New Books in Education

Gordon Gee was named the Top University President in the U.S. by Time Magazine, and is the only higher education leader to have been a president 7 times, including return stints at both The Ohio State University and WVU. He shares lessons and insights from his more than 4 decades of experience as a university president, including how he has boiled down all the information he needs to run WVU onto a card he can carry in his wallet. He discusses the vital role of our flagship public universities that he describes in detail in Land-Grant Universities for the Future: Higher Education for the Public Good (Johns Hopkins University Press), and that will appear in a new book with the same publisher. 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

Every year millions of high school seniors in China take the gaokao, China’s standardized college entrance exam. Students, parents, and head teachers all devote years, sweat, and tears to this consequential and chancy exam — even though the ideal of the gaokao as a fair, objective, and scientific measure of individual merit is known to be something of a myth.Why examinees and their families continue to believe in the relative fairness of the gaokao is what Zachary Howlett’s book, Meritocracy and Its Discontents: Anxiety and the National College Entrance Exam in China (Cornell University Press, 2021), seeks to explore. Based on fieldwork conducted in China’s Fujian province, this rich and engaging book looks at what it means for individuals and communities to believe in both the gaokao and the myth of meritocracy that it engenders. Accessible to both experts and those entirely unfamiliar with the gaokao, this book offers a fresh perspective on the role of examinations in the lives of individuals and in their communities, as well as a useful comparative tool, that of ‘fateful rites of passage,’ for future work. It is also filled with stories of examination candidates, their hopes, dreams, and the lengths that they (and their teachers and parents) go to in order to succeed, all of which should be of interest to anyone who has ever experienced a fateful right of passage of their own.Sarah Bramao-Ramos is a PhD candidate in History and East Asian Languages at Harvard. She works on Manchu language books and is interested in anything with a kesike. She can be reached at sbramaoramos@g.harvard.edu Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/education

Scott Miller, who has been recognized as one of the most innovative and influential college presidents in the U.S., shares insights from his over 3 decades of experience leading four private, independent colleges: Lincoln Memorial University, Wesley College, Bethany College, and Virginia Wesleyan University. Scott, who became the youngest college president in the U.S. when he took the helm at Lincoln Memorial at the age of 31, shares some of the secrets of his success, including how he has adapted with the times to master social media. He has been generous in sharing these through a number of publications he edits with his long-time professional partner, Mary Louise “Weezie” Fennell, including a series of essays on all aspects of presidential leadership and President to President. 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

Math Renaissance: Growing Math Circles, Changing Classrooms, and Creating Sustainable Math Education (Natural Math, 2018) couples two educational memoirs: Student Rachel Steinig brings her experience from diverse schooling models, surveys of teachers and fellow students, and selections of peer-reviewed scholarship to an examination of math instruction in the United States. Her chapters seek to locate root causes, transcend conventional advice, and inspire readers to imagine radical alternatives. Teacher Rodi Steinig invites readers into the role of leading math circles with detailed play-by-plays from her own experience. These chapters evince the importance (and interplay) in this role of background knowledge, preparation, compassion, and improvisation—and, perhaps most saliently for beginning teachers, of resisting the urge to rescue.Taken together, the book critiques the existing systems that provide children's math education and drills down on an alternative model whose popularity continues to grow. Among my favorite parts of the book were Rodi's self-reflective thought bubbles on her performance facilitating math circles and Rachel's chapter on math instruction from a human rights perspective. The book is intended for teachers and parents of school-age children, though i think middle and high school students and even casual readers would find value in this forthright, thorough, and readable work. It was an absolute delight to discuss the book with both its authors!Rodi Steinig is an educator, author, and teacher trainer who has educated K-12 students in an inquiry-based approach for over twenty years. She received a B.S.in Economics from the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania and her M.S.Ed. from Cabrini University. While Rodi finds joy in almost everything, she finds exceptional joy in pedagogy, communication about mathematics and pedagogy, and mathematics (current favorite math topic: isomorphic problems). Rodi has a great passion for sitting on the floor with a group of students in a collaborative spirit of inquiry.Rachel Steinig (she/her) is an educator, advocate, author, and future human rights lawyer. She recently graduated Phi Beta Kappa and Summa Cum Laude from the University of Pennsylvania with a B.A. in Political Science, a concentration in International Relations, and triple minors in Hispanic Studies, Modern Middle Eastern Studies, and Latin American and Latinx Studies. She is passionate about human rights, education access, making math fun, gender equity, and conflict resolution. 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. You are smart and capable, but you aren’t an island and neither are we. So, we reached across our mentor network to bring you podcasts on everything from how to finish that project, to how to take care of your beautiful mind. Wish we’d bring on an expert about something? DM us your suggestion on Twitter: The Academic Life @AcademicLifeNBN.In this episode you’ll hear: mentoring across academic careers from graduate students to seasoned faculty, optimal conditions for mentor-mentee relationships, mentoring scholars through the publishing process, and gender and power dynamics within academic mentoring.Our guest is: Dr. Claire M. Renzetti, Professor and Chair of Sociology and the Judi Conway Patton Endowed Chair for Studies of Violence Against Women at the University of Kentucky. She received a Ph.D. in Sociology from the University of Delaware, with specialties in criminology and the sociology of gender.For more than 40 years, Dr. Renzetti’s research has focused on the violent victimization experiences of socially and economically marginalized women and girls. She founded in 1995, and continues to edit, the peer-reviewed, international and interdisciplinary journal Violence Against Women, through Sage Publications. Dr. Renzetti is also the editor of the Gender and Justice book series for University of California Press; co-editor of the Interpersonal Violence book series for Oxford University Press, and editor of the Family and Gender-based Violence book series for Cognella. She has written or edited 26 books as well as numerous book chapters and journal articles based on her own research. She also studies the problem of domestic sex trafficking. Additionally, she conducts research on the effects of religiosity and religious self-regulation on intimate partner violence perpetration and victimization. She has held elected offices in several national and regional professional associations, including the American Sociological Association, the American Society of Criminology, the Society for the Study of Social Problems, and the Eastern Sociological Society. Her research and community service has been recognized with awards from the American Sociological Association, the American Society of Criminology, the Society for the Study of Social Problems, the University of Delaware, Artemis Center (Dayton, OH), and the YWCA of Dayton (OH).Your host is: Dr. Dana Malone, a higher education scholar and practitioner. Dana met Claire as a PhD student at the University of Kentucky, when one of Dana’s academic mentors introduced them.Listeners to this episode might be interested in: Positive Academic Leadership: How to Stop Putting Out Fires and Start Making a Difference by Jeffrey L. Buller Presumed Incompetent II: Race, Class, Power, and Resistance of Women in Academia edited by: Yolanda Flores Niemann, Gabriella Gutiérrez y Muhs, and Carmen G. González NBN Podcast on Presumed Incompetent II NBN Podcast on How to Create a Mentor Network Claire Renzetti’s video series on academic publishing for the American Sociological Association (ASA).*Please note access requires an ASA membership Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/education

This is the last episode of a four-part series featuring the winners and honorable mentions of the 2021 Book Awards for the Association of Asian American Studies (AAAS). This episode focuses on the winner of the award in Humanities and Cultural Studies in Media, Performance, and Visual Studies: Kandice Chuh’s The Difference Aesthetics Makes: On the Humanities “After Man.” This insightful and critical book challenges our divisions of aesthetics and politics, while showing how liberal humanism has persisted within the ways we organize in institutions, the ways we teach, and the ways that we think of ourselves.Kandice Chuh is a professor of English, American studies, and Critical Social Psychology at the CUNY Graduate Center. She’s currently working on The Disinterested Teacher, a collection of essays on pedagogies and praxis, and When/Where/How ‘Asia’, a project on Asian racialization in the contemporary era.Christopher B. Patterson is an Assistant Professor in the Social Justice Institute at the University of British Columbia. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/education

When we think about the process of European unification, our conversations inevitably ponder questions of economic cooperation and international politics. Salvatore Pappalardo offers a new and engaging perspective, arguing that the idea of European unity is also the product of a modern literary imagination. This book examines the idea of Europe in the modernist literature of primarily Robert Musil, Italo Svevo, and James Joyce (but also of Theodor Däubler and Srecko Kosovel), all authors who had a deep connection with the port city of Trieste.Writing after World War I, when the contested city joined Italy, these authors resisted the easy nostalgia of the postwar period, radically reimagining the origins of Europe in the Mediterranean culture of the Phoenicians, contrasting a 19th-century nationalist discourse that saw Europe as the heir of a Greek and Roman legacy. These writers saw the Adriatic city, a cosmopolitan bazaar under the Habsburg Empire, as a social laboratory of European integration. Salvatore Pappalardo's book Modernism in Trieste: The Habsburg Mediterranean and the Literary Invention of Europe, 1870-1945 (Bloomsbury, 2021) seeks to fill a critical gap in the extant scholarship, securing the literary history of Trieste within the context of current research on Habsburg and Austrian literature.Lea Greenberg is a scholar of German studies with a particular focus on German Jewish and Yiddish literature and culture; critical gender studies; multilingualism; and literature of the post-Yugoslav diaspora. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/education

Upward mobility through the path of higher education has been an article of faith for generations of working-class, low-income, and immigrant college students. While we know this path usually entails financial sacrifices and hard work, very little attention has been paid to the deep personal compromises such students have to make as they enter worlds vastly different from their own. Measuring the true cost of higher education for those from disadvantaged backgrounds, Moving Up Without Losing Your Way: The Ethical Costs of Upward Mobility (Princeton UP. 2021) looks at the ethical dilemmas of upward mobility—the broken ties with family and friends, the severed connections with former communities, and the loss of identity—faced by students as they strive to earn a successful place in society.Drawing upon philosophy, social science, personal stories, and interviews, Jennifer Morton reframes the college experience, factoring in not just educational and career opportunities but also essential relationships with family, friends, and community. Finding that student strivers tend to give up the latter for the former, negating their sense of self, Morton seeks to reverse this course. She urges educators to empower students with a new narrative of upward mobility—one that honestly situates ethical costs in historical, social, and economic contexts and that allows students to make informed decisions for themselves.A powerful work with practical implications, Moving Up without Losing Your Way paves a hopeful road so that students might achieve social mobility while retaining their best selves.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

Rewriting Our Stories: Education, Empowerment, and Well-Being (Atrium, 2020) harnesses the therapeutic power of storytelling to convert feelings of fear and powerlessness into affirmative life narratives. Rather than seeing fear as an outcome, we can view it as a feeling in the moment largely governed by narratives. Many of our fears are stories we tell ourselves, even if they are largely fictional and rooted in sociocultural belief systems. The result is that we often feel helpless in the face of those fears. This transformational book considers a potent antidote: by recognising our recurring negative stories, we can rewrite and transform them to achieve greater empowerment and well-being in our lives. Throughout human existence, no matter where our place of origin or when in history, storytelling shapes our societies, influencing personal, sociocultural, educational, and public discourses that impact how we live. Creating and communicating the language of stories - to ourselves and others - enhances our innate voices and can empower us to engage in greater empathy, compassion, and possibility. Intended for educators, leaders, therapists, mental health professionals, and youth organisations, as well as the general public, Derek Gladwin offers practical and positive tools for everyone to re-author their lives. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/education

The All India Institute of Medical Sciences (AIIMS) is iconic in the landscape of Indian healthcare. Established in the early years of independence, this enormous public teaching hospital rapidly gained fame for the high-quality treatment it offered at a nominal cost; at present, an average of ten thousand patients pass through the outpatient department each day. With its notorious medical program acceptance rate of less than 0.01%, AIIMS also sits at the apex of Indian medical education. To be trained as a doctor here is to be considered the best.In what way does this enduring reputation of excellence shape the institution's ethos? How does elite medical education sustain India's social hierarchies and the health inequalities entrenched within? In Special Treatment: Student Doctors at the All India Institute of Medical Sciences (Stanford UP, 2021), Anna Ruddock considers prestige as a byproduct of norms attached to ambition, aspiration, caste, and class in modern India, and illustrates how the institution's reputation affects its students' present experiences and future career choices. Ruddock untangles the threads of intellectual exceptionalism, social and power stratification, and health inequality that are woven into the health care taught and provided at AIIMS, asking what is lost when medicine is used not as a social equalizer but as a means to cultivate and maintain prestige.Anna Ruddock is a medical anthropologist, writer, and disability activist.Sneha Annavarapu is a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Chicago. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/education