Recommending Books for Purchase (Bulletin 58a - February 2020): Choice Reviews

Price: USD $125.00

This book arises out of a recognition that student affairs professionals have little preparation or guidance in dealing with matters of spirituality, religion, secularity, and interfaith work at a time of greater diversity in students' beliefs and, from a broad recognition that there is a need to engage with this aspect of student life. For those who don't know how to begin and may be nervous about tackling a topic that has the potential to lead to heated disagreements, this book provides the resources and practical guidance to undertake this work. With the aim of providing student affairs practitioners and faculty with the tools they need to increase their comfort level and enable their ability to engage in discussions about belief both in and out of the classroom, the contributors provide foundational knowledge, concrete teaching ideas, sample activities, and case studies that can be used in a variety of settings. This book serves multiple audiences in student affairs by providing teaching ideas for practitioners who want to include a session or two about interfaith in their programs as well as ideas for student affairs faculty who may be teaching one session on this topic or a whole course. The book is divided into four sections. The first offers context, provides the findings of research, and asks readers to reflect on the framework they use to embark on this work, whether a social justice framework that aims to highlight issues of power and privilege or an interfaith cooperation framework that aims to create religious pluralism. Part Two provides concrete ideas for creating courses, activities, events, and programs focused on spirituality, religion, secularity, and interfaith engagement, as well as ideas for incorporating these topics into courses typically offered in student affairs preparation programs. Part Three presents case studies to engage students, practitioners, and faculty in thinking about campus situations related to religious diversity. Part Four provides some basic information about a variety of religions and worldviews held by college students.

Price: USD $119.00

Critical media literacy is a necessary part of young people's education and can foster the space for a more thoroughly informed and involved citizenry. In order to make critical media literacy sustainable in K-12 classrooms, learning and application of it must begin with teachers, preferably during their formal schooling. Educating Media Literacy is a manifesto for the inclusion of media literacy in teacher education and, by extension, in K-12 classrooms. Through a discussion of critical media literacy's aims and the role of teacher education in the United States, this book argues for the inclusion of critical media literacy in teacher education. Educating Media Literacy addresses two separate topics - teacher education and media literacy - and illustrates how they are intertwined: The United States struggles simultaneously with how best to train and retain prospective teachers and how to foster a better understanding of mainstream media. These two struggles can join forces and move towards a solution through the following: The inclusion of critical media literacy in teacher education programs.

Price: USD $63.00

A comprehensive introduction to educational psychology, this volume is inclusive of all of the essentials--covering history, profiles, theories, applications, research, case studies, current events, issues, controversies, and more. Focused on human learning and teaching, the field of educational psychology informs a range of educational challenges, including instructional design, curriculum development, organizational learning, special education, student motivation, and classroom management. In this book, two veteran professors in the fields of education and psychology, offer a clear and concise yet comprehensive overview of this growing specialty. This volume will be valuable not only to university students aiming to understand psychology's subfields and to choose a major or a specialty, but also to classroom teachers, school administrators, and school social workers aiming to make teaching more effective and learning more thorough and lasting. Topics include the field's history, primary figures theories, research, theories, applications, issues, and controversies. Authors Martin and Torok-Gerard also explain current issues of social justice and educational equity, citing means that have been used to meet those goals in schools. The text additionally analyzes special education as a civil rights issue as well as equity and fairness for LGBTQ+ students in the context of social justice. The text ends with emerging research and predictions for the future of educational psychology. * Presents case studies that survey current social justice and educational equity issues * Includes a historical timeline that allows readers to understand how issues have developed over time * Offers a glossary of key terms that provides context for deeper understanding * Provides a resource list so readers can investigate issues on their own * Features a bibliography of citable resources that serves as a foundation for further research

Price: USD $50.00

Leading a public school today, regardless of its size, configuration, or location is an undertaking of immense responsibilities while confronting many challenges along with the rewards associated with watching children grow and learn. The leadership role rests with the school's principal. Rarely do they receive much on going professional development or recognition and praise even though their students find learning to be pleasurable and exciting in safe and secure classrooms. The book is intended to serve them as a reliable field manual. It provides them with a clear exposition on how to incorporate and exercise morale and servant leadership to their school community. The recommendations and suggestions provided throughout the book are based on years of experience observing the mix of social, emotional, and intellectual activities immersed in all formal schooling. What is proposed is supported by contemporary leadership and learning theories contributed by the social sciences. Thus, the purpose of this book is to enable principals to navigate safely through the many challenges accompanying today's educational reforms. It will require principals to exercise courage and tenacity, along with a high degree of collaboration with all those with a stake in the public service they pledge to provide.

Price: USD $120.00

Asian American women scholars experience shockingly low rates of tenure and promotion because of the particular ways they are marginalized by the intersectionalities of race and gender in academia. Although Asian American studies critics have long since debunked the model minority myth that constructs Asian Americans as the ideal academic subject, university administrators still treat Asian American women in academia as though they will simply show up and shut up. Consequently, because silent complicity is expected, power holders will punish and oppress Asian American women severely when they question or critique the system. However, change is in the air. Fight the Tower is a continuation of the Fight the Tower movement, which supports women standing up for their rights to claim their earned place in academia and to work for positive change for all within academic institutions. The essays provide powerful portraits, reflections, and analyses of a population often rendered invisible by the lies that sustain intersectional injustices in order to operate an oppressive system.

Price: GBP £16.99

From the University of California, Berkeley, to Middlebury College, institutions of higher learning increasingly find themselves on the front lines of cultural and political battles over free speech. Repeatedly, students, faculty, administrators, and politically polarizing invited guests square off against one another, assuming contrary positions on the limits of thought and expression, respect for differences, the boundaries of toleration, and protection from harm. In Free Speech on Campus, political philosopher Sigal Ben-Porath examines the current state of the arguments, using real-world examples to explore the contexts in which conflicts erupt, as well as to assess the place of identity politics and concern with safety and dignity within them. She offers a useful framework for thinking about free-speech controversies both inside and outside the college classroom, shifting the focus away from disputes about legality and harm and toward democracy and inclusion. Ben-Porath provides readers with strategies to de-escalate tensions and negotiate highly charged debates surrounding trigger warnings, safe spaces, and speech that verges on hate. Everyone with a stake in campus controversies--professors, students, administrators, and informed members of the wider public--will find something valuable in Ben-Porath's illuminating discussion of these crucially important issues.

Price: USD $30.00

Colleges and universities are seeing increasing numbers of students with a range of disabilities enrolling in postsecondary education. Many of these disabilities are invisible and, despite their potential for negative impact on students' academic and social adjustment, some students will choose not to identify as having a disability or request support. Approaching disability from the perspective of difference, the authors of this new volume offer guidance on creating more inclusive learning environments on campus so that all students--whether or not they have a recognized disability--have the opportunity to succeed. Strategies for supporting students with specific learning disabilities, attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder, autism spectrum disorder or who display learning and behavioral characteristics associated with these profiles are described. A valuable resource for instructors, advisors, academic support personnel, and others who work directly with college students.

Price: USD $99.00

Higher Education has become a central institution of society, building individual knowledge, skills, agency, and relational social networks at unprecedented depth and scale. Within a generation there has been an extraordinary global expansion of Higher Education, in every region in all but thepoorest countries, outstripping economic growth and deriving primarily from familial aspirations for betterment. By focusing on the systems and countries that have already achieved near universal participation, High Participation Systems of Higher Education explores this remarkable transformation.The world enrolment ratio, now rising by 10 per cent every decade, is approaching 40 per cent, mostly in degree-granting institutions, including three quarters of young people in North America and Europe. Higher Education systems in the one in three countries that enrol more than 50 per cent arehere classified as "high participation systems".Part I of the book measures, maps, and explains the growth of participation, and the implications for society and Higher Education itself. Drawing on a wide range of literature and data, the chapters theorize the changes in governance, institutional diversity, and stratification in Higher Educationsystems, and the subsequent effects in educational and social equity. The theoretical propositions regarding high-participation Higher Education developed in these chapters are then tested in the country case studies in Part II, presenting a comprehensive enquiry into the nature of the emerging"high participation society".

Price: USD $105.00

This groundbreaking volume is the first to concentrate specifically on the experiences, challenges, and triumphs of immigrant-origin community college students. Drawing on data from the Research on Immigrants in Community College Study (RICC), chapters highlight the unique needs of these students, the role of classrooms and campus settings, out-of-class time spent on campus, the importance of relationships, expectations versus outcomes, and key recommendations for policy and practice. The text integrates an array of important topics, including developmental challenges, language learning, the undocumented student experience, microaggressions, counseling center use, and academic engagement. Above all, this book looks at what community colleges can do to better help this growing population of new Americans succeed. Book Features: Holistic and resilience-based strategies of practice that build on the many strengths of new Americans in higher education. Federal, state, and local administrative policy recommendations to help this important and growing student population flourish. An in-depth study of more than 600 diverse immigrant-origin students attending three community colleges in New York City. Interdisciplinary, mixed-method research (survey, interviews, classroom observations) from a variety of viewpoints (students, faculty, administrators).

Price: USD $29.95

How the financial pressures of paying for college affect the lives and well-being of middle-class families The struggle to pay for college is one of the defining features of middle-class life in America today. At kitchen tables all across the country, parents agonize over whether to burden their children with loans or to sacrifice their own financial security by taking out a second mortgage or draining their retirement savings. Indebted takes readers into the homes of middle-class families throughout the nation to reveal the hidden consequences of student debt and the ways that financing college has transformed family life. Caitlin Zaloom gained the confidence of numerous parents and their college-age children, who talked candidly with her about stressful and intensely personal financial matters that are usually kept private. In this remarkable book, Zaloom describes the profound moral conflicts for parents as they try to honor what they see as their highest parental duty--providing their children with opportunity--and shows how parents and students alike are forced to take on enormous debts and gamble on an investment that might not pay off. What emerges is a troubling portrait of an American middle class fettered by the "student finance complex"--the bewildering labyrinth of government-sponsored institutions, profit-seeking firms, and university offices that collect information on household earnings and assets, assess family needs, and decide who is eligible for aid and who is not. Superbly written and unflinchingly honest, Indebted breaks through the culture of silence surrounding the student debt crisis, revealing the unspoken costs of sending our kids to college.

Price: USD $114.00

Partnerships are now pervasive in global education and development, but are they creating equitable, cooperative, and positive relationships? Through case studies of prominent multistakeholder partnerships--including the Education Cannot Wait Fund and Global Partnership for Education--as well as a comprehensive analysis of the global education network, this book exposes clear power imbalances that persist in the international aid environment. The author reveals how actors and organizations from high-income countries continue to wield disproportionate influence, while the private sector holds a growing degree of authority in public policy circles. In light of such evidence, this book questions if partnerships truly ameliorate power asymmetries, or if they instead reproduce the precise inequities they are meant to eliminate. Book Features: Provides in-depth case studies of two of the most prominent multistakeholder education organizations, including key informant interviews that provide insider perspectives and critiques. Applies innovative methodologies to understand power and influence, including a network analysis of hundreds of organizations engaged in the global education sector. Tackles pressing and evolving themes, such as increased private sector engagement and power asymmetries in international development.

Price: USD $160.00

Learning is the foundation of the human experience. It begins at birth and never stops, a continuous and malleable link across life stages of human development. Disparities in learning access and outcomes around the world have deep consequences for income, social mobility, health, and well-being. For international development practitioners faced with today's unprecedented environmental and geopolitical pressures, learning should be viewed as a touchstone and target for those seeking to truly effect global change. This book traces the path of international development work--from its pre-colonial origins to the emergence of economics as the dominant discipline in the field--and lays out a new agenda for policymakers, researchers, and practitioners, from early education through adulthood. Learning as Development is an attempt to rethink international education in a changing world.

Price: GBP £25.00

The first book to tell the story of the Advanced Placement program, the gold standard for academic rigor in American high schools The Advanced Placement program stands as the foremost source of college-level academics for millions of high school students in the United States and beyond. More than 22,000 schools now participate in it, across nearly forty subjects, from Latin and art to calculus and computer science. Yet remarkably little has been known about how this nongovernmental program became one of the greatest success stories in K-12 education--until now. In Learning in the Fast Lane, Chester Finn and Andrew Scanlan, two of the country's most respected education analysts, offer a groundbreaking account of one of the most important educational initiatives of our time. Learning in the Fast Lane traces the story of AP from its mid-twentieth-century origins as a niche benefit for privileged students to its emergence as a springboard to college for high schoolers nationwide, including hundreds of thousands of disadvantaged youth. Today, AP not only opens new intellectual horizons for smart teenagers, but also strengthens school ratings, attracts topflight teachers, and draws support from philanthropists, reformers, and policymakers. At the same time, it faces numerous challenges, including rival programs, curriculum wars, charges of elitism, the misgivings of influential universities, and the difficulty of infusing rigor into schools that lack it. In today's polarized climate, can AP maintain its lofty standards and surmount the problems that have sunk so many other bold education ventures? Richly documented and thoroughly accessible, Learning in the Fast Lane is a must-read for anyone with a stake in the American school system.

Price: USD $110.00

Learning language and using language to learn is at the core of any educational activity. Bringing together a globally representative team of experts, this volume presents an innovative and empirically robust collection of studies that examine the role of language in education, with a particular emphasis on features of school-relevant language in middle childhood and adolescents, and its precursors in early childhood. It addresses issues such as how children's linguistic and literacy experiences at home prepare them for school, how the classroom functions as a language-mediated learning environment, and how schools can support language minority students in academic attainment. Set in three parts - Early Childhood, Middle Childhood and Adolescence and Learning in Multilingual Contexts - each part features a discussion from experts in the field to stimulate conversation and further routes for research. Its structure will make it useful for anyone interested in ongoing efforts towards building a pedagogically relevant theory of language learning.

Price: USD $39.95

Imagine a classroom where students put away their smart phones and enthusiastically participate in learning activities that unleash creativity and refine critical thinking. Students today live and learn in a transmedia environment that demands multi-modal writing skills and multiple literacies. This collection brings together 17 new essays on using comics and graphic novels to provide both a learning framework and hands-on strategies that transform students' learning experiences through literary forms they respond to.

Price: USD $96.00

Rooted in examples from their own and others' classrooms, the authors offer discipline-specific practices for implementing antiracist literature instruction in White-dominant schools. Each chapter explores a key dimension of antiracist literature teaching and learning, including designing literature-based units that emphasize racial literacy, selecting literature that highlights voices of color, analyzing Whiteness in canonical literature, examining texts through a critical race lens, managing challenges of race talk, and designing formative assessments for racial literacy and identity growth. Book Features: Specific classroom scenarios and transcripts of race-related challenges that teachers will recognize to help situate suggested strategies. Sample racial literacy objectives, questions, and assessments to guide unit instruction. A literature-based unit that addresses societal racism in A Raisin in the Sun. Assignments for exploring Whiteness in the teaching of The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. Questions teachers can use to examine To Kill a Mockingbird through a critical race lens. Techniques for managing difficult moments in whole group discussions. Collaborative glossary and exploratory essay assignments to build understanding of race-based concepts and racial identity development.

Price: GBP £55.99

Academics often speak about love for their subject, mathematicians discuss their love for figures and numbers, and elementary school teachers speak about their love of children. As multidimensional as love is, it is often a taboo subject relative to teachers and students. In Love and Compassion, John P. Miller explores different forms of love, including self-love, the love of others, compassion, the love of learning, and cosmic love, and how these dimensions of love have the potential to improve education.


Love and Compassion is both a practical and conceptual work, and will interest those involved in the study and practise of holistic and contemplative education. In addition to the seven dimensions of love, Miller’s evaluation includes nonviolent action, the love of beauty, and how they are crucial to the practise of teaching.

Price: GBP £22.00

The ethical and emotional tolls paid by disadvantaged college students seeking upward mobility and what educators can do to help these students flourish 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 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.

Price: USD $145.00

Neoliberalism and Academic Repression: The Fall of Academic Freedom in the Era of Trump, co-edited by Erik Juergensmeyer, Anthony J. Nocella II, and Mark Seis, provides a theoretical examination of the current higher education system and explains how academia is being shaped into a corporate-factory-industrial-complex. This complex is transforming the relationships within and beyond the institution, transforming the mission of higher education from being the foundation of democracy to manager of professionalism. The outstanding contributors offer strategies of social change, policy suggestions, and important critiques of neoliberal practices. This timely collection challenges the neoliberal emphasis on valuation based on job readiness and outcome achievement--promoting equity, justice, and inclusivity in the process. Contributors include: Camila Bassi, Brad Benz, A. Peter Castro, Taine Duncan, Sarah Giragosian, Erik Juergensmeyer, Caroline K. Kaltefleiter, Peter N. Kirstein, Emil Marmol, Anthony J. Nocella II, Ben Ristow, JL Schatz, Mark Seis, Jeff Shantz, Kim Socha, Richard J. White.

Price: USD $64.00

Outside Money in School Board Elections documents and analyzes the injection of external funding into local elections. Local school board contests have recently become flashpoints of national donor interest. Some observers see this engagement as a needed boost for complacent school districts while others view it as a threat to local democracy.   Drawing on a detailed study of elections in five districts (Bridgeport, Connecticut, Denver, Indianapolis, Los Angeles, and New Orleans), the authors explore what happens when national issues percolate downward into local politics. They suggest that the involvement of wealthy individuals and national organizations in local school board elections are signs of the nationalization of local education politics that potentially have significant implications for equity and democracy.     Outside Money in School Board Elections brings attention back to local participation and the diversity of players at that level, and highlights the national trend of increasing wealth inequality and its impact on the politics of education. This cross-case investigation demonstrates that local and national education politics are not separate fields but closely intertwined areas of political advocacy with complex interactions.