Maya Angelou Resource Library: Education

Beyond A Dream Deferred is a multidisciplinary work that consolidates progressive perspectives on multicultural education, establishing it as a crucial sphere in a society charged with re-imagining its national identity in all its diversity.

Comprehensive, passionate, detailed, up-to-date: like an Our Bodies,Our Selves for undergraduate and graduate women, The College Woman's Handbook gathers together a world of information and and resources and organizes it in one accessible, 656-page reference. From managing everyday expenses, to health, sexuality and birth control, to career issues, it addresses the hundreds of specific needs, questions and concerns that college women have. Written by two recent Barnard graduates, Rachel Dobkin and Shana Sippy, here are thirty-one chapters to help college women educate themselves in and out of the classroom. There are chapters on Academics--how to choose a major and find a mentor, manage study time, and counter sexism in the classroom where male students are called on as much as 12 times more often then female students. On Money. On Living Spaces. On Travel and Study Abroad. On Wellness-common campus illnesses, body image and eating disorders. Plus religion, personal safety, activism and volunteerism, and more. Sidebars provide instant information to dozens of topics--government loans, dietary supplements, issues of campus confidentiality. And throughout, quotes from college women around the country enrich and enliven each subject.

Psychologist and educator Wlodkowski (Regis U., Denver) and independent education researcher and consultant Ginsberg present a pragmatic and theoretically substantive guide for teachers in postsecondary schools in the U.S. Coverage includes understanding relationships between culture and motivation to learn, establishing inclusion, developing attitude, enhancing meaning, engendering competence, and implementing a culturally responsive pedagogy.

Arthur Chickering and Linda Reisser have produced an intelligent and penetrating scholarly work that is a worthy sequel to its distinguished predecessor. If the history of Education and Identity is any indication, this second edition will take its place among the classics in higher education literature.

The chapter authors are of different ethnic backgrounds, ranging from Hispanic to Chinese to African American. The book focuses on the minority experience and how to not just cope but win at the academic game.

Remedial, illiterate, intellectually deficient-these are the stigmas that define America's educational underclass. As a child in a Los Angeles ghetto, Mike Rose shared these labels; today he works with educationally underprepared children and adults in order to give them a fair chance at learning. In Lives on the Boundary, Rose describes his innovative methods of awakening untapped potential and initiating "problem" students into the world of language, literature, and expression. Challenging educators, policymakers, and parents to re-examine their assumptions about the capacities of students, Rose offers a truly democratic vision, one that should be heeded by anyone concerned with America's future.

Children of color, as well as poor children?"other people's children"?are often victimized by school administrators and others who see "damaged and dangerous caricatures" instead of able youngsters who are capable of learning in a mainstream setting. This is the observation of Delpit, who has used her varied experience in schools from New Guinea to Alaska to better understand and resolve cultural clashes in American classrooms. In the provocative essays collected here, Delpit unfolds her views on teaching African American children, based on professional research and her own experience of school as an alien environment. Defining the goal of educators as celebration, not merely toleration, of diversity in the classroom, Delpit illustrates ways that teachers, including African Americans, can build on students' home cultures to help prepare them for life after school. The author's vision of alternative perspectives should stimulate rethinking the complexities of multicultural inclusiveness.

"Prepared by Clearinghouse on Higher Education, The George Washington University in cooperation with Association for the Study of Higher Education."

In Teaching Community bell hooks seeks to theorize from the place of the positive, looking at what works. Writing about struggles to end racism and white supremacy, she makes the useful point that "No one is born a racist. Everyone makes a choice." Teaching Community tells us how we can choose to end racism and create a beloved community. hooks looks at many issues-among them, spirituality in the classroom, white people looking to end racism, and erotic relationships between professors and students. Spirit, struggle, service, love, the ideals of shared knowledge and shared learning - these values motivate progressive social change. Teachers of vision know that democratic education can never be confined to a classroom. Teaching - so often undervalued in our society -- can be a joyous and inclusive activity. bell hooks shows the way. "When teachers teach with love, combining care, commitment, knowledge, responsibility, respect, and trust, we are often able to enter the classroom and go straight to the heart of the matter, which is knowing what to do on any given day to create the best climate for learning."

Cultural theorist hooks means to challenge preconceptions, and it is a rare reader who will be able to walk away from her without considerable thought. Despite the frequent appearance of the dry word "pedagogy," this collection of essays about teaching is anything but dull or detached. hooks begins her meditations on class, gender and race in the classroom with the confession that she never wanted to teach. By combining personal narrative, essay, critical theory, dialogue and a fantasy interview with herself (the latter artificial construct being the least successful), hooks declares that education today is failing students by refusing to acknowledge their particular histories. Criticizing the teaching establishment for employing an over-factualized knowledge to deny and suppress diversity, hooks accuses colleagues of using "the classroom to enact rituals of control that were about domination and the unjust exercise of power." Far from a castigation of her field, however, Teaching to Transgress is full of hope and excitement for the possibility of education to liberate and include. She is a gentle, though firm, critic, as in the essay "Holding My Sister's Hand," which could well become a classic about the distrust between black and white feminists. While some will find her rejection of certain difficult theory narrow-minded, it is a small flaw in an inspired and thought-provoking collection.

In this stimulating and often heartfelt collection of essays, 20 female academics from working-class backgrounds address the personal, pedagogical and ideological issues raised by their experiences as teachers and students. Though some essays adopt abstract academic language, most are personal narratives, and the issue of the appropriate "voice" in academia pervades the book. Pam Annas, after proposing a reading list for a course in working-class literature, explains how she has had her students replace traditional papers with a "critical reading journal" in which they analyze works and connect them to other course materials and to their lives. Several writers struggle with isolation and the "double consciousness" inherent in their position; bell hooks urges understanding and appreciation but not "empty romanticization" of working-class backgrounds. The conventional image of a female scholar, writes Suzanne Sowinska, is "one of refinement"; her essay, like several others, suggests how "economic survival strategies" have shaped an identity defined by struggle.