How the expansion of primary education in the West emerged not from democratic ideals but from the state's desire to control its citizens. Nearly every country today has universal primary education. But why did governments in the West decide to provide education to all children in the first place? In Raised to Obey: The Rise and Spread of Mass Educ…

How to Love a Child and Other Selected Works (Vallentine Mitchell, 2018) is the first comprehensive collection of Korczak's works translated into English. It contains his most important pedagogical writings, journal articles, as well as private texts. Volume 2 starts with extensive excerpts from two pedagogical treatises written for young readers. …

Black Woman on Board: Claudia Hampton, the California State University, and the Fight to Save Affirmative Action (University of Rochester Press, 2024) examines the leadership strategies that Black women educators have employed as influential power brokers in predominantly white colleges and universities in the United States. Author Donna J. Nicol t…

Today’s book is: A Pedagogy of Kindness (University of Oklahoma Press, 2024), by Dr. Catherine Denial, which explores why academia is not, by and large, a kind place. Without kindness at its core, Catherine Denial suggests, higher education fails students and instructors—and its mission—in critical ways. Part manifesto, part teaching memoir, part h…

In fourteenth-century Italy, literacy became accessible to a significantly larger portion of the lay population (allegedly between 60 and 80 percent in Florence) and provided a crucial means for the vernacularization and secularization of learning, and for the democratization of citizenship. In Dante's Education: Latin Schoolbooks and Vernacular Po…

The Association of University Presses (AUPresses), a global organization of 161 mission-driven publishers, is proud to announce a collection of 123 books, journals, and projects that embody the #StepUP theme of this year’s University Press Week, happening Nov. 11 to 15. The featured publications, curated by AUPresses members in 12 countries, presen…

Teaching, training, and gathering online has become a global norm since 2020. Restorative practitioners have risen to the challenge to shift restorative justice processes, trainings, and classes to virtual platforms, a change that many worried would dilute the restorative experience. How can people build relationships with genuine empathy and trust…

Peoples & Things host, Lee Vinsel, talks with Meryl Alper, Associate Professor of Communication Studies at Northeastern University, about her recent book, Kids Across the Spectrums: Growing Up Autistic in the Digital Age (MIT Press, 2023). In addition to being a professor, Alper is also an educational researcher who has worked over the past 20 year…

Who controls what is taught in American universities – professors or politicians? The answer is far from clear but suddenly urgent. Unprecedented efforts are now underway to restrict what ideas can be promoted and discussed in university classrooms. Professors at public universities have long assumed that their freedom to teach is unassailable and …

Democracy is struggling in an age of populism and post-truth. In a world swirling with competing political groups stating conflicting facts, citizens are left unsure whom to trust and which facts are true. The role of honesty in civic life is in jeopardy. When we lose sight of the importance of honesty, it hampers our ability to solve pressing prob…

Today’s book is: Black Woman on Board: Claudia Hampton, the California State University, and the Fight to Save Affirmative Action (University of Rochester Press, 2024) by Dr. Donna J. Nicol, which examines the leadership strategies that Black women educators have employed as influential power brokers in predominantly white colleges and universities…

The campus protests over conflict in Israel and Gaza have engulfed universities, and led to the resignation of several university presidents. In this podcast, recorded live at the New York Institute of the Humanities, Michael S. Roth, the long-time President of Wesleyan College, explains how he navigates sharp disagreements on campus, what he means…

Conducting Original Research for Your Library (Bloomsbury Libraries Unlimited, 2024) is a concise manual for professionals in the field, this book helps librarians master the skills to conduct, interpret, and analyze their own original research. Many working librarians discover that original research would help them advocate for their libraries, bu…

In Plato the Teacher: The Crisis of the Republic (Lexington, 2012), William Altman shines a light on the pedagogical technique of the playful Plato, especially his ability to create living discourses that directly address the student. Reviving an ancient concern with reconstructing the order in which Plato intended his dialogues to be taught as opp…

Librarians around the country are currently on a battleground, defending their right to purchase and circulate books dealing with issues of race and systemic racism. Despite this work, the library community has often overlooked—even ignored—its own history of White supremacy and deliberate inaction on the part of White librarians and library leader…

Today I talked to Sivan Zakai and Matt Reingold's their book Teaching Israel: Studies of Pedagogy from the Field (Brandeis UP, 2023). In this discussion we discuss best teaching practices for Israel Incorporating Israel educators from inner-city nontraditional college classrooms, the US marine core university, Jewish day school high schools and pre…

Ehaab D. Abdou's book Education, Civics, and Citizenship in Egypt: Towards More Inclusive Curricular Representations and Teaching (Palgrave Macmillan, 2023) explores how to render curricular representations more inclusive and how individuals' interactions with competing historical narratives and discourses shape their civic attitudes and intergroup…

Why do people go to college? In Polished: College, Class, and the Burdens of Social Mobility (U Chicago Press, 2024), Melissa Osborne, an associate professor at Western Washington University, explores the experiences of students from low income and first-generation backgrounds who attend elite universities in the USA. The book offers a vital interv…

Join us for an in-depth exploration of Professor Cass Sunstein's latest work, Campus Free Speech (Harvard University Press, September 2024). Together, we'll examine the book’s intriguing take on free speech in academic spaces and the broader implications for constitutional interpretation. Professor Sunstein also delves into the exercise of administ…

School vouchers are often framed as a way to help students and families by providing choice, but evidence shows that vouchers have a negative impact on educational outcomes. In The Privateers: How Billionaires Created a Culture War and Sold School Vouchers (Harvard Education Press, 2024), Josh Cowen describes voucher programs as the product of deca…

Brynn Quick speaks with Dr. Jinhyun Cho, Senior Lecturer in the Translation and Interpreting Program of the Department of Linguistics at Macquarie University in Sydney, Australia. Her research interests are primarily in the field of sociolinguistics and sociolinguistics of translation & interpreting. Jinhyun's research focuses on intersections betw…

Over the past several decades, American society has experienced fundamental changes - from shifting relations between social groups and evolving language and behavior norms to the increasing value of a college degree. These transformations have polarized the nation's political climate and ignited a perpetual culture war. In a sequel to their award-…

In Indigenous Materials in Libraries and the Curriculum: Latin American and Latinx Sources (Routledge, 2024), Javier Muñoz-Díaz, Kathia Ibacache, and Leila Gómez argue for a decolonial engagement with Indigenous peoples’ creative work to build awareness of divergent epistemologies and foster healing in the learning community. This interview discuss…

Angel, a Black tenth-grader at a New York City public school, self-identifies as a nerd and likes to learn. But she’s troubled that her history classes leave out events like the genocide and dispossession of Indigenous people in the Americas, presenting a sugar-coated image of the United States that is at odds with her everyday experience. “The his…

In Poor Queer Studies: Confronting Elitism in the University (Duke UP, 2020), Matt Brim shifts queer studies away from its familiar sites of elite education toward poor and working-class people, places, and pedagogies. Brim shows how queer studies also takes place beyond the halls of flagship institutions: in night school; after a three-hour commut…

Creating a Person-Centered Library: Best Practices for Supporting High-Needs Patrons (Bloomsbury, 2023) provides a comprehensive overview of various services, programs, and collaborations to help libraries serve high-needs patrons as well as strategies for supporting staff working with these individuals. While public libraries are struggling to add…

In 'We Want Better Education!': The 1960s Chicano Student Movement, School Walkouts, and the Quest for Educational Reform in South Texas (Texas A&M UP, 2023), James B. Barrera offers a detailed and comprehensive analysis of the educational, cultural, and political issues of the Chicano Movement in Texas, which remains one of the lesser-known social…

An in-depth examination of the regulatory, entrepreneurial, and organizational factors contributing to the expansion and transformation of China’s supplemental education industry. Like many parents in the United States, parents in China, increasingly concerned with their children’s academic performance, are turning to for-profit tutoring businesses…

Teaching our students how to become flexible and accurate evaluators of information requires teaching them adaptable processes and not static heuristics. Our conventional information literacy teaching and learning tools are simply not up to tackling the life-long, real-world challenges and transferable applications required by today's evolving info…

What does it take to become a teacher today and how does one become a teacher? Theodore G. Zervas's book With Grit and a Big Heart: A Beginners Guide to Teaching (Rowman and Littlefield, 2022) covers the ins and outs on becoming a teacher from receiving a teaching license, working with students, colleagues, and parents, and confronting some of the …

Elite colleges are boasting unprecedented numbers with respect to diversity, with some schools admitting their first majority-minority classes. But when the twin pandemics of COVID-19 and racial unrest gripped the world, schools scrambled to figure out what to do with the diversity they so fervently recruited. And disadvantaged students suffered. C…

When professor jobs are scarce and most academic jobs are temporary, what do you do if you still want to work on a campus? Can you make the leap to admin? How do you make the leap? Dr. Jacquelyn Ardam joins us to explain the hidden curriculum of the academic job market. She shares what helped her pivot roles from visiting professor to campus admini…

This is the Global Media & Communication podcast series. This podcast is a multimodal project powered by the Center for Advanced Research in Global Communication (CARGC) at the Annenberg School for Communication at the University of Pennsylvania. At CARGC, we produce and promote critical, interdisciplinary, and multimodal research on global media a…

The earliest Jewish Sunday schools were female-led, growing from one school in Philadelphia established by Rebecca Gratz in 1838 to an entire system that educated vast numbers of Jewish youth across the country. These schools were modeled on Christian approaches to religious education and aimed to protect Jewish children from Protestant missionarie…

During Hawai‘i’s territorial period (1900–1959), Native Hawaiians resisted assimilation by refusing to replace Native culture, identity, and history with those of the United States. By actively participating in U.S. public schools, Hawaiians resisted the suppression of their language and culture, subjection to a foreign curriculum, and denial of th…

What do universal rights to public goods like education mean when codified as individual, private choices? Is the “problem” of school choice actually not about better choices for all but, rather, about the competition and exclusion that choice engenders—guaranteeing a system of winners and losers? Unsettling Choice: Race, Rights, and the Partitioni…

Pete Imperial has been principal of St. Mary’s Catholic High School in Berkeley, California, a Lasallian Catholic School of 160 years and going strong. Yet only 45% of the students are Catholics (though a similar number are Protestant Christians) and some of the kids have had no religious experience at all. How does a good Catholic school infuse th…

This interview with Shawn(ta) Smith-Cruz about Grabbing Tea: Queer Conversations on Identity and Libraries and Grabbing Tea: Queer Conversations on Archives and Practice (available in 2024 from the Litwin Books Series on Gender and Sexuality in Library and Information Studies) explores how queerness is centered within library and archival theory an…

Israeli universities have long enjoyed a reputation as liberal bastions of freedom and democracy. Drawing on extensive research and making Hebrew sources accessible to the international community, Maya Wind shatters this myth by documenting how Israeli universities are directly complicit in the violation of Palestinian rights. In Towers of Ivory an…

A primary question for many librarians, directors, and board members is how to evaluate diversity in a collection on an ongoing basis. Curating Community Collections: A Holistic Approach to Diverse Collection Development (Bloomsbury, 2024) by Mary Schreiber and Wendy Bartlett provides librarians with the tools they need to understand the results of…

Building on the success and impact of Library 2020: Today’s Leading Visionaries Describe Tomorrow’s Library by Joseph Janes, Library 2035: Imagining the Next Generation of Libraries (Rowman & Littlefield, 2024) edited by Sandra Hirshupdates, expands upon, and broadens the discussions on the future of libraries and the ways in which they transform i…

Despite a mass expansion of the higher education sector in the UK since the 1960s, young people from socio-economically disadvantaged backgrounds remain less likely to enter university than their advantaged counterparts. Drawing on unique new research gathered from three contrasting secondary schools in England, including interviews with children f…

Throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, teachers, administrators, and policymakers fashioned a system of industrial education that attempted to transform Black and Indigenous peoples and land. This form of teaching—what Bayley J. Marquez names plantation pedagogy—was built on the claim that slavery and land dispossession are fundamentall…

A landmark work that weaves captivating stories about the past, present, and personal into an inspiring vision for how America can educate immigrant students Setting out from her classroom, Jessica Lander takes the reader on a powerful and urgent journey to understand what it takes for immigrant students to become Americans. A compelling read for e…

A perfectly timed book for the educational resistance—those of us who believe in public schools Culture wars have engulfed our schools. Extremist groups are seeking to ban books, limit what educators can teach, and threaten the very foundations of public education. What’s behind these efforts? Why are our schools suddenly so vulnerable? And how can…

In 2009, Fudan University launched China’s first MFA program in creative writing, spurring a wave of such programs in Chinese universities. Many of these programs’ founding members point to the Iowa Writers Workshop and, specifically, its International Writers Program, which invited dozens of Mainland Chinese writers to take part between 1979 and 2…

An increasing number of students worldwide attend graduate school while simultaneously navigating a variety of competing responsibilities in their personal lives. For many students, this includes both parenting and working full-time, while maintaining a rigorous graduate course-load. Because academia overwhelmingly defaults to assuming all graduate…

The unintended consequences of youth empowerment programs for Latino boys Educational research has long documented the politics of punishment for boys and young men of color in schools—but what about the politics of empowerment and inclusion? In Good Boys, Bad Hombres: The Racial Politics of Mentoring Latino Boys in Schools (U Minnesota Press, 2024…

Serving Hispanic, Latine, and Latinx Students in Academic Libraries (Library Juice Press, 2024) is a collection of essays written by library workers that highlights academic library practices, programs, and services that support Hispanic, Latine, and Latinx students. As of 2020, there were over 500 federally designated Hispanic-Serving Institutions…

Pivoting from studies that emphasize the dominance of progressivism on American college campuses during the late sixties and early seventies, Lauren Lassabe Shepherd positions conservative critiques of, and agendas in, American colleges and universities as an essential dimension of a broader conversation of conservative backlash against liberal edu…