New Books In Education

To many mathematicians and math enthusiasts, the word "innumeracy" brings to mind popular writing like that of John Allen Paulos. But inequities in our quantitative reasoning skills have received considerable interest and attention from researchers lately, including in psychology, development, education, and public health. Innumeracy in the Wild: Misunderstanding and Misusing Numbers (Oxford University Press, 2020) is a unified treatment of these broad-ranging studies, from the ways more and less numerate people differ in our perceptions of risk and our number-based decisions to the roots of our numeric faculties and how we can make the best of them. Dr. Ellen Peters has made significant contributions to the subject and brings her expertise and an exceptional clarity to its presentation. Precious little of the research surveyed in her book could fit into this interview! We discussed the three components of numeric ability—objective numeracy, subjective numeracy, and the innate number sense—and how they vary w

Shai Reshef shares the remarkable story of the creation of the University of the People, which has grown from an initial small class of students in 2008 to over 55,000 low-income students all over the world today. Reshef founded University of the People after a successful career as an educational technology entrepreneur, setting out to leverage these technologies to launch the world’s first free US-accredited asynchronous online university with a goal of serving the 100 million+ talented young people who lack access to a quality education. The University of the People has been able to make remarkable progress toward this ambitious goal by adopting a peer learning model overseen by a huge volunteer faculty workforce. It offers undergraduate and Master’s degrees in the high-demand areas of Business, Nursing, and Computer Science; courses are free, but students who want college credit pay for the final proctored assessment, with the cost of a full degree about $4800 and scholarships to support those who can’t af

James Fredal is Associate Professor in the Department of English at The Ohio State University. The recipient of multiple awards for his work in rhetorical theory and history, Fredal is the author in 2006 of Rhetorical Action in Ancient Athens: Persuasive Artistry from Solon to Demosthenes and now The Enthymeme: Syllogism, Reasoning and Narrative in Ancient Greek Rhetoric (Penn State UP, 2020). Central to rhetorical theory, the enthymeme is most often defined as a truncated syllogism. Suppressing a premise that the audience already knows, this rhetorical device relies on the audience to fill in the missing information, thereby making the argument more persuasive. James Fredal argues that this view of the enthymeme is wrong. Presenting a new exegesis of Aristotle and classic texts of Attic oratory, Fredal shows that the standard reading of Aristotle's enthymeme is inaccurate--and that Aristotle himself distorts what enthymemes are and how they work. From close analysis of the Rhetoric, Topics, and Analytics, Fr

In The Path to Free College: In Pursuit of Access, Equity, and Prosperity (Harvard Education Press, 2021), Michelle Miller-Adams argues that tuition-free college, if pursued strategically and in alignment with other sectors, can be a powerful agent of change. She makes the case that broadly accessible and affordable higher education is in the public interest, yielding dividends not just for individuals but also for the communities, states, and nation in which they reside. Miller-Adams offers a comprehensive analysis of the College Promise movement--its history, impacts, and unintended consequences--and its relationship to access, affordability, and workforce readiness.  These factors are explored through data, analysis, and case studies of existing place-based scholarship programs. She also examines historical precursors of the free-college movement and evaluates the possibility of national action. The Path to Free College outlines how the design of free-college programs should relate to programmatic goals an

In a global context of widespread fears over Islamic radicalization and militancy, poor Muslim youth, especially those socialized in religious seminaries, have attracted overwhelmingly negative attention. In northern Nigeria, male Qur'anic students have garnered a reputation of resorting to violence in order to claim their share of highly unequally distributed resources. Drawing on material from long-term ethnographic and participatory fieldwork among Qur'anic students and their communities, Quranic Schools in Northern Nigeria: Everyday Experiences of Youth, Faith, and Poverty (Cambridge University Press, 2018) offers an alternative perspective on youth, faith, and poverty. Mobilizing insights from scholarship on education, poverty research and childhood and youth studies, Hannah Hoechner, lecturer at the School of International Development, University of East Anglia, describes how religious discourses can moderate feelings of inadequacy triggered by experiences of exclusion, and how Qur'anic school enrollmen

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 cgessler05@gmail.com or dr.danamalone@gmail.com. Find us on Twitter: The Academic Life @AcademicLifeNBN. In this episode you’ll hear about: Maurice Wilson’s journey from the military to higher education, how he has pursued his dual interests in aviation and creative writing, and a discussion of his chapter in Learning from the Lived Experiences of Graduate Student Writers. Our guest is: Maurice Wilson, who considers himself the “Robin Hood” of academic literacy. Maurice develops and implements a comprehensive training program curriculum for writing center consultants at a large urban university. He is the administrator for a developmental writing program, and provides training and support for instruct

How can we feel at home in this world? Pragmatic Humanism Revisited: An Essay on Making the World a Home (Palgrave, 2019) offers a humanist re-reading of philosophical pragmatism and explores its potentials for a worldview that relies only on human resources. Thinking along with authors like William James and F.C.S. Schiller, it highlights a humanist strand of pragmatism aimed at fostering human creativity and transformative action. It is grounded in everyday experience and underlines our responsibility to strive for the better. Ana Honnacker traces perspectives on science, religion, and ethics in the light of a pragmatic understanding of humanism. Furthermore, she suggests how to address the existential challenges we face today. Thus, pragmatic humanism is explored as "a philosophy for real human beings". Kai Wortman is a PhD candidate at the Institute of Education, University of Tübingen, interested in philosophy of education. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show b

“Allying with a Hamas cell (on a Palestinian university campus) is not the same as joining the College Republicans at the University of Kansas...in the West Bank and Gaza, we are not in Kansas anymore” - Cary Nelson Why is there no academic freedom on university campuses in the Palestinian territories? In Not in Kansas Anymore: Academic Freedom in Palestinian Universities (AEN, 2021), Cary Nelson examines this question in the first empirical study of campus life under the Palestinian Authority and Hamas governance. For years, anti-Zionist activists have accused Israel of undermining academic freedom and campus free speech in both Gaza and the West Bank. Not in Kansas Anymore demonstrates conclusively that the major threats to academic freedom come from Palestinians themselves, including from both the Palestinian Authority and from paramilitary and terrorist groups, Hamas most prominent among them. Renee Garfinkel, Ph.D. is a psychologist, writer, Middle East television commentator and host of The New Books Ne

Sarah Drummond provides a master class for any higher education leader contemplating a strategic alliance or merger with another institution. She describes and draws lessons from the many earlier failed partnership efforts of Andover Newton Seminary as it sought ways to continue its mission and become financially viable. And then describes in detail the carefully crafted, three-stage process which ANS negotiated with Yale Divinity School to move the Seminary to New Haven. This is the first of three episodes with presidents who’ve led the successful integration of their institutions into larger universities. David Finegold is the president of Chatham University. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/education

In his highly influential book, Demographics and the Demand for Higher Education, Carleton College Professor of Economics, Nathan Grawe, alerted college and university leaders to the challenges they would be facing with the accelerating decline in the number of U.S. high school graduates that will come in the middle of this decade. In his new book, The Agile College: How Institutions Successfully Navigate Demographic Changes (Johns Hopkins UP, 2021), he updates the demographic trends through the mid-2030s and describes the variety of strategies different institutions are adopting to respond to the decline in their traditional student population. He shares what led him to become an economist and the rigorous training he received at the University of Chicago. We have an engaging discussion of the implications of his work for both university leaders and policymakers as they debate reforms for funding college students. He also shares some insights from his new project looking at the publishing and career paths of

Listen to this interview of Ken Hyland, Professor of Applied Linguistics in Education at the University of East Anglia, UK. We talked about his book Second Language Writing (Cambridge UP, 2019), the importance of reflection to teaching, and about the importance of teaching to research, and about the importance of research to reflection. Interviewer : "I wonder whether second language writing isn't sometimes identifying itself too closely with language learning, and not–––well, it should be writing in a second language, shouldn't it? You know, put something up front which is what this is really about." Ken Hyland : "Yeah, I think that one thing that an emphasis on second language writing has given us is the recognition that writing is important. I don't think that there is a university anywhere now that doesn't have a writing center or at least an office where students can go and get consultation about their texts. Writing has been recognized as important, and also in native-English-speaking contexts as well,

Marc Brackett is a professor in Yale University's Child Study Center and founding director of the Yale Center for Emotional Intelligence. In his 25 years as an emotion scientist, he has developed a remarkably effective plan to improve the lives of children and adults - a blueprint for understanding our emotions and using them wisely so that they help, rather than hinder, our success and well-being. The core of his approach is a legacy from his childhood, from an astute uncle who gave him permission to feel. He was the first adult who managed to see Marc, listen to him, and recognize the suffering, bullying, and abuse he'd endured. And that was the beginning of Marc's awareness that what he was going through was temporary. He wasn't alone, he wasn't stuck on a timeline, and he wasn't "wrong" to feel scared, isolated, and angry. Now, best of all, he could do something about it. In the decades since, Marc has led large research teams and raised tens of millions of dollars to investigate the roots of emotional we

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 about: how Sarah dealt with loneliness, worked as a teaching assistant from a tent her own backyard, and what the pandemic means for her dissertation, her timeline, and her funding. Our guest is: Sarah Paschal Gerenday is a PhD student in Earth Science at University of California Santa Barbara researching the use of recycled water for groundwater replenishment. She lives with a few friends and a dog in Santa Barbara. Our host is: Dr. Christina Gessler, a historian of women, gender, and sexuality. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our sh

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 about: the three realms of college belonging, why “finding your place” is bad advice for first-gen students, how financial aid packages affect students’ experiences of belonging, “nice” and “not-so-nice” diversity, and the hypocrisy of white niceness on college campuses. Our guest is: Lisa M. Nunn, Ph.D., author of College Belonging: How First-Year and First-Generation Students Navigate Campus Life and Professor of Sociology at the University of San Diego. She is the Director of her campus' Center for Educational Excellence. She is also the author of 33 Simple Strategies f

In Becoming Rwandan: Education, Reconciliation and the Making of a Post-Genocide Citizen (Rutgers UP, 2020), S. Garnett Russell argues that although the Rwandan government makes use of global discourses in national policy documents, the way in which teachers and students engage with these global models distorts the curricular intentions of the government, resulting in unintended consequences and an undermining of sustainable peace. She is assistant professor of international and comparative education and the director of the George Clement Bond Center for African Education at Teacher’s College, Columbia University. Susan Thomson is an Associate Professor of Peace and Conflict Studies at Colgate University. I like to interview pretenure scholars about their research. I am particularly keen on their method and methodology, as well as the process of producing academic knowledge about African places and people. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium me

Mary Marcy discusses her influential new book, The Small College Imperative: Models for Sustainable Futures (Stylus, 2020) which lays out five different models that small colleges and universities can use to succeed in today’s highly competitive marketplace. This begins with the “Traditional” liberal arts model that is increasingly limited to the most highly selective and well-endowed colleges. Most tuition-dependent institutions have made the move toward a more “Integrated” Model that retains a liberal arts core, but has added pre-professional and graduate programs. This model is perhaps best exemplified by the 25 members of the New American Colleges & Universities (NACU). “The Distinctive Model” adopted by institutions like Agnes Scott and Furman, and implemented with great success by Marcy at Dominican University, builds off the literature on High-Impact Practices to create a common set of experiences for all undergraduates. The models that entail the greatest transformation are “Growth” and “Distributed”

Whether and how to reform, indeed to transform graduate education has been a matter for debate, discussion and experimentation over the past 30 years – at least. In The New PhD: How to Build a Better Graduate Education (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2021), Leonard Cassuto and Robert Weisbuch look back at the many attempts, successes and failures to do so since the 1990s. They argue that graduate school has been preparing PhD students for jobs that don’t exist and encouraging students to want those jobs to the detriment of their career success and personal wellbeing. Cassuto and Weisbuch propose what they call a more humane and socially dynamic PhD experience that reconceives of graduate education as a public good. In The New PhD, Cassuto and Weisbuch provide recommendations from admissions to advising to curriculum to the dissertation, as well as suggestions for how to begin conversations at the departmental and graduate school level to make changes. Leonard Cassuto is a professor of English and American St

In Losing Hearts and Minds: American Iranian Relations and International Education During the Cold War (Cornell UP, 2017), Matthew K. Shannon, an associate professor of history at Emory & Henry College, shows the complex role that Iranian student migration to the United States played in shaping the relations between the two countries. For U.S. policymakers, Iranian student migration to the United States was as a useful way to provide Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi with the training and technical expertise necessary for his modernization program. But as Shannon shows, Iranian students quickly became immersed in the progressive student movements of the 1960, eventually turning their critical energies to the shah’s own authoritarian regime and contributing to his overthrow in the 1979 Iranian Revolution. This fascinating monograph is full of many unexpected twists and turns and will be of interest to historians of the U.S. in the world, US-Iran Relations, scholars of higher education, and anyone interested in this i

The origins of American public schools can help shed light on continued contemporary discussions around religion and education in American discourse. In The Common School Awakening: Religion and the Transatlantic Roots of American Public Education (Oxford UP, 2020), historian David Komline explores the rise of educational models that introduced professional teaching and systematic educational standards alongside a period of interdenominational Protestant cooperation. Some of the origins of American public education were linked to religious revivals in the early nineteenth century, though many of the educational innovations would outlive their religious movement that catalyzed them. Komline's study brings attention to the under-explored religious dimension of the rise of American public education, and provides much-needed insight into the origins some of the perennial tensions of public education in a pluralistic society. Ryan David Shelton (@ryoldfashioned) is a social historian of British and American Protes

Political Scientist Heath Brown’s new book, Homeschooling the Right: How Conservative Education Activism Erodes the State (Columbia UP, 2021) is an excellent overview of the homeschooling movement in the United States, but it is much more than an exploration of that movement, since it centers on the way that this movement developed into a parallel political structure within states and localities with substantial capacity to influence policy and politics. Brown notes that initially the homeschool movement was ideologically diverse, but that over the past forty years it has become much more directly connected to conservative politics and the Religious Right. As parents chose to opt out of public education and provide education for their children at home, an entire industry grew up around this undertaking, providing, in the pre-internet days, support, content, approaches, and the means to help parents negotiate this at home. Along the way, as this movement continued to grow and expand, even though it was compose