Tag: Book

  • English lessons: Review of Nick Gibb’s book on educational reform after 2010 – by HEPI Director Nick Hillman

    English lessons: Review of Nick Gibb’s book on educational reform after 2010 – by HEPI Director Nick Hillman

    • HEPI Director Nick Hillman reviews Reforming Lessons: Why English Schools Have Improved Since 2010 and How This Was Achieved by Nick Gibb and Robert Peal.
    • On Tuesday, 9 September 2025, HEPI will be hosting the launch of the OECD’s flagship Education at a Glance report. Book a place (in person or online) here.

    This is the second book on education in a row that I have reviewed on the HEPI website that comes from a right-of-centre perspective. The previous review (of a book by the President of the New College of Florida) garnered some pointed attacks underneath – ‘No doubt we’ll soon be seeing articles offering a “more balanced” perspective on Putin and Orban’s records in office’. So let me start by noting HEPI has also run many reviews (by me and others) of books written by left-of-centre authors as well as centrist authors, such as Sam Friedman and Aaron Reeve, Simon Kuper, Francis Green and David Kynaston, Melissa Benn, and Lee Elliot Major and Stephen Machin.

    Let me also note that we are always on the lookout for reviews of recent books that are likely to be of interest to HEPI’s audience, irrespective of where on the political spectrum the authors of the books in question or – indeed – the reviewers sit. When we started running book reviews on the HEPI site many years ago, they tended to receive less engagement than other output, but that has changed over the years and they are often now among our most-read pieces. We hope this remains true on our brand new website. So the door is wide open. Come on in.

    Now down to business. Reforming Lessons is a defence of the changes wrought by the long-standing and thrice-appointed Minister for Schools, Nick Gibb, and to a lesser extent his boss Michael Gove, co-written by Gibb himself. The other author is Robert Peal, who was one of a group of young state-school teachers (often, like Peal, powered by Teach First) who made up the advancing phalanx for the school reforms that were implemented by the Coalition and subsequent Conservative Governments. (John Blake, the Office for Students’s Director for Fair Access and Participation was another member of this front line and merits a mention in the book, as was Daisy Christodoulou, who has contributed a Foreword and who features multiple times.)

    At the risk of further brickbats, it would be absurd for HEPI to have ignored this particular book at this particular time, for it is currently a huge talking point among educationalists. But is not just about education; it is also a book about the practice of politics. As the authors themselves write, it is an account of ‘the virtues of a subject-specialist minister driven by conviction in a specific cause rather than personal ambition.’ It fulfils this brief very well indeed, so it should be read far beyond the education world, especially by aspiring ministers in any field where they want to make a difference. But, and I do not mean this to be in any way rude, I suspect it was not – in one important sense – all that hard for Gibb and Peal to make their case.

    This is because the key international data on school performance, which come from the OECD’s comparative PISA (the Programme for International Student Assessment), show England forging ahead, including against other parts of the UK, between 2009 and 2022. So Gibb and Peal had a secure evidence base on which to build their story.

    We may argue that PISA is not a perfect measure: it tests only a small number of disciplinary areas and to a fairly basic level of knowledge and it has not always been completed the same way (sometimes on paper and sometimes on screen), but it is better than anything else we have when it comes to comparing school systems – and infinitely better than anything we have in higher education. So anyone who wants to shoot down the book’s central claim that Nick Gibb succeeded as a Minister will struggle to find equally robust performance data for their argument – though they could presumably focus on other evidence such as on an apparent narrowing of the curriculum (though Gibb and Peal get their defence on this in first – see pages 123 and 124).

    Near the start, the book takes a look at how any education changes begun in 2010 had to be extremely cost-effective – cost-cutting or else free – given the dire fiscal position which led every major political party to promise drastic spending cuts at that year’s general election. Gibb and Peal also paint a picture of the ineffectiveness and wastefulness of the expensive centralised initiatives based on existing orthodoxies that preceded the Coalition. The multi-billion pound Building Schools for the Future programme was perhaps the archetype for, as Gibb shows, tens of millions of pounds were spent on building individual schools with open-plan classrooms where staff struggled to teach and pupils struggled to learn. Another challenge during the 2000s is that schools were overwhelmed with bureaucracy: in 2006/07 alone, we are told, there were around 760 missives to schools from Whitehall and quangos – four-per-day for the whole school year.

    Yet Nick Gibb is far from being a free-for-all libertarian right-winger. He is, rather, someone who wants to use the power of the state to drive policy, including how to teach reading (synthetic phonics) as well as how to shape other aspects of the school curriculum. It is easy to see how this approach could have gone wrong but Gibb’s primary goal is always to follow the evidence as he sees it, and I cannot be the only parent who was amazed by how quickly their children started to read during their initial school years in the second half of the 2010s. Gibb has given more thought to schooling than any other modern politician and he rejects many of the ideas of his colleagues as much as those from the political left: he did not favour a wave of new grammar schools, he did not want GCSEs to be replaced by O-Levels and he opposed Rishi Sunak’s Advanced British Standard.

    The book might begin and end somewhat immodestly and uncollegiately by reminding readers that many commentators picked out education as the one and only really big success of the Coalition and Conservative years, yet this is not by any stretch of the imagination a selfish book. Nick Gibb shows how his worldview was built upon teachers like Ruth Miskin, academics like ED Hirsch and others – even his researcher Edward Hartman gets a namecheck (or rather two) for introducing him to Hirsch. He shows how his agenda was carried forward by people like Hamid Patel, Katharine Birbalsingh and Jon Coles.

    Political colleagues like Michael Gove and David Cameron are given credit for changing Whitehall’s approach to schooling. The triumvirate of advisers, Dominic Cummins, Sam Freedman and Henry de Zoete all receive praise, as does Nick Timothy for his stint in Number 10 as Theresa May’s Joint Chief of Staff. Andrew Adonis garners the most praise of all for starting ‘the revolution we undertook whilst in office’, and Kenneth Baker is lauded for getting the successful City Technology Colleges (the forerunners of academies) off the ground in the 1980s. Gibb and Peal note there have been ‘squabbles’ between Conservatives and Lib Dems over who designed the Pupil Premium policy but they do not join in, concluding instead that ‘we should celebrate that it was jointly pursued and agreed upon by the Treasury’.

    There is high praise even for the man who temporarily displaced Gibb as the Minister for Schools, David Laws, especially for the design of the school accountability measure Progress 8 as well as for Lord Nash, who oversaw academies and free schools from the House of Lords. Gibb admits he did not agree with Nicky Morgan, who replaced Michael Gove as the Secretary of State for Education in 2014, on pushing ‘character education’ as a discrete concept but he excuses her on the grounds that ‘she had been transferred to Education from the Treasury with no notice, so never had the luxury of time I had enjoyed to read up on education philosophies.’

    The tales from Gibb’s period as a backbench MP and then Shadow Minister also remind us that the most effective Ministers have typically learnt their briefs in the years before they take office rather than on the job. They then stay in post long enough to make a difference (or, in Gibb’s case, do the job more than once). Even for bold reforming ministers, like Gibb and Gove, good policy tends to be patient policy. In contrast, many of Gibb’s predecessors as the Minister for Schools (who include the current Minister for Skills, Jacqui Smith, who did the job in 2005 to 2006) were not in post for long enough to make a major sort of difference. Gibb’s account of his time in office also serves to remind us that it is wrong to think effective ministers must have worked in the field they are overseeing before entering Parliament: Gibb was an accountant, not a teacher, just like David Willetts, the well-respected Minister for Universities and Science during the Coalition, was a civil servant rather than an academic or scientist.

    The book is peppered by illustrative and illuminating anecdotes. The one I found most shocking is about a visit Nick Gibb made in the mid-1990s to a school in Rotherham, where he was fighting a by-election: a headteacher ‘explained how she had completed an “audit” of her school library, removing any old-fashioned books that simply conveyed information.’ (A few years later, Tory party HQ abolished their library altogether, so it was not just schools that fell down this hole.) The second most shocking anecdote, at least to me, concerns the first draft of the rewritten National Curriculum for primary schools: ‘when the first draft of the curriculum was sent out for informal consultation amongst maths subject associations, it returned with all 64 mentions of the word “practice” expunged from the document.’ The funniest anecdote is one about Gibb visiting a successful academy that had converted from being an independent school: ‘On my train up to Yorkshire, I saw a pupil’s tweet expressing disappointment to find out the politician visiting her school was not Nick Clegg, as she had been led to believe, but instead “some random” called Nick Gibb.’

    Personally, I dislike the language used by those who talk of an educational ‘blob’, not least because it paints all educationalists in the same negative light. Gibb dislikes the term too, and he was uncomfortable with his political colleagues throwing it about. He is pro-teachers and there were always some classroom teachers who held out against the knowledge-light ‘progressivist ideology’ even at its height. Gibb’s reforms were designed to dilute the educational orthodoxy of unions and quangos and to give power to trusted headteachers as well as to multi-academy trusts instead – the mantra was ‘high autonomy and high accountability’. His core goals were to find the best resources and teachers, then to free school leaders to make the biggest differences they could and finally to encourage others to emulate them, especially via high-performing multi-academy trusts. If Blair’s mantra was ‘education, education, education’, Gibb’s was ’emulation, emulation, emulation’.

    But while rejecting the ‘blob’ term, the book does help one to understand how the moniker came to gain such currency. Gibb tells a story, for example, of how, as an MP and a member of the Education Select Committee, he was summoned to the ‘salubrious offices in Piccadilly’ of the Qualification and Curriculum Authority. Once there, the Chief Executive and Chairman demanded Gibb stop asking parliamentary questions about their work. It was an error of immense proportions – perhaps if they had known Gibb had circulated anti-communist propaganda in Brezhnev’s Russia, they would have had a better idea of how tough he is under the polite demeanour. Either way, the scenario served to remind Gibb not to back down in battles once he became a minister.

    One surprise in the book is the degree to which Gibb thinks his reforms have deep roots and are here to stay. He makes a persuasive case for this, especially in the Conclusion, when he notes how embedded and successful some multi-academy trusts now are. Yet his book also recounts how Scotland and Wales have in recent years moved in the opposite direction to England, downplaying knowledge in their school curricula (and suffering the consequences in international comparisons). So one-way travel is surely not guaranteed.

    Keith Joseph talked of a ‘ratchet effect’ in British politics and it might be too early to tell if the Gibb / Gove reforms are locked in or whether the pendulum could now swing back. What I saw after the 2024 general election from my vantage point of being a long-standing Board member of the National Foundation for Educational Research (NFER) gives me less confidence that educational policy is now settled. Despite Gibb’s belief his reforms will last, even he notes in passing the recent attempt to water down the freedoms enjoyed by academies. What is taught in schools, and how, will surely continue to be fervently debated and it is why HEPI has sought to focus minds in higher education on the important Curriculum and Assessment Review under Professor Becky Francis.

    The book is all about the pipeline to higher education but it is not really about higher education except near the end, where the authors take a look at teacher training. Those running university education departments were among the people who did not take Nick Gibb seriously while in Opposition or in Government and they too paid the price for it:

    ‘Of all the different sectors of the education establishment, university education faculties were – by a stretch – the most difficult with which to work. … the main message I received whenever I visited university education faculties was, as Jim Callaghan had been told 40 years previously, “keep off the grass”. Meetings I had usually consisted of being talked at for 90 minutes in a boardroom with no appetite or opportunity for discussion. If I, as a minister, showed any interest in what they thought, they would mistily invoke the virtues of “academic independence”, and insist the government had no place stepping on their hallowed turf.’

    At the very end of the book, Gibb bemoans the fact that, when it comes to ‘the evidence revolution in English education’, ‘university education faculties have been – with one or two exceptions – notable only by their absence’. And when it comes specifically to school teaching, Gibb regards universities as part of the problem rather than the solution. (So perhaps we should not be surprised that Gibb and Peal do not mention the short-lived attempt by Theresa May’s Government to get universities to sponsor academies.) As Universities UK prepare to release new research on public perceptions of higher education institutions, I was left wondering whether there might be lessons for how the higher education sector can best engage with Ministers and officials. 

    While Twitter / X may often be a sewer today, Gibb argues that various education bloggers and tweeters (often from the political left) played a vital role in shoring up his reforms, for example in helping Michael Wilshaw sort out Ofsted, who we are told ‘succeeded where Chris Woodhead could not.’ Gibb may point the finger of blame at those who pushed the ‘progressivist ideology’ that he has fought against but when it comes to A-Level grade inflation, for example, he does not limit his criticism to the Blair / Brown Governments, also complaining about his Conservative predecessors. Yet despite the ferocious attacks he was subjected to as a Minister, Gibb does not respond in kind, confident instead that his policies rested on evidence from the UK and overseas rather than polemic.

    This is a lengthy book and a very very good one, though it does not stop me wanting to know more about what Gibb thinks in one or two areas. For example, we surely do not talk enough about demographics in education. Yet it was the growing number of young people that was part of the reason why the Treasury and others accepted lots of brand new schools called ‘free schools’, just as it was the falling number of school leavers prior to 2020 which helped persuade the Treasury to remove student number caps for undergraduates in England. Gibb does acknowledge the impact of changes to the birth rate in boosting his agenda, but personally I would like to have read more than the single paragraph on page 155 about it.

    Churchill is said to have remarked, ‘history will be kind to me, for I intend to write it’. I kept thinking of this as I was reading the book, so it is perhaps too much to expect a deep dive into educational areas that the Conservatives failed to fix in their 14 years in charge. For me, these are: the educational underperformance of boys relative to girls, which does not merit any specific mentions; the current crisis in the supply of new teachers, which gets less than a page of dedicated text; and post-COVID truancy rates, which gets a paragraph and a couple of other fleeting mentions. But Nick Gibb is, and will rightly remain, one of the most important Ministers of recent decades – and to think he never even made it into the Cabinet.

    Source link

  • FIRE statement on Iowa’s book ban

    FIRE statement on Iowa’s book ban

    On May 26, 2023, Iowa Gov. Kim Reynolds signed into law Senate File 496, which requires the removal of book depicting “sex acts” from school libraries and classrooms. A federal judge initially blocked the law, citing potential unconstitutional application and the removal of books with “undeniable political, artistic, literary, and/or scientific value.” However, an appeals court later overturned the block.

    The following statement is from FIRE attorney Greg Greubel.

    Last Friday, FIRE filed a friend-of-the-court brief in the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Eighth Circuit in Penguin Random House LLC v. Robbins, a case challenging Iowa’s sweeping book ban law, SF496. The law, passed in May 2023, banned public schools from carrying any books that depict a “sex act,” which was broadly defined.

    Our brief urges the court to affirm the district court’s order blocking enforcement of the law, which has already forced school districts to purge hundreds of books from library shelves — including classics by George Orwell, Walt Whitman, and William Faulkner — simply because their works contain passages that fall under the law’s broad definition of a “sex act.” The law imposes harsh penalties on educators who fail to comply, threatening not only their jobs but also their professional licenses.

    FIRE argues that Iowa’s law ignores centuries of hard-won lessons about the value of free expression and the dangers of government censorship. We explain that public-school libraries are not instruments of government speech, but unique institutions that serve as repositories of knowledge and forums for intellectual exploration. Attempts to impose top-down, politically motivated control over their collections violate students’ First Amendment right to access information.

    FIRE is proud to stand in support of students, educators, and authors. The government should not have the power to dictate which ideas are permissible in school libraries — especially not through the blunt force of censorship.

    You can read our full amicus brief here.

    Source link

  • At the library you can take out a book … or dissect a body?

    At the library you can take out a book … or dissect a body?

    When Janet Calderon first visited the X̱wi7x̱wa Library in Vancouver, Canada it was different than anything she had ever seen before. It is the only Indigenous branch of an academic library in all of Canada. Pronounced “whei-wha,” its name is from the language of the Squamish people who have inhabited the region for thousands of years. 

    Calderon is a humanities librarian at Reed College near Portland in the U.S. state of Oregon and earned a master’s degree in Library & Information Studies from the University of British Columbia in Canada, which oversees the X̱wi7x̱wa Library. Experiencing this library was transformational in many ways for Calderon.

    “Everything about how this knowledge is put together reflects a unique perspective,” Calderon said. 

    The X̱wi7x̱wa Library is one of many examples from around the world of the transformation of libraries from collections of books to comprehensive learning centers and hubs for diverse communities. 

    British Columbia, where this library is located, has an Indigenous population of nearly 300,000 people, which is approximately 5.9% of the province’s overall population. The library embeds Indigenous knowledge in everything, from the use of Indigenous terms in its classification system to a building design that represents a pit house of the Interior Salish people.

    Hubs of enlightenment

    Libraries have a rich history of serving as gathering spaces. Early libraries, such as the Library of Alexandria in Egypt and Bayt al-Hikmah (House of Wisdom) in Iraq, were hubs for knowledge and enlightenment that attracted scholars from near and far. 

    Libraries today continue to serve as gathering places for communities by fostering the exchange of information and ideas. Many libraries are modifying their spaces so that they can be meeting places, information centers or culture centers, or serve other purposes for members of a given community. Depending on where you live, how a library chooses to configure its spaces and for what purposes can vary widely.

    Libraries across Kenya, for example, promote environmental sustainability through efforts such as adopting green building standards and by housing atriums within the library, as well as installing green roofs on top of the building itself.

    In Shanghai, China, a city known for strong ties to business and the global economy, public libraries serve different demographics such as the elderly, homeless and students by providing them space and access to information and resources that help them meet specific needs, such as applying for jobs.   

    In Santa Clara, Cuba, the central patio and surrounding spaces of the Marti Provincial Library were renovated. As a result, the Library is now able to host motivational and cultural activities, as well as events that meet specific needs such as workshops on job skills.

    The public library in Umeå, Sweden is housed within the Väven Cultural Center, which enables library visitors to check out books, tour the Women’s History Museum, watch a film in a theater and more, all under the same roof.

    Reassessing how space is used

    At my library at the California State Polytechnic University, Humboldt in California, visitors to the Hall of Simulation can use a flight simulator, digitally dissect an animal or cadaver and simulate wildfires, an annual problem in the state. The library’s spaces also host student-centered workshops, research symposiums and events, including an annual celebration of campus and community authors.

    Transformations at the Cal Poly Humboldt Library have been aided through the development of SpaceUse, software that enables the library to track and analyze how its spaces are utilized by patrons. For many library workers, changing and adapting existing library spaces allows them to reimagine how a library can serve its community.  

    Michell Hackwelder, the interpretation unit head at the Education & Outreach Department for the Abu Dhabi Department of Culture and Tourism in the United Arab Emirates, helped renovate libraries used by international peacekeeping forces in Egypt to create community hubs for the many people who came there for recreational activities and to find a quiet space. 

    Hackwelder has spent over 40 years in the library field and has helped guide many library transformations across the Middle East and North Africa. This includes creating maker spaces and programming areas for afterschool and computer and sciences programs at elementary schools in Saudi Arabia and upgrading the early childhood and technology areas at the Abu Dhabi Children’s Library. 

    Hackwelder said that people in the community get excited about the space transformations and more people from different demographics end up using the library.

    Some people miss the stacks.

    It should be noted that changes to library spaces are not without some controversy. Libraries have limited space to work with, so decisions about what to change can be difficult to navigate. Younger people who grow up in a digital world might not connect to books the way older generations did. However, the removal of books and shelves to make room for new spaces can anger the many book lovers who rely on libraries.

    As communities and societies change, libraries will be expected to do the same. 

    Samantha Mendiola is an architect at HGA that focuses on library design. Mendiola has worked on several library redesigns across the United States, from a high school library in Massachusetts to college libraries in Minnesota.  

    Mendiola said that many of the libraries she has worked with are focusing on renovations with existing spaces to better serve changing community demographics and technology needs while also fostering community engagement and accommodating diverse learning styles. 

    “Libraries have always been adaptable and they’re evolving even faster now, post-pandemic, to meet new expectations,” Mendiola said.

     

    Questions to consider:

    1. In what ways are libraries adapting to meet the needs of the people they serve?

    2, What is the primary role of a library?

    3. If you were to create a new library in your town, what would you want it to have?

     

    Source link

  • New book argues child care is a ‘societal imperative’

    New book argues child care is a ‘societal imperative’

    The other day, I came across an article about child care that felt so familiar I let out an exasperated sigh. Child care, the article announced, is now more expensive than college tuition and rent in most states. Many of us had just read another version of the article in March. And before that, in November 2024. Then there’s the one that dates back a little further — to 2013. 

    Many of these stories, which seem to come out on an annual basis, fail to mention that this is a problem that spans decades. The real news is that it hasn’t gotten any better, and many American lawmakers don’t seem to care enough to take action. 

    I asked Elliot Haspel his thoughts on this a few weeks ago when I interviewed him about his new book, “Raising a Nation,” which will be available Aug. 11. In the book, he presents 10 arguments — some of them well known and others less intuitive — for why child care needs to be a more supported part of American society. His book starts with an anecdote that echoes my observation on the dispiriting lack of momentum around the issue: In 1998, President William Jefferson Clinton stood in the Rose Garden and declared in an address that child care was essential to the nation’s economy. President Barack Obama made the same argument in 2015. President Donald Trump did the same in 2019. Yet as the years go by, little changes.

    “We have been having many of the same child care battles for a long time, for decades and decades and decades,” Haspel told me.

    Haspel’s arguments in “Raising a Nation” include “The Economic Case,” where he digs into how child care affects business productivity and the labor force; and the “The Patriotic Case,” where he presents parenthood as patriotic and argues child care is important for American democracy.

    He cites numerous worrisome examples of the consequences of insufficient policy and investment. In making “The Community Case,” for instance, he tells a jarring story from Montrose, Colorado, where the lack of child care has led to difficulties recruiting and retaining police officers. That, in turn, negatively affects the city’s crime rate and response time to emergency calls. And in arguing “The Antipoverty Case,” he highlights extensive research on how a lack of child care is a key theme for families who are unable to move out of poverty.  

    “Care is, in fact, just as important to our social infrastructure as having a public education system, having public libraries, having public parks,” he told me.

    As he writes, it’s clear why we haven’t made much progress as a nation, and why we remain behind nearly every other wealthy country in investing in child care: “We have never established that good child care belongs among the pantheon of American values.” 

    While Haspel’s book focuses more on why we need more robust child care policy than how we get there, he provides a few ideas for the latter: giving child care educators a wage that could support their own families, investing in stay-at-home parents and informal caregivers along with licensed care, and including before- and after-school care and summer care in the system. While those seem like lofty goals, Haspel argues it is indeed fully “American” to embrace such policies. Access to high-quality child care, he argues, is not an “individual family obligation but rather a societal imperative.”

    Contact staff writer Jackie Mader at 212-678-3562 or [email protected]. 

    This story about child care was produced by The Hechinger Report, a nonprofit, independent news organization focused on inequality and innovation in education. Sign up for the Hechinger newsletter.

    The Hechinger Report provides in-depth, fact-based, unbiased reporting on education that is free to all readers. But that doesn’t mean it’s free to produce. Our work keeps educators and the public informed about pressing issues at schools and on campuses throughout the country. We tell the whole story, even when the details are inconvenient. Help us keep doing that.

    Join us today.

    Source link

  • Book Report Summer 2025 | HESA

    Book Report Summer 2025 | HESA

    Morning everyone.  The days are getting long, so that means it’s getting close to the time when I need to wrap up this blog for the (northern hemisphere) summer.  And that, in turn, means book report time, where I round up everything I’ve read on higher education for the past six months.

    (If you’re looking for non-higher education recommendations: Terry David Martin’s The Affirmative Action Empire: Nations and Nationalism in the Soviet Union 1923-1939 will re-wire your thinking about what the early Stalinism actually looked like, and Ashoka Mody’s India is Broken will probably do the same for post-Independence India.  Can’t give you much on the fiction side because most of what I have read is pretty meh, but if you’re into the detective genre, I can recommend Inspector Imanishi Investigates by Seicho Matsumoto.  Not quite as good as his earlier Tokyo Express – which is the most brilliant novel-length thriller based on train timetables ever written – but still pretty good.)

    Let’s start with institutional histories, of which I read two: A European University: The University of Helsinki 1640-2010 and A History of Temple University Japan: An Experiment in International Education.  The first is an absolute doorstopper (over 800 pages – down from about 1500 in the original Finnish) but from a scholarly perspective it is genuinely top-notch.  Because fundamentally it is not just a history of the university, but an intellectual history of the country as a whole.  In that sense, it recalls my favourite book of last year Université de Montréal: une historie urbaine et internationale, but also to some extent Martin Friedland’s history of the University of Toronto.  The Temple Japan was also pretty interesting.  Branch campuses don’t often get their own histories, and this one is a doozy: a roller-coaster story which shows exactly how hard it is to lay down roots in a country where you don’t really speak the language, where government is mostly hostile, and your partners – even where they are legitimate (which not all of Temple’s were) – don’t always have similar goals in mind.  Great stuff.

    Searching for Utopia: Universities and Their Histories by Hanna Holborn Grey is a good short book with a misleading title.  It’s not actually about the histories of the American university, but a history of the ideas that animate them and how these ideas echo across a century or more, animated for the most part by the words of Robert Hutchins (U Chicago) and Clark Kerr (U California). 

    I was in Japan for a bit back in March, and so decided to pick up Shigeru Nakayama’s Science, Technology and Society in Postwar Japan. It’s at least 25 years out of date but it is a pretty interesting read as a kind of pre-history of the modern Japanese scientific enterprise and helpful to understand why university science is such a small part of the overall equation.  I also read Grant Black’s Education Reform Policy at a Japanese Super Global University, a book about Tsukubu U, from Routledge.  It reads like a Master’s thesis and is mostly pretty banal, but it does have just enough interesting nuggets about how top-tier institutions in Japan are re-imagining their offerings in the early twenty-first century to make it worth a skim at least.

    Two books I read focusing specifically on American university finances were Let Colleges Fail: The Power of Creative Destruction in Higher Education by Richard K. Vedder and Joshua Travis Brown’s Capitalizing on College: How Higher Education Went from Mission-Driven to Margin-Obsessed.  You can skip the Vedder book; over his career he has written a lot of useful stuff about college cost structures but now in his 80s this (apparently) farewell book contains far too much “colleges are woke so fuck ‘em” for my taste.  Capitalizing on College is a lot more interesting, containing as it does eight case studies of religious colleges and how the various financial strategies they have adopted to stave off financial decline have worked out.  The answer – mostly pretty badly except for the one who traded God for Mammon – might not sound riveting or surprising, but the routes that each institution takes towards the bottom of the canyon are varied and collectively tell a pretty interesting story, all of which come down to “nobody really wants to pay for higher education”.  Thought-provoking even if it is 50-100 pages longer than it needed to be and is too casual with use of the term “neoliberal”.

    Sticking with the theme of books with lots of institutional case studies, I also polished off two books that are heavy on case studies: Inside College Mergers: Stories From the Front Lines (Mark La Brance, editor) and Strategic Mergers in Higher Education by Ricardo Azziz, Guilbert Henschke, Lloyd Jacobs and Sonita Jacobs.  The former is seven first-person accounts of mergers, some of which worked and some of which didn’t (which is great because failure cases are always underexplored in the literature), while the latter is a more analytical look at university mergers over time.  The latter is arguably the more significant book both because of its attempts at theory-building (its typology of mergers is particularly helpful, I think) and because in many ways its checklists of how to run a merger right are actually applicable to all universities at all times!  Its inclusion of European and Canadian experiences are commendable, even if they get some of the details wrong and is awkwardly-placed in a book which is fundamentally America-focused.  Two thumbs up anyway.

    Tenure Tracks in European Universities, (free download at the link) is a collection of essays edited by Elias Pekkola and Taru Siekkinen.  Following the introduction of global rankings, there was a widespread desire to copy this North American invention partly in order to incentivize greater productivity, but also to make researcher careers more attractive to international scholars (broadly speaking, the old European systems were nicer to early career academics and much harder on mid-career academics than the North American system).    Generally speaking, tenure never replaced the old hierarchy but rather now sits uneasily beside it, but the specific manner in which reform was implemented differed from place to place, and this book is a very helpful overview.

    Two books on UK higher education to look out for.  The first was The Secret Lecturer by…well, it’s a secret (the idea is a play on a series of articles and books in the Guardian called The Secret Footballer, in which a professional talked a lot about what goes on behind the scenes on a professional soccer team…the footballer was never named but most people think it was Dave Kitson).  It was interesting in many ways, showing what day-to-day life in a UK university looks like, and it is in many ways very disappointing.  It’s a bit blighted by the lecturer’s insistence on centering his own views about the relationship between universities and the arms trade, but that’s a minor quibble: I sure would like a Canadian equivalent.  The second was Higher Imagination: A Future for Universities by British/Australian policy wonk Ant Bagshaw, which was…intriguing.  Some bits of it will probably enrage a lot of faculty – in particular the bits about being relentlessly focused on programs as “products”, but the bits stressing that one of the key outputs of universities should be “joy” are pretty original (and, IMHO, true, even if it would be madness for any institution to say stuff like this out loud).

    Education, Skills and Technical Change: Implications for Future US GDP Growth is a book I should have read when it came out a few years ago.  It’s a series of quite technical economic papers from some of the biggest names in US economics, not about higher education itself, for the most part, but mostly about returns to skills.  Of the two which are more specifically about institutional production functions, the one by Caroline Hoxby is interesting, the other one, about the rise in college costs, is garbage (as the article’s discussant in the book, Sandy Baum, ably points out).  It’s one of those books where you don’t necessarily need to buy all the results, or believe that the results hold outside the United States, but you do just sort of stand slack-jawed in wonder at how many different ways they have to analyze a problem thanks to a system of economic and institutional data collection which doesn’t suck the way Canada’s does.

    The Promise of Higher Education: Essays in Honour of 70 Years of the International Association of Universities: (also availableas a free download here) is a boatload of short ideas on the idea of higher education written on the occasion of the International Association of Universities.  Most of the individual articles are forgettable – the way to best experience this book is as a kind of mood music in favour of higher education’s greatest kumbaya themes.  But a couple are superb: in particular Simon Marginson and Lili Yang’s dissection of Chinese versus Western conceptions of institutional autonomy, as well as Pedro Teixera and Manja Klemencic’s article on the Civic Role of universities (also of interest is Daniel Levy’s screed against management-led institutional activism, which might be the politest and most substantive critique of institutional DEI approaches ever written). 

    The Learning-Centered University, whose author Steven Mintz I interviewed back here, is a book that was somewhat let down by poor editing.  The subject is interesting and Mintz is well-informed on the subject, but while the material is good, it’s presented in a somewhat disorganized fashion, which undermines the point a bit.  Knowledge Towns: Colleges and Universities as Talent Magnets, by David Staley and Dominic Endicottis…almost interesting.  That is to say: it has an interesting thesis about how cities can use educational institutions to re-define themselves, especially in periods of demographic change, but it is marred by some wishful thinking about the flexibility of institutional forms and a bunch of wishful thinking about things like “micro-colleges”.  Finally, there was Polarized by Degrees: How the Diploma Divide and the Culture War Transformed American Politics by Matt Grossman and David Hopkins, which is probably of more interest to political scientists studying voting patterns than it is to educationists trying to work out how to de-polarize the sector in the current environment of wild right-wing vandalism.

    On the subject of science more generally, I read Science of Science by Alexander Krauss (open access version available here), which is an interesting approach to the subject without being anywhere near as revolutionary as the author claims.  His central insight, though – that the history of science is to a very large extent a history of methodologies and the measurement tools that permit new methodologies to sprout – is pretty interesting and I am looking forward to the companion volume coming out later this year called The Motor of Scientific Discovery.  In the history of science category, I also picked up Scientific Babel: the Language of Science from the Fall of Latin to the Rise of English  by Michael Gordin which is about how over the course of two centuries English won out over German, French, Russian and a plethora of constructed languages like Volapuk, Esperanto and Ido (many of which, to my surprise, were actually constructed with the specific intention of being languages for the transmission of sciences) to become the lingua franca of sciences.  It’s terrific and I heartily endorse it.

    I think that’s it.  Hope you get some good reading this summer and if you find anything you think I need to read, drop me a line!

    Source link

  • New Book Helps Academics Become Public Writers

    New Book Helps Academics Become Public Writers

    I’d be hard-pressed to find any person in higher ed who has had a larger influence on my own thinking than James Lang. Many folks will know Jim from his books like Cheating Lessons, Small Teaching and Distracted. He’s consistently ahead of the curve when it comes to identifying a problem in teaching and learning spaces—academic dishonesty, class disengagement, student attention problems—and proposing remedies that instructors can explore and make use of for themselves.

    His new book, Write Like You Teach: Taking Your Classroom Skills to a Bigger Audience, part of the University of Chicago Press series of guides to writing, editing and publishing, is the best book I’ve ever seen for showing academics how to translate their current skills and practices to another audience and purpose. I’m excited by this book because we need as many academics as possible putting their voices into the world, not just because they have so many interesting and worthwhile things to say as individuals, but because it also helps remind everyone about the value of institutions where this kind of work happens.

    I had a great time talking to Jim over email. This Q&A even breaks some news on Jim’s next book, too.

    Jim Lang is a professor of the practice at the Kaneb Center for Teaching Excellence at the University of Notre Dame, and an emeritus professor of English at Assumption University. He’s the author of multiple books, including Small Teaching and Distracted, and a longtime columnist for The Chronicle of Higher Education. You can follow him on Substack at A General Education or connect with him on LinkedIn.  

    John Warner: One of my favorite initial questions for people who write is if they enjoy writing. So that’s my question: Do you enjoy writing?

    James Lang: “Enjoyment” doesn’t seem like the right word for my feelings about writing. Writing has always been the activity that drives and gives meaning to my life. It helps me make sense of the world; if I have deep questions about the purpose of my life, or questions about anything important, I seek answers through writing, both within my published work and in my various notebooks. I have always been a very curious person who gets excited about learning new things, so writing has always been a way to satisfy those curiosities and push me into new places in my life.

    If I focus specifically on the emotion of enjoyment … I hate to admit it, but I don’t seem to enjoy the actual writing process quite as much as I used to. I think I had a more unreserved embrace of writing when I was younger, when I felt like I had a lot to say and was confident that I had the ability to say it. I think both of those feelings have diminished, which I attribute in equal parts to the stroke I had a few years ago and to my age. I had to learn to speak and write again after my stroke, and while I have regained all of the words and writing skills I had before, I have to work a little harder than I used to [to] call them up and apply them. But even beyond the stroke, I guess I feel less of a desire to announce my ideas confidently to the world than I once felt. I have a great family, lots of friends and ongoing interests in many areas of my life. As my appreciation for those things has increased, the available real estate in the enjoyment part of my brain has shrunk slightly.

    But the key word in that sentence is “slightly.” I do still take much pleasure from finding the perfect word, crafting a great sentence or launching a new essay or book. Writing still fills my life with meaning, and I could never envision my life without writing, or at least the desire to write, being part of who I am.

    Q: What you describe sounds a bit like a winding down or maybe a shift in focus? I often say about myself that I’m never going to retire because I can’t imagine not reading and writing, which is both my pleasure and my work. But I do sometimes wonder if there’s a space to do less of it, if that makes sense. But as you note, it seems impossible to shut off that curiosity that drives those activities.

    Where does that curiosity come from for you? You’ve had a varied career and it seems like every so often you shifted gears. Was that necessity or design or something else?

    A: It comes from both a negative and a positive place. The negative place is that I do get bored of routines in any form, and when I feel like my life has fallen into a routine place, I start getting this itch to break it. I received tenure in the usual time frame, and it was only a couple of years after that I was seeking a new challenge, so I applied to direct our honors program. I enjoyed that work tremendously, but then once again sought a change and founded a new teaching center on campus. Right after the pandemic, based on the success of Small Teaching and Distracted, I decided to give myself a new challenge: give up tenure and try to make it with a mix of writing, speaking and adjunct teaching. That plan was upended by my long medical ordeal, but even after I was able to return to that life, I realized that I missed deeply having a home on a campus, which led me to Notre Dame. So that has definitely been a pattern in my career and in my life.

    For the positive explanation for this restlessness, I would point to something my wife (an elementary school teacher) told me about the kids who come into her classrooms each year. She says that while we might be all born curious, by the time children get into school, they are already separating in terms of how much curiosity they bring to school. The differentiating factor she sees is how much exposure kids have to different kinds of life experiences. The kids who sit in their bedroom on their parents’ tablets all day or play video games in their rooms just don’t see as much of the world, and they aren’t being prompted to ask questions, wonder and explore. The ones who come in curious are the ones whose parents have deliberately tried to expose them to new things in some form—trips, walks outside, reading aloud, giving them books, etc.

    When I heard that, I realized that I had been raised as one of those latter kids. My mother was also an elementary school teacher, but her best years were in preschool. She had a special love, and special gift, for very young children. And while I have only a few memories of my preschool years, I know from seeing how she interacted with my children that I must have been raised to become a curious person.

    Q: I had a mini epiphany while reading the opening section of Write Like You Teach, which is that good teachers and good writers think of the needs of their audience (students/readers) first. This is something I think I’ve always done as a teacher, perhaps because I was a writer before I was a teacher, but you make it pretty explicit and then give it a little specific flesh. When did this connection first come to you?

    A: I actually can’t quite remember where that specific connection came from. I do know that this book really came out of my desire to write some more about attention, the subject of my previous book. I have written books about several major issues in teaching and learning, and some of them I finished and felt like I was done with that topic. That wasn’t true for attention. The more you read and learn about attention, the more you realize how it has a part in almost everything that matters in our lives. Work, play, relationships, spirituality, learning—all of them demand our attention. They often go well or poorly depending upon the quality of our attention. And so I still find attention fascinating, and I keep reading and thinking and writing about it. I also just really enjoyed writing the book Distracted. So I think maybe I was trying to determine what else I could write about attention which would relate to another area where I have some interest and expertise.

    Reading was the initial bridge to further thinking about attention. Anyone who reads a lot knows that some books capture our attention more than others. I think the teaching-writing connection that produced this book came from realizing both in classrooms and books, you have to be aware of the limits of a learner’s attention. Both as teachers and writers, we can either just expect people to pay attention or we can try to help them. I had made the case for the latter approach in Distracted and realized I could make the same case to writers: If you want readers to sustain their attention over the course of many pages, don’t just bang away at them with paragraph after paragraph of argument and idea. They need breaks, they need stories, they need space to pause and think—just as students do in the classroom. Seeing how attention informs both teaching and writing led to the basic idea of the book: The things we do in the classroom to help students learn can also be useful for our readers.

    Q: In a note at Substack, Arvind Narayanan (coauthor of AI Snake Oil) offered a “hypothesis on the accelerating decline of reading.” It’s got a bunch of bullets, so I’ll do my best to paraphrase: Essentially, people mostly read for pleasure or to obtain information. These functions have been replaced by other things. Video is more entertaining than reading. We can use large language models to summarize long texts and deliver information to us. He theorizes that most people will be happy with the trade-off of increased speed/efficiency, the same way we’ve gravitated toward “shallow web search over deeper reading.” He’s worried about this but also believes that merely “moralizing” about this is not going to be helpful. (I tend to agree.) I’ve argued for years that getting students engaged with writing is a great way to get them reading, because reading is the necessary fodder for writing. Writing is also a tremendous way to cultivate our ability to pay attention. I’m wondering if you’re worried in the same way as Narayanan or if you have any additional ideas of what we can do about this.

    A: First, thanks for sharing that note, which will be helpful to me as I am working on my next project—which I am happy to announce here. My next book will be The End of Reading?, which will be published by W. W. Norton, a publisher whose books I have been reading since high school and assigning in my courses for my entire teaching career. I’m so excited to dig into this project, but I am going to beg off on an answer here because I am just in the beginning of my thinking and writing and need more time to formulate my ideas. Put another way: Ask me that question again in two years!

    Q: I have sort of the opposite problem as the folks this book is addressed to, in that I find it very natural to write to regular people—because that’s where I started—while writing for more formal or academic audiences is something I can struggle with. What is it about the experience of the academic that makes the transition you’re writing about difficult?

    A: The problem here is that experts often lose track of what novices don’t know in their fields. The more we know in a discipline, the further away we get from our memories of what it was like to know very little about biology or literature or politics. When academics write to each other, they can assume their readers know certain things: basic facts, theories, common examples or cases, histories, major players in the field. Let’s say I’m a scholar of Victorian literature and want to write something about a work of Victorian literature. If I am writing to other scholars in that field, I can be confident that my readers know things I know: the expansion of the British Empire during that time period, the impact of Darwin and evolutionary theory on many writers in that era, the political turbulence and social unrest accompanying the Industrial Revolution.

    If I am writing to a more public audience, I can’t assume my reader knows any of that stuff. In a classroom, I can always stop and just ask students, “Have you heard of this before?” If they haven’t, I can give a quick introduction. But as a writer with deep expertise in a subject, I have no idea what a more public audience knows or doesn’t know. Faced with that problem, I think a lot of academics just say, “Never mind, I’ll just keep writing to my people.” And that writing is important and can be great! I love a good scholarly book, and I still read them regularly. That kind of writing also helps people get and keep academic jobs, so I am not on some crusade to encourage everyone to write for the public. But I think the major sticking point for people who do want to expand their audiences is thinking more deeply about their audiences: what they know or don’t know, why they are reading your work, and what you want them to take away from the experience.

    Q: Something I’ve often said about both writing and teaching is that they are “extended exercises in failure,” where failure means not missing the target entirely, but falling short of one’s initial expectations. I find this reality interesting, fascinating, really, because with both activities, you usually get a chance to try again. Does this make sense to you, or do you have any different frames for how you view these two activities?

    A: No absolutely, and in fact that framework applies to all of the pursuits that give me satisfaction, including the other major intellectual pursuit of my life: learning languages. I did not start learning other languages until my first year of high school, where I started with Latin. Immediately I was fascinated, and so in my junior year I added ancient Greek into my curriculum. When I got to college, I took classes in both those languages, and then also took French. Over the next 30 years I have gone back and forth with those original three languages and also tried to learn Spanish and Italian and German.

    I start every new language with this expectation that this time I’m going to really dig in and master this thing and become just totally fluent. The truth is that I have some basic knowledge in all six of those languages but know none of them particularly well. But I just love the fact that I can go back to any of them, at any time, and start trying again. I’m 55, and my brain has a different shape than it used to (because of the stroke), so I have to be realistic and acknowledge that it’s unlikely that I will ever become a fluent speaker in any other language than English. But gosh, I just love to keep trying.

    As you say, teaching and writing are the same. You start off with such hope and expectation and excitement: This will be the best class I will ever teach! This essay or book is the one that will change people’s lives! But it never quite works out that way. Even when you teach a great course, not every class period will be perfect. Not every student will have a great experience. When I look at my own books, I am proud of them but can see places where I cringe and wish I had done better. But I don’t feel defeated by those feelings: They make me want to keep trying.

    Q: The book is filled with practical approaches to writing for broader audiences, but I wouldn’t quite call it a book of “advice.” The word that comes to mind is “guidance.” Does that distinction make sense to you?

    A: This distinction matters a lot to me, actually. I think because of the success of Small Teaching, which had a lot of concrete pieces of advice, people can view me as a “teaching tips” guy. I do love learning and thinking about specific practices in the classroom, so I don’t wholly disavow that association. Presenting theories and big ideas about teaching only gets people so far; they need to envision what those theories look like when they are standing in the classroom on Tuesday of week seven with 20 blank faces in front of them. Describing examples of specific practices helps them with that imaginative work.

    But I always want people to understand that I am not advising them to do anything in particular: I am showing examples designed to spur their own creative thinking. Write Like You Teach, for example, has a chapter about the challenge of reader attention, and I do offer some very concrete pieces of advice based on writing strategies that I have observed in great writers. Ultimately, though, I want the readers of my book to move beyond these specific examples and develop their own strategies based on the principle readers are learners, and learners need support for their attention. With that principle in mind, I want people to analyze their classroom practices and see what translates to the page.

    That leads me to the final thing I want to say: The first and final goal of this book is to help academics feel empowered and enabled to write for the public. The prospect of doing that kind of writing can be intimidating, and many of us shy away from it. But if I can convince academics of this one principle—a great teacher can become a great writer—then I hope they will be able to develop their own writing practices based on their experiences in the classroom.

    Q: And finally, the last question I ask everyone: What’s one book you recommend that you think not enough people are aware of?

    A: When people ask me to recommend a novel to them, or when people ask me to share my favorite novel, I always mention two: Zadie Smith’s White Teeth and Arundhati Roy’s The God of Small Things. I am cheating a little bit here because both of these novels were very well-known when they were published, sold many copies and won prizes. But they are both a couple of decades old now, and I believe that their themes are as relevant today as they were when they were first published. If you are a word person, choose Roy, whose prose comes as close to poetry as a novel can get; if you love a great plot, choose Smith, whose genius shines through the ebullience of her narrative construction. If I were forced to choose between the two, I would choose … I can’t. I just can’t.

    Source link

  • Ripping up the rule book

    Ripping up the rule book

    On May 7, I was honoured to address an audience at Goodenough College in London, at the kind invitation of the master of The Worshipful Company of Educators, to talk on the topic of ‘educators opening doors to the world’.

    For those not familiar with Goodenough College, it is a remarkable community in Bloomsbury, central London, comprising 700 postgraduate students and their families from around 95 different countries, each studying at any one of London’s world-leading universities.

    When I stepped inside the doors of the College, I was instantly transported back to my own experience as a first-time post-doctoral researcher at the University of British Columbia (UBC) in Canada, when I found myself living in a very similar international community called St John’s College at the heart of the UBC campus.

    It was there that I saw first-hand just how important communities like these are for bringing people together from across the globe through education and providing a ‘home from home’ for overseas students and researchers. These communities allow friendships to form, ideas to thrive and inter-cultural understanding to arise.

    It is also that experience that has since driven my subsequent career, both in making and influencing higher education policy, to ensure that our universities and colleges continue serving as dynamic meeting points for the world.

    Breaking the rules

    When you work in policy, one of the first rules you learn is not to base policy on anecdote or personal experience. However, when it comes to something as positive and life changing as international education, I am a firm believer in ripping up the rule book.

    While not everyone is fortunate to have an international education experience of their own, every single one of us indirectly benefits from the international students around us – not least given that, in the UK, they bring in £41.9 billion to the economy per annual cohort.

    when it comes to something as positive and life changing as international education, I am a firm believer in ripping up the rule book

    These economic benefits are felt even more acutely by our universities and colleges, where international student fees have become a lifeline to financially-stretched institutions – both to make up for the rising shortfall in domestic funding and to cross-subsidise world-leading research.

    Yet, as all good educators know, international students are much more than big pound and dollar signs to our sector.

    In a global city like London, international student communities are reflective of the global workforce and the multi-cultural population around us. Having international students in our midst helps prepare local students for the realities of living and working in these diverse environments. It encourages them to think differently about the world, and they learn to appreciate different cultures, traditions and perspectives.

    The real winners

    There are also substantial soft power benefits to be had from our diverse international student inflows. Each year the Higher Education Policy Institute (HEPI) publishes a soft power index showing the tally of serving world leaders educated in UK universities. While some may see this as a ‘bit of fun’ over the summer when it’s traditionally published, it’s actually a really powerful signal of the strength of the UK’s educational brand.

    It is also a stark reminder of what is at stake if we start to use education to close doors to the world rather use it than to open them.

    As one international student, and member of Goodenough College, said to me over dinner on the evening I spoke: “Today I might just be eating dinner here with other international students, but tomorrow we could be the ones doing deals together in politics or in business, and it is our countries that will be the real winners of this experience.”

    While policymakers across the Western world are fixated on finding ways to bring immigration down, when it comes to international education, perhaps they should pay more attention to the benefits that are had when international students return to their home countries with the skills, friendships and memories made during their overseas educational experiences. For, these are the things that from the foundations of closer business and trade relationships between different countries and enhance future diplomatic relations.

    The clock is ticking

    A very early read of the immigration white paper suggests UK universities may have dodged a bullet when it comes to major policy reform. While the post-study work entitlement may have been reduced to 18 months from two years, the UK still has a positive offer to sell to the world – and one that isn’t undermined by country-specific restrictions or provider-level caps as is the case elsewhere in the world. Gone too (for now at least) are any requirements for international graduates to meet certain salary thresholds should they wish to stay and work in the UK.

    We need to ensure policymakers are tackling the parts of the immigration system that are failing us, not those that are overwhelmingly helping us

    Of course, we need to take public concerns about immigration seriously and chart a sustainable path for the future. But we need to ensure policymakers are tackling the parts of the immigration system that are failing us, not those that are overwhelmingly helping us. This should be done through measures that strengthen the overall ecosystem, not ones that weaken it through reckless words and kneejerk reactions.

    Last month, the International Higher Education Commission (IHEC), for which I am proud to have served as a commissioner, set out a framework for success based on the three pillars of competitiveness, diversification and public trust. The challenge for all of us now is to find ways to move forward with this framework – and in the new context set out by the Immigration White Paper – to ensure we continue opening the doors to the world through our educational offer. The last thing we should do is close them down through the loss of any one of those important sides of the policy triangle.

    Source link

  • Student-created book reviews inspire a global reading culture

    Student-created book reviews inspire a global reading culture

    Key points:

    When students become literacy influencers, reading transforms from a classroom task into a global conversation.

    When teens take the mic

    Recent studies show that reading for pleasure among teens is at an all-time low. According to the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP), only 14 percent of U.S. students read for fun almost every day–down from 31 percent in 1984. In the UK, the National Literacy Trust reports that just 28 percent of children aged 8 to 18 said they enjoyed reading in their free time in 2023.

    With reading engagement in crisis, one group of teens decided to flip the narrative–by turning on their cameras. What began as a simple classroom project to encourage reading evolved into a movement that amplified student voices, built confidence, and connected learners across cultures.

    Rather than writing traditional essays or book reports, my students were invited to create short video book reviews of their favorite titles–books they genuinely loved, connected with, and wanted others to discover. The goal? To promote reading in the classroom and beyond. The result? A library of student-led recommendations that brought books–and readers–to life.

    Project overview: Reading, recording, and reaching the world

    As an ESL teacher, I’ve always looked for ways to make literacy feel meaningful and empowering, especially for students navigating a new language and culture. This video review project began with a simple idea: Let students choose a book they love, and instead of writing about it, speak about it. The assignment? Create a short, personal, and authentic video to recommend the book to classmates–and potentially, to viewers around the world.

    Students were given creative freedom to shape their presentations. Some used editing apps like Filmora9 or Canva, while others recorded in one take on a smartphone. I offered a basic outline–include the book’s title and author, explain why you loved it, and share who you’d recommend it to–but left room for personal flair.

    What surprised me most was how seriously students took the project. They weren’t just completing an assignment–they were crafting their voices, practicing communication skills, and taking pride in their ability to share something they loved in a second language.

    Student spotlights: Book reviews with heart, voice, and vision

    Each student’s video became more than a book recommendation–it was an expression of identity, creativity, and confidence. With a camera as their platform, they explored their favorite books and communicated their insights in authentic, impactful ways.

    Mariam ElZeftawy: The Fault in Our Stars by John Green
    Watch Miriam’s Video Review

    Mariam led the way with a polished and emotionally resonant video review of John Green’s The Fault in Our Stars. Using Filmora9, she edited her video to flow smoothly while keeping the focus on her heartfelt reflections. Mariam spoke with sincerity about the novel’s themes: love, illness, and the fragility of life. She communicated them in a way that was both thoughtful and relatable. Her work demonstrated not only strong literacy skills but also digital fluency and a growing sense of self-expression.

    Dana: Dear Tia by Maria Zaki
    Watch Dana’s Video Review

    In one of the most touching video reviews, Dana, a student who openly admits she’s not an avid reader, chose to spotlight “Dear Tia,” written by Maria Zaki, her best friend’s sister. The personal connection to the author didn’t just make her feel seen; it made the book feel more real, more urgent, and worth talking about. Dana’s honest reflection and warm delivery highlight how personal ties to literature can spark unexpected enthusiasm.

    Farah Badawi: Utopia by Ahmed Khaled Towfik
    Watch Farah’s Video Review

    Farah’s confident presentation introduced her classmates to Utopia, a dystopian novel by Egyptian author Ahmed Khaled Towfik. Through her review, she brought attention to Arabic literature, offering a perspective that is often underrepresented in classrooms. Farah’s choice reflected pride in her cultural identity, and her delivery was clear, persuasive, and engaging. Her video became more than a review–it was a form of cultural storytelling that invited her peers to expand their literary horizons.

    Rita Tamer: Frostblood
    Watch Rita’s Video Review

    Rita’s review of Frostblood, a fantasy novel by Elly Blake, stood out for its passionate tone and concise storytelling. She broke down the plot with clarity, highlighting the emotional journey of the protagonist while reflecting on themes like power, resilience, and identity. Rita’s straightforward approach and evident enthusiasm created a strong peer-to-peer connection, showing how even a simple, sincere review can spark curiosity and excitement about reading.

    Literacy skills in action

    Behind each of these videos lies a powerful range of literacy development. Students weren’t just reviewing books–they were analyzing themes, synthesizing ideas, making connections, and articulating their thoughts for an audience. By preparing for their recordings, students learned how to organize their ideas, revise their messages for clarity, and reflect on what made a story impactful to them personally.

    Speaking to a camera also encouraged students to practice intonation, pacing, and expression–key skills in both oral language development and public speaking. In multilingual classrooms, these skills are often overlooked in favor of silent writing tasks. But in this project, English Learners were front and center, using their voices–literally and figuratively–to take ownership of language in a way that felt authentic and empowering.

    Moreover, the integration of video tools meant students had to think critically about how they presented information visually. From editing with apps like Filmora9 to choosing appropriate backgrounds, they were not just absorbing content, they were producing and publishing it, embracing their role as creators in a digital world.

    Tips for teachers: Bringing book reviews to life

    This project was simple to implement and required little more than student creativity and access to a recording device. Here are a few tips for educators who want to try something similar:

    • Let students choose their own books: Engagement skyrockets when they care about what they’re reading.
    • Keep the structure flexible: A short outline helps, but students thrive when given room to speak naturally.
    • Offer tech tools as optional, not mandatory: Some students enjoyed using Filmora9 or Canva, while others used the camera app on their phone.
    • Focus on voice and message, not perfection: Encourage students to focus on authenticity over polish.
    • Create a classroom premiere day: Let students watch each other’s videos and celebrate their peers’ voices.

    Literacy is personal, public, and powerful

    This project proved what every educator already knows: When students are given the opportunity to express themselves in meaningful ways, they rise to the occasion. Through book reviews, my students weren’t just practicing reading comprehension, they were becoming speakers, storytellers, editors, and advocates for literacy.

    They reminded me and will continue to remind others that when young people talk about books in their own voices, with their personal stories woven into the narrative, something beautiful happens: Reading becomes contagious.

    Latest posts by eSchool Media Contributors (see all)

    Source link

  • Book bans draw libraries into damaging culture wars that undermine their purpose

    Book bans draw libraries into damaging culture wars that undermine their purpose

    For the last four years, school and public libraries have been drawn into a culture war that seeks to censor, limit and discredit diverse perspectives.

    Yet time and time again, as librarians have been encouraged or even directed to remove books that include LGBTQ+, Black, Latino and Indigenous characters or themes or history from their collections, they have said no.

    When librarians said no, policy changes were submitted and laws were proposed — all in the name of controlling the library collection.

    Some librarians lost their jobs. Some had their lives threatened. Legislators proposed bills that attempt to remove librarians’ legal protections, strive to prevent them from participating in their national professional associations, seek to limit some materials to “adults only” areas in public libraries and threaten the way library work has been done for decades.

    Here’s why this is wrong. For generations, libraries have been hubs of information and expertise in their communities. Librarians and library workers aid in workforce development, support seniors, provide resources for veterans, aid literacy efforts, buttress homeschool families —among many other community-enriching services. Your public library, the library in your school and at your college, even those in hospitals and law firms, are centers of knowledge. Restrictions such as book bans impede their efforts to provide information.

    Related: Become a lifelong learner. Subscribe to our free weekly newsletter featuring the most important stories in education. 

    Professional librarians study the First Amendment and understand what it means to protect the right to read. We provide opportunities for feedback from our users so that they have a voice in decision-making. We follow a code of ethics and guidelines to make the best selections for our communities.

    It is illegal for a library to purchase pornographic or obscene material; we follow the law established by the Supreme Court (Miller v. California, 1973). That decision has three prongs to determine if material meets the qualifications for obscenity. If the material meets all three, it is considered obscene and does not have First Amendment protection.

    But our procedures have been co-opted, abused and flagrantly ignored by a small and vocal minority attempting to control what type of information can be accessed by all citizens. Their argument, that books are not banned if they are available for purchase, is false.

    When a book or resource is removed from a collection based on a discriminatory point of view, that is a book ban.

    Librarians follow a careful process of criteria to ensure that our personal biases do not intervene in our professional work. Librarians have always been paying attention. In 1939, a group of visionary librarians crafted the Library Bill of Rights to counter “growing intolerance, suppression of free speech and censorship affecting the rights of minorities and individuals.” In 1953, librarians once again came together and created the Freedom to Read Statement, in response to McCarthyism.

    You may see a similar censorship trend today — but with the advent of the internet and social media, the speed at which censorship is occurring is unparalleled.

    Much of the battle has focused on fears that schoolchildren might discover books depicting families with two dads or two moms, or that high school level books are available at elementary schools. (Spoiler alert: they are not.)

    Related: The magic pebble and a lazy bull: The book ban movement has a long timeline

    The strategy of this censorship is similar in many localities: One person comes to the podium at a county or school board meeting and reads a passage out of context. The selection of the passage is deliberate — it is meant to sound salacious. Clips of this reading are then shared and re-shared, with comments that are meant to frighten people.

    After misinformation has been unleashed, it’s a real challenge to control its spread. Is some subject matter that is taught in schools difficult? Yes, that is why it is taught as a whole, and not in passages out of context, because context is everything in education.

    Librarians are trained professionals. Librarians have been entrusted with tax dollars and know how to be excellent stewards of them. They know what meets the criteria for obscenity and what doesn’t. They have a commitment to provide something for everyone in their collections. The old adage “a good library has something in it to offend everyone” is still true.

    Thankfully, there are people across the country using their voices to fight back against censorship. The new documentary “Banned Together,” for example, shows the real-world impact of book banning and curriculum censorship in public schools. The film follows three students and their adult allies as they fight to reinstate 97 books pulled from school libraries.

    Ultimately, an attempt to control information is an attempt to control people. It’s an attempt to control access, and for one group of people to pass a value judgment on others for simply living their lives.

    Libraries focus on the free expression of ideas and access to those ideas. All the people in our communities have a right to read, to learn something new no matter what their age.

    Lisa R. Varga is the associate executive director, public policy and advocacy, at the American Library Association.

    Contact the opinion editor at [email protected].

    This story about book bans was produced by The Hechinger Report, a nonprofit, independent news organization focused on inequality and innovation in education. Sign up for Hechinger’s weekly newsletter.

    The Hechinger Report provides in-depth, fact-based, unbiased reporting on education that is free to all readers. But that doesn’t mean it’s free to produce. Our work keeps educators and the public informed about pressing issues at schools and on campuses throughout the country. We tell the whole story, even when the details are inconvenient. Help us keep doing that.

    Join us today.

    Source link

  • Live Workshop on Promoting Your Book Online for Academics

    Live Workshop on Promoting Your Book Online for Academics

    You’re invited, academic authors

    Jennifer van Alstyne and Dr. Sheena Howard designed this live interactive virtual event for professors and researchers like you. Especially if you’ve ever felt like, “I don’t need to do this for me, but I should do this for my book” when it comes to your online presence. Or, if you worry about self-promotion but know your writing / research can help more people if you’re open to sharing it.

    Join Dr. Sheena C. Howard and Jennifer van Alstyne for a 90-minute virtual event to help academics and researchers amplify your work, attract media opportunities, and share your book in meaningful ways.

    We hope you can join us on April 12, 2025 for Promoting Your Book Online for Academics. You’re invited! 💌

    What: 1.5 hour interactive workshop
    When: April 12, 2025 at 11:30am Pacific Time / 2:30pm Eastern Time
    Where: Live on Zoom (there will be a replay)
    With: Jennifer van Alstyne and Dr. Sheena Howard

    A workshop for academics who have a book or research project you should be sharing with the world ✨

    April 12, 2025 on Zoom at 11:30am Pacific Time / 2:30pm Eastern Time. Sign up.

    About the workshop

    Promoting Your Book Online for Academics is on April 12, 2025 at 2pm Eastern / 11:30am Pacific Time. It will be recorded for when you can’t make it live.

    You should sign up if you’re open to

    • Sharing your book (or your research project)
    • Opportunities for your book to be featured in media (but aren’t sure where to start)
    • Helping more people with the writing / research you already do
    • Aim to attract funding
    • Want to build partnerships or collaborations for your equity focused work

    Promoting Your Book Online for Academics is a live event for academic authors. But it’s not just for your monograph or edited collection. If you’ve written a report. If you have created a resource. If your research outputs are something you want to share? This interactive workshop is for you.

    At the end of this workshop you’ll know what’s effective use of your time for media and online presence.

    What’s included?

    Icon of a person at their desk with a cup of coffee. On their computer monitor, a Zoom meeting is in progress.

    Our live interactive workshop is on April 12, 2025 on Zoom (1.5 hours)

    Icon of a video replay on a computer monitor

    Replay of the event (video and audio only if you prefer to listen)

    Worksheet to help you take action and Resources guide to keep

    Icon of a calendar

    A private scheduling link for your follow up consultation with Jennifer

    What inspired this event

    Hi, I’m Jennifer van Alstyne (@HigherEdPR). I’ve been working 1-on-1 with professors on their online presence since 2018. When I look back on the transformations my clients have gone through, there’s often an emotional journey, not just the capacity-building work we do for your online presence. Most of my clients are authors. The professor writers I work with want their words to reach the right people, but felt unsure about how to go about that online.

    Your book deserves to reach the people you wrote it for. When I ask professors who haven’t promoted their book, “do you hope more readers find this book?” The answer is often “Yes,” even if the book is older. Even when the book didn’t sell as well as you may have hoped. Even when your book is out of print there are things you can do to have agency in sharing it online.

    In 2021, Dr. Sheena Howard and I teamed up for an intimate live event that helped academics around the world. We’ve been wanting to do another one since. But we wanted something that was really going to help you. For years, authors have opened up to each of us about what stopped them from sharing their book for years. When we were brainstorming who we want to help most with this Promoting Your Book Online for Academics event, these are some of the stories that came up:

    I thought I’d have more support in marketing my book from the press…but it seems to be mostly on me.

    My publisher asked me to build up my social media presence for my new book…I’m not really a social media person.

    My books in the past didn’t do well…I’m worried my new book won’t do well either.

    I shared my book once. But I haven’t share it again since on socials.

    I am unsure if it is too early (or too late) to promote my book.

    If I want to promote my book, when should I be reaching out to media? Before the book launches? After the book launches? I don’t know where to start.

    I don’t think anyone will care about my book.

    I want to go on podcasts to talk about my book, but I haven’t done anything toward that, no.

    Do any of those feel like you? I hope you’ll join us.

    Your book deserves to be out there. You have agency in telling your book’s story. Here’s what’s on the Agenda for this workshop:

    • Goal-setting for your digital success as an academic for where to focusing your time and energy
    • Sharing your book or research project in meaningful ways on social media (in ways that don’t feel icky)
    • Using media to boost research impact and funding (and how being in the media can help you build relationships)
    • Media opportunities for your book and research even if you’re just starting to explore this path (digital, print, TV, YouTube, podcasts)
    • Live profile and online presence reviews
    • Q&A

    Sign up for Promoting Your Book Online for Academics.

    Dr. Sheena C. Howard (@drsheenahoward), a Professor of Communication. She helps professors get media coverage and visibility through Power Your Research (without the expense of a publicist). She’s been featured in ABC, PBS, BBC, NPR, NBC, The LA Times, The New York Times, The Washington Post, and more for her research on representation, identity, and social justice. Her book, Black Comics: Politics of Race and Representation won an Eisner Award. The Encyclopedia of Black Comics, which profiles over 100 Black people in the comics industry. Her book, Why Wakanda Matters, was a clue on Jeopardy.

    She’s a writer without limits. I’ve recommended Sheena to some of my clients because she’s someone who helps people move past the limits we sometimes set for ourselves as writers. The worries or beliefs that sometimes hold us back. She’s worked closely with writers and creatives to build their capacity, to have agency in your media presence so you can make an impact when it matters. You want visibility that makes a difference for you. That invites readers. That can attract opportunities when they’re aligned with with what you want for yourself and the world.

    This event is for you even when you want to do it yourself for your online presence. You won’t have to work with us after the workshop ends. This live event is about implementable strategies, and finding focus for what makes sense for sharing your book or research project.

    FAQs for Promoting Your Book Online for Academics

    Frequently asked questions you may be wondering about.

    Where is the workshop?

    This is a live virtual interactive event on Zoom on April 12, 2025 at 11:30am Pacific Time / 2:30pm Eastern Time.

    What if I can’t make it live?

    At our last event, some people knew they wouldn’t be able to attend live when they signed up. A couple people also couldn’t make it live unexpectedly. If you’re unable to join us live on April 12, 2025, you’ll have everything you need.

    Jennifer will email you the event replay when it’s finished processing. You’ll get a copy of the take home worksheet to help you take action and the resources guide. That email will also have your private scheduling link for a follow up meeting with Jennifer if you’d find space to chat about your online presence supportive.

    How much is the workshop?

    This event is $300 USD.

    You can sign up on Dr. Sheena Howard’s Calendly to pay with PayPal.

    Or, email Jennifer for a custom invoice at [email protected]

    Outside of the United States? We had people register from around the world last time. If you run into an issue checking out, Jennifer is happy to create an invoice for you through Wise. Email [email protected]

    This event is non-refundable. If something comes up and you’re unable to join us live on April 12, 2025, you’ll have everything you need.

    Jennifer will email you the event replay when it’s finished processing. You’ll get a copy of the take home worksheet to help you take action and the resources guide. That email will also have your private scheduling link for a follow up meeting with Jennifer if you’d find space to chat about your online presence supportive.

    Can I use professional development funds or research funds to pay for this event?

    Yes. If a custom invoice would be helpful for you, please reach out to [email protected]

    I’m interested in working with Jennifer and Sheena privately. Is this event still for me?

    Jennifer and Sheena team up for online presence VIP Days. And some of our clients have worked with us separately depending on your goals.

    While I’m happy to see how we can work together, this is not a sales event. At our last event, people found having a bit of private space after the event was helpful. So we wanted to be sure you get that private follow up consultation too. If you’re interested in working with us, please do sign up for that Zoom call. We can save time to chat about what may be helpful for you.

    This workshop isn’t in my budget…I still want a stronger online presence for my book / research.

    Yay, I’m glad you found this page because I want that for you. You deserve a stronger online presence if that’s something you want for yourself. Best wishes for your online presence, you’ve got this! There are free resources here on The Social Academic blog to help you have a stronger online presence for your book and your research. You can search by category to find what’s helpful for you. You might start resources related to Authors and Books.

    I don’t think this event is right for me, can I share it with a friend?

    Yes! I’d love that. If this event isn’t right for you, but you think it may be helpful for your friend or colleague, please share it with them. We appreciate you!

    Questions about this event? Please don’t hesitate to reach out. I’m happy to answer your question, hesitation, or concern.

    Email me at [email protected].
    Or, send me a message on LinkedIn.

    Source link