New Books in 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 in an expert about something? Email us at cgessler@gmail.com or dr.danamalone@gmail.com. Find us on Twitter: The Academic Life @AcademicLifeNBN.In this episode you’ll hear: things you really need to know to navigate graduate school, why there’s a hidden curriculum, and a discussion of the book A Field Guide to Grad School.Our guest is: Dr. Jessica McCrory Calarco, an Associate Professor of Sociology at Indiana University in Bloomington. She is the author of A Field Guide to Grad School: Uncovering the Hidden Curriculum (Princeton, 2020), and Negotiating Opportunities: How the Middle Class Secures Advantages in Schools (Oxford 2018). Her research examines inequalities in education and family life, which she has written about for The New York Times, The Atlantic, Inside Higher Ed, and The Conversation.Our host is: Dr. Christina Gessler, a historian of women, gender, and sexuality. She sincerely wished she had had a guide to graduate school; the lack of one coupled with the ongoing mysteries of the hidden curriculum of her PhD program led her to create a mentorship program while still a student. She later co-created the Academic Life channel for NBN with Dr. Dana Malone.Listeners to this episode might be interested in: A Field Guide to Grad School: Uncovering the Hidden Curriculum by Jessica McCrory Calarco The Merit Myth by Anthony Carnevale, Peter Schmidt and Jeff Strohl The Hidden Curriculum by Rachel Gable Degrees of Difference: Reflections of Women of Color on Graduate School by Kimberly McKee and Denise Delgado, eds. The Academic Life channel on New Books Network Dr. Calarco’s graduate school advice  here.  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/education

We continue the discussion with NYU President Emeritus John Sexton who shares how it took an intervention from his close friends to get him to give up his career as a professor of theology at St. Francis College and champion high school debate to go to law school and how it took a special recommendation from his friend and Constitutional Law Professor Lawrence Tribe to get Harvard Law to reconsider his initial rejection. He would go on to become one of the most successful law school deans in American history, lifting NYU into the upper echelon of legal education by systematically recruiting stars from the leading schools to join its faculty. It took several years for his close friend and eventual NYU Board chair to overcome his initial reluctance to become NYU 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

Ramsey McGlazer's Old Schools: Modernism, Education, and the Critique of Progress (Fordham University Press, 2020), traces the ways in which a group of modernist cultural practitioners (thinkers, politicians, artists, poets, novelists, and filmmakers) across varied linguistic and cultural contexts ((Italian, English, Irish, and Brazilian) resisted certain notions of education perceived as “progressive”. At the heart of this remarkable study, pulses a nexus of issues that are of interest to anyone teaching anything anywhere: What is education? How does it differ from “instruction”? What is education for? (if anything) What does it mean to ask the question “what is education for”? Who is education for? What are the stakes of that question? Education reforms from the end of the Victorian Era until the mid-20th century sought to surpass the “sterile and narrow” forms of education that insisted on rote learning (memorization, declamation, imitation, and so forth) that did not help students of any age or grade “transform.” Resisting the ideology of “progressive” education, the figures in McGlazer’s fascinating study propose instead a “counter tradition” that sought to offer resistant strategies in “old school” pedagogies focusing on rote means, reproducing (though McGlazer will “queer” that term) ordained content. The practitioners McGlazer focuses on include figures like Walter Pater, author of the influential Studies in the History of the Renaissance, first published in 1873 and whose interest in mechanistic pedagogies anchors the first chapter. Giovanni Pascoli and his focus on grammar follows, then a chapter on “direct instruction” in James Joyce’s Ulysses. McGlazer concludes by focusing on films centering on instruction, like the pedagogy of pain in Pier Paolo Pasolini’s Salò, or the 120 Days of Sodom (1975) and avant-garde Brazilian filmmaker Glauber Rocha’s film Claro (1975). McGlazer’s focus on this nucleus of texts and practitioners from the end of the 19th Century to about the middle of the 20th gives rise to questions about tradition, resistance, and the ideology of education that are evergreen and of interest to educators in a wide array of places and spaces and Old Schools will be of interest to anyone who has taught and anyone who has learned.Ellen Nerenberg is a founding editor of g/s/i-gender/sexuality/Italy and reviews editor of the Journal of Italian Cinema and Media Studies. Recent scholarly essays focus on serial television in Italy, the UK, and North America; masculinities in Italian cinema and media studies; and student filmmakers. Her current book project is La nazione Winx: coltivare la futura consumista/Winx Nation: Grooming the Future Female Consumer, a collaboration with Nicoletta Marini-Maio (forthcoming, Rubbettino Editore, 2020). She is President of the American Association for Italian Studies. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/education

New York University (NYU) President Emeritus and consummate story-teller John Sexton describes how his childhood experiences as a young entrepreneur growing up in a working-class neighborhood of Brooklyn prepared him to lead the world’s largest private university. He shares the profound impact that his teacher and mentor, Charlie, had on his lifelong passion for teaching, and the role that high-school forensics, first as a national champion debater, then as a volunteer coach of the debate at the local Catholic girls high school had on his vision of the modern, ecumenical university.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

One of the major debates surrounding higher education is whether to make college – whether 2- or 4-year public colleges and universities – free for all qualified applicants.Dr. David Finegold, President of Chatham University, discusses why this is bad public policy, based on comparisons with the experience in the UK and Germany and an analysis of the policy proposal in the US context. He shows that the two key elements of a more equitable and effective approach already exist and simply need to be expanded – doubling the resources available for Pell grants to increase the level of grant and the income thresholds for those families who qualify for it, and converting all Federal Student Loans to income-contingent repayment so individuals only begin repaying the investment in their education once they are earning enough to afford it. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/education

Dr. David Finegold, the President of Chatham University in Pittsburgh, PA and international expert on education and training systems and how they relate to changes underway in the global economy and workplace, provides an introduction to this new podcast which will focus on the forces that are shaping The Future of Higher Education and leaders that have found ways to help their institutions thrive in this challenging environment. He discusses the long-term trends that are disrupting the higher education marketplace – demographic decline in number of high school graduates, rising price competition, declining public funding, growth in large, higher quality online providers – that have been compounded by the pandemic. And he outlines the different types of episodes to come: interview with university leaders who have transformed the fortunes of their colleges and universities for the better, who have pioneered new models of higher education, or have created strategic partnerships or mergers that have enabled their institutions to continue to pursue their mission in a new way. He’ll also be speaking with leading experts on higher education, like Nathan Grawe and Mary Marcy, about their new books. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/education

In Poor Queer Studies: Confronting Elitism in the University (Duke UP, 2020), Matt Brim shifts queer studies away from its familiar sites of elite education toward poor and working-class people, places, and pedagogies. Brim shows how queer studies also takes place beyond the halls of flagship institutions: in night school; after a three-hour commute; in overflowing classrooms at no-name colleges; with no research budget; without access to decent food; with kids in tow; in a state of homelessness. Drawing on the everyday experiences of teaching and learning queer studies at the College of Staten Island, Brim outlines the ways the field has been driven by the material and intellectual resources of those institutions that neglect and rarely serve poor and minority students. By exploring poor and working-class queer ideas and laying bare the structural and disciplinary mechanisms of inequality that suppress them, Brim jumpstarts a queer-class knowledge project committed to anti-elitist and anti-racist education. Poor Queer Studies is essential for all of those who care about the state of higher education and building a more equitable academy.Matt Brim is Associate Professor of Queer Studies in the English Department at the College of Staten Island, City University of New York; author of James Baldwin and the Queer Imagination; and coeditor of Imagining Queer Methods.John Marszalek III is author of Coming Out of the Magnolia Closet: Same-Sex Couples in Mississippi (2020, University Press of Mississippi). He is clinical faculty of the Clinical Mental Health Counseling Program at Southern New Hampshire University. Website: Johnmarszalek3.com Twitter: @marsjf3 Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/education

Education is thought to be the route out of poverty, but history disagrees. For generations, Americans have looked to education as the solution to economic disadvantage. Yet, although more people are earning degrees, the gap between rich and poor is widening. Cristina Groeger delves into the history of this seeming contradiction, explaining how education came to be seen as a panacea even as it paved the way for deepening inequality.The Education Trap: Schools and the Remaking of Inequality in Boston (Harvard UP, 2021) returns to the first decades of the twentieth century, when Americans were grappling with the unprecedented inequities of the Gilded Age. Groeger's test case is the city of Boston, which spent heavily on public schools. She examines how workplaces came to depend on an army of white-collar staff, largely women and second-generation immigrants, trained in secondary schools. But Groeger finds that the shift to more educated labor had negative consequences--both intended and unintended--for many workers. Employers supported training in schools in order to undermine the influence of craft unions, and so shift workplace power toward management. And advanced educational credentials became a means of controlling access to high-paying professional and business jobs, concentrating power and wealth. Formal education thus became a central force in maintaining inequality.The idea that more education should be the primary means of reducing inequality may be appealing to politicians and voters, but Groeger warns that it may be a dangerous policy trap. If we want a more equitable society, we should not just prescribe more time in the classroom, but fight for justice in the workplace.Stephen Pimpare is director of the Public Service & Nonprofit Leadership program and Faculty Fellow at the Carsey School of Public Policy at the University of New Hampshire. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/education

Listen to this interview of Joan Turner, author of On Writtenness: The Cultural Politics of Academic Writing (Bloomsbury Academic 2018). We talk about writers, writing, writers writing, unwritten subtexts, and written text.Interviewer: "What do you see as the step which writing practitioners can take in the direction of their discipline-based colleagues, and what's the step that researchers can take toward writing practice?"Joan Turner: "Well, obviously, it has to be something that has to be ongoing, and in many respects, it comes down to individuals. There are a lot of well-meaning researchers who value collaboration with writing practitioners, as there are many who don't. And I think is it probably incumbent upon the writing practitioners to kind of put themselves forward more, to kind of slough off the sense of inferiority that might surround them because of how institutions position writing development, and they just have to attempt to begin the conversation. I think that often, when they do, on an individual level, it works. Although often, another problem that occurs with that, is, if you're actually making contact with a particular department where you've got a lot of students, then you might make contact with a particular individual, who then leaves that institution or goes on to a different role in the institution, and is no longer collaborating with the writing center, and then you have to begin again with another one. So, it can be an uphill struggle, but I do have some optimism that things will get better."Daniel Shea, heads Scholarly Communications, a Special Series on the New Books Network. Daniel is Director of the Heidelberg Writing Program, a division of the Language Center at Heidelberg University, Germany. Just write Daniel.Shea@zsl.uni-heidelberg.de 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 in an expert about something? Email us at dr.danamalone@gmail.com or cgessler@gmail.com. Find us on Twitter: The Academic Life @AcademicLifeNBN.In this episode you’ll hear: reflections on the shutdown, the weight and tension involved in decision-making during this time, mental and soul exhaustion, centering the humanity in higher education work, and thoughts on what we’re taking out of this pandemic as a field.Our guest is: Dr. James (Jim) D. Breslin, PhD a higher education scholar, practitioner, and consultant who specializes in student success, academic support and advising, assessment, institutional effectiveness, and leadership and administration. He currently serves as the Assistant Provost for Assessment, Accreditation, and Institutional Effectiveness at Bellarmine University.Dr. Breslin has presented more than 70 conference sessions and published several peer-reviewed articles and book chapters on a variety of topics. He is engaged currently with research teams that range from developing new conceptual and practical frameworks for assessment to exploring the relationships between higher education professionals and peer educators.Dr. Breslin participates as an active citizen in the field of higher education and has consulted with institutions and organizations across the US and beyond. He has served on editorial boards for several peer-reviewed publications and in leadership roles in professional organizations, including his current roles as Director-elect of Professional Development on the ACPA Governing Board and Chair of the ACPA Assessment Oversight Task Force. Dr. Breslin has been recognized for his contributions to the field of higher education and most recently was named a Diamond Honoree by the American College Personnel Association Foundation.Your host is: Dr. Dana Malone, a higher education scholar and practitioner. Dana first met Jim in graduate school in their “Theories of College Student Development” course. Over the years, a kindred professional relationship – and friendship – developed, which includes working, presenting, and writing together as well as sharing drinks over Facetime.Listeners to this episode might be interested in: Code Switch podcast. Throughline podcast. ACPA’s A Bold Vision Forward.  If anyone is interested in Dr. Breslin’s thoughts on pressing issues in higher ed just prior to COVID, check out Emerging Trends in Higher Education.  A recent read that stands out: Heavy: An American Memoir. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/education