Sadly, the American Educational Research Association annual meeting, originally scheduled for this weekend in San Francisco, was cancelled due to the current coronavirus outbreak. However, we reached out to acquisitions editor Meg Patterson and asked her to talk us through some of the books she would have been displaying at AERA. Enjoy this virtual book exhibit!
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Like many of you who would have been attending AERA this weekend, I really wish I could be in San Francisco right now. After setting up UTP’s booth in the Moscone Center, I would find some fresh sushi on the walk over to City Lights Books, where I would spend an evening browsing, preparing my introverted self for an intense three days of talking with education researchers from around the globe.
But COVID-19 didn’t just cause the cancellation of the conference, it caused major disruptions in education around the world. Educators have faced not only the difficulty of delivering classes online, but also the added strain of helping their students with issues of access, compounded by questions of housing, food, and safety, highlighting not just the differences in background, but the complicated ways in which institutions of education can be both a lifeline and a particular way of life.
UTP’s offerings at this year’s AERA all use rather different perspectives, methods, and points of entry to examine these rather difficult relationships between educational institutions and the students they serve.
rosalind hampton’s Black Racialization and Resistance at an Elite University, is a narrative, in-depth look at the legacy of slavery at McGill University, exploring experiences of Black professors and students from the late 1950s onward. But it is not a story about McGill as much as it is a story about Black lives in Higher Education. The book aims to correct the erasure of Black lives and work from institutional histories and spaces, and to highlight the ways in which these spaces assume a culture of whiteness.
Dorothy Smith notes in the foreword to Youth, School, and Community: Participatory Institutional Ethnographies, that the book taught her about public education in Canada in a “radically new way.” Naomi Nichols’ work connects and contrasts institutions’ understanding of young people, and the actual conditions of their lives, as well as how the institutions that allow some students to feel included and safe are implicated in other students’ experiences of exclusion, risk, and oppression.
Emerging from work alongside union leaders, teachers, and government officials, Paul Bocking’s Public Education, Neoliberalism, and Teachers: New York, Mexico City, Toronto, examines the ways in which neoliberal education policy is shaping teachers’ work in the context of three very unique North American cities.
After studying the narratives of hundreds of high school students, Stéphane Lévesque and Jean-Philippe Croteau contend in Beyond History for Historical Consciousness, that if education is to play a major role in shaping the views of the growing generations of citizens, it needs to find better ways of engaging the various forces from the ‘real-life’ curriculum that affect students’ understandings of the past, their sense of identity, and their visions of the communities in which they live.
At their core, educators want themselves and their students to be able to harness the power and possibilities of education for the public good. Stuart Shanker’s newest book, Reframed: Self-Reg for a Just Society gives readers an up-close picture of the neuroscience of self-regulation – for children and adults – and discusses how schools and society that encourages self-regulation might be marked by compassion, care, freedom, and justice.
I’m going to miss speaking with you in person this weekend in San Francisco, but if you’re interested in how a project you are working on might fit with what we’re doing at UTP, please contact me. I’ll be at home, reading emails while trying to teach my son grade 2 math.
