New Books in 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 que...

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 f...

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 bre...

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...

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 hu...

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.

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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...

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, an...

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...

Elaine Weiss, acclaimed author of The Woman’s Hour: The Great Fight to Win the Vote, follows that magisterial work with a work of equal scholarly significance and narrative excellence, Spell Freedom: The Underground Schools That Built the Civil Rights Movement (Simon and Schuster, 2025), "the story of four activists whose audacious plan to restore voting rights to Black Americans laid the groundwork for the Civil Rights Movement."
"In the summer of 1954, educator Septima Clark and small businessman Esau Jenkins travelled to rural Tennessee’s Highlander Folk School, an interracial training center for social change founded by Myles Horton, a white...

In Unlearning the Hush: Oral Histories of Black Female Educators in Mississippi in the Civil Rights Era (University of Illinois Press, 2025), Dr. Marlee Bunch shared her research on Black female educators in Mississippi during the Civil Rights era and discussed how their experiences and wisdom continue to inform contemporary teaching practices and diversity initiatives. The conversation explored the importance of preserving and unearthing hidden histories through various forms of cultural expression, while examining the role of educators in creating inclusive learning environments. Marlee's work extends to her teaching philosophy and upcoming projects, including a National Academy of Education postdoc awa...

Doing Good Social Science: Lessons from Immersion, Understanding Social Life and Exploring the In-Between (Routledge, 2025) takes readers on a personal and thought-provoking journey and empowers readers to become unshakeable, free-thinking scholars. Drawing from nearly two decades of experience in research and mentorship, this book shares insights gained from creating 'immersive moments' to challenge conventional methodology and social theory. In doing so, it integrates ideas from classical and contemporary scholarship across various disciplines, bringing them to life through engaging field notes, interviews, and often humorous examples. The book outlines how to cultivate disciplined and systematic scholarship on complex topics while cr...

The War on Critical Race Theory: Or, The Remaking of Racism (Polity Press, 2023) by David Theo Goldberg discusses how “Critical Race Theory” is consuming conservative America. The mounting attacks on a once-obscure legal theory are upending public schooling, legislating censorship, driving elections, and cleaving communities.

In this much-needed response, renowned scholar David Theo Goldberg cuts to the heart of the claims expressed in these attacks. He punctures the demonization of Critical Race Theory, uncovering who is orchestrating it, funding the assault, and eagerly distributing the message. The book richly illustrates the enduring nature of structural racism, even as a con...

In an overloaded, superficial, technological world, in which almost everything and everybody is judged by its usefulness, where can we turn for escape, lasting pleasure, contemplation, or connection to others? While many forms of leisure meet these needs, Zena Hitz writes, few experiences are so fulfilling as the inner life, whether that of a bookworm, an amateur astronomer, a birdwatcher, or someone who takes a deep interest in one of countless other subjects. Drawing on inspiring examples, from Socrates and Augustine to Malcolm X and Elena Ferrante, and from films to Dr. Hitz’s own experiences as someone who wa...

'Art, Science, and the Politics of Knowledge (MIT Press, 2022)' by Hannah Star Rogers

When I sat down with Hannah Star Rogers to discuss her new book Art, Science, and the Politics of Knowledge, I found myself nodding along to a refreshingly obvious yet somehow radical proposition: why do we insist on keeping art and science in separate corners? Rogers makes a compelling case that this artificial boundary isn't just limiting our understanding of both fields, it's actively distorting how we think about knowledge itself.

What struck me most during our conversation was Rogers' articulation o...

African American males are confronted with formidable barriers in their pursuit of quality education, resulting in stark disparities in academic performance, economic opportunities, and social outcomes. Despite numerous educational initiatives striving for parity, African American males persistently bear the brunt of the highest rates of suspensions, expulsions, and dropout rates, surpassing all other demographic groups. Educational environments often fail to acknowledge and integrate the cultural and social needs of Black males, viewing them as "problems" rather than recognizing their immense potential for academic and leadership success. The prevalence of negative stereotypes in media, particularly in video games, exacerbates societal...

Unequal Lessons: School Diversity and Educational Inequality in New York City (NYU Press, 2025) argues that diversity and racial integration efforts are not sufficient to address educational inequality.

New York City schools are among the most segregated in the nation. Yet over seven decades after the Brown v. Board of Education decision, New Yorkers continue to argue about whether school segregation matters. Amid these debates, Alexandra Freidus dives deep into the roots of racial inequality in diversifying schools, asking how we can better understand both the opportunities and the limits of school diversity and integration. Unequal Lessons is b...

Teacher By Teacher traces the journey of the tenth U.S. Secretary of Education and is a deeply personal love letter to all the teachers in our lives. The story of John B. King Jr.’s inspiring path to President Obama’s Cabinet begins the day that his mother died. He insisted on going to school that day, knowing he would find comfort in his classroom. As he navigated living alone with a father dying from undiagnosed Alzheimer’s, it was public school teachers who saved his life, believed in him and saw his potential. They made school a safe, s...

How has evolutionary theory shaped educational thinking over the past two centuries? ‘Evolutionary Theory and Education: The Influence of Evolutionary Thinking on Educational Theory and Philosophy’ (Brill, 2025) explores the considerable but under-appreciated influence of evolutionary ideas on educational theory and the philosophy of education. The book reveals the interplay between educational and evolutionary perspectives along the concepts of ‘adaptation’, ‘selection’, ‘inheritance’, and ‘progress’. It tracks these ideas across the works of various influential educational thinkers, including Herbert Spencer, Jean Piaget, John Dewey and Lev Vygotsky, and examines their continuing significance for how we understand and practice education today.

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 Today I’m speaking with Marcus Golding, historian and Director of Educational Operations at ClioVis. ClioVis is an incredible software and learning tool that allows educators and studies to create digital timelines, network visualizations, and interactive presentations. Founded by UT Austin history professor Erika Bsumek, ClioVis is made for professors and teachers by current professors and scholars. I’m thrilled to get the chance today to speak with Marcus about this software to share with our listeners how they can enhance their own work and teaching.

Visit ClioVis' website to learn more: Click Here

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This book provides background, strategies, and tips for higher education faculty and instructors interested in incorporating meditation in their classrooms. The work is based on research involving introducing brief meditation practices to college students and developing a detailed guide. Readers will learn how to develop their own meditation practice as an academic, to set the stage of introducing practice to students, to create ideal conditions for meditation in the classroom, specific, classroom-friendly meditation methods, ways to advance meditation practice with students and keep it interesting, and how to spread the culture of meditation across campus.

Guest: Steve...

How can I help my students not only learn my course material but also retain and transfer that information? This is a question that has plagued and intrigued teachers for centuries. In Smart Teaching Stronger Learning: Practical Tips for 10 Cognitive Scientists, the authors provide their readers with evidence-based practices for immediate classroom implementation. Their premise is that small changes can lead to powerful results.

In this approachable book, each chapter is written by a cognitive scientist who is currently teaching. The chapters introduce a concept, describe how to implement the concept in your classroom, and provide multiple r...

Who are 'gifted' children? In ‘Gifted Children’ in Britain and the World: Elitism and Equality since 1945 Jennifer Crane, a senior lecturer in the School of Geographical Sciences at the University of Bristol (Oxford UP, 2025) tells the social and cultural history of this category of young people. The book charts the individuals, organisations, policymakers, and media activities that aimed to identify children as ‘gifted’, lobbying for their social status and the potential benefit they might bring to both the UK and the rest of the world. At the same time, the book critically assesses the idea of 'gifted' children being closely intert...

Teachers are subject matter experts that can distill information into manageable chunks for their students. In Write Like You Teach: Taking Your Classroom Skills to a Bigger Audience (University of Chicago Press, 2025), Dr. James M. Lang insists that the skills teachers use in their classrooms can be transferred to a broader audience. This book provides a step-by-step guide to assist would-be authors in researching and developing a book.

Teachers are familiar with creating a course syllabus and developing learning objectives. Dr. Lang posits that these skills can help create a book for audiences outside one’s subject matter...

In Learning to Lead: Undocumented Students Mobilizing Education (Duke University Press, 2024), Jennifer R. Nájera explores the intersections of education and activism among undocumented students at the University of California, Riverside. Taking an expansive view of education, Nájera shows how students’ experiences in college—both in and out of the classroom—can affect their activism and advocacy work. Students learn from their families, communities, peers, and student and political organizations. In these different spaces, they learn how to navigate community and college life as undocumented people. Students are able to engage campus organizations where they can cultivate their leadership s...

In How Schools Make Race: Teaching Latinx Racialization in America, (Harvard Education PR, 2024) Laura C. Chávez-Moreno uncovers the process through which schools implicitly and explicitly shape their students’ concept of race and the often unintentional consequences of this on educational equity. Dr. Chávez-Moreno sheds light on how the complex interactions among educational practices, policies, pedagogy, language, and societal ideas interplay to form, reinforce, and blur the boundaries of racialized groups, a dynamic which creates contradictions in classrooms and communities committed to antiracism. Dr. Chávez-Moreno urges readers to rethink race, to reconceptualize Latinx as a racialized group, and to...

In his new book, The Community College Reform Movement: Contentions and Ideological Origins (Routledge, 2025), political scientist Milton Clarke critically examines the rise of the higher education reform movement, often referred to as the “completion agenda,” which, since the early 2000s, has sought to restructure core aspects of the community college experience. Drawing on community colleges from across nine U.S. states as practical examples, this exploration examines the major higher education reforms, including dual enrollment, guided pathways, the demise of developmental education, corequisites, and performance-based funding. Against the popular view that support for such policies is tied to neoliberalism, this boo...

In The Computer Always Wins: A Playful Introduction to Algorithms through Puzzles and Strategy Games (MIT Press, 2025), Elliot Lichtman will teach you some of computer science’s most powerful concepts in a refreshingly accessible way: exploring them through word games, board games, and strategy games you already know. Learn recursion by playing tic-tac-toe, efficient search through puzzle games like sudoku and Wordle, and machine learning by way of the playground classic rock-paper-scissors. Finish the book, and you’ll come away with not only a deeper understanding of these foundational programming techniques but also a new appreciation for the amazing feats t...

Children’s picture books are some of the most transparently ideological materials available to parents and educators, and as cultural objects they are an expression of the zeitgeist of a particular era. They reveal much about the hopes, values, and aspirations of the society that produces them, as well as that society’s vision of its place in the wider world at large.
Children’s Picture Books and Contemporary Egyptian Society (AUC Press, 2025) by Dr. Yasmine Motawy examines a new wave of Egyptian picture books that was published in the current century to see how these books responded to larg...

An Abundance of Caution: American Schools, the Virus, and a Story of Bad Decisions (MIT Press, 2025) is a devastating account of the decision-making process behind one of the worst American policy failures in a century—the extended closures of public schools during the pandemic. In fascinating and meticulously reported detail, David Zweig shows how some of the most trusted members of society—from Pulitzer Prize–winning journalists to eminent health officials—repeatedly made fundamental errors in their assessment and presentation of evidence. As a result, for the first time in modern American history, millions of healthy children did not set foot i...

An interview with Jean Ryoo and Jane Margolis about Power On!

A diverse group of teenage friends learn how computing can be personally and politically empowering and why all students need access to computer science education.

This lively graphic novel follows a diverse group of teenage friends as they discover that computing can be fun, creative, and empowering. Taylor, Christine, Antonio, and Jon seem like typical young teens—they communicate via endless texting, they share jokes, they worry about starting high school, and they have each other's backs. But when a racially-biased artificial intelligence system cau...

The debate over the inclusion of gender diverse people in sport has become the latest battleground in the fight for basic human rights and equality. Trans and nonbinary people around the world are facing physical harm and violence—including death—at unprecedented rates. In Let Us Play: Winning the Battle for Gender Diverse Athletes (Beacon Press, 2025), trans athlete Harrison Browne and investigative journalist Rachel Browne reveal how the opposition towards gender diverse athletes is fueled by fear and a moral panic as opposed to facts around what makes “a level playing field.”

Interweaving Harrison’s firsthand experience as a transge...

Over the years, American colleges and universities have made various efforts to provide prisoners with access to education. However, few of these outreach programs presume that incarcerated men and women can rise to the challenge of a truly rigorous college curriculum. The Bard Prison Initiative is different.
In his book, College in Prison: Reading in an Age of Mass Incarceration (Rutgers University Press, 2017), Daniel Karpowitz chronicles how, since 2001, Bard College has provided hundreds of incarcerated men and women across the country access to a high-quality liberal arts education. Earning degrees in subjects ranging from Mandarin to advanced mathematics, gr...

Why did Scots in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries know so little about their past and even less about those who controlled their history? Is the historical narrative the only legitimate medium through which the past can be made known? Are novelists and historians as far apart as convention has it? In an age when history grounds any claims to national status, these are important questions and they have implications for how Scottish history has evolved, and how Scottish identity has been understood up to the present day.

Scottish history is not simply the distillation of Scotland’s...

Why we must rethink our residency on the planet to understand the connected challenges of tribalism, inequity, climate justice, and democracy. How can we respond to the current planetary ecological emergency? In To Know the World: A New Vision for Environmental Learning (MIT Press, 2020), Mitchell Thomashow proposes that we revitalize, revisit, and reinvigorate how we think about our residency on Earth. First, we must understand that the major challenges of our time--migration, race, inequity, climate justice, and democracy--connect to the biosphere. Traditional environmental education has accomplished much, but it has not been able to stem the inexorable decline of gl...

The Education Myth: How Human Capital Trumped Social Democracy (Cornell UP, 2023) questions the idea that education represents the best, if not the only, way for Americans to access economic opportunity. As Jon Shelton shows, linking education to economic well-being was not politically inevitable. In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, for instance, public education was championed as a way to help citizens learn how to participate in a democracy. By the 1930s, public education, along with union rights and social security, formed an important component of a broad-based fight for social democracy.

Shelton demonstrates that beginning in the 1960s...

The teaching of copyright and related concepts can easily be overwhelming to instructors who are experts in their field but may have little to no detailed understanding of copyright law. They require reliable, accessible information to coach students on copyright-related matters. 
In Teaching Copyright: Practical Lesson Ideas and Instructional Resources (Bloomsbury, 2025), Sara Wolf provides explicit guidance based on U.S. copyright law in the teaching of copyright and related concepts to learners at schools, colleges, and universities. Instructors are supported with time-saving resources such as lesson templates, scenarios, practice activities, and a downloadable test question bank.
Additionally, Bloo...

An open access Asia Shorts edited volume from AAS.

The spring of 2020 will remain etched in collective memory as a moment of profound upheaval. The COVID-19 pandemic forced schools and universities around the world to close their doors, reshaping education overnight. Teachers scrambled to reimagine their classrooms in online spaces, while students adjusted to a new, distanced reality. For educators of Asia-related topics, these shifts carried unique challenges. Already marginalized within English-speaking curricula, Asia’s place in classrooms faced further reductions amidst the chaos of pandemic adaptation. Recognizing this, our Asia Shorts volume, Teaching about Asia in...

Learn how to take an apolitical, unbiased stance to support students as they pursue research, literature connections, maker activities, and civic engagement projects in their communities, nationally, and globally. In Youth Social Action in the Library: Cultivating Change Makers (Bloombury, 2025), Gina Seymour outlines school and public library programs, activities, and collaborative projects that will help students learn how to accomplish their goals in their communities. Highlighting the role of the librarian in fostering critical thinking and problem-solving skills, the book explores controversial topics to qualify and expand best practices. By incorporating the programs in the book, librarians can help st...

Learn to facilitate modern book clubs devoted to elevating the reading experience through active engagement, resulting in long-term commitment to book club events. How do you get the kids in your library to read? The benefits of reading are plentiful, especially for youth – it improves vocabulary, helps them become more empathetic and inclusive, and expands exposure to academic opportunities. In an age of digital distractions, book clubs can be a catalyst for encouraging youth to prioritize reading. These tried and tested strategies help even reluctant readers develop a love of reading through book club participation. 

In Revolutionize Yout...