New Books in Education

Chen examines the Chinese Nationalist government's distinctive support for private Muslim teachers schools between the 1920s and 1940s, and explores the complex relationship between these institutions and the Chinese state during the Republican period. In 1933, the government issued the Teachers Schools Regulations, mandating that all teachers schools be state-run. However, the Nationalists viewed private Muslim teachers schools as valuable allies in their efforts to assert influence in China's Muslim-dominated northwestern frontier region and deliberately refrained from enforcing the 1933 Teachers Schools Regulations on them. Instead, the government applied the 1933 Amended Private Schools Regulations, which did not specifically address teachers schools, to govern Muslim teachers schools. By charting the evolving dynamics between the Nationalist state and Chinese Hui Muslims, Hui Muslims in the Shaping of Modern China: Education, Frontier Politics, and Nation-State (Routledge, 2025) reevaluates the Hui Muslims' role in shaping modern China. Offering crucial context on the role of Islam in modern China, this book is a valuable resource for scholars and students of Chinese history, as well as for policymakers and journalists interested in religion in China. Bin Chen is Assistant Professor at Hong Kong Polytechnic University. He received his PhD from Pennsylvania State University, and his research interests include China's modern transition and Islam in China. His publications have appeared in The Journal of Asian Studies, Journal of Modern Chinese History, International Journal of Asian Studies, and others. Yadong Li is an anthropologist-in-training. He is a PhD candidate of Socio-cultural Anthropology at Tulane University. More details about his scholarship and research interests can be found here. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/education

The Highest Exam: How the Gaokao Shapes China (Harvard UP, 2025), provides a detailed, research-driven survey of the gaokao, China's high-stakes college entrance exam. Authors Ruixue Jia and Hongbin Li--past test-takers themselves--show how the exam system shapes schooling, serves state interests, inspires individualistic attitudes, and has lately become a touchstone in US education debates.   Ruixue Jia is a professor of economics at the School of Global Policy and Strategy at UC San Diego. She also serves as co-director of the China Data Lab, executive secretary of the Association of Comparative Economic Studies (ACES) and co-chair of the China Economic Summer Institute (CESI). Hongbin Li is the James Liang Chair, Faculty Co-director of the Stanford Center on China's Economy and Institutions, a Senior Fellow of Stanford Institute for Economic Policy Research (SIEPR) and Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies (FSI), Stanford University.  Interviewer Peter Lorentzen is an associate professor of economics at the University of San Francisco, where he leads the Master's program in International and Development Economics. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/education

Today we are joined by Claire Nicolas, a chercheuse du Fonds National Suisse at Basel University, a holder of a prestigious Ambizione Research Grant, and the author of Une si longue course: Sport, genre, et citoyenneté au Ghana et en Côte d'Ivoire (années 1900-1970) (Presses Universitaires de Rennes, 2024). In our conversation, we discussed physical culture in colonial and post-colonial Cote d'Ivoire and Ghana, the differences and the similarities between the imperial and post-imperial biopolitical strategies in both places, and the way that sports histories benefit from sustained engagement with critical theory. In Une si longue course, Nicolas engages in a sustained comparison between the colonial and post-colonial physical cultural life of Cote d'Ivoire and Ghana. She organizes her work into two sections: one on colonial West Africa and another on post-colonial West Africa. Each section has three chapters covering physical education, scouting and sports. Her work addresses athletic life from the top down and the bottom up. In doing so, she shows that contrary to any simple history of teleological progress or sport as a crucible for nationalism, physical education, scouting and sport have been imperfect tools for imperial and post-imperial states. Athletes, scouts, and students found innovative ways to reshape the physical cultural priorities of the state to suit their own agendas. This deeply ambitious work significantly adds to our understanding of physical culture in colonial and post-colonial West Africa through a comparative approach. It draws upon extensive primary source research: Nicolas works in the archives of the British and French colonial states, the ministries of post-colonial Cote d'Ivoire and Ghana, and the repositories of international sporting organizations in Switzerland. She also relies upon oral histories conducted with Ghanaian and Ivoirian sportsmen and women. Cote d'Ivoire, Ghana, Great Britain, and France: their physical cultural programmes shared continuities and ruptures. Colonial empires concerned with the mise en valeur of their subjects sought biopolitical solutions to increase the birthrate, expand agricultural and industrial production, and prepare men for the defence of the empire. They worried that physical cultural programs – if poorly managed – would become sites for resistance, but Nicolas' work shows that sporting clubs, scouting halls, and schools could confound any simple collaboration/resistance dichotomy. Nicolas' work also demonstrates the deeply gendered nature of both colonial and post-colonial physical culture. Newly emergent post-colonial nations sought to produce new men (and women) in ways that replicated the essentialism of their imperial predecessors. Nicolas' engaging work, thoroughly researched, and beautifully presented will be of broad interest to people invested in British, French, and West African history. It has broader conclusions for people interested in colonial and post-colonial theory. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/education

Rural students are unlikely to pursue degrees from private, selective schools. Why? And what happens to the handful of rural students who do attend elite colleges, colleges that may feel worlds away from home? Educated Out shows how geography shapes rural, first-generation students' access to college, their college experiences, and their postgraduation plans and opportunities. These students discover that home and college are very different worlds—and, over time, they start to question both. As they near graduation and navigate a job market in which the highest-paying and most prestigious opportunities are located in urban centers, they begin to feel the complicated burden of their schooling: they've been “educated out.”  In addition to advocating for a higher education landscape that truly includes rural students, Dr. Tieken critiques a system that requires people to leave their rural homes in search of opportunities. Without meaningful change, some students will have to make the impossible decision to leave home—and far more will remain there, undereducated and overlooked. Both engaging and accessible, Educated Out presents important and timely questions about rurality, identity, education, and inequality. Our guest is: Dr. Mara Casey Tieken, who is associate professor of education at Bates College. She is the author of Educated Out; and Why Rural Schools Matter. Our host is: Dr. Christina Gessler, who is an academic writing coach and editor. She is the producer and show host of the Academic Life podcast. Playlist for listeners: The Cornell Sweatshirt Tweet Show Them You're Good Where Is Home The Two Keys To Student Retention The Good- Enough Life How to Get In to the College of Your Dreams Imposter Syndrome Who Needs College? How to College A Meaningful Life Try To Love The Questions Welcome to Academic Life, the podcast for your academic journey—and beyond! You help support the show by downloading and sharing episodes. Join us again to learn from more experts inside and outside the academy, and around the world. Missed any of the 300+ Academic Life episodes? Find them here. And thank you for listening! Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/education

Parents are exhausted. When did raising children become such all-consuming, never-ending, incredibly expensive, and emotionally absorbing effort? In this eye-opening book, Nina Bandelj explains how we got to this point--how we turned children into financial and emotional investments and child-rearing into laborious work. At the turn of the twentieth century, children went from being economically useful, often working to support families, to being seen by their parents as vulnerable and emotionally priceless. In the new millennium, however, parents have become overinvested in the emotional economy of parenting. Analyzing in-depth interviews with parents, national financial datasets, and decades of child-rearing books, Bandelj reveals how parents today spend, save, and even go into debt for the sake of children. They take on parenting as the hardest but most important job, and commit their entire selves to being a good parent. The economization and emotionalization of society work together to drive parental overinvestment, offering a dizzying array of products and platforms to turn children into human capital--from financial instruments to extracurricular programs to therapeutic parenting advice. And yet, Bandelj warns, the privatization of child-rearing and devotion of parents' monies, emotions, and souls ultimately hurt the well-being of children, parents, and society. Overinvested: The Emotional Economy of Modern Parenting (Princeton UP, 2026) offers a compelling argument that we should reimagine children and what it means to raise them. Nina Bandelj is Chancellor's Professor in the Department of Sociology at the University of California, Irvine, and past president of the Society for the Advancement of Socio-Economics. Caleb Zakarin is CEO and Publisher of the New Books Network. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/education

A lively and entertaining cultural history of a supremely annoying intellectual vice Intellectuals have long provoked scorn and irritation, even downright aggression. Many learned individuals have cast such hostility as a badge of honor, a sign of envy, or a form of resistance to inconvenient truths. On Pedantry: A Cultural History of the Know-it-All (Princeton University Press, 2025) offers an altogether different perspective, revealing how the excessive use of learning has been a vice in Western culture since the days of Socrates. Taking readers from the academies of ancient Greece to today's culture wars, Arnoud Visser explains why pretentious and punctilious learning has always annoyed us, painting vibrant portraits of some of the most intensely irritating intellectuals ever known, from devious sophists and bossy savantes to hypercritical theologians, dry-as-dust antiquarians, and know-it-all professors. He shows how criticisms of pedantry have typically been more about conduct than ideas, and he demonstrates how pedantry served as a weapon in the perennial struggle over ideas, social status, political authority, and belief. Shifting attention away from the self-proclaimed virtues of the learned to their less-than-flattering vice, Visser makes a bold and provocative contribution to the history of Western thought. Drawing on a wealth of sources ranging from satire and comedy to essays, sermons, and film, On Pedantry sheds critical light on why anti-intellectual views have gained renewed prominence today and serves as essential reading in an age of rising populism across the globe. Arnoud S. Q. Visser is professor of textual culture in the Renaissance at Utrecht University and director of the Huizinga Institute, the Dutch national research school for cultural history. Caleb Zakarin is CEO and Publisher of the New Books Network. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/education

Today I talked to John L. Rudolph about his book Why We Teach Science (and Why We Should) (Oxford UP, 2023). Few people question the importance of science education in American schooling. The public readily accepts that it is the key to economic growth through innovation, develops the ability to reason more effectively, and enables us to solve the everyday problems we encounter through knowing how the world works. Good science teaching results in all these benefits and more -- or so we think. But what if all this is simply wrong? What if the benefits we assume science education produces turn out to be an illusion, nothing more than wishful thinking? John L. Rudolph is Vilas Distinguished Achievement professor in the Department of Curriculum and Instruction at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. He has affiliate appointments in the Department of Educational Policy Studies and the Robert and Jean Holtz Center for Science and Technology Studies and is the past editor-in-chief of the Wiley & Sons journal Science Education. Prior to his faculty appointment, he taught physics, chemistry, and biology in middle schools and high schools across Wisconsin. Morteza Hajizadeh is a Ph.D. graduate in English from the University of Auckland in New Zealand. His research interests are Cultural Studies; Critical Theory; Environmental History; Medieval (Intellectual) History; Gothic Studies; 18th and 19th Century British Literature. YouTube channel. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/education

In Subtle Webs: How Local Organizations Shape US Education (Oxford UP, 2025), Jose Eos Trinidad reveals how organizations outside schools have created an invisible infrastructure not only to affect local school districts but also to shape US education. He illustrates this by providing a behind-the-scenes look at how local organizations in Chicago, Philadelphia, and New York City have transformed data and worked with high schools to address the problem of students dropping out. The book argues that changes in a decentralized system happen less through top-down policy mandates or bottom-up social movements, and more through “outside-in” initiatives of networked organizations spread across various local systems. By detailing change across multiple levels and across multiple locations, Trinidad uncovers new ways to think about educational transformation, policy reform, and organizational change. João Souto-Maior (website: here) is a postdoc at Stanford University. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/education

An eye-opening look at how all American workers, even the highly educated and experienced, are vulnerable to the stigma of unemployment. After receiving a PhD in mathematics from MIT, Larry spent three decades working at prestigious companies in the tech industry. Initially he was not worried when he lost his job as part of a large layoff, but the prolonged unemployment that followed decimated his finances and nearly ended his marriage. Larry's story is not an anomaly. The majority of American workers experience unemployment, and millions get trapped in devastating long-term unemployment, including experienced workers with advanced degrees from top universities. How is it possible for even highly successful careers to suddenly go off the rails? In The Stigma Trap: College-Educated, Experienced, and Long-Term Unemployed (Oxford UP, 2024), Ofer Sharone explains how the stigma of unemployment can render past educational and professional achievements irrelevant, and how it leaves all American workers vulnerable to becoming trapped in unemployment. Drawing on interviews with unemployed workers, job recruiters, and career coaches, Sharone brings to light the subtle ways that stigmatization prevents even the most educated and experienced workers from gaining middle-class jobs. Stigma also means that an American worker risks more than financial calamity from a protracted period of unemployment. One's closest relationships and sense of self are also on the line. Eye-opening and clearly written, The Stigma Trap is essential reading for anyone who has experienced unemployment, has a family member or friend who is unemployed, or who wants to understand the forces that underlie the anxiety-filled lives of contemporary American workers. The book offers a unique approach to supporting unemployed jobseekers. At a broader level it exposes the precarious condition of American workers and sparks a conversation about much-needed policies to assure that we are not all one layoff away from being trapped by stigma. Stephen Pimpare is a Senior Fellow at the Carsey School of Public Policy at the University of New Hampshire. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/education

This open access book describes and explains a fifty-year-old woman's process of developing trade competences. Drawing from daily journal entries, photographs, interviews from 10 fabrication shops, and online forums about trades, this autoethnography details the author's learning process at Howe's Welding and Metal Fabrication, where she has worked for over three years. This book uses accessible, everyday language and draws heavily from personal experience in trades, taking the value of trades as a given and explaining the process of developing the depth and breadth of conceptual and procedural knowledges—the competences—required to work in repair and fabrication shops like Howe's. This book combines a research-derived framework for analyzing scaffolded learning and expertise development with stories of learning how and learning what. Readers will gain a better understanding of knowledge development in trades workplaces, including how one-to-one interactions scaffold knowledge, how workers gradually enter a community of practice, and how workplaces can constrain learning. This book also gives readers a view of workplace learning over time and helps readers—researchers and practitioners—recognize opportunities for development toward expertise. The book is useful for tradespeople, especially newcomers to trades and, in particular, women. Jo Mackiewicz, is a professor at Iowa State University. She studies communication and learning in pedagogical and workplace interactions. She has published four books about writing centers including 'Writing Center Talk over Time' which won the 2019 award for best monograph from the International Writing Centers Association and an edited collection 'Theories and Methods of Writing Center Studies' which won the 2021 award for best edited collection from the writing across the Curriculum Association. She has also written and cowritten numerous articles. Her book, 'Welding Technical Communication: Teaching and Learning Embodied Knowledge', was published by SUNY Press in May 2022. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/education

Valuing the Community College Library: Impactful Practices for Institutional Success (2025, ACRL) provides a holistic approach to exhibiting community college library value through historical context, practical applications, and future thinking. Through case studies, editorials from administrators, and practical approaches, it addresses why community college libraries exist and should exist, and the nuanced approaches to how library workers situate themselves at their institutions. Community college libraries need to provide access to content, people, space, and technology and offer instruction, but can also serve as an outreach arm in advancing the mission of open enrollment and affordable access to higher education. Valuing the Community College Library can help you be an advocate for your library on campus and in your community. Guests: Terra B. Jacobson (Chicago, IL) has been the dean of the Learning Resource Center at Moraine Valley Community College (Palos Hills, IL) since 2016 and has worked in community college libraries since 2009. She has a M.S. in Information Science (Indiana University, Bloomington) as well as a M.S. in Library Science (Indiana University, Bloomington). Terra received her Ph.D. in Information Studies (Dominican University, IL). Her dissertation title is: The Value of Community College Libraires: Executive Leadership Team Perceptions of the Community College Library. Terra is the 2021 recipient of the Illinois Library Association's Valerie J. Wilford Scholarship Grant for Library Education. She also received the ALA College Libraries Section Innovation in College Librarianship award in 2014. Terra participates locally as a board member for the Consortium of Academic and Research Libraries and works extensively with the Network of Illinois Learning Resources in Community Colleges (NILRC). She recently published the book Valuing the Community College Library: Impactful Practices for Institutional Success (2025) with ACRL. She currently teaches online at the State University of New York and at Dominican University in the School of Information Studies. Spencer Brayton is director of Library Services at Waubonsee Community College (northeastern Illinois, USA). His research and publication interests include media and information literacy, community college libraries, coaching and leadership. Spencer received his Master of Arts in Library and Information Studies from the University of Wisconsin-Madison, a Master of Science in Management from the University of St. Francis (Joliet, IL), and is currently pursuing a Doctorate of Education in Higher Education from the University of Southern Mississippi. Host: Dr. Michael LaMagna is the Information Literacy Program & Library Services Coordinator and Professor of Library Services at Delaware County Community College. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/education

In Sesame Street: A Transnational History (Oxford UP, 2023), author Helle Strandgaard Jensen tells the story of how the American television show became a global brand. Jensen argues that because the show's domestic production was not financially viable from the beginning, Sesame Street became a commodity that its producers assertively marketed all over the world. Sesame Street: A Transnational History combines archival research from seven countries, bolstering an insightful analysis of how local reception and rejection of the show related to the global sales strategies and American ideals it was built upon. Contrary to the producers' oft-publicized claims of Sesame Street's universality, the show was heavily shaped by a fixed set of assumptions about childhood, education, and commercial entertainment. This made sales difficult as Sesame Street met both skepticism and direct hostility from foreign television producers who did not share these ideals. Drawing on insights from new histories about childhood, education, and transnational media, the book lays bare a cultural clash of international proportions rooted in divergent approaches to children's television. In doing so, it provides a reflective backdrop to the many ongoing debates about children's media. In contrasting the positive receptions and renunciations of Sesame Street, Jensen demonstrates that it was only after a substantial rethinking of Sesame Street's aims and business model that this program ended up on numerous broadcasting schedules by the mid-1970s. Along the way, this rethinking and the constant negotiations with potential international buyers created and shaped the business and corporate brand that paved the way for the Sesame Street we know today. Peter C. Kunze is a visiting assistant professor of communication at Tulane 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 High School Students Unite! Teen Activism, Education Reform, and FBI Surveillance in Postwar America (UNC Press, 2025), Aaron G. Fountain Jr. highlights the crucial impact of high school activists in the 1960s and 1970s. Mid-twentieth-century student activism is a pivotal chapter in American history. While college activism has been well documented, the equally vital contributions of high school students have often been overlooked. Only recently have scholars begun to recognize the transformative role teenagers played in reshaping American education. Inspired by civil rights and antiwar movements, students across the nation demanded a voice in their education by organizing sit-ins, walkouts, and strikes. From cities such as San Francisco and Chicago to smaller towns such as Jonesboro, Georgia, these young leaders fought for curricula that reflected their evolving worldviews. Drawing on archival research and interviews, Aaron G. Fountain Jr. reveals how teenagers became powerful agents of change, advocating for constitutional rights and influencing school reform. Ironically, the modernization of school security, including police presence, was partly a response to these student-led movements. Through oral histories and FBI records, this fascinating history offers a fresh perspective on high school activism and its lasting impact on American education. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/education

In Home Work: Gender, Child Labor, and Education for Girls in Urban America, 1870-1930 (U Chicago Press, 2025) historian Ruby Oram tells the story of how middle-class, white women reformers lobbied the state to implement various public education reforms to shape the lives of girls and women in industrial cities between 1870 and 1930. Women such as Jane Addams and Florence Kelley used education reform to target working-class communities and advocate for their middle-class ideals of girlhood and femininity, which could vary depending on the racial or socio-economic backgrounds of the girls. For example, reformers generally encouraged white girls to care for their future families, while pushing Black girls toward becoming domestic workers in others' homes. Using Chicago as a case study, Oram also explores how many of the reforms sought by white women were in response to evolving anxieties about immigration, health, and sexual delinquency.An illuminating addition to the history of urban education in America, Home Work enriches our understanding of educational inequality in twentieth-century schools. Allie Morris (aemorris5@wisc.edu) is a joint Ph.D. student in Educational Policy Studies and History at the University of Wisconsin—Madison. She broadly studies gender, age, and education in the late 20th-century United States. Her current research focuses on the political history of girlhood from the 1960s to the 1990s, examining girls' culture and activism in the American high school. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/education

Today's battles over Christianity in U.S. public schools have deep roots. In the nineteenth century, disputes were largely between Protestants and later-arriving Catholics, but in 1905 Jews entered the conflict in a dramatic way. That Christmas, Frank Harding, a Presbyterian principal in Brooklyn, urged his Jewish students to be more like Jesus. For Orthodox activist Albert Lucas, already fighting Christian settlement houses that sought to convert Jewish children, Harding's remarks were the last straw. He accused the public schools of illegal proselytizing, and Jewish leaders quickly mobilized, petitioning for Harding's removal and demanding clear limits on religious practices in public education—limits they argued were violated by Bible readings, the Lord's Prayer, religious imagery, and Christmas pageants. When the New York Board of Education refused to act decisively, Jewish parents staged a citywide boycott of the 1906 school Christmas pageants, keeping as many as three-quarters of students home in some neighborhoods. The board briefly barred sectarian hymns and religious material, but the decision provoked a fierce antisemitic backlash, framed in the press as a Jewish attack on Christmas, and most of the restrictions were soon reversed. The Great Christmas Boycott of 1906: Antisemitism and the Battle Over Christianity in the Public Schools (U Nebraska Press, 2025) shows how this conflict—over law, tradition, and the place of religion in public schools—has never truly ended. With decisive victories elusive, Jewish organizations today have shifted toward other, more strategic ways of confronting Christian nationalism. Scott D. Seligman is a writer and historian. He is the author of numerous books, including The Great Kosher Meat War of 1902: Immigrant Housewives and the Riots That Shook New York City (Potomac Books, 2020), the award-winning The Third Degree: The Triple Murder That Shook Washington and Changed American Criminal Justice (Potomac Books, 2018), and The First Chinese American: The Remarkable Life of Wong Chin Foo. Rabbi Marc Katz is the Senior Rabbi of Temple Ner Tamid. He is the author of Yochanan's Gamble: Judaism's Pragmatic Approach to Life. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/education

Higher education is about transformation: research shows that the most well-prepared graduates are those who have experienced changes in how they think about and experience the world around them. Combined with flexible information-seeking and evaluation skills, learning ways to break information bubbles is essential for dealing with today's challenging, complex information environment. Jack Mezirow's transformative learning theory, which frames how adults think about and interact with the world around them, offers a way forward. In Information Literacy and Critical Thinking: Using Perspective Transformation to Break Information Bubbles (2025, ALA) Amanda Nichols Hess invites academic librarians to consider critical librarianship, pedagogy, and information literacy instruction in tandem with transformative learning theory, demonstrating tangible ways to integrate these concepts into their practice. Readers will discover an overview of critical library pedagogy and transformative learning theory, showing how reflection and action lie at the core of both ideas; in-depth exploration of the ten phases of the perspective transformation process and how they relate to key facets of critical librarianship, critical pedagogy, and critical information literacy; important theoretical and research viewpoints that elucidate perspective transformation; real-world scenarios modelling how one's own praxis can support learners; and a myriad of ideas, reflection questions, opportunities for action, and additional resources to spur readers to look beyond their own information bubbles and facilitate environments where learners can do the same. Guest: Amanda Nichols Hess, PhD, is the coordinator of instruction and research help at Oakland University in Rochester, Michigan. She holds a PhD in educational leadership, an education specialist certificate in instructional technology, and a Master of Science in information. Amanda's research focuses on information literacy, instructional design, online learning, and the intersections of these topics—particularly in library-centric professional learning. Her work has been published in College & Research Libraries, Communications in Information Literacy, Journal of Academic Librarianship, and portal: Libraries and the Academy, among other venues. In addition to editing and authoring books for ACRL and ALA Editions, Amanda also authored Transforming Academic Library Instruction (Rowman & Littlefield, 2019). Host: Dr. Michael LaMagna is the Information Literacy Program & Library Services Coordinator and Professor of Library Services at Delaware County Community College. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/education

Among the most common challenges on college campuses today is figuring out how to navigate our politically charged culture and engage productively with opposing viewpoints. In Try to Love the Questions: From Debate to Dialogue in Classrooms and Life (Princeton UP, 2024), Lara Schwartz introduces the fundamental principles of free expression, academic freedom, and academic dialogue, showing how open expression is the engine of social progress, scholarship, and inclusion. She sheds light on the rules and norms that govern campus discourse—such as the First Amendment, campus expression policies, and academic standards—and encourages students to adopt a mindset of inquiry that embraces uncertainty and a love of questions. Empowering students, scholars, and instructors to listen generously, explore questions with integrity, and communicate to be understood, Try to Love the Questions includes writing exercises and discussion questions in every chapter, making it an indispensable resource for anyone interested in practicing good-faith dialogue. Content note: The “test” Dr. Gessler references is a quiz on contraception, and the prevention and transmission of several different diseases; the prizes offered were candy bars. Our guest is: Professor Lara Schwartz, who focuses on dialogue across difference, freedom of speech and dissent, inclusive pedagogy, dispute resolution, and depolarization. Drawing on her experience as a legislative lawyer, lobbyist, and communications strategist in leading civil rights organizations, Professor Schwartz understands how to lay the groundwork for important, tough conversations across difference. She is the author of Try to Love the Questions. Our host is: Dr. Christina Gessler, who is a full-time writing coach, grad student coach, and developmental editor. She is the producer and show host of the Academic Life podcast. Playlist for listeners: The Good-Enough Life The Entrepreneurial Scholar What Do You Want Out of Life My What-if Year Gay on God's Campus Black and Queer On Campus Moments of Impact You Have More Influence Than You Think The Last Human Job The Ai Mirror Welcome to Academic Life, the podcast for your academic journey—and beyond! You help support the show by downloading, teaching with, and recommending episodes. Join us again to learn from more experts inside and outside the academy, and around the world. Missed any of the 300+ Academic Life episodes? Find them all here. And thank you for listening! Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/education

I'm excited to talk to Carlo Rotella today. Carlo is Professor of English at Boston College. His books include The World Is Always Coming to an End: Pulling Together and Apart in a Chicago Neighborhood (University of Chicago Press, 2019); Playing in Time: Essays, Profiles, and Other True Stories (University of Chicago Press, 2012); Cut Time: An Education at the Fights (Houghton Mifflin, 2003); and October Cities (University of California Press, 1998). He has written for the New York Times, The Boston Globe, The New Yorker, and Harper's. Today, we discuss Carlo's new book, What Can I Get Out of This?: Teaching and Learning in a Classroom Full of Skeptics (University of California Press, 2025). The book does two things. It directly reports what happened in a class Carlo taught in the spring of 2020. Carlo interviews students in the semesters after the class ended, learning what students were going through while they were taking your class, and also what stood out in their memories years later. The second thing the book does is offer hands-on lessons from a life of teaching. Throughout the book, Carlo discusses how to deal with a class that hates the novel that you assigned, how to reach out to a student who falls silent, and how to introduce the multitude of ways of being enthusiastic about literature to skeptical students. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/education

I have never spoken to anyone like Jennifer Conrad who teaches literature to her senior high school students through picture book appreciation. In our interview, we discuss how her unique program evolved, and how her students develop and deepen their love for this genre through interaction with young children. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/education

This week, we feature an episode with Dr. Alvaro Salas-Castro, President and CEO of the Reynolds Foundation, and Founder and Chairman of the Democracy Lab Foundation, which fosters civic innovation. We discuss the current state of the freedom and democracy movement, how philanthropic partnerships and democracy defenders are responding to authoritarianism, and how we create new transnational narratives and collaborative practices to support the movement for freedom and rights. We also dive into innovative projects in civic education and their potential to foster democratic renewal and commitments from the ground up. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/education

The US has some of the highest rates of STIs and teen pregnancies in the industrialized world. A comprehensive sex education curriculum—which teaches facts on contraception, prophylactics, consent, and STIs—has been available since the 90s. Yet the majority of states require that sex education stress abstinence, and 22 states do not require sex ed in public schools at all. In The Fight for Sex Ed: The Century-Long Battle Between Truth and Doctrine (Beacon Press, 2025), writer, advocate, and historian Margaret Grace Myers shows us how we got here. While the earliest calls for sex ed came from a coalition of religious leaders and doctors at the turn of the century who sought to control the prevalence of STIs, the advent of antibiotics and modern condoms meant that abstinence was no longer good public health policy. The religious right, however, continued to frame it as such, using its impressive machinery to replace scientific facts with conservative Christian values. Because sex ed is not mandated at the federal level, these battles have played out locally throughout the decades: through rigged school boards, administrative oustings, court cases, unjust firings, scare tactics, and threats. Myers also shows how the religious right has worked to narrow the discourse around sex ed, often dictating the terms of debate almost entirely. What we teach young people has serious ramifications for reproductive justice, LGBTQ+ rights, gender equality, and public health. Sex education lies at the intersection of these hugely important cultural forces, yet it has been largely invisible. This book illuminates its potential—and its power. This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars. You can find Miranda's interviews on New Books with Miranda Melcher, wherever you get your podcasts. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/education

In Doing the Work of Equity Leadership for Justice and Systems Change, scholars and practitioners who have worked together in various capacities across different school systems examine systemic equity leadership in U.S. public schools over the course of nearly a decade and across a time of profound racial and historical change. This volume weaves together real-world insights, research-based strategies, and practical tools for transforming P–12 education systems into more equitable and just learning spaces. Contributors explore the early days of district equity leadership sparked by the Obama administration's focus on civil rights in education; Black Lives Matter (beginning with the Million Hoodies Movement for Justice); the proliferation of formal equity director roles, policies, and priorities; and the recent politically driven anti-DEI backlash. In doing so, it reveals the complex and crucial work of sustaining justice-focused educational systems change in the face of subtle resistance and outright attacks. This book is important reading for school leaders, district personnel, policymakers, and everyone who cares about a public education that works for all students. Our guest is: Dr. Decoteau J. Irby, who is professor of educational policy studies at the University of Illinois Chicago, codirector of the Center for Urban Education Leadership, and coeditor of Dignity-Affirming Education. He co-edited Doing the Work of Equity Leadership for Justice and Systems Change with Dr. Ann M. Ishimaru. Our host is: Dr. Christina Gessler, who produces the Academic Life podcast. She is a dissertation and grad student coach, and a developmental editor for humanities scholars at all stages of their careers. She writes the Academic Life Newsletter at her Substack. Playlist for listeners: Teacher By Teacher Leading Toward Liberation Leading from the Margins Book Banning How Schools Make Race The Social Constructions of Race That Librarian We Are Not Dreamers We Refuse The Fight to Remove Monuments on Campus Sin Padres Ni Papeles Welcome to Academic Life, the podcast for your academic journey—and beyond! Join us again to learn from more experts inside and outside the academy, and around the world. Missed any of the 275+ Academic Life episodes? Find them here. And get bonus content HERE. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/education

At a time when college students and their parents often question the "return on investment" from humanities courses, accomplished feature writer and English professor Carlo Rotella invites us into the minds of a group of skeptical first-year students who are ultimately transformed by a required literature class. In What Can I Get Out of This?: Teaching and Learning in a Classroom Full of Skeptics (University of California Press, 2025) he follows thirty-three students through his class to provide an intimate look at teaching and learning from their perspectives as well as his own. The students' reluctance--"How does this get me a job?"--transforms into insight as they wrestle with challenging books, share ideas, discover how to think critically, and form a community. In all these ways, they learn how to extract meaning from the world around them, an essential life skill. Confronting skeptics of higher education, this compassionate and inspiring book reveals the truth of what students actually experience in college. Carlo Rotella is Professor of English at Boston College. Caleb Zakarin is editor of the New Books Network. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/education

Seventy years after Brown v. Board of Education and demands to desegregate public schools, race and class remain the most reliable predictors of educational achievement in America. In attempting to address this divide, many school reformers have championed school choice: solutions like charter schools, vouchers, and other innovations designed to build more options into the system. Today, at least thirty-five states have laws that enable parents to send their children to private and religious schools at public expense while forty-six states have legalized charter schools. In Radical Dreamers: Race, Choice, and the Failure of American Education (Oxford UP, 2025), Joseph P. Viteritti tells the definitive history of the school choice movement. In the 1990s, school choice emerged as an effort by a coalition of Black activists and conservative lawmakers seeking to offer economically disadvantaged students of color a way out of failing schools. As Viteritti shows, however, today's movement--championed by Republicans, conservatives, and faith-based organizations--has become less about placing disadvantaged children in better schools and more about providing public funding to students, irrespective of income, attending private--and frequently religious--schools. Viteritti, an education insider and supporter of school choice for underserved students, profiles six influential figures, the "radical dreamers," who were integral to understanding the movement for greater education equality and the role that choice can play in fully realizing the movement's potential. Radical Dreamers urges us to have an honest conversation about education in America and where we have gone wrong. Viteritti's compelling narrative of how some of the most passionate educators conceived of school choice provides a valuable context to our nation's long struggle to offer every child in America a good education, and how that goal was undermined by advocates on both the left and right. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/education

In Becoming Gods: Medical Training in Mexican Hospitals (Rutgers University Press, 2021), Vania Smith-Oka follows a cohort of interns throughout their year of medical training in hospitals to understand how medical students become medical doctors. She ethnographically tracks their engagements with one another, interactions with patients, experiences with doctors, and presentations of cases to show how medical students undergo a nuanced process of accumulating knowledge and practical experience in shaping their medical selves. Smith-Oka illuminates the gendered aspects of this process, whereby the medical interns' gender informs the kind of treatment they receive from other doctors and the kinds of possibilities they imagine for their careers and areas of medical practice. She documents the lives of the interns during which time they develop their medical selves and come to understand the tacit values of medical practice. The book is full of descriptive vignettes and ethnographic details that make it accessible to undergraduate students. It would be of interest to those in medical anthropology, hospital ethnography, medical education as well as people interested in how expertise is acquired and developed. The book examines medical interns' transformations through ordinary and extraordinary moments, through active and passive learning where they not only acquire new knowledge but also new ways of being. Vania Smith-Oka is an associate professor in the Department of Anthropology at the University of Notre Dame in Indiana. She is the Director of the Health, Humanities, and Society Program at the John J. Reilly Center. Reighan Gillam is an assistant professor in the Department of Anthropology at the University of Southern California. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/education

Gender by the Book: 21st-Century French Children's Literature (Routledge, 2025) investigates the gender representations that French children's literature transmits to readers today. Using an interdisciplinary, mixed methods approach, this book grounds its literary analysis in a sociohistorical examination of three key institutions – libraries, book clubs, and subscription magazines – that circulate reading material to children. It shows how French policies, cultural beliefs, and market forces influence the content of children's literature, including tensions between State support for unprofitable artistic endeavors and a belief in children's right to high-quality products on the one hand, and suspicion of activism as anathema to creativity and fear of losing boy readers on the other. In addition, the notion of universalism, which asserts that equality is best achieved when society is blind to differences, thwarts a diverse and equitable array of literary representations. Nevertheless, conditions are favorable for 21st-century French children's publishers to offer a robust body of richly entertaining egalitarian literature for children. Guest Julie Fette, author of Gender by the Book: 21st-Century French Children's Literature published in October 2024 by Routledge. Dr. Fette is Associate Professor of French Studies at Rice University where she is also Rice Faculty Scholar at the Center for the Middle East, Baker Institute and a Faculty Affiliate with the Center for the Study of Women, Gender, and Sexuality. She is also the author of Exclusions: Practicing Prejudice in French Law and Medicine, 1920-1945 from Cornell University Press in 2012 and the co-author of the textbook Les Français from Hackett in 2021, as well as numerous articles and book chapters on subjects from gender and professional life in France to teaching French studies in the classroom and online.  Host Gina Stamm is Associate Professor of French at The University of Alabama. Their research is concentrated on the environmental humanities and speculative literatures of the 20th and 21st centuries, from Surrealism to contemporary science fiction and feminist utopias, in Metropolitan France and the francophone Caribbean.  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/education

In Good Wife, Wise Mother: Educating Han Taiwanese Girls Under Japanese Rule (U Washington Press, 2024), female education and citizenship serve as a lens through which to examine Taiwan's uniqueness as a colonial crossroads between Chinese and Japanese ideas and practices. A latecomer to the age of imperialism, Japan used modernization efforts in Taiwan to cast itself as a benevolent force among its colonial subjects and imperial competitors. In contrast to most European colonies, where only elites received an education, in Taiwan Japan built elementary schools intended for the entire population, including girls. In 1897 it developed a program known as “Good Wife, Wise Mother” that sought to transform Han Taiwanese girls into modern Japanese female citizens. Drawing on Japanese and Chinese newspapers, textbooks, oral interviews, and fiction, Fang Yu Hu illustrates how this seemingly progressive project advanced a particular Japanese vision of modernity, womanhood, and citizenship, to which the colonized Han Taiwanese people responded with varying degrees of collaboration, resistance, adaptation, and adoption. Hu also assesses the program's impact on Taiwan's class structure, male-female interactions, and political identity both during and after the end of Japanese occupation in 1945. Good Wife, Wise Mother expands the study of Taiwanese history by contributing important gendered and nonelite perspectives. It will be of interest to any historian concerned with questions of modernity, hybridity, and colonial nostalgia. Fang Yu Hu is assistant professor of History at the California State Polytechnic University, Pomona who specializes in modern East Asian history, with a focus on Taiwan, gender, colonialism, and cross-border flows. She has published in the journals ERAS of Monash University and Twentieth-Century China. Her current research focuses on Taiwanese migrants to mainland China and Southeast Asia in the first half of the 20th century. Li-Ping Chen is a visiting scholar in the Department of East Asian Languages and Cultures at the University of Southern California. Her research interests include literary translingualism, diaspora, and nativism in Sinophone, inter-Asian, and transpacific contexts. Relevant Link: NBN interview for Indoctrinating the Youth: Secondary Education in Wartime China and Postwar Taiwan, 1937-1960 Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/education

Making a Grade: Victorian Examinations and the Rise of Standardized Testing (U Toronto Press, 2025) takes historiographic and sociological perspectives developed to understand large-scale scientific and technical systems and uses them to highlight the standardization that went into "standardized testing." Starting in the 1850s achievement tests became standardized in the British Isles, and were administered on an industrial scale. By the end of the century more than two million people had written mass exams, particularly in science, technology, and mathematics. Some candidates responded to this standardization by cramming or cheating; others embraced the hope that such tests rewarded not only knowledge but also merit. Written with humour, Making a Grade looks at how standardized testing practices quietly appeared, and then spread worldwide. This book situates mass exams, marks, and credentials in an emerging paper-based meritocracy, arguing that such exams often first appeared as "cameras" to neutrally record achievement, and then became "engines" to change education as people tailored their behaviour to fit these tests. Taking the perspectives of both examiners and examinees, Making a Grade claims that our own culture's desire for accountability through objective testing has a long history. James Elwick is Associate Professor at the Department of Science, Technology and Society, for which he is also Chair. He has written on the history of the life sciences and scientists including John Tyndall, Herbert Spencer, and T.H. Huxley, and is currently writing a history of academic integrity, viewed through the lens of students who cheat on their tests and other school assessments. Jacob Ward is a historian at Maastricht University, the Netherlands. He has written in the history of science and technology, environmental history, business and financial history, and political history. He recently published Visions of a Digital Nation: Market and Monopoly in British Telecommunications (MIT Press, 2024) and he's currently working on a history of futurology in the United Kingdom and Europe from 1945 to the present day. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/education

For many years, Diane Ravitch was among the country's leading conservative thinkers on education. The cure for what ailed the school system was clear, she believed: high-stakes standardized testing, national standards, accountability, competition, charters, and vouchers. Then Ravitch saw what happened when these ideas were put into practice and recanted her long-held views. The problem was not bad teachers or failing schools, as conservatives claimed, but poverty. She denounced privatization as a hoax that did not help students and that harmed the public school system. She urged action to address the root causes of inequality. In An Education: How I Changed My Mind About Schools and Almost Everything Else (Columbia UP, 2025) this passionate and timely memoir of her life's work as a historian and advocate, Ravitch traces her ideological evolution. She recounts her personal and intellectual journey: her childhood in Houston, her years among the New York intelligentsia, her service in government, and her leftward turn. Ravitch shares how she came to hold conservative views and why she eventually abandoned them, exploring her switch from championing standards-based curriculum and standardized testing to arguing for greater investment in professional teachers and in public schools. Bringing together candid reflections with decades of research on education, Ravitch makes a powerful case for becoming, as she calls herself, “an activist on behalf of public schools.” Diane Ravitch is a historian of education and a prominent commentator about education and politics. Her many books include Reign of Error: The Hoax of the Privatization Movement and the Danger to America's Public Schools (2013); The Death and Life of the Great American School System: How Testing and Choice Are Undermining Education (2010); and The Great School Wars: New York City, 1805–1973 (1974). Ravitch was assistant secretary of education under President George H. W. Bush and served on the national testing board during the Clinton administration. She is cofounder and president of the Network for Public Education Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/education

Matthew D. Nelsen, an Assistant Professor of Political Science at the University of Miami, has a new book out that focuses on the content of civic education in the United States, and how we learn about the diverse and varied history of the United States. There is an ongoing and contemporary conversation about civic education in the United States, and what should and should not be taught in explaining the United States, how it works, who is part of it, and how it has evolved over four centuries. Nelsen's work, The Color of Civics: Civic Education for a Multiracial Democracy (Oxford UP, 2023), pays close attention to what happens in classrooms, particularly urban classrooms, when these lessons are taught, and how students respond to these curricula and experiences. What he finds should be of interest to all of us, since it gets to the very heart of civic education, which is how to teach young people about being citizens in a democracy. Nelsen poses these broader questions throughout the book: Who is learning what? What is the general social studies curriculum that discusses “how a bill becomes a law” and the basic information about separation of powers and checks and balances? How is this curriculum, which is both somewhat abstract and also an idealized version of the American political system, taught, and how is it engaged by students? Nelsen found a variety of answers, but what is of particular interest is that there are teachers and instructors who have taken this somewhat static curriculum, and integrated different dimensions to it, engaging students in understandings of social movements, highlighting activities by a number of different political leaders, from both mainstream and marginalized groups. When the education becomes more multifaceted, it pulls in more students, and allows them to see themselves in these activities, even in leadership roles. And it also is more encompassing for all of the students in the classroom, regardless of race or other identity groupings. The Color of Civics pulls together a variety of forms and kinds of research methodology to understand what happens in classrooms and how students learn and see themselves within this fabric of American democracy. Using qualitative, quantitative, and ethnographic approaches, Nelsen weaves together robust data to explore what makes diverse impacts within the classrooms, especially within a big, urban public school system. Part of what is teased out in this research is the potential longevity of political socialization that transpires at an early age among students—this is a key dimension of citizenship, creating in individuals an understanding of their role and capacities within a democracy. The ability to teach about social movements, and political movements, and the individuals who were involved in these movements expands the concept of citizen participation in American politics and thus expands the notion of citizenship in general. This approach also moves beyond the “great man” narrative of history and helps students to think about how various people engage in politics, not just by running for elected office. Nelsen's work is important and useful as we continue to consider how citizens can and should participate in American politics and how the next generation is taught about citizenship, the American republic, and the idea of a complex democracy. This book may be acquired at Books and Books in Miami, Florida, at the Seminary Co-op Bookstore in Chicago, IL, and at Women & Children First Bookstore in Chicago, IL. Lilly J. Goren is a professor of political science at Carroll University, and co-host of the New Books in Political Science. She is co-editor of The Politics of the Marvel Cinematic Universe Volume I: The Infinity Sage and Volume II: Into the Multiverse (UP Kansas, 2022 & 2025), as well as co-editor of Women and the White House: Gender, Popular Culture, and Presidential Politics (UP Kentucky, 2012). She can be reached @gorenlj.bsky.social Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/education

Why should we ask students to learn about genocides? What outcomes do we aim for from this learning? How successful are we being and how can we do better? And why, in the end, does it matter? These questions form the heart of a recent special edition of Genocide Studies International titled “The Future of Genocide Education.” The stem from a conference at Rowan University co-sponsored by Rowan and the Zoryan Institute. The papers and conversations held there have been reworked into a series of articles that form the heart of the special issue.  I talk with two of the authors, James Waller and Maureen Hiebert, about their contributions to the issue, there experience at the conference, and their concerns and successes in teaching students about genocide. New Books in Genocide Studies has partnered with Genocide Studies International to bring you conversations with authors of cutting edge research and reflection that may not be reflected in published monographs. You can find more about the journal here. GSI is a housed at the Zoryan Institute. Learn more about the Institute here Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/education

In Leading Toward Liberation: How to Build Cultures of Thriving in Higher Education (JHU Press, 2025), Dr. Annmarie Caño reimagines academic leadership as a practice rooted in liberation and equity. Drawing on her experiences as a Latina, first-generation college student, clinical psychologist, and higher education administrator, Caño shows how leaders can foster inclusive cultures where everyone thrives. Through a lens of liberation psychology, Caño outlines actionable strategies for transforming institutions into spaces of freedom and growth. From crafting a values-driven vision to navigating institutional obstacles, accompanying others in solidarity, and leading with courage, this book offers practical insights to create systemic change. In this guide to navigating and disrupting the status quo to promote freedom and growth, Caño explains how to lead courageously, grow liberatory leadership skills, and plan career steps. Each chapter concludes with reflective self-coaching questions that empower readers to assess and refine their leadership journeys. Leading Toward Liberation offers an antidote to toxic and unhealthy academic cultures that silence or force out talented colleagues and stifle creativity. Addressing challenges like hierarchical norms, burnout, and the marginalization of underrepresented voices, Caño inspires readers to rethink leadership as a shared endeavor of transformation. With a keen focus on the intersections of identity and power, this is an essential resource for leaders seeking to dismantle oppressive systems and co-create healthier academic environments. Our guest is: Dr. Annemarie Caño, who is a professor of psychology at Gonzaga University and a two-time Fellow of the American Psychological Association who has held leadership positions at public and private universities. Our host is: Dr. Christina Gessler, who is an editor and a writing coach. She is the producer of the Academic Life podcast, and writes the show's newsletter at christinagessler.stubstack.com. Playlist for listeners: Leading From The Margins The Cornell Sweatshirt Tweet The Entrepreneurial Scholar You Have More Influence Than You Think A Pedagogy of Kindness Belonging Welcome to Academic Life, the podcast for your academic journey—and beyond! You can support the show by downloading and sharing episodes. Join us again to learn from more experts inside and outside the academy, and around the world. Missed any of the 280+ Academic Life episodes? Find them here. And thank you for listening! Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/education

Is there such a thing as an ‘Indian university'? Is there an ‘idea' of an Indian university? Were universities in India living and breathing products of the soil, or were they conceptual imports from a colonial heritage? What is the relationship between universities in India and the ‘publics' that have inhabited or are alienated by them? More pointedly, how ‘public' is the Indian public university? This volume explores the historical makings of the Indian university as it stands today, by sifting through archives, colonial/postcolonial policies, textual-literary records and political-economic developments. What results is a ‘critical history' – navigating the force of myth and promise, revolutions and reforms, communities and markets. From the glorification of ancient ‘greatness' to the riskiness of ‘platform futures', this book offers a time travel through one of the most exalted and yet most abused institutions of our age – the university. Dr. Tiatemsu Longkumer, Senior Lecturer in Anthropology at Royal Thimphu College, Bhutan, researches indigenous religion and Christianity among the Nagas, Buddhism in Bhutan, and Generative AI in education. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/education

Designing and Facilitating Workshops with Intentionality offers practical guidance, tools, and resources to assist practitioners in creating effective, engaging workshops for adult learners. Drawing from three key learning frameworks and the author's considerable expertise in facilitating workshops across both educational and corporate settings, this book focuses on ten essential principles to consider when developing professional learning experiences. Whether facilitating on-site or virtually, readers will gain a deeper understanding of how to design and facilitate workshops with an inclusive mindset, thus creating meaningful, active learning opportunities that result in greater involvement among participants and better feedback. Guiding questions, chapter takeaways, and a compendium of additional online resources supply plentiful opportunities to further build and fine-tune these skills. Within these pages, both new and seasoned facilitators will find inspiration, encouragement, and support, as they craft professional learning experiences that ignite curiosity and spark growth in all learners. Our guest is: Dr. Tolu Noah, who is an educational developer at California State University, Long Beach, USA, where she designs and facilitates professional learning programs for instructors. She has 16 years of teaching experience, and she enjoys facilitating engaging workshops and keynotes about a variety of teaching, learning, and technology topics. Our host is: Dr. Christina Gessler, who is a dissertation and writing coach, and a developmental editor. She is the producer of the Academic Life podcast, and author of the show's newsletter found at ChristinaGessler.Substack.Com. Playlist for listeners: Moments of Impact How We Show Up A Pedagogy Of Kindness Project Management Engage in Public Scholarship Leading From The Margins Diversity and Inclusion You Have More Influence Than You Think A Guide To Learning Student Names The Power of Play in Higher Education Belonging: The Science of Creating Connection Imposter Syndrome Attention Management Welcome to Academic Life, the podcast for your academic journey—and beyond! You can support the show by downloading and sharing episodes. Join us again to learn from more experts inside and outside the academy, and around the world. Missed any of the 275+ Academic Life episodes? Find them here. And thank you for listening! Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/education

Constructing Student Mobility: How Universities Recruit Students and Shape Pathways between Berkeley and Seoul (MIT Press, 2023) challenges the popular image of the international student in the American imagination, an image of affluence, access, and privilege. In this provocative book, higher education scholar Stephanie Kim argues that universities -- not the students -- create the paths that allow students their international mobility. Focusing on universities in the United States and South Korea that aggressively grew their student pools in the aftermath of the Great Recession, Kim shows the lengths to which universities will go to expand enrollments as they draw from the same pool of top South Korean students. Using ethnographic research gathered over a ten-year period in which international admissions were impacted by the Great Recession, changes in US presidential administrations, and the COVID-19 pandemic, Constructing Student Mobility provides crucial insights into the purpose, effects, and future of student recruitment across the Pacific. Constructing Student Mobility received the Best Book Award from the Association for the Study of Higher Education Council on International Higher Education. Stephanie Kim is a scholar, educator, author, and practitioner in the field of comparative and international higher education. She teaches at Georgetown University, where she is an Associate Professor of the Practice and Faculty Director of Higher Education Administration in the School of Continuing Studies. She is also an affiliated faculty member of the Asian Studies Program in the School of Foreign Service. Leslie Hickman is a translator and writer. She has an MA in Korean Studies from Yonsei University. You can follow her activities here. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/education

With a growing number of students entering college with an existing mental health diagnosis, College Mental Health 101: A Guide for Students, Parents, and Professionals (Oxford UP, 2025) offers hope and clear direction to those struggling with mental illness. There is an undeniable mental health crisis on campuses these days. More students are anxious, depressed, drinking, and self-harming than ever before. The statistics are startling: 50% of mental health issues begin by age 14, 75% by age 24, while suicide is the second leading cause of death among young adults. And yet even while more students are struggling, more students than ever are breaking through stigma, seeking help, and sharing openly in person and social media about their challenges. College Mental Health 101 offers more answers, relief, resources, and research backed information for families, students, and staff already at college or beginning the application process. With simple charts and facts, informal self-assessments, quick tips for students and those who support them, the book includes hundreds of voices addressing common concerns. Basics like picking and contacting a therapist, knowing your rights, disclosing to friends and family, advice on medication and time off, are all covered in brief digestible sections. The book also offers support and understanding to families and friends of struggling students who are often uncertain of where else to turn for expert advice. Packed with hundreds of expert and student voices, three diverse experts in the field have assembled the right resources at the right time. Christopher Willard is a clinical psychologist, author, and consultant based in Massachusetts. He teaches at Harvard Medical School. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/education

In an era of globalized education, where ideals of freedom and inquiry should thrive, an alarming trend has emerged: foreign authoritarian regimes infiltrating American academia. In Authoritarians in the Academy, Sarah McLaughlin exposes how higher education institutions, long considered bastions of free thought, are compromising their values for financial gain and global partnerships. This groundbreaking investigation reveals the subtle yet sweeping influence of authoritarian governments. University leaders are allowing censorship to flourish on campus, putting pressure on faculty, and silencing international student voices, all in the name of appeasing foreign powers. McLaughlin exposes the troubling reality where university leaders prioritize expansion and profit over the principles of free expression. The book describes incidents in classrooms where professors hesitate to discuss controversial topics and in boardrooms where administrators weigh the costs of offending oppressive regimes. McLaughlin offers a sobering look at how the compromises made in American academia reflect broader societal patterns seen in industries like tech, sports, and entertainment. Meticulously researched and unapologetically candid, Authoritarians in the Academy: How the Internationalization of Higher Education and Borderless Censorship Threaten Free Speech (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2025) is an essential read for anyone who believes in the transformative power of education and the necessity of safeguarding it from the creeping tide of authoritarianism. Sarah McLaughlin is a senior scholar of global expression at the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression. Caleb Zakarin is editor of the New Books Network. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/education

In this optimistic yet practical assessment of how postsecondary education can evolve to meet the needs of next-generation learners, Kathleen deLaski reimagines what higher education might offer and whom it should serve. In the wake of declining enrollment and declining confidence in the value of a college degree, she urges a mindset shift regarding the learning routes and credentials that best prepare students for post-high-school success. Who Needs College Anymore draws on a decade of research from the Education Design Lab, and interviews of educational experts, college and career counselors, teachers, employers, and learners. Kathleen deLaski applies human-centered design to higher education reform. She highlights ten top principles based on user feedback and considers how well they are being enacted by colleges. She urges institutions to better attend to the needs of new-majority learners, including people from low- or moderate-income backgrounds, people of color, first-generation students, veterans, single mothers, rural students, part-time attendees, and neurodivergent students. She finds ample opportunity for colleges to support learners via alternative pathways to marketable knowledge, including skills-based learning, apprenticeships, career training, and other types of workplace learning. Our guest is: Kathleen deLaski, who spent twenty years as a journalist, including time as ABC News White House correspondent. In the second half of her career, she has focused on education reform, cofounding or founding nonprofits including the Education Design Lab. She is a senior advisor to the Project on Workforce at Harvard University, and is an adjunct professor at George Mason University. Our host is: Dr. Christina Gessler, who is a developmental editor for humanities scholars and social scientists at all stages of their careers. She is the producer and show host of the Academic Life podcast, and writes the Academic Life newsletter, found here  Playlist for listeners: Get Real and Get In How To College The Two Keys to Student Retention The Role of Community Colleges in Higher Education Show Them You're Good Education Behind The Wall Graduate School Myths and Misconceptions Welcome to Academic Life, the podcast for your academic journey—and beyond! Please join us again to learn from more experts inside and outside the academy, and around the world. Missed any of the 275+ Academic Life episodes? Find them here. And thank you for listening! Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/education

In this episode of the Language on the Move Podcast, Dr Hanna Torsh speaks with Dr Vaughan Rapatahana about sexual predation in the English language teaching industry. The conversation addresses his new book Sexual Predation and TEFL: The teaching of English as a Foreign Language Enables Sexual Predation (Brill, 2024), which explores how teaching English overseas intersects with and enables widespread sexual exploitation. Trigger warning: this show discusses sexual exploitation and related content that listeners may find distressing. For additional resources, show notes, and transcripts, go here. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/education

The game of basketball is perceived by most today as an “urban” game with a locale such as Rucker Park in Harlem as the game's epicenter (as well as a pipeline to the NBA). While that is certainly a true statement, basketball is not limited to places such as New York City. In recent years scholars have written about the meaning of the game (and triumphs on the hardwood) to other groups, such as Asian Americans (Kathleen Yep and Joel Franks) and Mexican Americans (Ignacio Garcia). To this important literature one can now add an examination of the sport in the lives of Native Americans, through Wade Davies' Native Hoops: The Rise of American Indian Basketball, 1895-1970 (University Press of Kansas, 2020). The game, as Davies notes, was not just something imposed upon Natives in locales such as the Indian Industrial Training School in Kansas (and elsewhere). The game provided linkages to the Native past, and was embraced as a way to “prove their worth” within a hostile environment designed to strip students of all vestiges of their cultural inheritance. The sport provided both young men and women with an opportunity to compete against members of other institutions (both Native and white) and to challenge notions of inferiority and inherent weaknesses. Davies' work does an excellent job of detailing the role of the sport in the lives of individuals, schools, and eventually, Native communities. Additionally, it examines how these players competed against sometimes seven opponents (the five players on the court and the two officials) to claim their rightful place on the court. They also often had to deal with the taunts and racism of crowds at opposing gyms. Still, most of these schools managed to field competitive teams that created their own “Indian” style of basketball that proved quite difficult to defeat. Wade Davies is professor of Native American studies at the University of Montana, Missoula. Jorge Iber is a professor of history at Texas Tech University. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/education

Debates about Ethnic Studies in K-12 and Higher Education have highlighted the importance of culturally inclusive pedagogy in schools. Despite discussions about Ethnic Studies, there is a more extended history of Mexican-origin people pushing for culturally responsive education. In Reading, Writing, and Revolution: Escuelitas and the Emergence of a Mexican American Identity in Texas (University of Texas Press, 2020), historian Philis M. Barragán-Goetz argues that through cultural negotiation, escuelitas (community schools) shaped Mexican American identity and civil rights activism in the late 19th and early 20th century. Barragán Goetz weaves in oral histories, government documents, newspapers, and archival sources to demonstrate the power in grassroots organizing for educational justice in Texas. She debunks a popular myth that Mexican Americans have not cared for education throughout history. Barragán Goetz writes that the progressive education movement in the late 19th century was not all that progressive if we examine the lived experienced of Mexican-origin people. Activists such as Idar Family, Villegas de Magnon, Maria Villarreal, Maria Renteria, and many involved in the two main Mexican American civil rights organizations of the time provided a foundation for Latina/os to be part of the fight for educational inclusion in the 20th century. Reading, Writing, and Revolution is not merely a book about educational history; it is a trailblazing study on how Mexican Americans have relied on any tools available to create a more inclusive educational system for themselves and their community. Philis M. Barragán Goetz is an Assistant Professor of History at Texas A&M University - San Antonio. She earned her Ph.D. from the University of Texas at Austin. She can be found on Twitter: @philismaria Tiffany Jasmin González, Ph.D. is the Postdoctoral Fellow in Women's History at the Newcomb Institute of Tulane University. You can follow Tiffany on Twitter @T_J_Gonzalez Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/education

The Jacobites and the Grand Tour: Educational travel and small-states' diplomacy (Manchester University Press, 2025) by Dr. Jérémy Filet is the first monograph to fully examine the intersecting networks of Jacobites and travellers to the continent. In the book, Dr. Filet considers how small states used official diplomacy and deployed soft power - embodied by educational academies - to achieve foreign policy goals. This work uses little-known archival materials to explain how and why certain small states secretly supported the Jacobite cause during the crucial years surrounding the 1715 rising, while others stayed out of Jacobite affairs. The book demonstrates how early modern small states sought to cultivate good relations with Britain by attracting travellers as part of a wider trend of ensuring connections with future diplomats or politicians in case a Stuart restoration never came. This publication therefore brings together a study of Britain, small states, Jacobitism, and educational travel, in its nexus at continental academies. This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars. You can find Miranda's interviews on New Books with Miranda Melcher, wherever you get your podcasts. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/education