New Books In Education

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 expertise. He provides insight into the technical aspects of writing, including organization, writing style, and revision. By providing writing prompts at the end of each chapter, Dr. Lang provides the prospective author the opportunity to immediately begin his/her/their own writing journey. The book concludes with an appendix that provides a behind the scenes look at the publishing proc

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 skills and—importantly—learn that they are not alone. These students embody and mobilize their education through both large and small political actions such as protests, workshops for financial aid applications, and Know Your Rights events. As students create community with each other, they come to understand that their ind

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 pay attention to how schools construct Latinidad (a concept about Latinx experience and identity) in relation to Blackness, Indigeneity, Asianness, and Whiteness. The work explores, as an example, how Spanish-English bilingual education programs engage in race-making work. It also illuminates how schools can

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 book argues for a more nuanced understanding of the complicated and often indistinct ideological foundation of the reform movement, demonstrating that supporters and detractors alike draw on similar concepts of equity, student success, and affordability. This complication is further clarified thro

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 that can be accomplished using simple, readable code. Elliot Lichtman started teaching online classes in computer science when he was a freshman in high school. Small classes quickly grew into a series of larger and longer offerings, and from those, this book was born. Elliot is currently a junior at Yale University. Caleb Zakarin is editor of the New B

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 larger societal trends and transformations in Egypt, as well as to explore the ideologies that lie behind them. Dr. Motawy argues that a host of factors, including the growth of gated communities and international schooling, the proliferation of lucrative literary awards, returning Gulf migrants, television dramas, and nationwide reading advocacy initiatives helped give rise to a new kind of children’s picture book in Egypt.Dr.

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 in a classroom for more than a year.Since the spring of 2020, many students in Europe had been learning in person. Even many peers at home—in private schools, and public schools in mostly “red” states and districts—were in class full time from fall 2020 onward. Whatever inequities that existed among American children before the pandemic, the selective school closures

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 causes harm in their neighborhood, they suddenly realize that tech isn't as neutral as they thought it was. But can an algorithm be racist? And what is an algorithm, anyway?In school, they decide to explore computing classes, with mixed results. One class is only about typing. The class that Christine wants to join is full, and the school counselor suggests that she take a class in “Tourism and Hospit

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 transgender athlete with exclusive accounts—from athletes, coaches, policymakers, and advocates on the front lines—Let Us Play dismantles the illusion that sports have ever been fair, that trans athletes pose a threat to women’s sports, and that gender-affirming healthcare for athletes should be prohibitive to play. Calling for a reframing of the binaries from youth and high school l

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, graduates have, upon release, gone on to rewarding careers and elite graduate and professional programs. Yet this is more than just a story of exceptional individuals triumphing against the odds. It is a study in how the liberal arts can alter the landscape of some of our most important public institutions giving people from all walks of life a chance t

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 past: authors shape what we know and how we judge our forebears. The Caledoniad: The Making of Scottish History (John Donald, 2024) by Dr. Catriona MacDonald investigates who decided which Scottish voices of the past would be heard in history’s pages and which would ultimately be silenced. It sketches a picture of a narrow and privileged cultural elite that responded belatedly to a more democratic age and only slowly embraced

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 global ecosystems. Thomashow, the former president of a college dedicated to sustainability, describes instead environmental learning, a term signifying that our relationship to the biosphere must be front and center in all aspects of our daily lives. In this illuminating book, he provides rationales, narratives, and approaches for doing just that

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 political power of the education myth choked off powerful social democratic alternatives like A. Philip Randolph and Bayard Rustin's Freedom Budget. The nation's political center was bereft of any realistic ideas to guarantee economic security and social dignity for the majority of Americans, particularly those without college degrees. Embraced first by Democ

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, Bloom's Taxonomy labels lessons, activities, and assessment items to enable an appropriately diverse set of learning for students. Instead of reducing copyright to simple recall, the lessons and information in this text will help instructors develop higher-level thinking about copyright and assist them in measuring le

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 a Time of Pandemic (AAS, 2025), was conceived as a timely response, offering guidance and inspiration during those uncertain times. Almost five years later, the world has moved forward, but the ripple effects of that historic spring are still felt. This supplemental set of open-access essays, edited by Kin Cheung (Associate Professor of Eas

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 students learn how to have reasoned arguments inside and outside of the classroom and to become responsible members of society. UN Sustainable Development Goals are addressed, making this book not only based in community but global in scope. Numerous examples of youth activism from volunteering to protest ma

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 Youth Book Clubs: Strategies for Meaningful and Fun Reading Experiences (Bloomsbury, 2025) Stacy Brown, who has facilitated book clubs for more than twenty years, shows you how to build active engagement through hands-on activities, reflective discussions, and theme-related tips and tricks, even in the face of time and budget constraints. Learn how to attract participants, bra

In Banned: The Fight for Mexican American Studies in the Streets and in the Courts (Cambridge UP, 2025), readers are taken on a journey through the intense racial politics surrounding the banning of Mexican American Studies in Tucson, Arizona. This book details the state-sponsored racism that led to the elimination of this highly successful program, and the grassroots and legal resistance that followed. Through extensive research and firsthand narratives, readers will gain a deep understanding of the controversy surrounding this historic case. The legal challenge successfully overturned the Arizona law and became a central symbol in the modern-day Ethnic Studies renaissance. This work is a must-read for anyone interested in understanding the power of community activism, the importance of fighting for educational equity, and why the example of Tucson created an alternative blueprint for how we can challenge states that are currently banning critical race theory. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphon

We often think of reason as a fixed entity, as a definitive body of facts that do not change over time. But during the Enlightenment, reason also was seen as a process, as a set of skills enacted on a daily basis. How, why, and where were these skills learned? Concentrating on Scottish students living during the long eighteenth century, Media and the Mind: Art, Science, and Notebooks as Paper Machines, 1700-1830 (University of Chicago Press, 2023) by Dr. Matthew Daniel Eddy argues that notebooks were paper machines and that notekeeping was a capability-building exercise that enabled young notekeepers to mobilize everyday handwritten and printed forms of material and visual media in a way that empowered them to judge and enact the enlightened principles they encountered in the classroom. Covering a rich selection of material ranging from simple scribbles to intricate watercolor diagrams, the book reinterprets John Locke’s comparison of the mind to a blank piece of paper, the tabula rasa. Although one of the m

Today I’m speaking with Pano Kanelos, founding president of the University of Austin. A scholar and professor of Shakespeare studies, Panos’ advocacy for the liberal arts eventually lead him to become president of St. John’s College in Annapolis. In the past few years, Pano has found himself at the center of an academic project that seemed rather unlikely in an era where the big universities are getting bigger and other colleges are shuttering their doors. The University of Austin’s creation points to the potential for dynamism and change in academia. While it’s just getting started, the story of University of Austin is one to follow for anyone interested in how higher education is changing in the 21st century. Caleb Zakarin is editor at the New Books Network. Let's face it, most of the popular podcasts out there are dumb. NBN features scholars (like you!), providing an enriching alternative to students. We partner with presses like Oxford, Princeton, and Cambridge to make academic research accessible to al