Book picks similar to
Keeping Track: How Schools Structure Inequality by Jeannie Oakes
education
non-fiction
sociology
teaching
The Person You Mean to Be: How Good People Fight Bias
Dolly Chugh - 2018
But how do we stand up for those values in our turbulent world? The Person You Mean to Be is the smart, "semi-bold" person’s guide to fighting for what you believe in.Dolly reveals the surprising causes of inequality, grounded in the "psychology of good people". Using her research findings in unconscious bias as well as work across psychology, sociology, economics, political science, and other disciplines, she offers practical tools to respectfully and effectively talk politics with family, to be a better colleague to people who don’t look like you, and to avoid being a well-intentioned barrier to equality. Being the person we mean to be starts with a look at ourselves.She argues that the only way to be on the right side of history is to be a good-ish— rather than good—person. Good-ish people are always growing. Second, she helps you find your "ordinary privilege"—the part of your everyday identity you take for granted, such as race for a white person, sexual orientation for a straight person, gender for a man, or education for a college graduate. This part of your identity may bring blind spots, but it is your best tool for influencing change. Third, Dolly introduces the psychological reasons that make it hard for us to see the bias in and around us. She leads you from willful ignorance to willful awareness. Finally, she guides you on how, when, and whom, to engage (and not engage) in your workplaces, homes, and communities. Her science-based approach is a method any of us can put to use in all parts of our life.Whether you are a long-time activist or new to the fight, you can start from where you are. Through the compelling stories Dolly shares and the surprising science she reports, Dolly guides each of us closer to being the person we mean to be.
Growing Up Empty: The Hunger Epidemic in America
Loretta Schwartz-Nobel - 2002
Twenty years after Ronald Reagan declared that hunger was no longer an American problem, Schwartz-Nobel shows that hunger has reached epic proportions, running rampant through urban, rural, and suburban communities, affecting blacks, whites, Asians, Christians and Jews, and nonbelievers alike. Among the people we come to know are the new homeless. Born of the "Welfare to Work" program, these working poor have jobs but do not make enough to support their families, such as the formerly middle-class housewife reduced to stealing in order to feed her children, or the soldier fighting on our front lines while his young wife stands in bread lines and is denied benefits and baby formula at a military health clinic. With skillful investigative reporting and a novelist's humanitarian eye for detail, Schwartz-Nobel portrays a haunting reality of human suffering that need not exist. A call to action, "Growing Up Empty" is advocacy journalism at its best.
Teaching College: The Ultimate Guide to Lecturing, Presenting, and Engaging Students
Norman Eng - 2017
They aren’t engaged in class. Getting them to talk is like pulling teeth. Whatever the situation, your reality is not meeting your expectations. Change is needed. But who’s got the time? Or maybe you’re just starting out, and you want to get it right the first time. If so, Teaching College: The Ultimate Guide to Lecturing, Presenting, and Engaging Students is the blueprint. Written for early career instructors, this easy-to-implement guide teaches you to: • Think like advertisers to understand your target audience—your students • Adopt the active learning approach of the best K-12 teachers • Write a syllabus that gets noticed and read • Develop lessons that stimulate deep engagement • Create slide presentations that students can digest • Get students to do the readings, participate more, and care about your course Secrets like “focusing on students, not content” and building a “customer” profile of the class will change the way you teach. The author, Dr. Norman Eng, argues that much of these approaches and techniques have been effectively used in marketing and K-12 education, two industries that could greatly improve how college instructors teach. Find out how to hack the world of college classrooms and have your course become the standard by which all other courses will be measured against. Whether you are an adjunct, a lecturer, an assistant professor, or even a graduate assistant, pedagogical success is within your grasp.
Racial Formation in the United States: From the 1960s to the 1990s
Michael Omi - 1994
This second edition builds upon and updates Omi and Winant's groundbreaking research. In addition to a preface to the new edition, the book provides a more detailed account of the theory of racial formation processes. It includes material on the historical development of race, the question of racism, race-class-gender interrelationships, and everyday life. A final chapter updates the developments in American racial politics up to the present, focusing on such key events as the 1992 Presidential election, the Los Angeles riots, and the Clinton administration's racial politics and policies."…required reading for scholars engaged in historical, sociological, and cultural studies of race. In the new edition, the authors further develop their provocative theory of 'racial formation' and extend their political analyses into the 1990s. They introduce the concept of 'racial project', linking race as representation with race as it is embedded in the social structure." -- Angela Y. Davis
Choice Words: How Our Language Affects Children's Learning
Peter H. Johnston - 2004
Teachers create intellectual environments that produce not only technically competent students, but also caring, secure, actively literate human beings.Choice Words shows how teachers accomplish this using their most powerful teaching tool: language. Throughout, Peter Johnston provides examples of apparently ordinary words, phrases, and uses of language that are pivotal in the orchestration of the classroom. Grounded in a study by accomplished literacy teachers, the book demonstrates how the things we say (and don't say) have surprising consequences for what children learn and for who they become as literate people. Through language, children learn how to become strategic thinkers, not merely learning the literacy strategies. In addition, Johnston examines the complex learning that teachers produce in classrooms that is hard to name and thus is not recognized by tests, by policy-makers, by the general public, and often by teachers themselves, yet is vitally important.This book will be enlightening for any teacher who wishes to be more conscious of the many ways their language helps children acquire literacy skills and view the world, their peers, and themselves in new ways.
Planning Programs for Adult Learners: A Practical Guide for Educators, Trainers, and Staff Developers
Rosemary S. Caffarella - 1994
Yet the staff who set up and administer these programs often lack skills for the very task that is so critical to the success of their efforts--the planning of the programs themselves. Drawing on the tremendous success of the first edition, Planning Programs for Adult Learners, Second Edition covers the development of adult education programs in clear, specific detail. This popular guide contains information on every area of program planning for adult learners, from understanding the purpose of educational programs to obtaining suitable facilities. Thoroughly expanded and revised, the book contains a wealth of new material and examples, and features new information on incorporating technology into the development and practice of adult education programs. Educators and practitioners alike will find this guide to be an essential tool.
Troublemakers: Lessons in Freedom from Young Children at School
Carla Shalaby - 2017
Time and again, we make seemingly endless efforts to moderate, punish, and even medicate our children, when we should instead be concerned with transforming the very nature of our institutions, systems, and structures, large and small. Through delicately crafted portraits of these memorable children—Zora, Lucas, Sean, and Marcus—Troublemakers allows us to see school through the eyes of those who know firsthand what it means to be labeled a problem.From Zora’s proud individuality to Marcus’s open willfulness, from Sean’s struggle with authority to Lucas’s tenacious imagination, comes profound insight—for educators and parents alike—into how schools engender, exclude, and then try to erase trouble, right along with the young people accused of making it. And although the harsh disciplining of adolescent behavior has been called out as part of a school-to-prison pipeline, the children we meet in these pages demonstrate how a child’s path to excessive punishment and exclusion in fact begins at a much younger age.Shalaby’s empathetic, discerning, and elegant prose gives us a deeply textured look at what noncompliance signals about the environments we require students to adapt to in our schools. Both urgent and timely, this paradigm-shifting book challenges our typical expectations for young children and with principled affection reveals how these demands—despite good intentions—work to undermine the pursuit of a free and just society.
Cultural Proficiency: A Manual for School Leaders
Randall B. Lindsey - 1999
The authors meticulously provide information gathered from their experiences working with schools, educational agencies, and organizations across the United States and Canada and show how school leaders can:Gain a personal understanding of what cultural proficiency means in practice Use collaborative activities to effect change in a school Lead a learning community toward becoming a culturally proficient organization
Five Miles Away, a World Apart: One City, Two Schools, and the Story of Educational Opportunity in Modern America
James E. Ryan - 2010
Board of Education, educational opportunities remain so unequal for black and white students, not to mention poor and wealthy ones? In his important new book, Five Miles Away, A World Apart, James E. Ryan answers this question by tracing the fortunes of two schools in Richmond, Virginia--one in the city and the other in the suburbs. Ryan shows how court rulings in the 1970s, limiting the scope of desegregation, laid the groundwork for the sharp disparities between urban and suburban public schools that persist to this day. The Supreme Court, in accord with the wishes of the Nixon administration, allowed the suburbs to lock nonresidents out of their school systems. City schools, whose student bodies were becoming increasingly poor and black, simply received more funding, a measure that has proven largely ineffective, while the independence (and superiority) of suburban schools remained sacrosanct. Weaving together court opinions, social science research, and compelling interviews with students, teachers, and principals, Ryan explains why all the major education reforms since the 1970s--including school finance litigation, school choice, and the No Child Left Behind Act--have failed to bridge the gap between urban and suburban schools and have unintentionally entrenched segregation by race and class. As long as that segregation continues, Ryan forcefully argues, so too will educational inequality. Ryan closes by suggesting innovative ways to promote school integration, which would take advantage of unprecedented demographic shifts and an embrace of diversity among young adults. Exhaustively researched and elegantly written by one of the nation's leading education law scholars, Five Miles Away, A World Apart ties together, like no other book, a half-century's worth of education law and politics into a coherent, if disturbing, whole. It will be of interest to anyone who has ever wondered why our schools are so unequal and whether there is anything to be done about it.
McKeachie's Teaching Tips: Strategies, Research, and Theory for College and University Teachers
Wilbert J. McKeachie - 1953
The suggested strategies are supported by research and are grounded in enough theory to enable teachers to adapt them to their own situations. The author does not suggest a "set of recipes" to be followed mechanically, but gives teachers the tools they need to deal with the ever changing dynamics of teaching and learning.
The End of Poverty
Jeffrey D. Sachs - 2005
Sachs is renowned for his work around the globe advising economies in crisis. Now a classic of its genre, The End of Poverty distills more than thirty years of experience to offer a uniquely informed vision of the steps that can transform impoverished countries into prosperous ones. Marrying vivid storytelling with rigorous analysis, Sachs lays out a clear conceptual map of the world economy. Explaining his own work in Bolivia, Russia, India, China, and Africa, he offers an integrated set of solutions to the interwoven economic, political, environmental, and social problems that challenge the world's poorest countries. Ten years after its initial publication, The End of Poverty remains an indispensible and influential work. In this 10th anniversary edition, Sachs presents an extensive new foreword assessing the progress of the past decade, the work that remains to be done, and how each of us can help. He also looks ahead across the next fifteen years to 2030, the United Nations' target date for ending extreme poverty, offering new insights and recommendations.
Dimensions of Human Behavior: The Changing Life Course
Elizabeth D. Hutchison - 2003
It examines general patterns of human behavior in age-graded periods, sources of diversity in life course trajectories, and unique life stories. It is multidimensional in scope and current in theory and research. This completely revised second edition maintains the use of case studies to help students appreciate the diversity of life course trajectories, and all chapters have been updated to reflect social trends and new developments in theory and research. To reflect the trend toward finer gradations in life phases, this edition addresses nine age-graded periods instead of the six presented in the first edition: Conception, Pregnancy, and Birth; Infancy and Toddlerhood; Early Childhood; Middle Childhood; Adolescence; Young Adulthood; Middle Adulthood; Late Adulthood; and Very Late Adulthood. The Changing Life Course is the companion volume to Person and Environment (ISBN 0-7619-8765-7). The two volumes are also available as a Two-Volume Kit (ISBN 0-7619-8803-3). An Instructor′s Manual containing chapter summaries, suggested classroom activities and discussions, and essay and multiple choice questions is also available (ISBN: 0-7619-8804-1).
Start Where You Are, But Don’t Stay There: Understanding Diversity, Opportunity Gaps, and Teaching in Today’s Classrooms
H. Richard Milner IV - 2010
A down-to-earth book, it aims to help practitioners develop insights and skills for successfully educating diverse student bodies. The book centers on case studies that exemplify the challenges, pitfalls, and opportunities facing teachers in diverse classrooms. These case studies—of white and African American teachers working (and preparing to work) in urban and suburban settings—are presented amid more general discussions about race and teaching in contemporary schools. Informing these discussions and the cases themselves is their persistent attention to opportunity gaps that need to be fully grasped by teachers who aim to understand and promote the success of students of greatly varying backgrounds.Start Where You Are, But Don’t StayThere arises out of recent scholarship about race and education, but it is more directly inspired by the pressing need for useful and credible guidance for professional educators in diverse classrooms. It will prove indispensable to teachers, administrators, and scholars alike.
Small Teaching: Everyday Lessons from the Science of Learning
James M. Lang - 2016
But that's easier said than done. Many books about cognitive theory introduce radical but impractical theories, failing to make the connection to the classroom. In "Small Teaching, " James Lang presents a strategy for improving student learning with a series of modest but powerful changes that make a big difference-many of which can be put into practice in a single class period. These strategies are designed to bridge the chasm between primary research and the classroom environment in a way that can be implemented by any faculty in any discipline, and even integrated into pre-existing teaching techniques. Learn, for example: How does one become good at retrieving knowledge from memory? How does making predictions now help us learn in the future? How do instructors instill fixed or growth mindsets in their students?Each chapter introduces a basic concept in cognitive theory, explains when and how it should be employed, and provides firm examples of how the intervention has been or could be used in a variety of disciplines. Small teaching techniques include brief classroom or online learning activities, one-time interventions, and small modifications in course design or communication with students.
Not Light, but Fire: How to Lead Meaningful Race Conversations in the Classroom
Matthew R. Kay - 2018
In
Not Light, But Fire: How to Lead Meaningful Race Conversations in the Classroom,
Kay realizes we often never graduate to the harder conversations so in this text he offers a method for getting them right, providing candid guidance on:How to
recognize
the difference between meaningful and inconsequential race conversations.How to
build
conversational “safe spaces,” not merely declare them.How to
infuse
race conversations with urgency and purpose.How to
thrive
in the face of unexpected challenges.How administrators might
equip
teachers to thoughtfully engage in these conversations. With the right blend of reflection and humility, Kay asserts, teachers can make school one of the best venues for young people to discuss race.