New Books at PEOSTA

Reviewed: PW 1 June 2020 p. 51.
Description: Mary Cappello’s book is a song for the forgotten art of the lecture. Brimming with energy and erudition, it is an attempt to restore the lecture’s capacity to wander, question, and excite. Cappello draws on examples from Virginia Woolf to Mary Ruefle, Ralph Waldo Emerson to John Cage, blending rigorous cultural criticism with personal history to explore the lecture in its many forms–from the aphorism to the note–and give new life to knowledge's dramatic form. (publ.)

Reviewed: PW 12 Oct. 2020 p. 65.
Description: When racist curriculum “goes viral” on social media, it is typically dismissed as an isolated incident from a “bad” teacher. Educator Bree Picower, however, holds that racist curriculum isn’t an anomaly. It’s a systemic problem that reflects how Whiteness is embedded and reproduced in education. … Drawing on her experience teaching and developing a program that prepares teachers to focus on social justice and antiracism, Picower demonstrates how teachers’ ideology of race, consciously or unconsciously, shapes how they teach race in the classroom. She also examines current examples of racist curricula that have gone viral to demonstrate how Whiteness is entrenched in schools and how this reinforces racial hierarchies in the younger generation. With a focus on institutional strategies, Picower shows how racial justice can be built into programs across the teacher education pipeline–from admission to induction. By examining the who, what, why, and how of racial justice teacher education, she provides radical possibilities for transforming how teachers think about, and teach about, race in their classrooms. (publ.)

Reviewed: CHE 24 Sept. 2020 (online)
Description: William Germano & Kit Nicholls take a fresh look at this essential but almost invisible bureaucratic document and use it as a starting point for rethinking what students–and teachers–do. What if a teacher built a semester’s worth of teaching and learning backward–starting from what students need to learn to do by the end of the term, and only then selecting and arranging the material students need to study? Thinking through the lived moments of classroom engagement–what the authors call “coursetime”–becomes a way of striking a balance between improv and order. (publ.)

Reviewed: PW 31 Aug. 2020 p. 49.
Description: Jennifer Berkshire and Jack Schneider, co-hosts of the popular education podcast Have You Heard, lay out the increasingly potent network of conservative elected officials, advocacy groups, funders, and think tanks that have aligned behind a radical vision to unmake public education. They describe the dogma underpinning the work of the dismantlers and how it fits into the current political context, giving readers an up-close look at the policies–school vouchers, the war on teachers’ unions, tax credit scholarships, virtual schools, and more–driving the movement’s agenda. Finally they look forward, surveying the world the dismantlers threaten to build. (publ.)