Books like Studying Diversity in Teacher Education — picked by fans

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.  

This book is the first to look specifically at teacher education at Minority Serving Institutions (MSIs), which include Historically Black Colleges and Universities (HBCUs), Tribal Colleges (TCUs), Hispanic Serving Institutions (HSIs), Asian American, Native American and Pacific Islander Serving Institutions (AANAPISIs), among other federally designated categories. 

Petchauer and Mawhinney edited this collection of essays by teacher education faculty at MSIs, which emphasize the ways in which teacher education at MSI adopts a new model wherein: 1) teacher candidates are part of a larger cohort and community of educational activists; 2) all learning integrates culturally relevant pedagogy; and 3) there are diverse opportunities for teacher candidates to spend quality time in local schools prior to student teaching and graduation.

Rita Kohli has emerged as one of the most innovative and influential scholars in teacher education. She has published broadly about both diversifying the profession and supporting teachers of color once they are in service.

This perspective is critically important as it doesn’t make sense to attract more teachers of color only to lose them due to hostile work environments and the perpetuation of an educational status quo that is unequal and discriminatory for students of color. Kohli is a proponent of professional learning communities and has been instrumental in creating those communities as the Co-Director of the Institute for Teachers of Color Committed to Racial Justice (ITOC).

Although we’ve come a long way in supporting what has traditionally been called English Language Learners (ELLs), there is a long way yet to go. With a critical shortage of certified bilingual teachers, it is still the case in many schools that students for whom English is not their first language are placed in lower academic tracks and do not benefit from the growing body of research on supporting bilingual and multilingual learners. 

This collection of essays adopts an asset-based approach to language learning, noting that: “bilinguals who speak another language possess linguistic, lexical, grammatical and cultural knowledge and are simultaneously acquiring dual languages.”  The book includes new models and frameworks for culturally relevant, community-based, and inquiry-oriented pedagogy.

The Oxford (and, later, Cambridge) literature scholar looks out at the shifting cultural landscape of post-war Britain in the late 1940s and prophesies the postmodern future we now inhabit. It is one of Lewis’s lesser-known volumes (he is the author of the Chronicles of Narnia and bestselling religious books such as Mere Christianity) and one of the shortest.

But this book packs a powerful punch that I have used in teaching law students about our culture three generations after Lewis wrote it. Why are people so confused about morality today and yet so strident in their opinions? Lewis helped me see why, as few others have.

Yes, it says for writers, but this book is a great resource for in-person storytelling. On these pages are thousands of ideas on how you can show, not tell.

Comb through ideas on how to express a character’s emotion with posture, tone, and mannerisms. Don’t just say, “he looked guilty.” Look up “guilt” and find ways to indicate guilt without telling people what to think. Have your guilty character “avert her eyes,” “shift her feet,” “pull at her collar,” or “suddenly lose her appetite.” I regularly flick through this book to train my imagination on the sensory cues that make a story come alive.

This writing instruction book came to my aid as I began to teach writing at Harvard University in the late 1990s, when I was trying to help college students cultivate their own voice as writers.

The title was brilliant, surprising the reader that the subject was revision and not writing, per se. This focused on a fundamental truth, which is that good writing – whether it be fiction or non-fiction, artistic or professional – almost always goes through several revisions. Students often recoil at the idea of revisions because they threaten to burden them with more work.

What Murray underlined (and a point I’ve reiterated) is that revisions provide the opportunity to improve your work. The more that writers are comfortable with making revisions, the easier it will be to cultivate and improve their voices in their written work.

This clever and funny book explains that there are specific techniques that make good writing sound good, or a pithy phrase stick in the mind, and tells you the long and difficult Greek (or slightly easier Latin) names for all these rules you kind of knew without actually knowing.

I can hardly retain any of the Greek labels, but I do remember the fun little examples, like why Oscar Wilde’s epigrams are so striking (antithesis) and how Shakespeare totally lifted part of Julius Caesar from a historian, but polished it up (alliteration). And whenever you hear a memorable three-part phrase, it was probably longer but everyone forgot the other bits (tricolon). 

This is not one for fans of utilitarian writing, but as Forsyth says, “To write for mere utility is as foolish as to dress for mere utility.”

There was probably never a language documentary as compelling as The Story of English, and the companion book The Story of English was an inspiration for my own book – and my title.

How could the language of a small out-of-the-way island go global and become the entire world’s second language? Conquest? (that’s a plus and a minus) Dysfunctional spelling and crazy grammar? (joke) Political and cultural good fortune? (Definitely.) But what else? And to what ends?

And this language ‘game’ has had so many players besides the English – the Scots, the Irish, the Americans, Africa, and Asia. And of course, 35 years ago no one could have imagined how many more global roles English would be playing.

This book takes the reader back to another speech world, that of 16th and 17th century English, albeit one on which we have some purchase through the plays of William Shakespeare. Where someone today may hedge their words with I suppose or probably, people in this time peppered their speech with expressions conveying certainty like verily and forsooth. This contrast represents the ethos of truth and faith that reigned at this time before it was replaced by a modern spirit of epistemic detachment ushered in by the British enlightenment. Yet a by my troth was not interchangeable with a by my faith, and each chapter of the book opens the door on the specifics of an epistemic expression in 16th and 17th century English through colourful examples, cultural evidence and a statement of its meaning. I love this book.