New Books in Education

Today we talked to Joseph Lo Bianco about the edited volume Community and Heritage Languages Schools Transforming Education (Routledge, 2023). The conversation addresses community and heritage language schooling research and practice, and our guest’s long history of important language policy research and activism, as well as the interconnections between the two.For additional resources, show notes, and transcripts, go here. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/education

Today’s book is: Leading From the Margins: College Leadership from Unexpected Places (Johns Hopkins UP, 2024), by Dr. Mary Dana Hinton, which is a guide to why people from marginalized backgrounds may be uniquely qualified to become effective higher education leaders―and how they can get there. Students and faculty in higher education increasingly reflect more diverse backgrounds, but this diversity remains rare in many leadership roles. In Leading from the Margins, Dr. Hinton celebrates the unique strengths of marginalized individuals, inviting them to embrace their leadership potential and make a difference. Drawing from Dr. Hinton's own journey to becoming a university president, this book challenges conventional leadership theories and highlights the value of diverse voices. This book is a vital resource for people in higher education aspiring to senior leadership positions who feel unheard or unrepresented in traditional leadership roles. Leading from the Margins is an essential read for anyone seeking to foster inclusive and effective leadership, bridging the gap between theory and lived experiences. Whether you're an emerging or established leader, Leading from the Margins will empower you to find your own leadership style and discover strength in unexpected places.Our guest is: Dr. Mary Dana Hinton, who is the 13th president of Hollins University. An active and respected proponent of the liberal arts and inclusion, her leadership reflects a deep and abiding commitment to educational equity and the education of women. Dr. Hinton was elected to the American Academy of Arts & Sciences, an organization established more than 240 years ago by the nation’s founders to honor exceptionally accomplished individuals and engage them in advancing the public good. Her scholarship focuses on higher education leadership, strategic planning, the role of education in peace building, African American religious history, and inclusion in higher education. She is the author of The Commercial Church: Black Churches and the New Religious Marketplace in America, and of Leading from the Margins: College Leadership from Unexpected Places.Our host is: Dr. Christina Gessler, the 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.Welcome to Academic Life, the podcast for your academic journey—and beyond! Join us again to learn from more experts inside and outside the academy, and around the world. You can support the show by downloading and sharing episodes. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/education

What is the future of higher education? In The Liberal Arts Paradox in Higher Education: Negotiating Inclusion and Prestige (Policy Press, 2023), Dr Kathryn Telling, a lecturer in education at the University of Manchester, explores the rise of liberal arts degrees in England to examine the broader contours of the contemporary university. The book tells the story of student and staff perspectives on liberal arts, as well as examining the institutional motivations and narratives underpinning the dilemmas and paradoxes of this subject area. Offering a rich and detailed engagement with key issues such as interdisciplinarity, institutional status, employability, and inequality in higher education, the book is essential reading across the humanities and social sciences. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/education

The engaging memoir of a legendary president of Wellesley College known for authentic and open-hearted leadership, who drove innovation with power and love. The Claims of Life: A Memoir (The MIT Press, 2023) traces the emergence of a young woman who set out believing she wasn’t particularly smart but went on to meet multiple tests of leadership in the American academy—a place where everyone wants to be heard and no one wants a boss. In college, Diana Chapman met Chris Walsh, who became a towering figure in academic science. Their marriage of fifty-seven years brought them to the forefront of revolutions in higher education, gender expectations, health-care delivery, and biomedical research. The Claims of Life offers readers an unusually intimate view of trustworthy leadership that begins and ends in self-knowledge. During a transformative fourteen-year Wellesley presidency, Walsh advanced women’s authority, compassionate governance, and self-reinvention. After Wellesley, Walsh’s interests took her to the boards of five national nonprofits galvanizing change. She kept counsel with Nobel laureates, feminist icons, and even the Dalai Lama, seeking solutions to the world’s climate crisis. With an ear tuned to social issues, The Claims of Life is an inspiring account of a life lived with humor, insight, and meaning that will surely leave a lasting impression on its readers.Diana Chapman Walsh is President Emerita of Wellesley College and an emerita member of the governing boards of MIT and Amherst College. She was a trustee of the Kaiser Family Foundation, the Institute for Healthcare Improvement, and the Mind and Life Institute, and also chaired the Broad Institute's inaugural board and cofounded the Council on the Uncertain Human Future.Caleb Zakarin is editor at the New Books Network. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/education

Bringing into dialogue the fields of social history, Andean ethnography, and postcolonial theory, The Lettered Indian: Race, Nation, and Indigenous Education in Twentieth-Century Bolivia (Duke University Press, 2024) by Dr. Brooke Larson maps the moral dilemmas and political stakes involved in the protracted struggle over Indian literacy and schooling in the Bolivian Andes.Dr. Larson traces Bolivia’s major state efforts to educate its unruly Indigenous masses at key junctures in the twentieth century. While much scholarship has focused on “the Indian boarding school” and other Western schemes of racial assimilation, Dr. Larson interweaves state-centred and imperial episodes of Indigenous education reform with vivid ethnographies of Aymara peasant protagonists and their extraordinary pro-school initiatives. Exploring the field of vernacular literacy practices and peasant political activism, she examines the transformation of the rural “alphabet school” from an instrument of the civilising state into a tool of Aymara cultural power, collective representation, and rebel activism. From the metaphorical threshold of the rural school, Dr. Larson rethinks the politics of race and indigeneity, nation and empire, in postcolonial Bolivia and beyond.This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose forthcoming book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/education

Student parents can feel unwelcome and invisible in their institutions. And for every student parent who is struggling to complete an education despite these hurdles, there are many others who have not been able to find a way. Supporting Student Parents in the Academic Library: Designing Spaces, Policies, and Services (ACRL, 2024) by Kelsey Keyes and Ellie Dworak is a guide to engaging with and aiding the student parents in your libraries and leading the charge in making your institutions more family friendly.Supporting Student Parents in the Academic Library is part toolkit, part treatise, and part call to action. In four parts: The Higher Education Landscape, The Role of Academic Libraries, Looking Outward to Community, and Evaluating Needs and Measuring Success. It includes templates, sample policy language, budgets, survey instruments, and other immediately useful tools and examples. There are field notes from academic librarians from institutions of varying sizes and resources demonstrating different ways of supporting these students, and the voices of students themselves.Kelsey Keyes was an academic librarian for fifteen years and is now Emerita Professor at Boise State University. She holds a Master of Library and Information Science and a Masters of English Literature from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. She is currently the Managing Editor of Critical AI (Duke University Press), as well as the copy editor of College & Research Libraries and Rare Books and Manuscripts (both ACRL publications). She also provides writing and editing support for academics, business, fiction and non-fiction writers (kelseykeyes.com). For over a decade, her research has focused on parenting students in higher education. Kelsey lives in Europe with her family.Ellie Dworak is an Associate Professor and the Research Data Librarian at Boise State University. She earned her Masters in Library and Information Services from the University of Michigan in 1996 and worked for the Ohio University and San Diego State University libraries prior to joining the faculty at Boise State in 2018. Her research focuses on higher education policy, human computer interaction, and the social impacts of living in a datafied society. She lives with her husband and three dogs in Boise, Idaho.Dr. Michael LaMagna is the Information Literacy Program & Library Services Coordinator and Professor of Library Services at Delaware County Community College. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/education

When Sharde M. Davis turned to social media during the summer of racial reckoning in 2020, she meant only to share how racism against Black people affects her personally. But her hashtag, BlackintheIvory, went viral, fostering a flood of Black scholars sharing similar stories. Soon the posts were being quoted during summer institutes and workshops on social justice, equity, diversity, and inclusion. And in fall 2020, faculty assigned the tweets as material for course curriculum.Being Black in the Ivory: Truth-Telling about Racism in Higher Education (UNC Press, 2024) is a curated collection of original personal narratives from Black scholars across the country seeks to continue the conversation that started with BlackintheIvory. Put together, the stories reveal how racism eats its way through higher education, how academia systemically ejects Black scholars in overt and covert ways, and how academic institutions--and their individual members--might make lasting change. While anti-Black racism in academia is a behemoth with many entry points to the conversation, this book marshals a diverse group of Black voices to bring to light what for too long has been hidden in the shadow of the ivory tower. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/education

In Crip Spacetime: Access, Failure, and Accountability in Academic Life (Duke University Press, 2024), Margaret Price intervenes in the competitive, productivity-focused realm of academia by sharing the everyday experiences of disabled academics. Drawing on more than three hundred interviews and survey responses, Price demonstrates that individual accommodations--the primary way universities address accessibility--actually impede access rather than enhance it. She argues that the pains and injustices encountered by academia's disabled workers result in their living and working in realities different from nondisabled colleagues: a unique experience of space, time, and being that Price theorizes as "crip spacetime." She explores how disability factors into the exclusionary practices found in universities, with multiply marginalized academics facing the greatest harms. Highlighting the knowledge that disabled academics already possess about how to achieve sustainable forms of access, Price boldly calls for the university to move away from individualized models of accommodation and toward a new system of collective accountability and care. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/education

For decades now, we’ve all heard the refrain – we are in a war against obesity, with perhaps the most important battle being fought over the health of our children. What better place could there be to defeat the enemy of obesity than our schools, where children are fed and educated and educated about being fed on a daily basis? But how did we come to see health promotion in schools as the key solution to solving the problem of obesity? And is obesity really at the root of our problems to begin with? Intertwining policy analysis and ethnography, José Tenorio’s School Food Politics in Mexico: The Corporatization of Obesity and Healthy Eating Policies (Routledge, 2023) examines how, and why now, the promotion of healthy lifestyles has been positioned as an ideal ‘solution’ to obesity and how this shapes the preparation, sale and consumption of food in schools in Mexico.This book situates obesity as a structural problem enabled by market-driven policy change, problematizing the focus on individual behavior change which underpins current obesity policy. Expanding the conversation on the politics of food in schools, obesity policy and dominant perspectives on the relation between food and health, this book is a must-read for scholars of food and nutrition, public health and education, as well as those with an interest in development studies and policy enactment and outcomes. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/education

Today’s book is: Contingent Faculty and the Remaking of Higher Education: A Labor History (University of Illinois Press, 2024), which is an essay collection co-edited by Eric Fure-Slocum and Claire Goldstene. It explores why in the United States more than three-quarters of the people teaching in colleges and universities work as contingent faculty. This “gig” economy includes lack of job security and health care, professional disrespect, and poverty wages that can require some faculty to juggle multiple jobs. The included essays draw on a wide range of perspectives, investigate structural changes that have caused the use of contingent faculty to skyrocket, illuminate how precarity shapes day-to-day experiences in the academic workplace, and delve into the ways contingent faculty engage in collective action and other means to resist austerity measures, improve their working conditions, and instigate reforms in higher education. By challenging contingency, this volume issues a call to reclaim higher education’s public purpose.Our guest is: Dr. Claire Goldstene, who taught as contingent faculty at the University of Maryland, the University of North Florida, and American University. She has published extensively on contingent faculty issues and served on the board of New Faculty Majority Foundation. She is also the author of The Struggle for America's Promise: Equal Opportunity at the Dawn of Corporate Capital and is currently working on a book about free speech in the early-twentieth century United States. She is the co-editor of Contingent Faculty and the Remaking of Higher Education.Our co-guest is: Maria Maisto, who taught as a contingent faculty member for over fifteen years in Maryland and Ohio. She has published and spoken widely on the topic of contingent faculty equity, advocacy, and coalition building. In 2009, she co-founded New Faculty Majority: The National Coalition for Adjunct and Contingent Equity, a 501(c)6 membership and advocacy organization, and served as its president. She is a featured essayist in Contingent Faculty and the Remaking of Higher Education.Our host is: Dr. Christina Gessler, who is the creator and show host 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 like this playlist: Chasing Chickens: When Life After Graduation Doesn't Go the Way You Planned An inside look at the American Association of University Professors Why Did 48,000 UC-workers Go on Strike? How to Leave Academia Welcome to Academic Life, the podcast for your academic journey—and beyond! Join us again to learn from more experts inside and outside the academy, and around the world. Please support the show by downloading and sharing episodes. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/education