A White Teacher Talks about Race


Julie Landsman - 2001
    She speaks honestly about issues of race, poverty, institutional responsibility, and white privilege by engaging the reader in the experiences of a day in the classroom with some of her remarkable students.Throughout the day, we meet bigotry head-on, struggle with questions of racial identity, and find cultural conflict in the corridors of the school building. Along the way, we come face to face with Tyrone, a young African-American student grappling with the realities of discrimination in suburbia. We encounter Sheila, a teenage mother struggling to raise her baby in poverty, and we get to know Sarah, a white girl living on the streets of Minneapolis.Through the author's eyes, we begin to understand the complexities of teaching in today's society and we learn within the pages of this book, if only just for a moment, what it feels like to be the other.

The Power of Reading: Insights from the Research


Stephen D. Krashen - 1993
    Krashen also explores research surrounding the role of school and public libraries and the research indicating the necessity of a print-rich environment that provides light reading (comics, teen romances, magazines) as well as the best in literature to assist in educating children to read with understanding and in second language acquisition. He looks at the research surrounding reading incentive/rewards programs and specifically at the research on AR (Accelerated Reader) and other electronic reading products.

Excellent Sheep: The Miseducation of the American Elite and the Way to a Meaningful Life


William Deresiewicz - 2014
    His students, some of the nation’s brightest minds, were adrift when it came to the big questions: how to think critically and creatively, and how to find a sense of purpose.Excellent Sheep takes a sharp look at the high-pressure conveyor belt that begins with parents and counselors who demand perfect grades and culminates in the skewed applications Deresiewicz saw firsthand as a member of Yale’s admissions committee. As schools shift focus from the humanities to "practical" subjects like economics and computer science, students are losing the ability to think in innovative ways. Deresiewicz explains how college should be a time for self-discovery, when students can establish their own values and measures of success, so they can forge their own path. He addresses parents, students, educators, and anyone who's interested in the direction of American society, featuring quotes from real students and graduates he has corresponded with over the years, candidly exposing where the system is broken and clearly presenting solutions.

The Art of Critical Pedagogy; Possibilities for Moving from Theory to Practice in Urban Schools


Jeffrey M.R. Duncan-Andrade - 2007
    It addresses two looming, yet under-explored questions that have emerged with the ascendancy of critical pedagogy in the educational discourse: (1) What does critical pedagogy look like in work with urban youth? and (2) How can a systematic investigation of critical work enacted in urban contexts simultaneously draw upon and push the core tenets of critical pedagogy? Addressing the tensions inherent in enacting critical pedagogy - between working to disrupt and to successfully navigate oppressive institutionalized structures, and between the practice of critical pedagogy and the current standards-driven climate - The Art of Critical Pedagogy seeks to generate authentic internal and external dialogues among educators in search of texts that offer guidance for teaching for a more socially just world.

How the Word Is Passed: A Reckoning with the History of Slavery Across America


Clint Smith - 2021
    It is the story of the Monticello Plantation in Virginia, the estate where Thomas Jefferson wrote letters espousing the urgent need for liberty while enslaving over 400 people on the premises. It is the story of the Whitney Plantation, one of the only former plantations devoted to preserving the experience of the enslaved people whose lives and work sustained it. It is the story of Angola Prison in Louisiana, a former plantation named for the country from which most of its enslaved people arrived and which has since become one of the most gruesome maximum-security prisons in the world. And it is the story of Blandford Cemetery, the final resting place of tens of thousands of Confederate soldiers. In a deeply researched and transporting exploration of the legacy of slavery and its imprint on centuries of American history, How the Word Is Passed illustrates how some of our country's most essential stories are hidden in plain view-whether in places we might drive by on our way to work, holidays such as Juneteenth, or entire neighborhoods—like downtown Manhattan—on which the brutal history of the trade in enslaved men, women and children has been deeply imprinted. Informed by scholarship and brought alive by the story of people living today, Clint Smith’s debut work of nonfiction is a landmark work of reflection and insight that offers a new understanding of the hopeful role that memory and history can play in understanding our country.

Deculturalization and the Struggle for Equality: A Brief History of the Education of Dominated Cultures in the United States


Joel Spring - 1994
    It focuses on the educational, legal, and social construction of race and racism, and on educational practices related to deculturalization, segregation, and the civil rights movement. Spring emphasizes issues of power and control in schools and shows how the dominant Anglo class has stripped away the culture of minority peoples in the U.S. and replaced it with the dominant culture. In the process, he gives voice to the often-overlooked perspectives of African Americans, Asian Americans, Hispanic/Latino Americans, and Native Americans. An understanding of these historical perspectives and how they impact current conditions and policies is critical to teacher's success or failure in today's diverse classrooms.

Uprooting Racism: How White People Can Work for Racial Justice


Paul Kivel - 1995
    Substantially revised and expanded, the new edition has more tools to help white people understand and stand-up to racism.Uprooting Racism explores the manifestations of racism in politics, work, community, and family life. It moves beyond the definition and unlearning of racism to address the many areas of privilege for white people and suggests ways for individuals and groups to challenge the structures of racism. Uprooting Racism’s welcoming style helps readers look at how we learn racism, what effects it has on our lives, its costs and benefits to white people, and what we can do about it.In addition to updating existing chapters, the new edition of Uprooting Racism explores how entrenched racism has been revealed in the new economy, the 2000 electoral debacle, rising anti-Arab prejudice, and health care policy. Special features include exercises, questions, and suggestions to engage, challenge assumptions, and motivate the reader towards social action. The new edition includes an index and an updated bibliography.Marketing Plans: • Print review campaign to progressive and social action magazines • Web publicity campaign to progressive and activist sites • Course adoption campaign • Advertising in Education magazines • Promotional mailing to librariesPaul Kivel is the author of Boys Will Be Men (ISBN: 0-86571-395-2, New Society Publishers, 1999) and Men's Work (ISBN: 0-34537-939-X, Ballantine, 1998). He is the founder of the nationally recognized Oakland's Men's Project and has conducted hundreds of workshops on racism and anti-violence for teens and men all over the country. He lives in Oakland, California.Also Available by Paul KivelBoys Will Be Men: Raising Our Sons for Courage, Caring, and Community TP $16.95, 0-86571-395-2 • USA

Culturally Responsive Teaching: Theory, Research, and Practice


Geneva Gay - 1900
    Insights from theory, research and classroom practice show that minority pupils perform better when teaching is filtered through their own cultural experiences and frames of reference.

Privilege, Power, and Difference


Allan G. Johnson - 2001
    Written in an accessible, conversational style, Johnson links theory with engaging examples in ways that enable readers to see the underlying nature and consequences of privilege and their connection to it. This extraordinarily successful book has been used across the country, both inside and outside the classroom, to shed light on issues of power and privilege.Allan Johnson has worked on issues of social inequality since receiving his Ph.D. in sociology from the University of Michigan in 1972. He has more than thirty years of teaching experience and is a frequent speaker on college and university campuses. Johnson has earned a reputation for writing that is exceptionally clear and explanations of complex ideas that are accessible to a broad audience.Instructors and students can now access their course content through the Connect digital learning platform by purchasing either standalone Connect access or a bundle of print and Connect access. McGraw-Hill Connect(R) is a subscription-based learning service accessible online through your personal computer or tablet. Choose this option if your instructor will require Connect to be used in the course. Your subscription to Connect includes the following:- SmartBook(R) - an adaptive digital version of the course textbook that personalizes your reading experience based on how well you are learning the content.- Access to your instructor's homework assignments, quizzes, syllabus, notes, reminders, and other important files for the course.- Progress dashboards that quickly show how you are performing on your assignments and tips for improvement.- The option to purchase (for a small fee) a print version of the book. This binder-ready, loose-leaf version includes free shipping.Complete system requirements to use Connect can be found here: http: //www.mheducation.com/highered/platform...

Children of Immigration


Carola Suárez-Orozco - 2001
    At the center of this prospect are the children of immigrants, who make up one fifth of America's youth. This book, written by the codirectors of the largest ongoing longitudinal study of immigrant children and their families, offers a clear, broad, interdisciplinary view of who these children are and what their future might hold.For immigrant children, the authors write, it is the best of times and the worst. These children are more likely than any previous generation of immigrants to end up in Ivy League universities--or unschooled, on parole, or in prison. Most arrive as motivated students, respectful of authority and quick to learn English. Yet, at the same time, many face huge obstacles to success, such as poverty, prejudice, the trauma of immigration itself, and exposure to the materialistic, hedonistic world of their native-born peers.The authors vividly describe how forces within and outside the family shape these children's developing sense of identity and their ambivalent relationship with their adopted country. Their book demonstrates how Americanization, long an immigrant ideal, has, in a nation so diverse and full of contradictions, become ever harder to define, let alone achieve.

How Does It Feel to Be a Problem?: Being Young and Arab in America


Moustafa Bayoumi - 2008
    Under the cover of the terrorist attacks, the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, and the explosion of political violence around the world, a fundamental misunderstanding of the Arab and Muslim American communities has been allowed to fester and even to define the lives of the seven twentysomething men and women whom we meet in this book. Their names are Rami, Sami, Akram, Lina, Yasmin, Omar, and Rasha, and they all live in Brooklyn, New York, which is home to the largest number of Arab Americans in the United States.We meet Sami, an Arab American Christian, who navigates the minefield of associations the public has of Arabs as well as the expectations that Muslim Arab Americans have of him as a marine who fought in the Iraq war. And Rasha, who, along with her parents, sister, and brothers, was detained by the FBI in a New Jersey jail in early 2002. Without explanation, she and her family were released several months later. As drama of all kinds swirls around them, these young men and women strive for the very things the majority of young adults desire: opportunity, marriage, happiness, and the chance to fulfill their potential. But what they have now are lives that are less certain, and more difficult, than they ever could have imagined: workplace discrimination, warfare in their countries of origin, government surveillance, the disappearance of friends or family, threats of vigilante violence, and a host of other problems that thrive in the age of terror.And yet How Does It Feel to Be a Problem? takes the raw material of their struggle and weaves it into an unforgettable, and very American, story of promise and hope. In prose that is at once blunt and lyrical, Moustafa Bayoumi allows us to see the world as these men and women do, revealing a set of characters and a place that indelibly change the way we see the turbulent past and yet still hopeful future of this country.

Notes from No Man's Land: American Essays


Eula Biss - 2009
    Eula Biss explores race in America and her response to the topic is informed by the experiences chronicled in these essays -- teaching in a Harlem school on the morning of 9/11, reporting for an African American newspaper in San Diego, watching the aftermath of Katrina from a college town in Iowa, and settling in Chicago's most diverse neighborhood.As Biss moves across the country from New York to California to the Midwest, her essays move across time from biblical Babylon to the freedman's schools of Reconstruction to a Jim Crow mining town to post-war white flight. She brings an eclectic education to the page, drawing variously on the Eagles, Laura Ingalls Wilder, James Baldwin, Alexander Graham Bell, Joan Didion, religious pamphlets, and reality television shows.These spare, sometimes lyric essays explore the legacy of race in America, artfully revealing in intimate detail how families, schools, and neighborhoods participate in preserving racial privilege. Faced with a disturbing past and an unsettling present, Biss still remains hopeful about the possibilities of American diversity, "not the sun-shininess of it, or the quota-making politics of it, but the real complexity of it."

Sticks and Stones: Defeating the Culture of Bullying and Rediscovering the Power of Character and Empathy


Emily Bazelon - 2013
    Bullying, once thought of as the province of queen bees and goons, has taken on new, complex, and insidious forms, as parents and educators know all too well. No writer is better poised to explore this territory than Emily Bazelon, who has established herself as a leading voice on the social and legal aspects of teenage drama. In Sticks and Stones, she brings readers on a deeply researched, clear-eyed journey into the ever-shifting landscape of teenage meanness and its sometimes devastating consequences. The result is an indispensable book that takes us from school cafeterias to courtrooms to the offices of Facebook, the website where so much teenage life, good and bad, now unfolds. Along the way, Bazelon defines what bullying is and, just as important, what it is not. She explores when intervention is essential and when kids should be given the freedom to fend for themselves. She also dispels persistent myths: that girls bully more than boys, that online and in-person bullying are entirely distinct, that bullying is a common cause of suicide, and that harsh criminal penalties are an effective deterrent. Above all, she believes that to deal with the problem, we must first understand it. Blending keen journalistic and narrative skills, Bazelon explores different facets of bullying through the stories of three young people who found themselves caught in the thick of it. Thirteen-year-old Monique endured months of harassment and exclusion before her mother finally pulled her out of school. Jacob was threatened and physically attacked over his sexuality in eighth grade—and then sued to protect himself and change the culture of his school. Flannery was one of six teens who faced criminal charges after a fellow student’s suicide was blamed on bullying and made international headlines. With grace and authority, Bazelon chronicles how these kids’ predicaments escalated, to no one’s benefit, into community-wide wars. Cutting through the noise, misinformation, and sensationalism, she takes us into schools that have succeeded in reducing bullying and examines their successful strategies. The result is a groundbreaking book that will help parents, educators, and teens themselves better understand what kids are going through today and what can be done to help them through it.Praise for Sticks and Stones “Intelligent, rigorous . . . [Emily Bazelon] is a compassionate champion for justice in the domain of childhood’s essential unfairness.”—Andrew Solomon, The New York Times Book Review   “[Bazelon] does not stint on the psychological literature, but the result never feels dense with studies; it’s immersive storytelling with a sturdy base of science underneath, and draws its authority and power from both.”—New York   “A humane and closely reported exploration of the way that hurtful power relationships play out in the contemporary public-school setting . . . As a parent herself, [Bazelon] brings clear, kind analysis to complex and upsetting circumstances.”—The Wall Street Journal   “Bullying isn’t new. But our attempts to respond to it are, as Bazelon explains in her richly detailed, thought-provoking book. . . . Comprehensive in her reporting and balanced in her conclusions, Bazelon extracts from these stories useful lessons for young people, parents and principals alike.” —The Washington Post

English with an Accent: Language, Ideology and Discrimination in the United States


Rosina Lippi-Green - 1997
    Using examples drawn from a variety of contexts: the classroom, the court, the media and corporate culture, she exposes the way in which discrimination based on accent functions to support and perpetuate social structures and unequal power relations. English with an Accent: focuses on language variation linked to geography and social identity looks at how the media and the entertainment industry work to promote linguistic stereotyping examines how employers discriminate on the basis of accent reveals how the judicial system protects the status quo and reinforces language subordinationThis fascinating and highly readable book forces us to acknowledge the ways in which language is used to discriminate.

The Disappearance of Childhood


Neil Postman - 1982
    But now these divisions are eroding under the barrage of television, which turns the adult secrets of sex and violence into popular entertainment and pitches both news and advertising at the intellectual level of ten-year-olds.