New Books in Education

Every year, thousands of teachers visit San Diego to understand project-based learning and find inspiration in the work done by students at High Tech High. Their multimedia presentations have been installed in public art galleries, and state and local ecologists have relied on their field guides for years. These high school students spend their time doing the complex work of professionals in countless fields. But what are the benefits of teaching this way? How do teachers create their own curricula? What structures do they use in their classrooms? In Work That Matters: The Teacher’s Guide to Project-Based Learning (Paul Hamlyn Foundation, 2012), Alec Patton outlines the rationale and foundations for project-based learning, while succinctly addressing the practical questions posed by curious teachers. Patton joins New Books in Education for the interview. You can find more information about his work, including his own projects with students, on his digital portfolio. To share your thoughts on the podcast, you can connect with him on Twitter at @AlecPatton. You can reach the host on Twitter at @tsmattea. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/education

Ellen Hazelkorn, Policy Advisor to the Higher Education Authority (Ireland) and Director of the Higher Education Policy Research Unit (HEPRU), Dublin Institute of Technology, provides an in-depth analysis of higher educational rankings and what they mean globally in the second edition release of Rankings and the Reshaping of Higher Education: The Battle for World-Class Excellence (Palgrave Macmillan, 2015). The author explores the measurements, metrics, and processes used by the most influential university rankings, such as Academic Ranking of World Universities, QS World University Rankings, Times Higher Education’s the World University Rankings, and others. From the perspective of higher education institutions, to students and policymakers, the book is an essential resource for understanding this pressurized educational discourse, which now impacts almost every country throughout the world. Professor Hazelkorn, who is also President of the European Association of Institutional Research (EAIR) and on the Management Committee of ESRC/HEFCE at the Centre for Global Higher Education (CGHE), Institute of Education, UCL, joins New Books in Education for the interview to discuss the book. For questions or comments on the podcast, you can also find the host on Twitter at @PoliticsAndEd. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/education

Dr. William Elliott III, associate professor in the School of Social Welfare at the University of Kansas, and Melinda Lewis, associate professor of practice in the School of Social Welfare at the University of Kansas, explore the landscape of the US higher education student loan situation in The Real College Debt Crisis: How Student Borrowing Threatens Financial Well-Being and Erodes the American Dream (Praeger 2015). Using real-life examples along with academically rooted studies, the authors attempt to answer the question, “Does the student who goes to college and graduates but has outstanding student debt achieve similar financial outcomes to the student who graduates from college without student debt?” Co-author Melinda Lewis joins New Books in Education for the interview to discuss the book. For questions or comments on the podcast, you can also find the host on Twitter at @PoliticsAndEd. You can also find the authors on Twitter at @melindaklewis and Dr. Elliott’s organization at @AssetsEducation. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/education

Recent years have witnessed a spate of journalistic and popular writings on the looming threat to civilization that lurks in traditional Islamic seminaries or madrasas that litter the physical and intellectual landscape of the Muslim world. In his riveting new book What is a Madrasa? (University of North Carolina Press, 2015), Ebrahim Moosa, Professor of History and Islamic Studies at the University of Notre Dame, challenges such sensationalist stereotypical narratives by providing a nuanced and richly textured account of the place and importance of Madrasas in Islam both historically and in the contemporary moment. Rather than approaching madrasas from a policy studies viewpoint as institutions requiring reform and modernization, this book instead examines madrasas on their own terms with a view of highlighting their internal complexities and tensions. Focused primarily on the madrasas of South Asia, what makes this book particularly remarkable is the way it brings together the intellectual histories and traditions that define madrasa education and the everyday practices in madrasa life today. The reader of this book travels through an arcade of the seminal texts, scholars, and sites that have shaped the madrasa as an institution and its curricula over the last several centuries. But moreover, this book also provides readers intimate portraits of daily life at madrasas through the eyes of students who study there, thus bringing into view the rhythms of everyday practices that punctuate the lives of madrasa students, and the hopes, anxieties, and aspirations that irrigate their religious and social imaginaries. In our conversation, in addition to discussing these themes, we also talked about Professor Moosa’s own journey as a teenager in the madrasas of South Asia to the corridors of the American academy. Written in an exceptionally lucid fashion, this book is essential reading for anyone interested in understanding the complexities of Muslim traditions of knowledge and education. It will also be particularly well suited for undergraduate and graduate seminars on Muslim intellectual thought, education, and Islam in South Asia. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/education

With high educational and professional attainment, Asian Americans are often portrayed as the “Model Minority” in popular media. This portrayal, though, is widely panned by academics and activists who claim that it lacks nuance. Madeline Y. Hsu, Associate Professor, University of Texas at Austin, provides such nuance through here historical account of Chinese immigration to the US, entitled The Good Immigrants: How the Yellow Peril Became the Model Minority (Princeton University Press, 2015). Dr. Hsu brings focus to “side door” immigration–students, paroled refugees, and even current H-1B visa holders–that has been crucial to Chinese immigration to the US for well over a century. Through her historical analysis, she shows that the US immigration policy towards China has mostly been skewed towards a selection of higher skilled or more educated émigré. Dr. Hsu joins New Books in Education for the interview to discuss her book. For questions or comments on the podcast, you can also find the host on Twitter at @PoliticsAndEd. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/education

Dr. Ruth Hayhoe, professor at the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education of the University of Toronto, has dedicated her academic career to the study of Chinese education. Now, after several decades of becoming one of the most recognizable names in the field of international and comparative education, she has compiled some of her most relevant works into a succinct piece for the World Library of Educationalists series, entitled China Through the Lens of Comparative Education: The Selected Works of Ruth Hayhoe (Routledge. 2015). The book consists of three parts: Comparative Education and China, Higher Education and History, Religion, Culture and Education, all of which are made up of past pieces selected by Dr. Hayhoe herself. Dr. Hayhoe joins New Books in Education for the interview to discuss this book and her distinguished career. For questions or comments on the podcast, you can also find the host on Twitter at @PoliticsAndEd. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/education

Nick Sousanis‘s new book is a must-read for anyone interested in thinking or teaching about the relationships between text, image, visuality, and knowledge. Unflattening (Harvard University Press, 2015) uses the medium of comics to explore “flatness of sight” and help readers think and work beyond it by opening up new perceptive possibilities. It proposes that we think about unflattening as a “simultaneous engagement of multiple vantage points from which to engender new ways of seeing,” and beautifully embodies what it can look like to make that happen. Readers will find thoughtful reflections on the possibilities and constraints afforded by working and thinking with different kinds of verbal and visual language, including a consideration of comics as “an amphibious language of juxtapositions and fragments,” and some wonderful work on storytelling and imagination. The book includes a wonderful “Notes” section that offers some background on the inspiration behind many of the images (including Flatland, Calvino’s Six Memos for the New Millennium, Deleuze & Guattari, and many others) a bibliography for further reading, and a series of maps of the structure of the book when it was a work-in-progress. It’s a fabulous book that is a pleasure to read and deserves a wide readership. For more on Nick’s work on Unflattening and beyond, check out his website: http://spinweaveandcut.com/. For listeners and readers interested in teaching with the book, check out this site: http://scholarlyvoices.org/unflattening/index.html Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/education

Universities across the world have become more attuned to a global competition in higher education. International rankings and world class status are now critical focuses for these institutions. Academics have also gotten swept into this perceived competition, as their research plays a key factor for rankings and prestige. This phenomenon has pressed Dr. Chuing Prudence Chou to edit a volume chronicling these concerns and implications, entitled The SSCI Syndrome in Higher Education: A Local or Global Phenomenon (Sense Publishers, 2013), a series in Comparative and International Education: A Diversity of Voices. The authors contend that the completion and pressure of high stakes publishing has created an unhealthy environment, even lessening collaboration. For the social sciences, being published in a journal listed in the Social Sciences Citation Index has become a must for professors. However, Dr. Chou and her colleagues contend that the focus on SSCI has marginalized other journals and also academics whom come from non-English speaking countries. While the book’s roots are in Taiwan, the lessons are far reaching for higher education globally. Dr. Chou joins New Books in Education for the interview. For questions or comments on the podcast, you can also find the host on Twitter at @PoliticsAndEd. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/education

Much of the public debate about the relationship between science and theology has been antagonistic or adversarial. Proponents on both sides argue that their respective claims are contradictory–that the claims of science trump and even discredit the claims of religion or theology. Some have sought to portray the relationship in a different light. The evolutionary biologist Stephen J. Gould famously asserted that the two realms were “nonoverlapping magisteria.” But recently theologians and scientists have begun to mark out new ground for robust conversation. Tom McLeish‘s book Faith and Wisdom in Science (Oxford University Press, 2014) takes this conversation to new heights. Locating the impulse for science in much biblical literature, particularly the wisdom books of the Hebrew Bible, he shows how one might understand science as a theological endeavor. Rather than a paradigm of “science and theology,” he posits a “theology of science,” an interrelationship that not only gives us new eyes with which to read the history of science more coherently but also yields a renewed appreciation for science as part of a “ministry of reconciliation” with the natural world and the causes of human suffering. Tom McLeish is Professor of Physics and former Pro-Vice-Chancellor for Research at Durham University. He studied for his first degree and PhD in polymer physics at the University of Cambridge and in 1987 became a lecturer in physics at the University of Sheffield. In 1993 he took the chair in polymer physics at the University of Leeds. He took up his current position in Durham in 2008. He is a fellow of the Institute of Physics, the Royal Society of Chemistry, the American Physical Society, and the Royal Society. He is also involved in science communication with the public via radio, television, and school lectures, discussing topics ranging from the physics of slime to the interaction of faith and science. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/education

The development of higher education in Asia has been as dramatic as the region’s rapid economic rise. The landscape of this diverse and ever-changing sector is thoroughly explored in Asia: The Next Higher Education Superpower? (Institute of International Education [IIE] and the American Institute For Foreign Study Foundation, 2015). Dr. Rajika Bhandari, IIE’ Deputy Vice President for Research and Evaluation, and Dr. Alessia Lefebure, Director of the Alliance at Columbia University and Adjunct Professor at the university’s School of International and Public Affairs, edited this in-depth volume exploring Asian higher education by bringing together a globally and culturally diverse group of experienced academics, up-and-coming researchers, and even practitioners.The multiple perspectives provided throughout the book weave an expansive analysis of the region’s rich higher educational tapestry–from the reverence of international rankings, to issues of quality control, the branch campus phenomenon, and a myriad of other focused and fascinating inquiry. Dr. Lefebure joins New Books in Education for the interview. For questions or comments on the podcast, you can also find the host on Twitter at @PoliticsAndEd. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/education