100 Books Like Decolonization and Feminisms in Global Teaching and Learning

When I first read this book, I had just started teaching gender in university classrooms and was studying gender training for my PhD research. This book crystallized for me what I found so fascinating and important about teaching and learning as a feminist.

In this book, the late great bell hooks weaves together personal experience with academic engagement in a way that is accessible and engaging. In dialogue with the iconic Brazilian education theorist Paolo Freire, she lays out her vision for education as a practice of freedom, as opposed to education that reinforces systems of domination. I assign parts of this book in my courses every year and recommend it to everyone interested in thinking about how education can be a liberatory practice.  

Resistance by students is common in gender training, and I was grappling with trying to understand under what conditions we accept knowledge as true, and what logic we use to disavow other forms of knowledge.

This book was a revelation for me when I was working through these questions. Against the preconception that education is about a technical knowledge transfer, Megan Boler insists that we understand emotion as central to teaching and learning. She reveals that emotions are central to how we know and what we know. In particular, her notion of a ’pedagogy of discomfort’ helped me think about what an ethical engagement with resistance and difficult questions of complicity might look like.

I had been designing and delivering gender training for many years and was researching it for my Phd when this book came out. Its publication was akin to finding an oasis in a desert. Even though gender training has become, as the editors Maria Bustelo, Lucy Ferguson, and Maxime Forest point out in their introduction to this collection of essays, the most widely used tool for gender mainstreaming worldwide, remarkably little has been written about it.

This smart and expertly curated book is one of the first to fill this gap. Featuring writing by both professionals involved in gender training and academics researching it, it shows that the concerns of feminist pedagogy reach beyond formal education, into spheres of public policy through adult learning and training practices.

Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick was one of those rare academic authors who comes across as incredibly likable in her writing. I never met her, but her text just exudes warmth, humour, and relatability, in addition to (or perhaps even in spite of) being erudite and insightful.

In this collection of essays, she attends to questions of pedagogy—how we know and learn things—but examines sites of pedagogy beyond formal education or training. She reveals to the reader that the cat who brings her owner small prey is actually trying to teach the former how to hunt, and shares how studying Buddhism rearranged for her the landscape of how to think about death.

I love this book dearly because it made me think about questions of pedagogy in a completely novel theoretical register, and because it made me both laugh and cry in doing so.

The message of Leadership Reckoning is that we need do a better job of developing human-centered business leaders who can meet the challenges of a disrupted world. I believe the approach in this book will also achieve the goal of building more inclusive organizational cultures in which all employees can thrive, regardless of their variations.

Joy Williamson-Lott has a powerful voice and perspective the permeates every sentence in this book. She doesn’t waste a word. And, her research skills are superb. For anyone wanting to learn how to write beautiful history, this book is a model. She is also particularly good at showcasing the voices of African American students who were instrumental to the Black freedom struggle. You can feel their energy and frustration in her passages, and their commitment to freedom and justice comes alive.

Before delving into the business and culture of college radio, I had to think through the complicated relationships between universities and their surrounding communities. Davarian Baldwin helped me do just that.

The FM signals emanating from inside the walls of the ivory tower occupied the public’s airwaves, and so surrounding residents not affiliated with institutions had legitimate claims to these signals, which usually operated on licensed signals requiring public service and educational functions. While these signals often did provide valuable culture and information for wide and diverse communities, they sometimes replicated the more complicated politics of these institutions and the destructive role they played in communities.

Baldwin’s engaging and enraging exploration of town and gown provides a critical lens to use when thinking through the relationship between universities, nearby music scenes, cultural service, and radio.

As a double UVA grad, I knew that Jefferson was the founder and that the school had been built largely by enslaved laborers. This book uplifted and depressed me: I was uplifted by the ferocity with which Jefferson pursued the importance of a secular university (owned by the state and without religious affiliation) and the revolutionary flexibility of its curriculum.

I was depressed by how much of the structure and the University’s early life were completely intertwined with slavery. Some of the stories are shocking.

The editors and contributing authors present research and theory interspersed with unique personal experiences of the journey taken by first-generation students as they move through college. The volume provides the reader with up-to-date data on two- and four-year colleges, and discusses the intersection of first-generation status with varied student identities including LGBT, low-income, African-American, Latinx, Native American, and undocumented. The last section of the book offers an introduction to practices, policies, and programs across the U.S., and directs educators, policymakers, and administrators to make campuses inclusive for diverse first-generation college students. At the Intersection is a resource for understanding and effectively responding to first-generation students’ divergent, shared, and intersectional identities in order to understand and alter their access, retention, learning, and well-being on the college campus.

This book opened my eyes to how higher education actually works to advance social mobility for a few while primarily reproducing social inequality. I was amazed to learn that the way that today’s elite universities select among applicants started as a solution for limiting the enrollment of “outsiders.”

Top universities feared that having too many of these outsiders would lower the status of the institution and make it less attractive to the ruling class. Beginning with Jewish students, continuing with Black students, and now emerging with Asian and low-income students, this pattern continues and affects our entire society.