New Books in Education

Transforming Ethos: Place and the Material in Rhetoric and Writing (Utah State UP, 2020) approaches writing studies from the rhetorical flank, the flank which, for many, is the only flank the discipline has. However, at a time when universities are optimizing structurally and streamlining pedagogically, the book must plead the case for a university where character is formed. Now that writing studies has shouldered up to its other disciplinary and institutional neighbors, composition instructors need to begin asking themselves tough questions about administration, teaching, and assessment, and perhaps more importantly, composition instructors need to begin providing answers.Rosanne Carlo provides answers, answers which spring from the New Rhetoric, from the writings of Jim Corder, from ethos as a gathering place for community, from kairos, chora, and from many another well found and well placed theoretical tool turned to her overriding purpose of teaching writing and teaching rhetoric as a way of life.Scholarly Communication is the podcast series about how knowledge gets known. Scholarly Communication adheres to the principle that research improves when scholars better understand their role as communicators. Give scholars more opportunities to learn about publishing, and scholars will communicate their research better.The interviewer, Daniel Shea, heads Scholarly Communication, a Special Series on the New Books Network. Daniel is Director of the Writing Program at Heidelberg University, Germany. Just write writingprogram@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

Do you teach, or do you care about education? Then you have to read this book. At turns radical in the interventions it proposes in educational practice, at turns perspicacious in the views it opens on the act of teaching, at turns inspirational in the words it drops in the teacher's ear, Syllabus: The Remarkable, Unremarkable Document that Changes Everything (Princeton UP, 2020) belongs in every teacher's hand, as well as in the hands of many an administrator and policymaker.William Germano's and Kit Nicholls's idea to tag an entire pedagogy to one single document is brilliant, and it's brilliant because the document deserves the attention. As any college instructor and also many high school teachers will know, the syllabus kicks off the academic season, fills in as the rulebook and the referee, and presents that scoreboard of disciplinary knowledge called the reading list. William Germano and Kit Nicholls have much to say about all these functions of one remarkable and unremarkable document, much that is new and much that was already there but has now been put in new light; and more importantly, William Germano and Kit Nicholls say much, much more. In fact, every line of the syllabus becomes for them an opportunity to consider and discuss just what teachers want and (more to the point) just what their students want. Aligning these two in the interests of learners is one of the books many achievements.The book is not a how-to guide because, like all good books about such essentially human activities as parenting or writing or (as here) teaching and learning, Syllabus takes the wide view and Syllabus covers all the details: collaboration and community, schedules and heightened moments of learning, the citizen of the classroom, the optimal assignment, and the studied improvisation required to the teacher who would learn together with a classroom of students. These are just a few of William Germano's and Kit Nicholls's concerns in their book Syllabus, a book about what teaching looks like when teaching turns into learning.Daniel Shea heads Scholarly Communication, a Special Series on the New Books Network. Daniel is Director of the Writing Program at Heidelberg University, Germany. Just write writingprogram@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

Dr. Christopher Harris (@chrisharris) is a neuroscientist, engineer and educator at the EdTech company Backyard Brains. He is principal investigator on an NIH-funded project to develop brain-based robots for neuroscience education. In their recent open-access research paper, Dr. Harris and his team describe, and present results from, their classroom-based pilots of this new and highly innovative approach to neuroscience and STEM education. They argue that neurorobotics has enormous potential as an education technology, because it combines multiple activities with clear educational benefits including neuroscience, active learning, and robotics.Dr. Harris did his undergraduate degree in Psychology and Philosophy at the University of Warwick, where he developed his life-long love of the brain. For his graduate work at the University of Sussex and subsequent postdoctoral work at the National Institutes of Health he applied electrophysiological, optical and computational techniques to construct cellular-resolution maps of large and diverse neural circuits. He is particularly interested in reward-system, visual system, and central motor pattern generator circuits.Dr. John Griffiths (@neurodidact) is an Assistant Professor at the University of Toronto, and Head of Whole Brain Modelling at the CAMH Krembil Centre for Neuroinformatics. His research group (www.grifflab.com) works at the intersection of computational neuroscience and neuroimaging, building simulations of human brain activity aimed at improving the understanding and treatment of neuropsychiatric and neurological illness. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/education

Every fall on move-in day, parents tearfully bid farewell to their beloved sons and daughters at college dormitories: it is an age-old ritual. The residence hall has come to mark the threshold between childhood and adulthood, housing young people during a transformational time in their lives. Whether a Gothic stone pile, a quaint Colonial box, or a concrete slab, the dormitory is decidedly unhomelike, yet it takes center stage in the dramatic arc of many American families. This richly illustrated book examines the architecture of dormitories in the United States from the eighteenth century to 1968, asking fundamental questions: Why have American educators believed for so long that housing students is essential to educating them? And how has architecture validated that idea? Living on Campus: An Architectural History of the American Dormitory (University of Minnesota Press, 2019) is the first architectural history of this critical building type. Grounded in extensive archival research, Carla Yanni’s study highlights the opinions of architects, professors, and deans, and also includes the voices of students. For centuries, academic leaders in the United States asserted that on-campus living enhanced the moral character of youth; that somewhat dubious claim nonetheless influenced the design and planning of these ubiquitous yet often overlooked campus buildings. Through nuanced architectural analysis and detailed social history, Yanni offers unexpected glimpses into the past: double-loaded corridors (which made surveillance easy but echoed with noise), staircase plans (which prevented roughhousing but offered no communal space), lavish lounges in women’s halls (intended to civilize male visitors), specially designed upholstered benches for courting couples, mixed-gender saunas for students in the radical 1960s, and lazy rivers for the twenty-first century’s stressed-out undergraduates. Against the backdrop of sweeping societal changes, communal living endured because it bolstered networking, if not studying. Housing policies often enabled discrimination according to class, race, and gender, despite the fact that deans envisioned the residence hall as a democratic alternative to the elitist fraternity. Yanni focuses on the dormitory as a place of exclusion as much as a site of fellowship, and considers the uncertain future of residence halls in the age of distance learning.Bryan Toepfer, AIA, NCARB, CAPM is the Principal Architect for TOEPFER Architecture, PLLC, an Architecture firm specializing in Residential Architecture and Virtual Reality. He has authored two books, “Contractors CANNOT Build Your House,” and “Six Months Now, ARCHITECT for Life.” He is a professor at Alfred State College and the Director of Education for the AIA Rochester Board of Directors. Always eager to help anyone understand the world of Architecture, he can be reached by sending an email to btoepfer@toepferarchitecture. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/education

Kathryne M. Young, an Assistant Professor of Sociology at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, has written a combination of a sociological study and self-help book about and for American law school students.In How to Be Sort of Happy in Law School (Stanford UP, 2018), Dr. Young surveyed over 1,100 then-current law students, 250 alumni, and conducted detailed interviews with law students about their experiences in law school and concerns about pedagogy, other students, law professors, and hopes and fears about school and their future careers. Young’s work reveals the diversity of types of people and personalities who attend law school and how remarkably similar their experiences are, ranging from the most selective schools to the least. She reveals the varieties of perspectives and coping mechanisms used by students to grapple with the challenges of legal education. Dr. Young also includes much of her own impressions from when she was a law student at Stanford. Her perspectives and the responses of her subjects allow the book to also serve as a kind of self-help book for law students and anyone contemplating law school. In this interview, she discusses her sources, the current state of legal education and law students, and her hopes for reforms in legal education.Ian J. Drake is an Associate Professor of Political Science and Law at Montclair State University. His scholarly interests include American legal and constitutional history and political theory. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/education

The updated paperback edition of Hate: Why We Should Resist it With Free Speech, Not Censorship (Oxford University Press) dispels misunderstandings plaguing our perennial debates about "hate speech vs. free speech," showing that the First Amendment approach promotes free speech and democracy, equality, and societal harmony.As "hate speech" has no generally accepted definition, we hear many incorrect assumptions that it is either absolutely unprotected or absolutely protected from censorship. Rather, U.S. law allows government to punish hateful or discriminatory speech in specific contexts when it directly causes imminent serious harm.Yet, government may not punish such speech solely because its message is disfavored, disturbing, or vaguely feared to possibly contribute to some future harm. "Hate speech" censorship proponents stress the potential harms such speech might further: discrimination, violence, and psychic injuries. However, there has been little analysis of whether censorship effectively counters the feared injuries.Citing evidence from many countries, this book shows that "hate speech" are at best ineffective and at worst counterproductive. Therefore, prominent social justice advocates worldwide maintain that the best way to resist hate and promote equality is not censorship, but rather, vigorous "counterspeech" and activism.New York Law School professor Nadine Strossen, the immediate past President of the American Civil Liberties Union (1991-2008), is a leading expert and frequent speaker/media commentator on constitutional law and civil liberties, who has testified before Congress on multiple occasions.Arya Hariharan is a lawyer in politics. She spends much of her time working on congressional investigations and addressing challenges to the rule of law. You can reach her via email or Twitter. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/education

“Consider the works of the renowned Nobel-prize-winning African American writer, literary and social critic, and activist Toni Morrison (b. 1931),” writes Majid Daneshgar. “Hers—like Said’s—are popular in the West and cover most of the principal themes covered by Orientalism, including otherness, outsider-ship, exploitation and cultural colonialism and imperialism. Yet … one would be hard-pressed to find, for instance, even a free publisher’s copy of Morrison’s essay The Origin of Others, in translation or not, on the bookshelf of one of the Muslim academy’s experts on Islam or history, or politics, or sociology.”With this provocative introductory passage to set the stage for his book, Studying the Qur’an in the Muslim Academy (Oxford University Press), Majid Daneshgar invites his readers on a journey exploring how the Muslim academy—that is, academic institutions in the Muslim-majority world—teaches Islamic Studies, with an emphasis on the Qur’an.Through his personal experience and scholarly endeavors spanning Southeast Asia, the Middle East, and Europe, Daneshgar illuminates how Qur’anic and Islamic Studies in the Muslim academy are inevitably circumscribed and delimited by political and polemical agendas—with special attention paid to how Edward Said’s Orientalism is marshaled toward these effort—thus offering only selective readings of the Qur’anic text and wider Islamic source material.In addition, he also shows how such agendas even color intra-Muslim engagement across sectarian and national lines. Daneshgar offers alternative approaches—drawing from both theory and philology—and argues that bringing theories and methods from both the Western academy and the Muslim academy into more constructive dialogue with each other will advance—not hinder—intellectual and public engagement with Islam and the Qur’an. In our increasingly global and interconnected world, we can settle for no less.Majid Daneshgar, Ph.D. is a Research Associate at the Orientalisches Seminar, University of Freiburg, Germany.Asad Dandia is a graduate student of Islamic Studies at Columbia University. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/education

In this episode, I speak with fellow New Books in Education host, Jonathan Haber, about his book, Critical Thinking (The MIT Press, 2020).This book explains the widely-discussed but often ill-defined concept of critical thinking, including its history and role in a democratic society. We discuss the important role critical thinking plays in making decisions and communicating our ideas to others as well as the most effective ways teachers can help their students become critical thinkers.Haber oversees the projects, Critical Voter, LogicCheck, and Degree of Freedom, and can be reached at jonathan@degreeoffreedom.org.His recommended resources included the following: Thank You for Arguing, Fourth Edition: What Aristotle, Lincoln, and Homer Simpson Can Teach Us About the Art of Persuasion by Jay Heinrichs (Broadway Books, 2020) Think Again I: How to Understand Arguments Critical Thinker Academy The Dream of Reason: A History of Western Philosophy from the Greeks to the Renaissance by Anthony Gottlieb (W. W. Norton & Company, 2016)  Trevor Mattea is an educational consultant and speaker. His areas of expertise include deeper learning, parent involvement, project-based learning, and technology integration. He can be reached by email at tsmattea@pm.me or on Twitter at @tsmattea. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/education

In this episode, I speak with Federico R. Waitoller about his book, Excluded by Choice: Urban Students with Disabilities in the Education Marketplace (Teachers College Press). This book highlights the challenges faced by students of color who have special needs and their parents who evaluate their educational options.We discuss the services to which students with disabilities are entitled, how they are manifested in neighborhood and charter schools, and how they may be in tension with practices sometimes found in schools marketing themselves based on high test scores and college enrollment numbers. You can follow him on Twitter at @Waitollerf.His recommended books included the following: Ghosts in the Schoolyard: Racism and School Closings on Chicago's South Side by Eve L. Ewing (University of Chicago Press, 2018) Culturally Sustaining Pedagogies: Teaching and Learning for Justice in a Changing World by Djano Paris and H. Samy Alim (Teachers College Press, 2017) Savage Inequalities: Children in America's Schools by Jonathan Kozol (Broadway Books, 2012) Federico R. Waitoller is an associate professor in the department of special education at the University of Illinois at Chicago.Trevor Mattea is an educational consultant and speaker. His areas of expertise include deeper learning, parent involvement, project-based learning, and technology integration. He can be reached by email at tsmattea@pm.me or on Twitter at @tsmattea. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/education

Teaching world history surveys can be a nightmare! How on Earth is anyone supposed to cover so much information from all over the world and from so many different time periods? It can be nothing short of overwhelming.But fear not, listeners! Professor David Eaton has a strategy to stay sane and make the class more accessible to your students. Instead of following the “laundry list” approach of covering everything under the sun, he suggests using selected case studies to illustrate key concepts. In his World History through Case Studies: Historical Skills in Practice (Bloomsbury Academic, 2019), he holds that mastering these concepts will build the critical thinking skills essential to a historian. While World History through Case Studies could be used in the classroom, the real target audience is world history teachers who wanted to make their courses more successful.In our conversation, Dr. Eaton discusses the book and offers his thoughts on the field of world history. We also get into some of his case studies, which range from the history of yoga to the domestication of cattle and from human sacrifice in Mesoamerica to genocide in Poland. There is something for everyone in this discussion.Dr. David Eaton is an Associate Professor at Grand Valley State University. Along with Matt Drwenski, Dr. Eaton hosts “On Top of the World”Michael G. Vann is a professor of world history at California State University, Sacramento. A specialist in imperialism and the Cold War in Southeast Asia, he is the author of The Great Hanoi Rat Hunt: Empires, Disease, and Modernity in French Colonial Vietnam (Oxford, 2018). When he’s not quietly reading or happily talking about new books with smart people, Mike can be found surfing in Santa Cruz, California. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/education