New Books in Education

In this this interview, Dr. Carrie Tippen talks with A.R. Ruis about the 2017 book Eating to Learn, Learning to Eat: The Origins of School Lunch in the United States – published in 2017 by Rutgers University Press. Ruis narrates the development of school lunch programs from the late 19th century to the present, describing the evolution from locally organized charitable initiatives into the federally funded and managed programs that we know today. While school lunches seem almost inseparable from the American public school experience, Ruis explains that it was not clear in the 19th century whether schools had the ethical obligation or even the legal right to provide food. Ruis argues that the decision to supply lunches for students extends from constitutive moments in history when schools became a site for distributing health and wellness services of many kinds.Through case studies of Chicago, New York, and rural schools in the Midwest, Ruis demonstrates that while most schools followed a similar path to establishing lunch programs – starting with lunches provided by a private, charitable group and eventually being taken under school board control – the results varied greatly based on the challenges of the particular area and the philosophy of the school board. Through an extended discussion of the National School Lunch Act of 1946, Ruis describes a key tension still at work in school lunch debates today; that is, whether school lunch is a program for providing nutrition to children or providing a predictable market for surplus agricultural commodities. Ruis concludes, “History suggests that without development of a system that integrates eating and learning, that values skilled labor and community involvement, and that privileges children’s health over agricultural protection, malnourishment will continue to be ‘our greatest producer of ill health.’”A. R. Ruis is a historian of medicine and a learning scientist at the University of Wisconsin, Madison. You can find him on Twitter at @AndrewRuis.Carrie Helms Tippen is Assistant Professor of English at Chatham University in Pittsburgh, PA, where she teaches courses in American Literature. Her 2018 book, Inventing Authenticity: How Cookbook Writers Redefine Southern Identity (University of Arkansas Press), examines the rhetorical strategies that writers use to prove the authenticity of their recipes in the narrative headnotes of contemporary cookbooks. Her academic work has been published in Food and Foodways, American Studies, Southern Quarterly, and Food, Culture, and Society. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/education

With free college in the national conversation, there’s been no better time for Daniel T. Kirsch’s new book Sold My Soul for a Student Loan: Higher Education and the Political Economy of the Future (Praeger, 2019). Kirsch teaches at California State University, Sacramento.American colleges and universities boasts an impressive legacy, but the price of admission for many is now endless debt. As Kirsch shows in the book, increasing educational indebtedness undermines the real value of higher education in US democracy. To help readers understand this dilemma, he examines how the student debt problem emerged and what the long-term effects of this might be. Sold My Soul for a Student Loan examines this vitally important issue from an unprecedented diversity of perspectives, focusing on the fact that student debt is hindering the ability of millions of people to enter the job market, the housing market, the consumer economy, and the political process. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/education

We’ve all heard that a picture is worth a thousand words, but what if we don’t understand what we’re looking at? Social media has made charts, infographics, and diagrams ubiquitous―and easier to share than ever. We associate charts with science and reason; the flashy visuals are both appealing and persuasive. Pie charts, maps, bar and line graphs, and scatter plots (to name a few) can better inform us, revealing patterns and trends hidden behind the numbers we encounter in our lives. In short, good charts make us smarter―if we know how to read them.However, they can also lead us astray. Charts lie in a variety of ways―displaying incomplete or inaccurate data, suggesting misleading patterns, and concealing uncertainty―or are frequently misunderstood, such as the confusing cone of uncertainty maps shown on TV every hurricane season. To make matters worse, many of us are ill-equipped to interpret the visuals that politicians, journalists, advertisers, and even our employers present each day, enabling bad actors to easily manipulate them to promote their own agendas.In How Charts Lie: Getting Smarter about Visual Information (W. W. Norton, 2019), data visualization expert Alberto Cairo teaches us to not only spot the lies in deceptive visuals, but also to take advantage of good ones to understand complex stories. Public conversations are increasingly propelled by numbers, and to make sense of them we must be able to decode and use visual information. By examining contemporary examples ranging from election-result infographics to global GDP maps and box-office record charts, How Charts Lie demystifies an essential new literacy, one that will make us better equipped to navigate our data-driven world. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/education

If we want children from poor families and communities to succeed in school, then we must pay attention to more than merely what happens in school. With twelve case studies highlighting an array of Integrated Student Support (ISS) strategies from throughout the U.S., Paul Reville shows us that we already know a lot about how to move toward a world in which children have genuine equality of opportunity. Join us to hear about Reville and Elaine Weiss' book Broader, Bolder, Better: How Schools and Communities Help Students Overcome the Disadvantages of Poverty (Harvard Education Press, 2019).Stephen Pimpare is Senior Lecturer in the Politics & Society Program and Faculty Fellow at the Carsey School of Public Policy at the University of New Hampshire. He is the author of The New Victorians (New Press, 2004), A Peoples History of Poverty in America (New Press, 2008), winner of the Michael Harrington Award, and Ghettos, Tramps and Welfare Queens: Down and Out on the Silver Screen (Oxford, 2017). 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 of Talking Legal History, Siobhan talks with William P. Hustwit about his book Integration Now: Alexander v. Holmes and the End of Jim Crow Education (UNC Press, 2019). Hustwit is the Associate Professor of History and Chair of the History Department at Birmingham-Southern College. Fifty years after the Supreme Court decision, Integration Now explores how studying the case Alexander v. Holmes (1969) enhances understandings of the history underlying school desegregation. This episode is part of a series featuring legal history works from UNC Press.Recovering the history of an often-ignored landmark Supreme Court case, William P. Hustwit assesses the significant role that Alexander v. Holmes (1969) played in integrating the South’s public schools. Although Brown v. Board of Education has rightly received the lion’s share of historical analysis, its ambiguous language for implementation led to more than a decade of delays and resistance by local and state governments. Alexander v. Holmes required “integration now,” and less than a year later, thousands of children were attending integrated schools.Hustwit traces the progression of the Alexander case to show how grassroots activists in Mississippi operated hand in glove with lawyers and judges involved in the litigation. By combining a narrative of the larger legal battle surrounding the case and the story of the local activists who pressed for change, Hustwit offers an innovative, well-researched account of a definitive legal decision that reaches from the cotton fields of Holmes County to the chambers of the Supreme Court in Washington.Support for the production of this series was provided by the Versatile Humanists at Duke program.Siobhan M. M. Barco, J.D. explores U.S. legal history at Duke University. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/education

As you may know, university presses publish a lot of good books. In fact, they publish thousands of them every year. They are different from most trade books in that most of them are what you might called "fundamental research." Their authors--dedicated researchers one and all--provide the scholarly stuff upon which many non-fiction trade books are based. So when you are reading, say, a popular history, you are often reading UP books at one remove. Of course, some UP books are also bestsellers, and they are all well written (and, I should say, thoroughly vetted thanks to the peer review system), but the greatest contribution of UPs is to provide a base of fundamental research to the public. And they do a great job of it.How do they do it? Today I talked to Kathryn Conrad, the president of the Association of University Presses, about the work of UPs, the challenges they face, and some terrific new directions they are going. We also talked about why, if you have a scholarly book in progress, you should talk to UP editors early and often. And she explains how! Listen in.Marshall Poe is the editor of the New Books Network. He can be reached at marshallpoe@gmail.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/education

Professor Jay Driskell of Hood College, author of Schooling Jim Crow: The Fight for Atlanta's Booker T. Washington High School and the Roots of Black Protest Politics (University of Virginia Press, 2014), traces the roots of black protest politics to early 20th century Atlanta and the fight for equal education.In 1919 the NAACP organized a voting bloc powerful enough to compel the city of Atlanta to budget $1.5 million for the construction of schools for black students. This victory would have been remarkable in any era, but in the context of the Jim Crow South it was revolutionary. Schooling Jim Crow tells the story of this little-known campaign, which happened less than thirteen years after the Atlanta race riot of 1906 and just weeks before a wave of anti-black violence swept the nation in the summer after the end of World War I. Despite the constant threat of violence, Atlanta’s black voters were able to force the city to build five black grammar schools and Booker T. Washington High School, the city’s first publicly funded black high school. Schooling Jim Crow reveals how they did it and why it matters.In this pathbreaking book, Driskell explores the changes in black political consciousness that made the NAACP’s grassroots campaign possible at a time when most black southerners could not vote, let alone demand schools. He reveals how black Atlantans transformed a reactionary politics of respectability into a militant force for change. Contributing to this militancy were understandings of class and gender transformed by decades of racially segregated urban development, the 1906 Atlanta race riot, Georgia’s disfranchisement campaign of 1908, and the upheavals of World War I. On this cultural foundation, black Atlantans built a new urban black politics that would become the model for the NAACP’s political strategy well into the twentieth century.Beth A. English is director of the Liechtenstein Institute's Project on Gender in the Global Community at Princeton University. She also is a past president of the Southern Labor History Association. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/education

We say on this show all the time that democracy is hard work. But what does that really mean? What it is about our dispositions that makes it so hard to see eye to eye and come together for the greater good? And why, despite all that, do we feel compelled to do it anyway? Jonathan Haidt is the perfect person to help us unpack those questions.We also explore what we can do now to educate the next generation of democratic citizens, based on the research Jonathan and co-author Greg Lukianoff did for their latest book The Coddling of the American Mind: How Good Intentions and Bad Ideas are Setting Up a Generation for Failure (Penguin, 2018).Jonathan is social psychologist at New York University’s Stern School of Business. His research examines the intuitive foundations of morality, and how morality varies across cultures––including the cultures of American progressive, conservatives, and libertarians.Democracy Works is created by the McCourtney Institute for Democracy at Penn State and recorded at WPSU Penn State, central Pennsylvania’s NPR station. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/education

Anthony Kronman, former dean of Yale Law School, has written an account of his view of the decline of the American university from a bastion of free inquiry and an arena for the pursuit of excellence to become a vocational training school and mere reflection of the wider society. In The Assault on American Excellence (Free Press, 2019), Professor Kronman contends that this is a failure by faculty and administrators to provide students with the intellectual and moral challenges they need in order become a fully-formed human being. He reviews recent controversies happening at his school, Yale University, such as the debate over the name of Calhoun College and student and faculty objections to the use of the term “master” to describe the faculty head of a residential college. Kronman’s book is his response to what he sees as a crisis in higher education and an argument in favor of encouraging students, faculty, administrators and members of the general public to viewing college as a unique opportunity to pursue excellence in all its forms.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 podcast discusses how being an academic doesn't automatically make us good teachers. It emphasizes embracing geekiness for effective pedagogy. Topics include the evolution of nerd stereotypes, importance of seeking support, and key elements of effective teaching like collaboration and humor.