New Books in Education

There is an epidemic of bad thinking in the world today. An alarming number of people are embracing crazy, even dangerous ideas. They believe that vaccinations cause autism. They reject the scientific consensus on climate change as a “hoax.” And they blame the spread of COVID-19 on the 5G network or a Chinese cabal. Worse, bad thinking drives bad acting—it even inspired a mob to storm the U.S. Capitol. In this book, Steven Nadler and Lawrence Shapiro argue that the best antidote for bad thinking is the wisdom, insights, and practical skills of philosophy. When Bad Thinking Happens to Good People: How Philosophy Can Save Us from Ourselves (Princeton UP, 2021) provides an engaging tour through the basic principles of logic, argument, evidence, and probability that can make all of us more reasonable and responsible citizens.When Bad Thinking Happens to Good People shows how we can more readily spot and avoid flawed arguments and unreliable information; determine whether evidence supports or contradicts an idea; distinguish between merely believing something and knowing it; and much more. In doing so, the book reveals how epistemology, which addresses the nature of belief and knowledge, and ethics, the study of moral principles that should govern our behavior, can reduce bad thinking. Moreover, the book shows why philosophy’s millennia-old advice about how to lead a good, rational, and examined life is essential for escaping our current predicament.In a world in which irrationality has exploded to deadly effect, When Bad Thinking Happens to Good People is a timely and essential guide for a return to reason.Marshall Poe is the founder and editor of the New Books Network. He can be reached at marshallpoe@newbooksnetwork.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/education

In Becoming Gods: Medical Training in Mexican Hospitals (Rutgers University Press, 2021), Vania Smith-Oka follows a cohort of interns throughout their year of medical training in hospitals to understand how medical students become medical doctors. She ethnographically tracks their engagements with one another, interactions with patients, experiences with doctors, and presentations of cases to show how medical students undergo a nuanced process of accumulating knowledge and practical experience in shaping their medical selves. Smith-Oka illuminates the gendered aspects of this process, whereby the medical interns’ gender informs the kind of treatment they receive from other doctors and the kinds of possibilities they imagine for their careers and areas of medical practice. She documents the lives of the interns during which time they develop their medical selves and come to understand the tacit values of medical practice. The book is full of descriptive vignettes and ethnographic details that make it accessible to undergraduate students. It would be of interest to those in medical anthropology, hospital ethnography, medical education as well as people interested in how expertise is acquired and developed. The book examines medical interns’ transformations through ordinary and extraordinary moments, through active and passive learning where they not only acquire new knowledge but also new ways of being.Vania Smith-Oka is an associate professor in the Department of Anthropology at the University of Notre Dame in Indiana. She is the Director of the Health, Humanities, and Society Program at the John J. Reilly Center.Reighan Gillam is an assistant professor in the Department of Anthropology at the University of Southern California. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/education

In Re-Union: How Bold Labor Reforms Can Repair, Revitalize, and Reunite the United States (Cornell UP, 2021), David Madland explores how labor unions are essential to all workers. Yet, union systems are badly flawed and in need of rapid changes for reform. Madland's multilayered analysis presents a solution--a model to replace the existing firm-based collective bargaining with a larger, industry-scale bargaining method coupled with powerful incentives for union membership.These changes would represent a remarkable shift from the norm, but would be based on lessons from other countries, US history and current policy in several cities and states. In outlining the shift, Madland details how these proposals might mend the broken economic and political systems in the United States. He also uses three examples from Britain, Canada, and Australia to explore what there is yet to learn about this new system in other developed nations.Madland's practical advice in Re-Union extends to a proposal for how to implement the changes necessary to shift the current paradigm. This powerful call to action speaks directly to the workers affected by these policies--the very people seeking to have their voices recognized in a system that attempts to silence them.David Madland is Senior Fellow and Strategic Director of the American Worker Project at the Center for American Progress. He is author of Hollowed Out: Why the Economy Doesn’t work without a strong middle class. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/education

Following the Treaty of Versailles, European nation-states were faced with the challenge of instilling national loyalty in their new borderlands, in which fellow citizens often differed dramatically from one another along religious, linguistic, cultural, or ethnic lines. Peripheries at the Centre: Borderland Schooling in Interwar Europe (Berghahn Books, 2021) compares the experiences of schooling in Upper Silesia in Poland and Eupen, Sankt Vith, and Malmedy in Belgium — border regions detached from the German Empire after the First World War. It demonstrates how newly configured countries envisioned borderland schools and language learning as tools for realizing the imagined peaceful Europe that underscored the political geography of the interwar period.Jill Massino is a scholar of modern Eastern Europe with a focus on Romania, gender, and everyday life. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/education

Digital games for learning are now commonplace, used in settings that range from K–12 education to advanced medical training. In Making Games for Impact (MIT Press, 2021), Kurt Squire examines the ways that games make an impact on learning, investigating how designers and developers incorporate authentic social impact goals, build a team, and work with experts in order to make games that are effective and marketable. Because there is no one design process for making games for impact—specific processes arise in response to local needs and conditions—Squire presents a series of case studies that range from a small, playable game created by a few programmers and an artist to a multimillion-dollar project with funders, outside experts, and external constraints.These cases, drawn from the Games + Learning + Society Center at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, show designers tackling such key issues as choosing platforms, using data analytics to guide development, and designing for new markets. Although not a how-to guide, the book offers developers, researchers, and students real-world lessons in greenlighting a project, scaling up design teams, game-based assessment, and more. The final chapter examines the commercial development of an impact game in detail, describing the creation of an astronomy game, At Play in the Cosmos, that ships with an introductory college textbook. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/education

This episode feature an interview with Michael Alexander, one of the most innovative small university presidents in the U.S. He discusses a number of the innovations during his 15-year tenure at Lasell University located in the suburbs of Boston, MA: Lasell Village, a very successful retirement community where residents sign up to be full-time students for the rest of their lives, Lasell Works and a new program that lowers the costs of obtaining a degree for students who agree to spend their whole sophomore year learning online while working off campus. Alexander is also one of the co-founders of the Low-Cost Models Consortium that is fostering collaboration among private colleges and industry to find ways to significantly reduce the debt for students to complete their degrees. 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

Jean Hopman’s book Surviving Emotional Work for Teachers: Improving Wellbeing and Professional Learning Through Reflexive Practice (Routledge, 2020), is a guide to improving teachers' wellbeing and practice through support of their emotional workload. The book argues that teachers should be given a formal opportunity to debrief on challenging events, allowing them to reflect on and reframe these experiences in a way that informs future practice to prevent the emotional fatigue that can lead teachers to leave the field altogether.Each chapter opens with a teacher's story, acknowledging the emotional layers present in the scenario and what learnings can be drawn from it. This is valuable reading for teachers at all stages of their career, whether preparing for the complex work ahead or making sense of past and current experiences. This book offers a reflexive process that teachers and schools can implement to facilitate the useful exploration of their emotion, a process vital for the overall wellbeing of any school.Dr Jean Hopman works in Initial Teacher Education at Victoria University in Melbourne, Australia. Her doctoral work explored the emotional aspects of teaching by exploring the underlying layers of a teacher's role. She initially completed a Bachelor of Primary and Secondary Education and a Graduate Diploma in Child Psychotherapy Studies. Since 2000 she has taught and counselled in diverse educational settings, including government schools, private schools, international schools, alternative education settings and universities.Discount for listeners: Save 30% on Surviving Emotional Work for Teachers when you purchase here by entering PBC30at the checkout. Offer valid until the 31 October, 2021. Alice Garner is historian, teacher and performer with a PhD from the University of Melbourne, Australia. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/education

Welcome to The Academic Life! In this episode you’ll hear about: Dr. Liz Faber’s long road from completed PhD to dream job Why academia said she was a failure The financial reasons she worked two academic jobs at once The importance of speaking out about pay-scale and departmental inequities Putting kindness in the classroom Why you have to define your own success Our guest is: Dr. Liz W Faber, an Assistant Professor of English & Communication at Dean College. Her teaching and research interests include multimodal communication, science communication, representations of AI in science fiction, computer history, and gender/sexuality studies. She is the author of The Computer's Voice: From Star Trek to Siri (U. Minnesota Press, 2020) and the guest editor for the Popular Culture Studies Journal special issue on robots and labor. She can be found on Twitter (@lizwfab) or at her website (lizwfaber.com).Our host is: Dr. Christina Gessler, the co-producer of the Academic Life podcasts.Listeners to this episode might be interested in: "Faculty Talk about Teaching at a Community College" by Dianne Finley and Sherry Kinslow Academic Ableism by Jay Dolmage (U Michigan Press, 2017) More than Machines? by Laura Voss (Columbia U Press, 2021) Carleigh Brower’s work The Computer's Voice: From Star Trek to Siri by Liz Faber (U. Minnesota Press, 2020)  Articles on robots and labor, ed by Dr. Liz Faber Popular Culture Studies Journal https://mpcaaca.org/the- NEA article on the need for change  Inside Higher Ed examines contingent faculty wages  The Daily Beast finds making coffee pays more than being an adjunct You are smart and capable, but you aren’t an island and neither are we. We reach across our mentor network to bring you podcasts. Wish we’d bring on a particular expert? DM on Twitter @AcademicLifeNBN. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/education

Book workshops produce great books, but too few scholars have access to the resources needed to organize and execute one, especially scholars at Historically Black Colleges and Universities, Hispanic Serving Institutions, Asian American and Pacific Islander Serving Institutions, and Tribal Colleges and Universities. The 2021 American Political Science Association Annual Meeting in Seattle, launched a new initiative, The Minority-Serving Institution Virtual Book Workshop Project, to provide book workshops for scholars (tenured, untenured, VAP, term appointments) at Minority-Serving Institutions.In the podcast, the co-directors of the Project discuss the importance of supporting MSI faculty, how to successfully apply, and what other authors, editors, and administrators can do to make this project a success.Niambi M. Carter, Associate Professor of Political Science at Howard University, published American While Black: African Americans, Immigration, and the Limits of Citizenship (Oxford 2019) and listeners may remember her New Books in Political Science podcast.Heath Brown, Associate Professor of Public Policy at John Jay College of Criminal Justice City University of New York (and former host of New Books Political Science), published Homeschooling the Right: How Conservative Education Activism Erodes the State (Columbia 2021) and Lilly Goren interviewed him for NBPS.Minority-Serving Institution Virtual Book Workshop | Deadline: January 14, 2022 | Apply Now!Susan Liebell is Dirk Warren '50 Professor of Political Science at Saint Joseph’s University in Philadelphia. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/education

Michael Horowitz discusses the origins and evolution of The Cooperative Solution (TCS) Education System, which was created in 2009 as a spinout from The Chicago School of Professional Psychology. TCS is one of the only private, non-profit systems of separately accredited schools and colleges in the U.S., with each of the 6 members focusing on different educational niches, while benefitting from centralized shared services. As the higher ed sector faces growing competitive pressure in the coming decades, TCS may offer a model that allows institutions to focus on their benefit, while saving costs, gaining economies of scale, and providing strong supports for online learners.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