores both non-metaphorical (actual, material) as well as conceptual perspectives on land. Contributions to this book center land as a foundational category underpinning social relations, as a necessity for the function and reproduction of capitalism, and as a place where we work and learn together. Fundamentally, we live on the land and how we live in relation to the land matters to how we understand ourselves as individuals and a society.Jen Hoyer is Technical Services and Electronic Resources Librarian at CUNY New York City College of Technology. Jen edits for Partnership Journal and organizes with the TPS Collective. She is co-author of What Primary Sources Teach: Lessons for Every Classroom and The Social Movement Archive. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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, Robin Phylisia Chapdelaine, Abena Ampofoa Asare, and Michelle Dionne Thompson's book When Will the Joy Come?: Black Women in the Ivory Tower (U Massachusetts Press, 2023) 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. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In recent years, public schools have become one of the central battlegrounds of American politics. Making Schools American: Nationalism and the Origin of Modern Educational Politics (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2022) lucidly explores how schools acquired such a critical role in the United States and its nation-building projects. Its author, Cody Dodge Ewert, illustrates how school reformers in the Progressive Era celebrated public education’s unique capacity to unite a diverse and diffuse citizenry while curing a broad swath of social and political ills. Pitching the school as a quintessentially American institution, these reformers’ lofty visions and nation-building projects inspired a historic expansion in public schooling, laying the groundwork for contemporary struggles over the structure and curriculum of public schools.Making Schools American carefully historicizes this varied progressive movement, examining case studies in New York, Utah, and Texas which all shed a unique light on the development of American education and the broader debates of the turn-of-the-twentieth-century United States concerning what it meant to be an American.Thomas Cryer is a PhD Student in American History at University College London, where he studies race, nationhood, education, and memory through the life, scholarship, and activism of the historian John Hope Franklin. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Decentering Whiteness in Libraries: A Framework for Inclusive Collection Management Practices (Rowman & Littlefield, 2023) serves as a "how to" guide for evaluating and crafting collection development policies that will help create equity in library collections. In this book, Andrea Jamison not only contextualizes the need for inclusive collection development policies but provides user-friendly tables, guides, and sample policies.This episode discusses why the history of inequality in libraries matters to our work today and what we can learn from it; how the Library Bill of Rights can be used as an advocacy tool; how we can evaluate and create diverse collection management policies; where to get started with putting policy into practice; and more.Jen Hoyer is Technical Services and Electronic Resources Librarian at CUNY New York City College of Technology. Jen edits for Partnership Journal and organizes with the TPS Collective. She is co-author of What Primary Sources Teach: Lessons for Every Classroom and The Social Movement Archive. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Princeton University Press’ Our Compelling Interests series focuses on diversity, in racial, gender, socioeconomic, religious, and other forms. Some of the titles in this series so far include The Walls around Opportunity: The Failure of Colorblind Policy for Higher Education by Gary Orfield, Out of Many Faiths: Religious Diversity and the American Promise By Eboo Patel, and The Diversity Bonus: How Great Teams Pay Off in the Knowledge Economy, by Scott E. Page.Earl Lewis is the Thomas C. Holt Distinguished University Professor of history, Afroamerican and African Studies, and Public Policy and director of the Center for Social Solutions at the University of Michigan. From March 2013-2018, he served as President of The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.Nancy Cantor is Chancellor of Rutgers University – Newark. A fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and member of the National Academy of Medicine, she previously led Syracuse University and the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and was provost at the University of Michigan, where she was closely involved in the defense of affirmative action in 2003 Supreme Court cases Grutter and Gratz.Caleb Zakarin is the Assistant Editor of the New Books Network. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices