New Books in Education

Why read the Classics, and how to do it best? Louis Petrich teaches at St. John’s College, the third-oldest college and “the nation's most contrarian college” (according to the New York Times, meant as a compliment). St. John’s takes a remarkable approach to the liberal arts: students and teachers read and discuss 3,000 years of Great Books over four years, all via primary readings without disciplinary boundaries. Louis Petrich and I talked about teaching and reading Classic Books as a means of deepening rather than resolving the mystery of who we are, what we do, and how best to engage the world around us. St. John’s offers the series Continuing the Conversation with professors where “questions are more important than answers,” which is a natural companion to Think About It. Uli Baer teaches literature and photography as University Professor at New York University. A recipient of Guggenheim, Getty and Humboldt awards, in addition to hosting "Think About It” he hosts (with Caroline Weber) the podcast "The Proust Questionnaire” and is Editorial Director at Warbler Press. Email ucb1@nyu.edu; Twitter @UliBaer. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/education

Interweaving a deeply personal narrative of elite-level cycling and mental health struggles with an evocative history of Western philosophy from Plato to the Existentialists, The Art of Cycling: Philosophy, Meaning, and a Life on Two Wheels (Pegasus Books, 2023) explores the limits of rationality and how the visceral, embodied nature of sport ultimately has the potential to redeem us from the painful, locked-in isolation of our own heads.In the tradition of philosophical road trip titles like Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance and On the Road, The Art of Cycling turns a critical eye towards our increasingly disconnected digital lives --showing how re-engaging with the material world can breathe new vitality into everyday existence and serve as a countervailing force against the sense of detachment which has come to characterize modern life for so many.A former professional cyclist, James Hamilton Hibbard studied philosophy at The University of California, Santa Cruz and DePaul University. He has received grants and been selected for workshops by PEN America and Tin House. Also a screenwriter, James' first feature film is currently being developed. He lives with his wife and son in Northern California.Tom Discenna is Professor of Communication at Oakland University whose work examines issues of academic labor and communicative labor more broadly. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/education

In Sesame Street: A Transnational History (Oxford UP, 2023), author Helle Strandgaard Jensen tells the story of how the American television show became a global brand. Jensen argues that because the show's domestic production was not financially viable from the beginning, Sesame Street became a commodity that its producers assertively marketed all over the world. Sesame Street: A Transnational History combines archival research from seven countries, bolstering an insightful analysis of how local reception and rejection of the show related to the global sales strategies and American ideals it was built upon.Contrary to the producers’ oft-publicized claims of Sesame Street’s universality, the show was heavily shaped by a fixed set of assumptions about childhood, education, and commercial entertainment. This made sales difficult as Sesame Street met both skepticism and direct hostility from foreign television producers who did not share these ideals. Drawing on insights from new histories about childhood, education, and transnational media, the book lays bare a cultural clash of international proportions rooted in divergent approaches to children's television. In doing so, it provides a reflective backdrop to the many ongoing debates about children's media.In contrasting the positive receptions and renunciations of Sesame Street, Jensen demonstrates that it was only after a substantial rethinking of Sesame Street’s aims and business model that this program ended up on numerous broadcasting schedules by the mid-1970s. Along the way, this rethinking and the constant negotiations with potential international buyers created and shaped the business and corporate brand that paved the way for the Sesame Street we know today.Peter C. Kunze is a visiting assistant professor of communication at Tulane University. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/education

What happens when jobs in academia are scarce, and few of the descriptions of jobs outside academia seem like a fit? How can graduates find the right job for them, whether it’s inside academia or far afield? This episode explores: Ways to explain your skills and expertise so an employer sees you as a good match for them. Tips for reframing how graduate students talk about themselves and their research. How advisors can encourage graduates to explore a wider range of jobs. A discussion of the book chapter “Beyond the Data: Navigating the Struggles of Post-PhD Employability,” in The Sage Handbook of Graduate Employability. Our guest is: Dr. Holly Prescott, who is a career guidance practitioner specializing in working with postgraduate researchers (graduate students/ PhDs). She completed a PhD in Literature and Cultural Geography at the University of Birmingham (UK) in 2011. Since then, she has gained ten years' experience in postgraduate student recruitment, admissions, and careers support. Holly also holds a PGDip (QCG) in Career Guidance from Coventry University (UK) and the Career Development Institute, and is a Fellow of the Higher Education Academy. She is currently the Careers Adviser for Postgraduate Researchers at the University of Birmingham (UK). Holly is particularly passionate about developing Postgraduate Researchers' awareness of career routes beyond and adjacent to academic research, helping them to make transitions into meaningful careers. This led her to found the PhD careers blog ‘PostGradual’ (www.phd-careers.co.uk). Holly lives with a rare autoimmune eye condition called AZOOR which causes visual field defects, and outside of work she volunteers for the British sight loss charity RNIB. She is also Assistant Artistic Director of Ottisdotter Theatre Company based in London. She is the author of “Beyond the Data: Navigating the Struggles of Post-PhD Employability,” in The Sage Handbook of Graduate Employability.Our host is: Dr. Christina Gessler, a historian of women and gender.Listeners to this episode may also be interested in: The Employability Journal, by Barbara Bassot Leaving Academia: A Practical Guide, by Christopher L. Caterine Candid Advice for New Faculty Members, by Marybeth Gasman Putting the Humanities PhD to Work: Thriving in and beyond the Classroom, by Katina Rogers Going Alt-Ac: A Guide to Alternative Academic Careers, by Kathryn Linder, Keven Kelly, and Thomas Tobin The Connected PhD podcast episode, part one Academic Life podcast episode on Hope for the Humanities PhD Academic Life podcast on Leaving Academia Welcome to The Academic Life! Join us here each week, to learn from experts inside and outside the academy, and embrace the broad definition of what it means to lead an academic life. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/education

We have an engaging discussion with Dr. Dan Greenstein, who in 2018 left the Gates Foundation, where he led the Post-Secondary program, to become the Chancellor for the PASSHE system. He knew he was taking on a great challenge with a system that had seen enrollment decline over the prior decade from a peak of 120,000 to fewer than 90,000 students. He was able to garner the necessary political support for a major transformation of the system, starting with financial stabilization by taking out $300 million in costs while freezing tuition for 4 consecutive years. This was followed by a system redesign, integrating sets of 3 independent institutions in the Western and Eastern parts of Pennsylvania into two new universities: West Penn and Commonwealth University. He shares lessons from this reform effort that will be part of a forthcoming book.David Finegold is the president of Chatham University. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/education

Reading instruction is the most legislated area of education and the most frequently referenced metric for measuring educational progress. This book, How Education Policy Shapes Literacy Instruction: Understanding the Persistent Problems of Policy and Practice (Palgrave Macmillan, 2022), edited by Rachael Gabriel, traces the trajectories of policy issues with direct implications for literacy teaching, learning, and research in order to illustrate the dynamic relationships between policy, research, and practice as they relate to perennial issues such as: retention in grade, remediation, intervention, instruction for English learners, early literacy instruction, coaching, and leadership. Using policy documents and peer-reviewed articles published from the 1960s to the present, the editor and authors illustrate how issues were framed, what was at stake, and how policy solutions to persistent questions have been understood over time. In doing so, the book links a generation of scholars with research that illustrates trajectories of development for ideas, strategies, and solutions.Laura Beth Kelly is an assistant professor of Educational Studies at Rhodes College in Memphis, Tennessee. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/education

Mentorship continues to loom large in stories about women's work and personal lives-- sometimes for the better, but often for the worse. If mentors can nurture and support, they can also bitterly disappoint, reproducing the hardships they once suffered and reinforcing the same old hierarchies and inequities. The stories gathered in Feminists Reclaim Mentorship (SUNY Press, 2023) challenge our fundamental assumptions about mentorship, illuminating the obstacles that make it difficult to connect meaningfully and ethically while reimagining the possibilities for reciprocity. Does mentorship require sameness? Might we find more inventive, collaborative ways to bond than the traditional top-down model of mentoring? Drawing on their experiences in academia, creative writing, publishing, and journalism, the volume's editors, Nancy K. Miller and Tahneer Oksman, and their twenty-six contributors collectively strive for relationships that acknowledge differences alongside the importance of common bonds. Feminists Reclaim Mentorship will resonate across workspaces and arrives at a moment when the need to form feminist connections within and between generations couldn't feel more urgent.Host Annie Berke sits down with Drs. Miller and Oksman, as well as contributor Dr. Elizabeth Alsop, to discuss the origins of this anthology, the biggest myths behind mentorship, and what mentors and mentees owe to one another.Nancy K. Miller is Distinguished Professor of English and Comparative Literature at The Graduate Center of the City University of New York. Her many books include My Brilliant Friends: Our Lives in Feminism; Breathless: An American Girl in Paris; What They Saved: Pieces of a Jewish Past; and But Enough About Me: Why We Read Other People's Lives.Tahneer Oksman is Associate Professor of Academic Writing at Marymount Manhattan College. She is the author of "How Come Boys Get to Keep Their Noses?" Women and Jewish American Identity in Contemporary Graphic Memoirs and coeditor (with Seamus O'Malley) of The Comics of Julie Doucet and Gabrielle Bell: A Place Inside Yourself. She reviews memoirs, graphic novels, and comics for NPR and The Washington Post.Elizabeth Alsop is Assistant Professor of Communication and Media at the CUNY School of Professional Studies, and affiliated faculty in the M.A. in Liberal Studies program at the CUNY Graduate Center. She is the author of Making Conversation in Modernist Fiction (Ohio State UP, 2019) and a number of scholarly essays on 20th-century fiction, film and television aesthetics, and contemporary TV storytelling. Her cultural criticism has appeared in The Atlantic, The Los Angeles Review of Books, Salon, and The New York Times Magazine. She is currently writing a book on the films of Elaine May.Annie Berke is the Film Editor at the Los Angeles Review of Books and author of Their Own Best Creations: Women Writers in Postwar Television (University of California Press, 2022). Her scholarship and criticism has been published in Feminist Media Histories, Public Books, Literary Hub, and Ms. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/education

How to Think Like Shakespeare: Lessons from a Renaissance Education (Princeton UP, 2020) offers a short, spirited defense of rhetoric and the liberal arts as catalysts for precision, invention, and empathy in today's world. The author, a professor of Shakespeare studies at a liberal arts college and a parent of school-age children, argues that high-stakes testing and a culture of assessment have altered how and what students are taught, as courses across the arts, humanities, and sciences increasingly are set aside to make room for joyless, mechanical reading and math instruction. Students have been robbed of a complete education, their imaginations stunted by this myopic focus on bare literacy and numeracy. Education is about thinking, Newstok argues, rather than the mastery of a set of rigidly defined skills, and the seemingly rigid pedagogy of the English Renaissance produced some of the most compelling and influential examples of liberated thinking. Each of the fourteen chapters explores an essential element of Shakespeare's world and work, aligns it with the ideas of other thinkers and writers in modern times, and suggests opportunities for further reading. Chapters on craft, technology, attention, freedom, and related topics combine past and present ideas about education to build a case for the value of the past, the pleasure of thinking, and the limitations of modern educational practices and prejudices.Scott Newstok is professor of English and founding director of the Pearce Shakespeare Endowment at Rhodes College. A parent and an award-winning teacher, he is the author of Quoting Death in Early Modern England and the editor of several other books. He lives in Memphis, Tennessee. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/education

Beyond Citizenship: Literacy and Personhood in Everyday China, 1900-1945 (Brill, 2022) focuses on the role of literacy in building a modern nation-state by examining the government provision of adult literacy training in early twentieth-century China. Based on untapped archives and diaries, Di Luo uncovers people’s strategic use of literacy and illiteracy in social interactions and explores the impact of daily experiences on the expansion of state power. Highlighting interpersonal and intergroup relations, Beyond Citizenship suggests a new methodology of studying literacy which foregrounds the agentive role of historical actors and so moves away from a more traditional approach that treats literacy itself as the key factor enabling social change.Dr. Yi Ren is a lecturer in the Department of History at the University of Pennsylvania. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/education

African-Americans and women are increasingly visible in professional mathematical institutions, organizations, and literature, expanding our mental models of the mathematics community. Yet early representation also matters: We begin building these models as soon as we begin seeing and doing mathematics, and they can be slow to adapt. In her wonderful activity book Women Who Count: Honoring African American Women Mathematicians (MAA Press, 2019), Dr. Shelly Jones invites children, and their parents and educators, to immerse themselves in the lives and deeds of Black women mathematicians.The 29 profiles trace back to "the Firsts" in their fields, such as early PhD awardee Evelyn Boyd Granville; the "Pioneers" of emerging fields and programs, including ethnomathematics co-founder Gloria Gilmer; through "Unhidden Figures" like Dorothy Johnson Vaughan of recent biopic fame; and to "Contemporary Firsts" who are living, working, and opening new doors today. Along with their mathematical contributions, Dr. Jones shares details of these mathematicians' early lives, their hobbies and interests, and how they have been shaped by and in turn shaped their communities. Each mini-biography introduces a whole person whom readers new to mathematics can relate to and be inspired by.Each profile is accompanied by a pencil-and-paper activity that brings to life the some part of their story. Some are classics, including word searches and I-Spy, while others introduce readers to mathematical and educational concepts explored by their subjects—coloring tessellations, for example, or solving equations to decode messages. The text and activities are targeted to grades 3–8, and are ideal for elementary and middle school classrooms.In our conversation, Dr. Jones described how she conceived the book, assembled the stories and activities, and connected with illustrator Veronica Martins. I came away with a richer perspective on the state of the field for aspiring mathematicians—in addition to a perfect gift for my second-grade nephew.Suggested companion works: Mathematicians of the African Diaspora Mathematically Gifted and Black Mathematician Project Lathisms We are Indigenous Mathematicians Black Girl MATHgic Talitha Washington Dr. Shelly M. Jones is a Professor of Mathematics Education at Central Connecticut State University. She has been an educator for 30 years and currently teaches undergraduate mathematics content and methods courses for pre-service teachers as well as graduate level mathematics content, curriculum and STEM courses for in-service teachers. Dr. Jones serves her community by working with various professional and community organizations. You can see her CCSU TEDx talk on YouTube where she talks about culturally relevant mathematics. She is also a contributing author to The Brilliance of Black Children in Mathematics: Beyond the Numbers and Toward a New Discourse and co-author of Engaging in Culturally Relevant Math Tasks: Fostering Hope. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/education