Books: Fall 2019

Recent books published by members of the HGSE community

Posted August 28, 2019
By Lory Hough

READER, COME HOME
Maryanne Wolf
Written as a series of long letters to the reader, Maryanne Wolf, Ed.D.’79, uses historical, literary, and scientific sources, as well as her own experiences as director of the Center for Dyslexia, Diverse Learners, and Social Justice at UCLA, and (former) director of the Center for Reading and Language Research at Tufts University, to look at what is happening to reading and the reading brain as it adapts to a digital culture. “There is as much reason for excitement as caution as we turn our attention to the specific changes in the evolving reading brain that are happening now and may happen in different ways in a few short years,” she writes.

IN SEARCH OF DEEPER LEARNING
Jal Mehta and Sarah Fine
In Search of Deeper Learning was not the book that Professor Jal Mehta and Sarah Fine, Ed.M.’13, Ed.D’17, set out to write. Initially, they set out to study high schools that were truly engaging students, the ones that were helping students flourish. In an effort to figure out what made these exceptional schools tick, they spent more than 750 hours in 30 high schools, ob-serving and interviewing students, teachers, parents, and administra-tors. The problem was, even at schools considered the best of the best when it came to deep learning, they found big gaps between aspira-tion and reality. The good news: They also found pockets of inspiration, in individual teachers, classrooms, electives, and extracurriculars.

MAYBE TOMORROW?
Charlotte Agell
In her new picture book, author and educator Charlotte Agell, Ed.M.’86, confronts a topic that is tough for anyone, but especially for children: the loss of someone they love. In Maybe Tomorrow?, which Agell says was inspired by her students, Elba, a tiny hippo, is dragging around a heavy block but isn’t quite sure why. Norris, an al-ligator, is always happy as a trail of butterflies follow him around. Norris realizes that there’s sadness in the block and through his friendship and empathy, helps Elba let go of the heaviness, at least a little, while still celebrating his lost friend, Little Bird.

THE ALLIANCE WAY
Tina Owen-Moore
She opened the first school with a mission of being completely bully-free. When Tina Owen-Moore, Ed.L.D.’19, cofounded the Alliance School in Milwaukee in 2005, it was personal, having been bullied her-self, but it was also more than that. “Almost everyone has a story about a time when they were bullied and didn’t want to go to school,” she writes in The Alliance Way: The Making of a Bully-Free School. The book is both a guide for educators and others who care about creating safe schools and a case study of how all schools can be accepting, inclusive, and academically challenging. “What we do at Alliance,” she writes, “can be done anywhere.”

THE LOST EDUCATION OF HORACE TATE
Vanessa Siddle Walker
In this nearly 500-page nonfiction book, historian and Emory University Professor Vanessa Siddle Walker, Ed.M.’85, Ed.D.’88, tells the story of a network of heroic black educators in the South who helped lay the groundwork for Brown v. Board of Education and the civil rights movement, including providing the money, the data, and the plaintiffs for the NAACP to move forward with its legal cases. In writing her book, Siddle Walker says, “My hope is that this account assists a new generation to see what it might otherwise have missed.”