New Books in Education

Ahmad Atif Ahmad’s  Pitfalls of Scholarship: Lessons from Islamic Studies (Palgrave Macmillan, 2016) is a unique reflection on the field of Islamic studies. It is not quite a memoir, although it is reflective of Islamic studies, academia, and higher education in general. It is also not quite a book of theory, although it offers several deep readings of various figures in the Muslim intellectual canon. Rather, it is a collection of essays. Chapter 1, for example is a rumination the humanities and its place in the modern academy. Ahmad then goes on to  concept of academic frustration. He builds on this in the third chapter by examining the iconic Muslim intellectual al-Ghazali. The final chapter ties the wider world into the academy and considers themes of nationalism and democracy. In this interview, we talk to Ahmad about what it is to be a scholar in 21st-century America (and specifically a scholar of Islam in 21st-century America), the politics of the field, what it is to be bold in academia,  and the value of curiosity, all with Ahmad’s jocular cheer and sage advice.Ahmad Atif Ahmad is professor of religious studies at the University of California in Santa Barbara (UCSB).  He also serves on UCSB’s 'Council on Faculty Issues and Awards' and the UC-System wide Academic Advisory Committee for Internship Programs in the University Center in Washington, DC.  He previously served as associate director of the University of California Center in Washington, Sultan Qaboos Chair of Mideast Studies at the College of William and Mary in Williamsburg, Virginia, and as visiting associate professor at Utrecht University in the Netherlands.  The author of ‘Islamic Law: Cases, Authorities, and Worldview (London: Bloomsbury, 2017), ‘The Fatigue of the Sharia’ (NYC: Palgrave, 2012), and ‘Structural Interrelations of Theory and Practice in Islamic Law' (Leiden: Brill, 2006), Ahmad teaches courses on Islamic legal reasoning in medieval Islam and early modern Egypt.Nadirah Mansour is a graduate student at Princeton University’s Department of Near Eastern Studies working on the global intellectual history of the Arabic-language press. She tweets @NAMansour26 and produces another Middle-East and North Africa-related podcast: Reintroducing.  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/education

When the young Diné boy Hopi-Hopi ran away from the Santa Fe Indian Boarding School in the early years of the twentieth century, he carried with him no paper map to guide his way home. Rather, he used knowledge of the region, of the stars, and of the Southwest’s ecology instilled in him from before infancy to help navigate over rivers, through mountains, and across deserts. In The Earth Memory Compass: Diné Landscapes and Education in the Twentieth Century (University of Kansas Press, 2018), Farina King argues that education and the creation of “thick” cultural knowledge played, and continues to play, a central role in the survival of Diné culture. King, Assistant Professor of History at Northeastern State University in Tahlequah, Oklahoma, takes a unique methodological approach in telling the story of Diné education and knowledge. The Earth Memory Compass is, in King’s words, an “autoethnography,” weaving her personal story of cultural discovery and family history into a larger narrative of Indigenous boarding school experiences and deep learning within families and other sites of indigenous education. The book tracks four of the six sacred directions in Diné culture, East, South, West, and North, each connected with a sacred mountain in the Southwest, and in doing so tells a rich and complicated history of how the Diné people resisted and sometimes embraced American education while never losing their own much older forms of knowledge in the process.Stephen Hausmann is a doctoral candidate at Temple University and Visiting Instructor of history at the University of Pittsburgh. He is currently writing his dissertation, a history of race and the environment in the Black Hills and surrounding northern plains region of South Dakota, Wyoming, and Montana. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/education

In his groundbreaking new book, Alef is for Allah: Childhood, Emotion, and Visual Culture in Islamic Societies (University of California Press, 2018), Jamal Elias takes his readers on a riveting intellectual tour thematically centered on the interaction of childhood, visual culture, and affect in contemporary Muslim majority societies, and in Muslim intellectual thought more broadly. Drawing on while also significantly extending and reworking recent theoretical explorations in the field of affect theory, Elias interrogates, with lucidity as well as with dazzling insight, the promises, aspirations, and tensions invested in childhood and the figure of the child in Muslim visual culture. Elias convincingly shows that not only is childhood itself a concept and construct fraught with ambiguity, but also that the mobilization of the ideal child through material and visual culture can take remarkably malleable forms and purposes. Alef is for Allah moves seamlessly between such varied contexts as Iran, Turkey, and Pakistan to illumine the depth and diversity of the intersection of piety, nationalism, and visual culture in Islam and Muslim societies. This lyrically written book also includes incredible and excellently presented images making it particularly well suited for undergraduate and graduate seminars on material Islam, Muslim visual culture, affect studies, and childhood studies.SherAli Tareen is Associate Professor of Religious Studies at Franklin and Marshall College. His research focuses on Muslim intellectual traditions and debates in early modern and modern South Asia. His academic publications are available at https://fandm.academia.edu/SheraliTareen/. He can be reached at stareen@fandm.edu. Listener feedback is most welcome. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/education

I don’t know about the colleges and universities you’re familiar with, but the U.S. military has a pretty visible presence on my campus—through the ROTC, a newly remodeled Veterans Resource Center, and the student veterans themselves who enroll in my classes each semester. So I was immediately intrigued when I heard about the book Grateful Nation: Student Veterans and the Rise of the Military-Friendly Campus (Duke University Press, 2017) by Ellen Moore. In Grateful Nation, Moore uses interviews and observations to document the experiences of student veterans, the challenges they face re-integrating into academic life, strategies they use to navigate that experience, and the nature of the resources available to them along the way. Moore considers an interesting paradox—that despite the presence of overtly military-friendly programs and practices on most US campuses today, there is still a perception, stemming from the Vietnam War era, that college campuses are anti-military and anti-veteran spaces; this misperception serves to silence or censor discussions of contemporary military conflicts on campus, even among veterans themselves. If you find this all as interesting as I do, you’ll want to listen to my upcoming interview with Dr. Ellen Moore about her book.Carrie Lane is a Professor of American Studies at California State University, Fullerton and author of A Company of One: Insecurity, Independence, and the New World of White-Collar Unemployment (Cornell University Press, 2011). Her research concerns the changing nature of work in the contemporary U.S. She is currently writing a book on the professional organizing industry. To suggest a recent title or to contact her, please send an email to clane@fullerton.edu. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/education

Today, we're talking to Janelle Adsit about her book, Toward an Inclusive Creative Writing (Bloomsbury, 2017). In it, Adsit takes a hard look at the way American colleges and universities teach creative writing. What do students who enter creative-writing classrooms encounter as these young men and women hope to discover who they are and can be as writers? Does the teaching they receive help or hinder them? As Adsit’s title suggests, one of the problems she’s found with writing instruction in our institutions is that it’s too exclusive, too centered on limited and limiting ideas of what counts as good writing and, by extension, who can be good writers. Too often, in writing classrooms across the country, students encounter models that are predominately male and predominately white. How, Adsit asks, can we foster the writing of students who don’t identify with these models? How can we guide our students to write from and give voice to their own diversity? At stake in these questions is not merely the experience of students in the classroom, but, in the long run, the future of American literature, for in these classrooms are our authors-to-be, those writers who will go on to write the books we’ll read in the coming decades. Adsit hopes to lead us forward into a brighter literary future, one in which our literature is as rich and diverse as the Americans who read it.Eric LeMay is on the creative writing faculty at Ohio University. His work ranges from food writing to electronic literature. He is the author of three books, most recently In Praise of Nothing: Essay, Memoir, and Experiments (Emergency Press, 2014). He can be reached at eric@ericlemay.org. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/education

Our evolutionary success, according to co-authors Alex Bentley and Michael O'Brien, lies in our ability to acquire cultural wisdom and teach it to the next generation. Today, we follow social media bots as much as we learn from our ancestors. We are radically changing the way culture evolves.In The Acceleration of Cultural Change: From Ancestors to Algorithms (MIT Press, 2017), Bentley and O'Brien describe how the transmission of culture has become vast and instantaneous across an internet of people and devices, after millennia of local, ancestral knowledge that evolved slowly. Long-evolved cultural knowledge is aggressively discounted by online algorithms, which prioritize popularity and recency. If children learn more from Minecraft than from tradition, this is a profound shift in cultural evolution.Bentley and O'Brien examine the broad and shallow model of cultural evolution seen today in the science of networks, prediction markets, and the explosion of digital information. They suggest that in the future, artificial intelligence could help solve the problem of information overload, learning to integrate concepts over the vast milieu of digitally stored information.Professor Alex Bentley is Chair of the Department of Anthropology at the University of Tennessee. Follow him on Twitter @ralexbentley.Hoover Harris, editor of Degree Or Not Degree?, holds a PhD in English and writes and speaks about trends in higher education. He can be reached by email at hooverharris@icloud.com or on Twitter @degreenot. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/education

In an atmosphere filled with social media and fake news, history is more important than ever. But, what do you really know about history? In the second edition of his book, Teaching What Really Happened: How to Avoid the Tyranny of Textbooks and Get Students Excited About Doing History(Teachers College Press, 2018).  Dr. James W. Loewen interrogates what we think we know about our past. Loewen, a sociologist and professor at the University of Vermont, shows readers that history must be reconsidered in order to avoid previously accepted misconceptions. As Loewen demonstrates throughout this valuable text, teachers must look beyond the textbook to discover what really happened and to teach their students how to "do" history. Teaching What Really Happened is an eye-opening book that reinvigorates history and empowers its readers. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/education

What is learning? There is a robust body of literature that seeks to tell us what the most effective classroom techniques and strategies are, but Joshua Eyler goes further. In his new book How Humans Learn: The Science and Stories behind Effective College Teaching (West Virginia UP, 2018), Eyler digs deeply into research from a broad range of disciplines to help us understand the act of learning itself, and then showing us how that deeper understanding can translate into more effective teaching and learning in our own classrooms. It’s an important book for all college instructors.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

McKenzie Wark’s new book offers 21 focused studies of thinkers working in a wide range of fields who are worth your attention. The chapters of General Intellects: Twenty-One Thinkers for the Twenty-First Century (Verso, 2017) introduce readers to important work in Anglophone cultural studies, psychoanalysis, political theory, media theory, speculative realism, science studies, Italian and French workerist and autonomist thought, two “imaginative readings of Marx,” and two “unique takes on the body politic.” There are significant implications of these ideas for how we live and work at the contemporary university, and we discussed some of those in our conversation. This is a great book to read and to teach with! Carla Nappi is the Andrew W. Mellon Chair in the Department of History at the University of Pittsburgh. You can learn more about her and her work here. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/education

According to most experts, boys have more trouble in schools than girls. Further, African-American boys have even more trouble than, say, white boys. What to do? According to some, one possible solution to the latter problem is all-Black male schools, or "ABMSs." In her new book In a Classroom of Their Own: The Intersection of Race and Feminist Politics in All-Black Male Schools (University of Illinois Press, 2018), Keisha Lindsay critiques ABMSs from a feminist perspective and has some helpful things to say about how to educate young African-Americans generally.Adam McNeil is a PhD student in History, African American Public Humanities Initiative and Colored Conventions Project Scholar at the University of Delaware. He can be reached on Twitter @CulturedModesty. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/education