Choice's Outstanding Academic Titles 2006

Education Top

This book describes a different approach to teacher education designed to create "carriers of the torch"-teachers who have a sense of efficacy and the attitudes, dispositions, and skills necessary to teach students from diverse racial, ethnic, and linguistic backgrounds. Through her examination of teacher change and teacher education in two countries-the United States and South Africa-the author proposes new ways to prepare teachers for a rapidly changing global society.

Malik Goes to School: Examining the Language Skills of African American Students From Pre-School-5th Grade synthesizes a decade of research by the authors, Holly Craig and Julie Washington, on the oral language and literacy skills of African American children from preschool to fifth grade. Their research has characterized significant influences on the child's use of AAE and the relationship between AAE and.phpects of literacy acquisition. The research has also led to the characterization of other nondialectal.phpects of language development. The outcome has been a culture-fair, child-centered language evaluation protocol. This very readable volume will be important to students, clinicians, and teachers learning about and working with, African American children. The book has direct relevance to academic planning, clinical decision-making, curriculum development, and educational policymaking.

Many would argue that the state of urban science education has been static for the past several decades and that there is little to learn from it. Rather than accepting this deficit perspective, Improving Urban Science Education strives to recognize and understand the successes that exist there by systematically documenting seven years of research into issues salient to teaching and learning in urban high school science classes.

“The nation needs to be confronted with the crime that we’re committing and the promises we are betraying. This is a book about betrayal of the young, who have no power to defend themselves. It is not intended to make readers comfortable.” Over the past several years, Jonathan Kozol has visited nearly 60 public schools. Virtually everywhere, he finds that conditions have grown worse for inner-city children in the 15 years since federal courts began dismantling the landmark ruling in Brown v. Board of Education. First, a state of nearly absolute apartheid now prevails in thousands of our schools. The segregation of black children has reverted to a level that the nation has not seen since 1968. Few of the students in these schools know white children any longer. Second, a protomilitary form of discipline has now emerged, modeled on stick-and-carrot methods of behavioral control traditionally used in prisons but targeted exclusively at black and Hispanic children. And third, as high-stakes testing takes on pathological and punitive dimensions, liberal education in our inner-city schools has been increasingly replaced by culturally barren and robotic methods of instruction that would be rejected out of hand by schools that serve the mainstream of society. Filled with the passionate voices of children and their teachers and some of the most revered and trusted leaders in the black community, The Shame of the Nation is a triumph of firsthand reporting that pays tribute to those undefeated educators who persist against the odds, but directly challenges the chilling practices now being forced upon our urban systems by the Bush administration. In their place, Kozol offers a humane, dramatic challenge to our nation to fulfill at last the promise made some 50 years ago to all our youngest citizens. From The Shame of the Nation “I went to Washington to challenge the soft bigotry of low expectations,” the president said in his campaign for reelection in September 2004. “It’s working. It’s making a difference.” It is one of those deadly lies, which, by sheer repetition, is at length accepted by large numbers of Americans as, perhaps, a rough approximation of the truth. But it is not the truth, and it is not an innocent misstatement of the facts. It is a devious appeasement of the heartache of the parents of the poor and, if it is not forcefully resisted and denounced, it is going to lead our nation even further in a perilous direction. Also available as a Random House AudioBook and an eBook From the Hardcover edition.

Shows how school professionals can prevent and reduce bullying by creating a positive environment and by ensuring all children have the social skills to communicate well and solve problems without aggression. The book has guidance in selecting research-based bullying prevention programs, and steps for assessing a school's needs and for evaluating a program's effectiveness.

The middle years of schooling are increasingly recognised as a crucial stage in students' lives, one that has significant consequences for ongoing educational success. International research indicates that young adolescents benefit from programs designed especially for their needs, and the middle years have become an important reform issue for education systems. This guide offers a systematic overview of the philosophy, principles and issues in middle schooling. It includes contributions from academics and school-based practitioners on intellectual and emotional development in early adolescence, pedagogy, curriculum and assessment of middle years students. Written for teachers, student teachers, education leaders and policy makers, this work is an invaluable resource for anyone involved in educating young adolescents.

This book presents an evidence-based framework for understanding the literacy needs of adolescents. The premise is that educators and other critical stakeholders need to understand evidence-based principles in order to develop effective curriculum to meet the needs of diverse learners. Recommendations are provided for middle and secondary education, professional development, teacher education research and policy. At the center of the book are Eight Guiding Principles developed by the authors through a process that included an extensive review of research and policy literature in literacy and related fields, a comparison of National Standards documents, and visits to the classrooms of 28 middle and high school teachers across the United States. The Principles are broad enough to encompass a variety of contexts and student needs, yet specific enough to offer real support to those involved in program development or policy decisions. They provide an overarching structure that districts and teachers can use to develop site-specific curriculum that is both research-based and designed to meet the needs of the learners for whom they are responsible. Important Text Features: Organized to help readers understand empirically supported principles of practice that can be used to address literacy concerns in today's schools, each chapter that addresses one of the eight Principles follows a similar format: * The Principle is presented along with a brief explanation of the research base and a sample of national standards that support it. * One or more case examples - spanning a wide variety of disciplines, grade levels, and local conditions - provide an in-depth look at the Principle in action. * A well-known adolescent literacy expert offers a response to each case exampls, giving readers an informed view of the importance of the Principle, how it is enacted in the cases, and examples of other work related to the Principle. Discussion questions are provided that can be used for individual reflection or group discussion. Principled Practices for Adolescent Literacy: A Framework for Instruction and Policy is intended as a text for pre-service and in-service upper-elementary, middle and high school literacy methods courses and graduate courses related to adolescent literacy, and as a resource for school district personnel, policymakers and parents.

New easy to use, low-cost Web publishing and information gathering tools are spawning a revolution in our relationship to the Internet. Now, with Blogs and podcasting, millions of people are creating content for the Internet as well as consuming it. Outside the classroom, students are at the forefront of innovative and collaborative site development, just as they were often ahead of the curve in bringing results from Internet research into the k-12 classroom ten years ago. For educators, the potential changes in the ways our teachers teach and students learn are momentous. The tools of the new Internet give us opportunities for collaboration and for constructivist learning, and allow students to become meaningful contributors to the vast body of knowledge that is the Internet.nbsp; Will Richardson writesnbsp;for educators of all levels and disciplines who want to understand the new Internet tools and learn how to use them effectively in the classroom. Henbsp;provides real-life examples from K-12 teachers who are already using these tools in their schools and with their students, and offers practical advice on how teachers and students can start using the Web to learn more, create more and communicate better. Educators will find a whole new toolbox and a clear explanation of specific teaching applications, with both benefits and how-to steps for: Weblogs: Known as Blogs, these are easily created, easily updateable Websites, and currently the most widely adopted tool of the Read/Write Web Wikis: A collaborative Web space where visitors and collaborators can add content and edit already published content Rich Site Summary (RSS): Readers can subscribe to "feeds" of the content created on the Internet, i.e., content comes to the teacher instead of the teacher or student searching for the content sect; Aggregators: Used for collecting and organizing the content generated via the RSS feed Social Bookmarking: Bookmarking sites allow users to not only save the Web addresses of interesting content, but also to archive the entire page, thus producing a form of a searchable, "classroom Internet" Online Photo Galleries: Publishing digital photos to the Web means adding another dimension to working with digital images in the classroom Many students are dabbling or expert in using these tools. Educators now have an opportunity to harness them for learning.

Leading experts examine such heated higher education topics as accessibility and quality at state universities where, given the current economic climate, appropriations per student may well be no higher today, in real terms, than they were in 1900.

Author Kenneth Winograd contends that it is imperative to understand the inevitable complexities of classroom life and to use these understandings to construct a teacher identity that is more flexible and grounded. This book will stimulate readers to reconsider their understandings of what it means to be a teacher.

For 300 years scholars in Britain and France have been working industriously to explain the idea of medieval aristocracy.nbsp; One part of this book analyses this enormous international field of publications, and breaks it down into four debates: on noble conduct, noble lineage, noble class and noble power.nbsp; It identifies the points of divergence in the national traditions in each of these debates, and where they have been mutually incomprehensible.nbsp; It integrates American historiography into the British and French debates as it touches on each.nbsp; But in addition to all this, the book presents an entirely new perspective on each of the four great debates.nbsp; Each is subjected to a thorough review by comparing current scholarship with what a vast range of historical source material actually says about each.nbsp;

Bombs are as old as hatred itself. But it was the twentieth century--one hundred years of incredible scientific progress and terrible war--that brought forth the Big One, the Bomb, humanityýs most powerful and destructive invention. In The Bomb: A Life, Gerard DeGroot tells the story of this once unimaginable weapon that--at least since 8:16 a.m. on August 6, 1945--has haunted our dreams and threatened our existence.The Bomb has killed hundreds of thousands outright, condemned many more to lingering deaths, and made vast tracts of land unfit for life. For decades it dominated the psyches of millions, becoming a touchstone of popular culture, celebrated or decried in mass political movements, films, songs, and books. DeGroot traces the life of the Bomb from its birth in turn-of-the-century physics labs of Europe to a childhood in the New Mexico desert of the 1940s, from adolescence and early adulthood in Nagasaki and Bikini, Australia and Kazakhstan to maturity in test sites and missile silos around the globe. His book portrays the Bombýs short but significant existence in all its scope, providing us with a portrait of the times and the peopleýfrom Oppenheimer to Sakharov, Stalin to Reaganýwhose legacy still shapes our world.

Over the course of the past four decades Stephen J. Tonsor, professor emeritus of European intellectual history at the University of Michigan, has made a reputation within the conservative intellectual movement as a trenchant thinker, forceful writer, and witty, sometimes caustic, lecturer. But without a book to introduce his thought to the wider public, Tonsor has remained largely unknown outside conservative circles. For many readers, then, this generous collection, edited by historian Gregory Schneider, will serve as an enlightening introduction to the work of a man who is among the most penetrating of conservative thinkers. Equality, Decadence, and Modernity features substantial excerpts from Tonsor?s two book-length unpublished manuscripts, "Decadence" and "Equality," as well as insightful essays on conservative thought and politics. Among other pieces, this volume includes Tonsor?s controversial polemic, "Why I Too Am Not a Neoconservative." "Halfway from modernity is not far enough" , asserted Tonsor in this essay. Yet Tonsor?s critique of modernity, and much else, is complex and always intelligent. With the publication of Equality, Decadence, and Modernity, readers may now share in, and profit from, that intelligence.

Beginning with Latin America in the fifteenth century, this book comprises a social history of the experiences of African Muslims and their descendants throughout the Americas, including the Caribbean. The years under slavery are examined, as well as the post-slavery period. The study also analyzes Muslim revolts in Brazil--especially in 1835. The second part of the book traces the emergence of Islam among U.S. African descendants in the twentieth century, featuring chapters on Noble Drew Ali, Elijah Muhammad, and Malcolm X to explain how orthodoxy arose from varied unorthodox roots. Currently Professor of History and Middle Eastern Studies at NYU, Michael Gomez has research interests that include Islam in West Africa, the African d.phpora and African culture in North America. He has been involved with the launching of a new academic organization, the Association for the Study of the Worldwide African D.phpora (ASWAD), and has published widely in the field.

With startling revelations, Tsuyoshi Hasegawa rewrites the standard history of the end of World War II in the Pacific. By fully integrating the three key actors in the story--the United States, the Soviet Union, and Japan--Hasegawa for the first time puts the last months of the war into international perspective. From April 1945, when Stalin broke the Soviet-Japanese Neutrality Pact and Harry Truman assumed the presidency, to the final Soviet military actions against Japan, Hasegawa brings to light the real reasons Japan surrendered. From Washington to Moscow to Tokyo and back again, he shows us a high-stakes diplomatic game as Truman and Stalin sought to outmaneuver each other in forcing Japan's surrender; as Stalin dangled mediation offers to Japan while secretly preparing to fight in the Pacific; as Tokyo peace advocates desperately tried to stave off a war party determined to mount a last-ditch defense; and as the Americans struggled to balance their competing interests of ending the war with Japan and preventing the Soviets from expanding into the Pacific. Authoritative and engrossing, Racing the Enemy puts the final days of World War II into a whole new light.

As the last stage of a long life, old age has been a subject about which practically every mortal has thought, sometimes with dread, sometimes with stoic acceptance, but always with the need somehow to come to terms with a challenging condition. In the book, six authors examine how the best thinkers and artists of each historical epoch in the West have treated old age. They examine, too, the myths that have grown up around it-especially in our own time, when we firmly believe that never have people grown so old as they now do!-and the images, both visual and verbal, that have been created to encapsulate that thing which we shall all become. Opulently and ingeniously illustrated with reproductions drawn from an astonishingly wide range of eras and media, A History of Old Age provides a welcome and refreshing look at what the subject has meant to the Greeks and the Romans, the medievals, the Romantics, and the modern men and women of rootless urban societies. This book will surprise with many of its facts about old age and the visions of it that it recounts; it will reassure as it cites from literature and from art the strength and nobility that so many writers and artists have found in the old and even the infirm; and, finally, it just may calm the fears of readers who, like it or not, know that they someday must embrace their own decrepitude.

A magnificent history of postwar Europe, East and West, by arguably the subject's most esteemed historian. Tony Judt's Postwar makes one lament the overuse of the word "groundbreaking." It is an unprecedented accomplishment: the first truly European history of contemporary Europe, from Lisbon to Leningrad, based on research in six languages, covering thirty-four countries across sixty years in a single integrated narrative, using a great deal of material from newly available sources. Tony Judt has drawn on forty years of reading and writing about modern Europe to create a fully rounded, deep account of the continent's recent past. The book integrates international relations, domestic politics, ideas, social change, economic development, and culture-high and low-into a single grand narrative. Every country has its chance to play the lead, and although the big themes are superbly handled-including the cold war, the love/hate relationship with America, cultural and economic malaise and rebirth, and the myth and reality of unification-none of them is allowed to overshadow the rich pageant that is the whole. Vividly and clearly written for the general reader; witty, opinionated, and full of fresh and surprising stories and asides; visually rich and rewarding, with useful and provocative maps, photos, and cartoons throughout, Postwar is a movable feast for lovers of history and lovers of Europe alike.

For as long as accuser and accused have faced each other in public, criminal trials have been establishing far more than who did what to whom–and in this fascinating book, Sadakat Kadri surveys four thousand years of courtroom drama. A brilliantly engaging writer, Kadri journeys from the silence of ancient Egypt’s Hall of the Dead to the clamor of twenty-first-century Hollywood to show how emotion and fear have inspired Western notions of justice–and the 480 to which they still riddle its trials today. He explains, for example, how the jury emerged in medieval England from trials by fire and water, in which validations of vengeance were presumed to be divinely supervised, and how delusions identical to those that once sent witches to the stake were revived as accusations of Satanic child abuse during the 1980s. Lifting the lid on a particularly bizarre niche of legal history, Kadri tells how European lawyers once prosecuted animals, objects, and corpses–and argues that the same instinctive urge to punish is still apparent when a child or mentally ill defendant is accused of sufficiently heinous crimes. But Kadri’s history is about.phpiration as well as ignorance. He shows how principles such as the right to silence and the right to confront witnesses, hallmarks of due process guaranteed by the U.S. Constitution, were derived from the Bible by twelfth-century monks. He tells of show trials from Tudor England to Stalin’s Soviet Union, but contends that “no-trials,” in Guantánamo Bay and elsewhere, are just as repugnant to Western traditions of justice and fairness. With governments everywhere eroding legal protections in the name of an indefinite war on terror, Kadri’s analysis could hardly be timelier. At once encyclopedic and entertaining, comprehensive and colorful, The Trial rewards curiosity and an appreciation of the absurd but tackles as well questions that are profound. Who has the right to judge, and why? What did past civilizations hope to achieve through scapegoats and sacrifices–and to what 480 are defendants still made to bear the sins of society at large? Kadri addresses such themes through scores of meticulously researched stories, all told with the verve and wit that won him one of Britain’s most prestigious travel-writing awards–and in doing so, he has created a masterpiece of popular history.

A groundbreaking study that radically alters our understanding of the Americas before the arrival of the Europeans in 1492. Traditionally, Americans learned in school that the ancestors of the people who inhabited the Western Hemisphere at the time of Columbus’s landing had crossed the Bering Strait twelve thousand years ago; existed mainly in small, nomadic bands; and lived so lightly on the land that the Americas was, for all practical purposes, still a vast wilderness. But as Charles C. Mann now makes clear, archaeologists and anthropologists have spent the last thirty years proving these and many other long-held assumptions wrong. In a book that startles and persuades, Mann reveals how a new generation of researchers equipped with novel scientific techniques came to previously unheard-of conclusions. Among them: • In 1491 there were probably more people living in the Americas than in Europe. • Certain cities–such as Tenochtitlán, the Aztec capital–were far greater in population than any contemporary European city. Furthermore, Tenochtitlán, unlike any capital in Europe at that time, had running water, beautiful botanical gardens, and immaculately clean streets. • The earliest cities in the Western Hemisphere were thriving before the Egyptians built the great pyramids. • Pre-Columbian Indians in Mexico developed corn by a breeding process so sophisticated that the journal Science recently described it as “man’s first, and perhaps the greatest, feat of genetic engineering.” • Amazonian Indians learned how to farm the rain forest without destroying it–a process scientists are studying today in the hope of regaining this lost knowledge. • Native Americans transformed their land so completely that Europeans arrived in a hemisphere already massively “landscaped” by human beings. Mann sheds clarifying light on the methods used to arrive at these new visions of the pre-Columbian Americas and how they have affected our understanding of our history and our thinking about the environment. His book is an exciting and learned account of scientific inquiry and revelation.

This comprehensive, illustrated almanac is packed with fascinating information about the entire physical world and its peoples. Organized into four main parts for easy reference---What Is Geography, Physical Geography, Human Geography, and Places---the work covers not only the most important subjects to geographers today, including earth's formation and structure, weather and climate, geology and bioregions, population growth and migration, urbanization and cultural identity, and global trade and the environment, but also the history of geography itself and the critical work geographers do in the art and science of mapmaking. Generously illustrated with hundreds of vivid color photographs, charts, graphs, sidebars, and maps that range from new satellite images of the earth to the diversity of human languages to the forces of nature around the globe, this one-of-a-kind volume also features some of the National Geographic Society's most recent world maps. An extensive Flags and Facts section provides many vital statistics on the geography, culture, economy, industry, and more for every nation of the world. Including an