How do you write a comparative politics textbook for changing times?

When I studied comparative politics as an undergraduate in the 1990s, I was introduced to the field through static comparisons between national political systems. Each chapter in the textbook we read described a different country, and we learned about constitutions, legislatures, and parties as if they were fixed features of political life.

That approach has long since been overtaken by events. Today’s students live in a world where party systems are changing from election to election, new technologies are transforming political participation and communication, and authoritarian rulers are coming up with new ways of grabbing and holding on to power.

How should we teach comparative politics in this rapidly changing environment? That’s something I thought about when I sat down to write my new textbook, An Introduction to Comparative Politics. My answer has four parts.

1. Get to the key concepts and ideas right away

Scholars of comparative politics ask two big questions: why are political systems so different from one another, and how do those differences matter for people’s lives? If we help students understand why those two questions are so important and guide them as they learn about the main differences between political systems, we can put them on a life-long journey of discovery. Today’s students have easy access to reasonably accurate data on political systems via their computers and their phones, so it’s not factual information they need from us—they need concepts and ideas they can use to make sense of the information that is available to them.

2. Take a global view

The modern discipline of comparative politics developed in America and Europe in the nineteenth century, and it has long treated the institutions of North American and Western European democracies as the standard against which all other systems are measured. That attitude never made much sense, and it makes less sense today than ever, since many of today’s political challenges and conflicts have a global scope. Today’s students are eager to understand how the key concepts and ideas of comparative politics travel across continents—or, as is sometimes the case, they don’t.

3. Talk about historical change

The turn away from static comparisons between national political systems also requires that we pay attention to processes of historical change, continuities, and resurgences.

It is remarkable how much history has been repeating itself lately. Over the last two decades, leading comparativists have presented in-depth analyses of “electoral authoritarianism”—conducting multi-party elections in de facto authoritarian regimes. As Theodore Zeldin showed in the 1950s, Napoleon III’s regime in France in the 1850s and 1860s had all the hallmarks of electoral authoritarianism. Other comparativists have examined the rise of populism. Donald Trump’s rise to power in the United States has a lot in common with Georges Boulanger’s meteoric political career in France in the 1880s.

4. Emphasize data and methods

For better or worse, we live in a data-driven world, and whatever our students choose to do when they’re done studying, they’re going to need basic data literacy skills. This makes it all the more important for us as teachers to emphasize that comparative politics isn’t just a set of facts to memorize—it is a way of thinking about the world. Students need to become familiar with the main methodological approaches in comparative politics right away, including both broad cross-national comparisons and focused case studies. I therefore deemed it essential, when writing An Introduction to Comparative Politics, to present students with up-to-date data and up-to-date empirical examples in all chapters.

By learning the key concepts and ideas, taking a global view, tracing processes of historical continuity and change, and using diverse comparative methods, students can gain the independence of mind they need to make sense of politics throughout their lifetimes.

^{Feature image: photo by Bhabin Tamang via Pexels.}

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Knowledge and teaching in the age of information

The advent of the World Wide Web in the turn of the last century completely transformed the way most people find and absorb information. Rather than a world in which information is stored in books or housed in libraries, we have a world where all of the information in the world is accessible to everyone via computers, and in the last decade or so, via their handheld mobile device. The young people currently in university or in school grew up in a world where information is not privileged and immediate access to all of it is taken for granted. In this age of immediate and readily accessible information on any subject, we must ask: What is the role of academic institutions in teaching? If anyone can find out anything at any time, why learn anything? Is there any value to knowledge in its own right?

The answer is that of course teaching and learning are still important, but they must change to reflect the way information is accessed. The fact is that information on its own is useless without a contextual framework. It may be possible to easily find a detailed account of all of the units and commanders that participated in the Battle of Regensburg in 1809, but if the reader has no understanding of military history, and no background on the politics leading to the Napoleonic wars, this information is no different from a shopping list. Similarly, it may be possible to find detailed information on the excretory system of annelid worms, but without an understanding of what excretory systems are and what their role is in the organism, and without a knowledge of the biology and evolution of annelid worms, this information is no more than a list of incoherent technical terms.

These two very different examples serve to highlight the difference between information and knowledge. Possessing knowledge about a subject means being able to place information into a broad framework and context. People who are knowledgeable about the Napoleonic wars do not necessarily know the names of every commander of every unit in the Battle of Regensburg, but if they need this information, they can access it and use it better than someone with no knowledge. A comparative zoologist may not know all the details about annelid excretory systems, but when needed, they will know what to look for.

With this distinction in mind, I suggest that teaching and textbooks need to shift their focus from transferring information to transferring knowledge. No textbook can compete with the wealth of information available at the students’ fingertips. No course can ever impart all that there is to know about a subject. However, a good teacher and a well-written textbook can provide a much better framework for knowledge and understanding than a search engine will ever be able to. Indeed, a course or module that overburdens the students with numerous bits of information is not only a misuse of resources, it is ultimately counter-productive, as the student will always be able to challenge the teacher with a new bit of information not included in the course.

Teaching in the age of information should focus on providing a working vocabulary of a subject and on building a robust framework of knowledge. Detailed examples can be used to demonstrate principles, but this should be done sparingly. The curious students can then fill in the details on their own, taking advantage of the information at their fingertips.

I have been following these principles in my teaching of evolution and organismic biology for as long as I have been a university professor. My frustration at the details-heavy zoology textbooks led me to write a new textbook, focusing on principles and on providing a conceptual framework to organismic biology, rather than on details. For example, I have written a chapter on excretory systems that outlines what the roles and functions of this system are, and gives a few demonstrative examples of how these functions are manifested in a small number of organisms. I have included similar chapters on other systems interspersed with chapters on individual animal phyla, which give an overview of the phylum and its diversity, and present the specific variations within each of the organ systems, and how these are adapted to the life history of members of the phylum.

As we and our students continue to have easier and more readily available access to information, this new approach will provide a more successful framework for students to continue to grow and learn as they step out into the world. Hopefully this approach will be picked up by authors of additional textbooks to provide a new generation of teaching resources, more suitable for the age of information.

^{Feature image credit: Ilya Lukichev via iStock.}

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Five tips to improve your research culture

With principal investigators facing work, life, mental health and career challenges, time is often a limiting factor. But creating a healthy environment helps all achieve and feel well. 

A typical principal investigator (PI) must overcome many challenges and has a great deal to learn. The experience was accurately portrayed in a recent Twitter post with the caption “Transitioning from a post-doc fellowship to PI of a lab…” In it, the “PI” sets off across a muddy terrain to reach a stable foothold with unexpected and humorous results. Reading the comments, the clip appears to resonate well with academics and researchers alike. 

The example reflects other transitions as well, including tenure, promotion, and taking on further organizational and research leadership responsibilities. On top of balancing various roles, along with one’s health and wellbeing, PIs must regularly figure out what research questions to pursue, how to win highly competitive funding, and manage their research career, as well as how to build and sustain a healthy team. There is a growing need to support and equip researchers with skills to shape their environments.

At the heart of this challenge is research culture and team leadership. Research culture encompasses the behaviours, values, expectations, attitudes, and norms of a given community. Culture emerges from many factors: past history, explicit and implicit expectations, values and cultural norms as well as the relational dynamics and power systems. That said, each individual can and does impact their culture in subtle and overt ways. If we want to create a research ecosystem that is diverse, healthy, and more inclusive, we must recognize that every person in research can make a positive difference. 

Lately, funders and policy makers are paying increasing attention to this agenda. Principal investigators are well placed to help and have much to gain from it. If you are on your way to being a PI or already in the role, the five practical tips below will help you reflect on, explore, and begin to proactively manage a healthier research culture. 

Five practical tips for a healthier research culture

1. Get curious about the research culture you have now

Imagine an unexpected visitor staying in your group for a week. What would this person see? For example, what is the nature of interactions between different members of your group? What is and isn’t talked about? What tends to get rewarded and celebrated? Who succeeds here and who tends to struggle? How is help given? How are errors and learning shared? Are people tense or on edge? When a junior researcher speaks or presents their work, do senior researchers show up and listen? Your answers to these questions will help reveal more about the culture you have. From this place, you can more easily consider what would be the best scenario and how to bridge the current set up with this vision. 

2. Establish your key values 

What makes values so useful is that they guide behaviour and culture. For example, if a given team values results, some people may interpret this to mean “results at all cost.” But when we value teamwork and results, the way we get to the finish line matters. Decide on a small number of values that are key to your team’s collective and individual success and wellbeing. Consult your team. Here are some ideas for what could be valued: trust, honesty, excellence, teamwork, healthy debate, or even conflict that is effectively resolved. Talk about your values with the team and use them to guide how everyone works and behaves. 

3. Focus on fostering good communication

Results have inherent value but sometimes they can come at a cost. This could be health, well-being, work quality, motivation, and teamwork. Pay special attention to how you and others communicate. How are people supported and guided? What happens if someone does something wrong? Is everyone invited to speak and is their view fully considered? Is there enough compassion and healthy curiosity in the system? How is conflict handled and resolved? What sort of career support can one expect to receive at the start, mid-way through and towards one’s next career step? 

One of the most practical ways to improve communications is by asking people about what they need, how they feel, what they notice, and what would be better. Your job as a leader is to open and guide these conversations. Sharing your views is important but their greatest effect often comes when they are shared at the end of these conversations, along with a mutually agreed action plan. 

4. Major in curiosity over criticism

Avoid confusing rigour with criticism however much you intend to help. Uninvited negative evaluation risks damaging people’s confidence, motivation, and morale. This can quickly turn a healthy culture into one where fear inhibits everyone’s full potential. To counter this, adopt the following positive intention when speaking with others and holding meetings: “I am here to discover and learn.” Seek to first understand rather than jump to premature conclusions. Treat conversations as a worthwhile time investment as clear, mutual understanding is foundational to healthy results and relationships. 

5. Celebrate and be curious about difference

One of the best way to nurture and support diversity is to be curious and welcome difference. If you speak less and inquire about other people’s experience, needs, and desires, you will be better placed to ensure everyone’s success. Along the way you will develop genuine trust and respect and inspire others to follow your lead. The possibility to make this better exists in every interaction with much room to get things wrong and learn. Through conscious positive intention, regular reflection, and feedback, you will create the sort of culture that delivers top results and where everyone thrives. 

Is all this worth it? Absolutely! 

The ideas here can be worked into one-to-one meetings, regular group discussions, annual retreats, and appraisals, as well as countless informal interactions. Start small and you will feel and notice a big difference in little time. Your team and visitors will too.

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The color line: race and education in the United States [podcast]

Black History Month celebrates the achievements of a globally marginalized community still fighting for equal representation and opportunity in all areas of life. This includes education.

In 1954, the United States’ Supreme Court ruled “separate but equal” unconstitutional for American public schools in “Brown v. Board of Education.” While this ruling has been celebrated as a pivotal victory for civil rights, it has not endured without challenge.

On today’s episode, we spoke with Zoë Burkholder, author of An African American Dilemma: A History of School Integration and Civil Rights in the North and Color in the Classroom: How American Schools Taught Race, 1900-1954, and Nina M. Yancy, author of the upcoming How the Color Line Bends: The Geography of White Prejudice in Modern America, examining issues around education, integration, and segregation through their scholarship. In particular, we discussed segregation in northern schools and a recent case study from Baton Rouge, Louisiana.

Check out Episode 69 of The Oxford Comment and subscribe to The Oxford Comment podcast through your favourite podcast app to listen to the latest insights from our expert authors.

Recommended reading

In this episode, we discussed Nina M. Yancy’s How the Color Line Bends and Zoë Burkholder’s books An African American Dilemma and Color in the Classroom.

Zoë Burkholder is also the co-author of Integrations: The Struggle for Racial Equality and Civic Renewal in Public Education. Here you can find the introductions to An African American Dilemma and Integrations. Burkholder also wrote a blog post for the OUPblog entitled “Which is better: school integration or separate, Black-controlled schools?”

In 2019, Nina Yancy wrote an article in the Journal of Race, Ethnicity, and Politics called “Racialized Preference in Context: The Geography of White Opposition to Welfare“, which reported some of her research for How the Color Line Bends.

You can also check out Takeover: Race, Education, and American Democracy, which offers a systematic study of state takeovers of local school districts.

Additionally, you can visit The Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Education for entries such as “Critical Race Theory and Qualitative Methodology in Education” and “Critical Whiteness Studies.”

_{Featured image: Photo by CDC on Unsplash.}

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Police-free schools: the new frontier in ending the school-to-prison pipeline

On 25 October 2015, a Black high school student named Niya Kenny filmed a white school police officer body slamming her classmate, a Black sixteen-year-old girl, to the floor at Spring Valley High School in Columbia, South Carolina. Deputy Sherriff Ben Fields placed Shakara in a headlock, flipped her desk over, and then dragged and threw her across the classroom floor, all for allegedly refusing to hand over her cell phone. Yet it was Niya and her classmate who were arrested, charged with criminal “disturbing school,” and sent to juvenile detention.

Niya’s video went viral. Students across the country involved in the Alliance for Educational Justice and local groups working to dismantle the school-to-prison pipeline wrote and delivered love letters to Niya at a national youth power conference. The movement delivered a petition with 150,000 signatures to drop the charges against Niya and Shakara, and the incident served to accelerate the growing, but at the time little known, movement for police-free schools.

Community organizing and police-free schools

Riding the wave of mass protests against police violence and racism in 2020, Black and Brown parents and students won their first victories in defunding or removing police from schools. Since even before the Niya Kenny incidents, these local activists had been patiently organizing for police-free schools for many years. They had built a base of student and parent leaders knowledgeable about the issue, had developed and even submitted policy proposals, and had been lobbying school board members. When the protest wave opened up new opportunities, these organizing groups were ready. They won some quick and early victories and sparked a movement that spread across the country.

Long-established organizing campaigns won quick victories in 2020, cutting the school police budget by 35% or $25 million in Los Angeles in 2020 (and by another $25 million in 2021), ended the contracts between the Madison and Denver school districts and their police departments, and entirely eliminated the Oakland Schools Police Department, reinvesting its $6 million budget into a non-carceral safety plan. Since June 2020, over 138 school districts have announced that they will remove police from schools.

Police do not make students safe

Police-free school advocates spent years developing the argument that school police, also known as school resource officers (SROs), do not make schools safe. There is, in fact, no research-based evidence that demonstrates that police improve safety in schools.

As opposed to promoting safety, school police target students of color and those with disabilities, which starts them on the road to prison. During the 2017-18 school year, nearly 230,000 students were referred to law enforcement, with about a quarter leading to arrests, often for minor behavioral issues. In schools with police presence, students are five times more likely to be arrested and charged than students in schools without SROs. Overall, Black students are twice as likely to be arrested in school as white students. Many young people have their first encounter with police in schools. One study found that in North Carolina, school-based referrals make up about 40% of the referrals to the juvenile justice system and most of these referrals are for minor, nonvio­lent offenses.

The rise of armed security personnel in schools came with zero tolerance approaches to the so-called war on drugs in the 1980s and escalated in the 1990s as part of the move towards mass incarceration of Black and Brown people, which Michelle Alexander has called the “New Jim Crow.” In the late 1970s, there were fewer than one hundred police officers in schools in the US. By 2003, there were almost 15,000 and the proportion of schools with armed security continued to grow.

The fact of the matter is that public schools in low-income communities of color invest in systems of discipline, control, and punishment rather than student support. The result is that 1.7 million students attend schools with police but no counselors; 10 million students attend schools with police but no social workers.

Alternatives to zero tolerance and policing

Advocates working to end zero tolerance and create police-free schools are organizing for alternative approaches to criminalization like restorative justice. When students misbehave or fight, rather than being disciplined or arrested, school staff and student peers hold restorative circles—dialogic processes that get at the root causes of the issue and help resolve conflicts. The main problem, however, may not be student misbehavior. Rather, when teachers start to learn about restorative justice, it often leads them to realize that they must break with zero tolerance mentalities and practices that result in punishing and criminalizing students rather than supporting them. In this way, the movement for police-free schools seeks to create supportive school climates and to reimage public schooling as safe, humane, and empowering for low-income students, students of color, and all students.

The movement to dismantle the school-to-prison pipeline

In the early 2000s, a new movement arose to challenge the school-to-prison pipeline. Its focus was primarily on ending zero tolerance school discipline policies that suspend and expel students of color and those with disabilities at high rates, pushing them out of school and into the juvenile and criminal justice systems. Black students were and still are three times as likely to be suspended as white students; in Texas, over 75% of Black students are suspended at some point in their high school years.

When parents and students of color first named the school-to-prison pipeline and called for an end to zero tolerance, few were listening. After fifteen years of organizing, in 2014, the US Departments of Education and Justice issued joint guidance calling for an end to zero tolerance and warning school districts against racially discriminatory discipline practices. Organizing groups won a rolling series of victories in states and districts across the country that ended zero tolerance discipline policies. As a result, suspension rates have begun to fall, in some places dramatically. In Los Angeles, a coalition of organizing groups won a series of victories in campaigns to reduce exclusionary discipline, culminating in the end to suspensions for “willful defiance” in 2011. Lost days of instruction due to suspensions fell from about 75,000 in 2007-18 to 8,300 by 2013-14 and fewer than 5,600 lost days in 2017-18.

Ten years ago, the Black Organizing Project in Oakland declared the goal of completely removing police from schools by 2020. Few were listening. Now, the demand for police-free schools is gaining momentum across the country. It is the new frontier of the movement to dismantle the school-to-prison pipeline and transform public education towards racial equity and educational justice.

_{Featured image by NeONBRAND via Unsplash.}

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Eradicating ableism with disability-positive K-12 education

More than half a century ago, powerful civil rights laws brought disabled children into American school systems, breaking down the physical barriers that held these young people at the margins of society. But attitudes towards disability as a devalued limitation persisted, holding social and cultural barriers between disabled and nondisabled people firmly in place. There is, however, an opportunity to use the power of education and learning to reimagine how we design the world.

In 1970, United States public schools educated only one in five students with disabilities, and most states had laws on the books denying children with both physical and developmental disabilities access to mainstream schooling. In 1975, Congress passed the Education for All Handicapped Children Act (EHA) to support states and localities in the public education of students with disabilities. When it was reauthorized in 1990, EHA was renamed the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA). As a millennial born in 1984, IDEA afforded me, a blind kindergartener, the right to attend my local public school. I was born with a degenerative eye condition that meant I would have night blindness my whole life, and gradually lose my daytime vision as well.

By 2016, 95% of children 6-21 who were eligible for services under IDEA were spending at least some part of each school day in a mainstream classroom. This was a huge leap forward but was happening in the absence of a major culture shift—even though more and more disabled children were joining classrooms, disability was absent from the curriculum. For instance, no one—not my parents, my teachers, my classmates, or myself—referred to me as “blind.” We often referred to my “eye problem,” or said that, “I couldn’t see in the dark.” There was no vocabulary to describe my sense of difference, though it was deeply felt.

In school, I did wear glasses, but none of the trappings of blindness—the white cane, the Braille business cards—those would come later. Still, I was the source of relentless bullying. I recall dreading mundane things like accidentally dropping my pencil on the ground, as I’d have to kneel down, in a cold sweat of shame, as the boys in the class taunted me, calling me “blindy” as I traced my fingers across the floor to locate my fallen writing implement. This was all because none of us knew better—because, for centuries, disabled children were bundled away and corralled inside institutions, while nondisabled children were taught to fear and underestimate them. These deeply-engrained fears of disability still exist in the present day and are acted upon in ways that harm disabled children.

Though there are only 10 US studies linking disability to bullying in school, according to one study from 2009, disabled children were two to three times more likely to experience bullying than their nondisabled peers. A more recent 2019 analysis from the National Center for Educational Statistics    found that, alongside physical appearance, race/ethnicity, gender, sexual orientation, and religion, disability was among the most common reason for bullying reported by students. Negative outcomes of bullying include lower performance in school, greater absenteeism, and lower graduation rates, among others.

This data comes as no surprise to me, as it reflects my own childhood. And this is how schools perpetuated a culture of ableism—and it took powerful civil rights laws to achieve the simple step of giving disabled children access to the same educational opportunities as their nondisabled peers.

Thankfully, for a new generation of disabled students, this reality is changing, and we can begin to see a world remade by people who will grow up immersed in disability-positive education.

Organizations like Disability Equality and Education in Pennsylvania are developing disability-positive curricula that teach children about various forms of disability, as well as how to honor and respect the differences that make us all whole and human. Disabled authors are publishing children’s books like We Move Together and Rolling Warrior that further reinforce these ideas. Films like Crip Camp are being used in schools to tell stories of the disability civil rights movement. These are the narratives that I had to seek out in my adult life, that will no longer be invisible for the next generation of disabled youth.

And this is just the beginning. States, localities, and school boards must demand that disability become part of the K-12 curriculum. Students who, because of IDEA, have the opportunity and the right to learn alongside their nondisabled peers should see themselves in the education they receive. And they shouldn’t be alone in these discoveries—nondisabled children should be right there with them, building disability consciousness and finding creative ways to work together to ensure everyone is included in every aspect of life. If this becomes the foundation, a child who grows into an architect is less likely to forget to build that ramp and make it beautiful; a high school student who becomes a doctor is more likely to show compassion and provide accommodation to a disabled patient; and a nondisabled government leader is more likely to consider disability issues when designing public policies. Even after the harms of bullying and the loneliness of exclusion, I believe this new world is possible because knowledge is a powerful tool to repair our entrenched fear of otherness.

Featured image by Markus Spiske on Unsplash

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Why were Finnish schools so successful with distance and in-person learning during the pandemic?

On 18 March 2020, schools in Finland closed. On 14 May 2020, they reopened successfully. Why was Finland successful in transitioning to distance education and then back to face-to-face learning and teaching?

There is an a priori answer. Finns have a view of education and learning that often contradicts common wisdom (such as worrying less about the standardized performance of children and teachers’ accountability) to truly serve the wellbeing of children by empowering the highly selective and trained teacher force with trust.

Finns are passionate about face-to-face education even in the age of technology-driven educational services. They have invested heavily in new or refurbished twenty-first century superschools, which create superb and highly resourced teaching and learning environments that facilitate the face-to-face and digital interactions between teachers and students. Together with a serendipitous policy mix of national, local, and school decisions, the school is no longer only a place to teach and learn subjects but also a phenomenon where the whole learning experience and children’s growth occur. They put a lot of effort into making sure that the children feel safe under a relaxed culture of interaction between students and teachers.

The Finns have invested in two structural foundations to facilitate the pedagogic interaction: a powerful teaching force and a technological infrastructure (sound broadband internet access and educational tools so that teachers can navigate different pedagogic proposals and environments). They have reduced the number of smaller, less well-resourced schools, and instead, they have established large superschools to house more resources for many students. Fewer, well-resourced schools, rather than many low-resourced schools, is one of their key ideas.

Digitalization in schools followed digitalization in life—but schools went one step further. More screen time is not learning. Therefore, Finnish schools decided to provide digital access for everyone and train teachers and students with skills on how to use this technology for learning and wellbeing. They don’t force digitalization but make sure that if teachers and students want to explore digital means, all the schools are ready for them.

Since collaboration among all school agents (teachers, students, and parents) has always been essential in the Finnish model of education, and since the society and parents have a high value of education (for example, the teaching profession is one of the most highly demanded fields of university studies by high school students), it was not very difficult for schools and teachers to communicate with parents and students during the pandemic.

The pandemic accelerated the turn-of-the-century trends: more digitalization, flexible technology, teamwork, and a focus on the wellbeing of students and teachers. So, what should we expect in the future? In the short term, new spaces for outdoor activities, more digital skills, more constant formative evaluations for students, and more strategic planning for future crises in the long term.

Here are the key learnings shared by Finnish teachers, experts, and principals during the pandemic:

• The need to keep the information and communication channels open and frequent among all people.
• The need to bring the newly acquired skills into daily lives, perhaps with remote sessions once a week or per school term, as modern technology companies do.
• The knowledge that we are living, in part, the normality of the future.
• The pandemic is a phenomenon with solid consequences: loneliness kills.
• A school is a place to learn academic skills and, perhaps more importantly, grow and share with others. A school is a place where one can safely fail and recover.
• Teachers took a tremendous digital leap.
• The majority opinion seems to be that closing schools hurt students.
• Face-to-face teaching and learning is the correct form of education and deep learning.
• Although the pandemic has driven the digital leap at all educational levels, the coronavirus will not change school curricula. The issue is how to approach rather than change the school curricula.
• Education has been, and continues to be, the number one priority in Finland.
• When everyone (students, parents, teachers, community) works together, we can get the best results.
• Lifelong learning is not just a phrase; it is a necessity for every one of us.

Face-to-face education is so important to achieve. Digitalization is an instrument, a means to an end. Digital technology complements the work of teachers. The dual vision of digital preparedness and children’s wellbeing, backed by the already-in-place teachers’ pedagogic command, facilitated the successful transition back and forth between distance and face-to-face learning during the 2020-2021 coronavirus crisis.

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SHAPE and societal recovery from crises

The SHAPE (Social Sciences, Humanities, and the Arts for People and the Economy) initiative advocates for the value of the social sciences, humanities, and arts subject areas in helping us to understand the world in which we live and find solutions to global issues. As societies around the world respond to the immediate impact of the COVID-19 pandemic, research from SHAPE disciplines has the potential to illuminate how societies process and recover from various social crises.

In recognition of the essential role these disciplines play for societal recovery, we have curated a hub of SHAPE research which looks back on how we have rebuilt from social crises in the past, how societies process living through extraordinary times, and considers the next steps societies can take on the road to recovery.

Lessons from the past

Throughout history, individuals and societies have encountered periods of crisis caused by factors including war, natural disasters, and health pandemics. Responses to these crises can provide a vital insight into how we respond to future global threats.

In a review of how societies respond to peril, Robert Wuthnow suggests that, “nothing, it appears, evokes discussion of moral responsibility quite as clearly as the prospect of impending doom.” Wuthnow examines how societies have responded to four major threats: nuclear holocaust, weapons of mass destruction, concern about a global pandemic, and the threat of global climate change, and finds that, “the picture of humanity that emerges in this literature is one of can-do problem solvers. Doing something, almost anything, affirms our humanity.”

Looking further back, the US Civil War also had a profound impact on many people and touched women’s lives in contradictory ways. Hannah Rosen’s chapter “Women, the Civil War, and Reconstruction” examines the wartime and postwar experiences primarily of black and white but also Native American women and provides insights into how we can reconstruct a fairer society following conflicts. Meanwhile, in Total War: An Emotional History, Claire Langhamer examines the role emotions played in the immediate aftermath of WWII, approaching our relationship to feeling through the lens of social, as well as cultural, history.

How we choose to commemorate the past is also a key question, explored by Joshua Gamson in an article published in Social Problems about the US National AIDS Memorial Grove.

Looking back on the economic implications of social crises, Mark Bailey discusses how the plague acted as a catalyst for the vast transformation of trading routes in North Sea economies. This economic shift has been reflected in the COVID-19 pandemic and, in response, authors from the Journal of Consumer Research have created a conceptual framework for understanding how consumers and markets have collectively responded over the short term and long term to threats that disrupt our routines, lives, and even the fabric of society.

Literature, classics, and the arts also provide an avenue to explore the effects of social crises. Laura E. Tanner’s blog post explores the works of author Marilynne Robinson. According to Tanner, these works provide us with tools for coping during lockdown by exploring the familiar, whilst her characters also navigate the threat of mortality and how trauma disrupts the comforts of the everyday.

In her chapter “Post-Ceasefire Antigones and Northern Ireland”, Isabelle Torrance traces the evocation of Antigone in the context of the Northern Irish conflict. In this way, literature provides a mirror to explore and process contemporary social crises.

Music history also provides a window into past responses to social traumas. In her chapter “Embodying Sonic Resonance as/after Trauma – Vibration, Music, and Medicine”, Jillian C. Rogers shows that interwar French musicians understood music making as a therapeutic, vibrational, bodily practice which offered antidotes to the unpredictable and harmful vibrations of warfare.

Living through extraordinary times

As the COVID-19 pandemic and its effects have spread across the globe, nations and individuals have adapted rapidly to dramatic shifts in how we experience the world.

Recent history can provide a fascinating insight into how communities have lived through extraordinary times in the past. In Pandemics, Publics, and Narrative, the authors explore how the general public experienced the 2009 swine flu pandemic by examining the stories of individuals, their reflections on news and expert advice given to them, and how they considered vaccination, social isolation, and other infection control measures.

During the COVID-19 pandemic, historians have considered how we will write the histories of 2020. In “Documenting COVID-19”, Kathleen Franz and Catherine Gudis explore people’s keen awareness of the “historic” moment in which we are living, and the questions it poses for historians: how do we ethically document our current social, public health, and economic crises, and in doing so help to dismantle structural inequalities?

In her article “Slow History”, published in The American Historical Review, Mary Lindemann asks whether the pandemic provides an opportunity to evaluate the “doing” of history and to isolate what really matters in research, writing, and instruction. Arguing that we should learn to value a slow, painstaking approach to our work, Lindemann argues that “historians are, after all, long-distance runners not sprinters.”

Among the many frontline workers enduring the COVID-19 pandemic are social workers, who continued to support people through a period of unprecedented change. A 2020 article from Social Work—“Voices from the Frontlines: Social Workers Confront the COVID-19 Pandemic”—explores how these key workers operated in the US, how they were coping with their own risks, and how social work as a profession anticipated the needs of vulnerable communities during the early stages of the US health crises. The pandemic has also presented specific challenges for social workers interacting with children; a paper from Children & Schools delves into nine ethical concerns facing school social workers when they must rely on electronic communication platforms.

A philosophical approach allows us to explore human emotions and ethics during major world threats. In their chapter on “Emotional resilience”, Ann Cooper Albright explores resilience in the face of threats—from natural disasters to school bullies—finding that emotional resilience provides the opportunity for lasting transformation: “often in returning and remembering, we find that we no longer want what we had before.“

The road to recovery

Living through these extraordinary times, the COVID-19 pandemic poses some important questions for the future. How do we rebuild from the economic, social, and emotional traumas of the past?

Charlotte Lyn Bright’s Social Work Research article considers the vital role social workers play in supporting society and individuals by looking at the unique skills they employ in their work during difficult times. Meanwhile, in her paper on “Community development in higher education”, Lesley Wood explores how academics can ensure their community-based research makes a difference by discussing the socio-structural inequalities that influence community participation.

In piece for the OUPblog, Nicole Hassoun calls for universal, legally enforced human rights access to essential medicines and healthcare, arguing that, “protecting human rights can help us increase our Global Health Impact.”

The study of the past provides a vital tool to help societies rebuild in the future. In “Making Progress: Disaster Narratives and the Art of Optimism in Modern America”, Kevin Rozario examines the role of disaster writings and “narrative imagination” in helping Americans to conceive of disasters as instruments of progress, arguing that this perspective has contributed greatly to the nation’s resilience in the face of natural disasters.

In this blog piece “Listen now before we choose to forget”, oral historian Mark Cave describes how memory is pliable; our recollections are continually reshaped by our own changing experiences and the influence of collective interpretations. In 2020, Cave writes, the Black Lives Matter protests, divisive partisan politics, and anger over extended lockdowns were all influencing our memories of the pandemic. Cave further explores an oral history project conducted among New Orleans residents following Hurricane Katrina in 2005, which “filled a deep need within our community to reflect and make sense of the experience of the storm and its aftermath.” Cave’s research will be vital for future historians considering how to study and understand the COVID-19 pandemic “at a time when history is clearly ‘in the making’.”

Literature continues to provide our society with a tool to understand and process trauma. In her blog post “Why literature must be part of the language of recovery from crisis”, Carmen Bugan explores trauma and social recovery in poetry, and its pertinence during the COVID-19 crises.

Pandemic life has underscored how digital technology can foster intimate connections. Research from Nathan Rambukkana discusses how this influx of digital connection has fostered a mode of interaction know as “distant sociality,” and asks whether this is here to stay following life under lockdown.

Looking much further to the future, Pasi Heikkurinen discusses the end of the human-dominated geological epoch and the potential technological advances needed to make a non-human dominated planet sustainable. Heikkurinen’s chapter provides sustainability scholars and policymakers with an opportunity “to deliberate not only on the proper kind of technology or the amount of technology needed, but also to consider technology as a way to relate to the world, others, and oneself.”

The impact of COVID-19 on the global economy is profound, and yet economists must grapple with how this impact will shape the future. In their chapter “The Interactional Foundations of Economic Forecasting”, Werner Reichmann explores how economic forecasters produce legitimate and credible predictions of the economic future, despite most of the economy being transmutable and indeterminate. Meanwhile, in “Why we can be cautiously optimistic for the future of the retail industry”, Alan Treadgold explores the new retail landscape following the COVID-19 pandemic. Although there is unprecedented uncertainty for retail outlets, Treadgold argues “there are substantial opportunities for reinvention also.”

Music also has the power to enact social healing and transformation following crises. In their chapter “Unchained Melody: The Rise of Orality and Therapeutic Singing”, June Boyce-Tillman explores therapeutic approaches to singing, finding that “singing has the ability to strengthen people physically and emotionally,” which brings “individuals and communities together in order to provide healing at the deepest level.”

SHAPE research

SHAPE research is an essential component of all societies and will be critical for rebuilding from the global COVID-19 crisis. In “Humanities of transformation: From crisis and critique towards the emerging integrative humanities”, Sverker Sörlin evaluates the efforts to enhance and incentivize the humanities in the among Nordic countries in the last quarter century, finding a far richer and more complex image of quality in the humanities following structural education reform in 1990.

Meanwhile, Jack Spaapen and Gunnar Sivertsen assess the societal impact of SHAPE subjects, arguing that the social sciences and humanities have an obligation to assist the main challenges faced by people and governments.

As governments, universities, and research institutions consider where and how they focus their efforts as the world tentatively begins to explore the idea of recovery, the range of research that we’ve gathered here demonstrates that, while science and technology must play a crucial role, a recovery without SHAPE will be no recovery at all.

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Which is better: school integration or separate, Black-controlled schools?

This summer journalist Nikole Hannah-Jones shocked Americans when she decided to decline tenure at the University of North Carolina (UNC), Chapel Hill in favor of an endowed chair at historically Black Howard University. The choice is unexpected because Ms Hannah-Jones, who identifies as Black, has spent her career arguing for school integration as an essential strategy to equalize educational opportunities for students of color.

Ms Hannah-Jones writes, “Since the second grade when I began being bused into white schools, I have been fighting against people who did not think a Black girl like me belonged, people who tried to control what I did, how I spoke how I looked, the work I produced.”

But now, after the Board of Trustees at UNC attempted to block her tenure appointment for political reasons, Ms Hannah-Jones has accepted a position at one of the nation’s leading historically Black colleges and universities (HBCUs).

Ms. Hannah-Jones explains, “For too long, Black Americans have been taught that success is defined by gaining entry to and succeeding in historically white institutions. I have done that, and now I am honored and grateful to join the long legacy of Black Americans who have defined success by working to build up their own.”

Many Americans wonder: is it hypocritical for a Black integrationist to leave a predominantly white university to work at an historically Black one?

An historical perspective helps shed light on this important question. I have traced debates within northern Black communities over the question of which would better serve the larger civil rights movement, racially integrated schools or separate, Black-controlled ones. These debates stretch back to the nation’s earliest, tax-supported schools in Boston in the 1840s and forward to the present day.

School integration seeks to break down the sinister effects of residential segregation created by decades of redlining, housing discrimination, white flight, gentrification, and discriminatory zoning by deliberately engineering diverse schools, typically by busing students out of their racially homogenous neighborhoods. Separation requires these very plans to be dismantled so that Black parents can have control over local, majority Black schools in their immediate neighborhoods. Although it is not impossible, it is challenging to pursue both strategies at the same time.

To date, neither has been entirely successful, yet both ideals—integration and separation—reappear with each new generation of students, parents, educators, and leaders who insist that quality public schools will improve Black students’ life chances, empower Black communities, and begin to redress larger racial inequalities in American society.

For this reason, historians are not surprised by Ms Hannah-Jones’ decision to abandon a majority white university for an historically Black one. The logic at the heart of this dilemma echoes back across the generations, including her frustration with high levels of racial discrimination at a predominantly white school and her powerful belief that a separate, Black-controlled one offers a more nurturing and supportive environment in which to succeed so that she can do more to advance the larger Black freedom struggle.

A meticulous historical analysis of school board records, court cases, the Black press, and civil rights organizations shows that either school integration or separation dominated the political discourse of northern Black educational activists in the US during particular historical eras. For example, school integration dominated between 1840 and 1900, but separation was more pronounced between 1900 and 1940, at which point school integration rose to prominence again alongside the wartime Black civil rights movement, before being subsumed by the Black Power movement in 1966. By 1975, African Americans remained committed to school integration as a strategy, but they modified this approach to include many of the features we associate with separate schools such as a critical mass of Black students, more Black teachers and administrators, and a curriculum and pedagogy that reflected Black students’ lived experiences.

During each historical era where either integration or separation dominated, a chorus of dissent, debate, and counter-narratives pushed Black communities to consider a fuller range of educational reform. This dynamic tension did not undermine Black educational activism, but made it smarter, more flexible, and more effective. The major improvements to racial equality in US public schools come from the important work of school integrationists and the vital work of those who advocated separate, Black-controlled schools.

In other words, the debate over school integration versus separation has a long and venerable tradition in African American communities, and because Americans have failed to equalize schools by 2021, this debate is still very much with us.

While the Black civil rights movement achieved so many righteous victories, it also suffered terrible defeats. The failure to equalize public education for Black students is among the most troubling of these losses. American public schools are becoming more segregated by race and socioeconomic class each year, which correlates directly with unequal educational opportunities and outcomes. Many of the nation’s most segregated schools today can be found not in the South, but in the supposedly progressive North.

Unlike public transportation, parks, restaurants, movie theaters, and even hospitals, which were successfully desegregated, schools are intended to offer a route out of poverty and serve as an equalizing mechanism in a deeply unequal social order. In the United States, access to a quality public school provides every child, no matter the status of his or her birth, with a shot at achieving the American Dream. Thus, equalizing access to public education represents one of the most pressing, unfinished agendas of the Black civil rights movement and a crucial site of analysis for historians.

School integration can help equalize educational opportunity and advance the civic function of public education in a democracy. But it is not a simple undertaking, and Black educational activists have long disagreed over whether integration is the best strategy to achieve a structural vision of educational equality and redistributive justice. Meaningful school integration requires a frank reckoning with how institutionalized racism has long discriminated against Black students and parents in ways that harm Black students and create vastly unequal educational opportunities.

Mixing Black and white students inside of formerly white schools is not a viable model for effective school integration. Generations of Black educational activists have supported separate schools as institutions that nurture the intellectual and emotional growth of Black youth while empowering Black communities. The argument for separate schools has always contained within it a vital critique of majority white schools as hegemonic institutions that fail to meet the needs of Black students and, consequently, fail to meet the larger purpose of public education in a democracy.

Ms Hannah-Jones’ decision to support school integration while working at an historically Black one is not hypocritical, but smart and reasonable given that she faced overt racial hostility and discrimination at the UNC. She used the opportunity to call for specific reforms that would make predominantly white universities like UNC truly welcoming places for scholars of color.

It’s not Ms Hannah-Jones’ responsibility to fix the systemic racism her very existence uncovered at the University of North Carolina. As she puts it, “The burden of working for racial justice is laid on the very people bearing the brunt of the injustice, and not the powerful people who maintain it. I say to you: I refuse.”

As she should. History shows us that for school integration to work well it must be more than not racist, it must be explicitly anti-racist.

If we want to make all schools welcoming places for people of color, we should take note of the features that work so well in separate, Black-controlled schools, including hiring and retaining more faculty and administrators of color, reforming hiring and promotion processes like tenure, affirming diverse Black histories and cultures, and treating Black faculty and students with dignity and respect. These are the very reforms Ms Hannah-Jones asks for at UNC. It remains to be seen whether predominantly white institutions like UNC will listen.

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Why climate change education needs more empathy

As citizens of this planet, we remain at an impasse when it comes to drastically changing the course of our environmental futures. At the heart of this impasse is climate change and the future of human and more-than-human survival. And yet, a significant key to potentially resolving climate change revolves around how we communicate with and relate to others.

Dismantling knowledge deficit models of education

Advocacy for climate change justice must pivot away from an assumption that people simply lack knowledge about the issues. Or, worse, that people should be shamed for being ignorant. While it may be true that people aren’t often educated about environmental risks caused by human behaviour, deficit educational models nevertheless present an unsustainable path forward.

Information or knowledge deficit models are built on the belief that increasing knowledge can be a primary motivator of social change. Deficit framing arose historically out of an attempt to sway public scepticism toward supporting scientific and technological advances. If people can simply remedy their lack of knowledge, according to this didactic approach, then they will eventually change their behaviour and attitudes.

In environmental education, this tactic has been a common misstep. It’s easy to see why the deficit model has been the primary mode of environmental communication since the 1980s and remains so to this day. There is some linear logic to it—filling educational gaps in knowledge can solve the problem. However, the evidence continually suggests that it doesn’t work.

Shifting attitudes and beliefs about climate change must do more than unilaterally telling social groups, often different from our own sociocultural backgrounds, that they are wrong. This deficit model uses a top-down flow of knowledge and creates an inherent hierarchy between the expert (knowledge holder) and audience (empty container). Rather than perform its intended outcome of motivating social change, the deficit model intensifies polarization and hostility.

As researchers have pointed out for decades, economic status, geographical location, and racial identity affect a person’s or group’s access to education. In other words, education can be significantly inequitable and so can the ways knowledge might be transferred and understood within deficit models. Labelling deficit or lack on any one individual or group only generates more animosity and division because of these systemic sociocultural dynamics.

Regardless, the deficit model remains a primary strategy for climate justice communication and other forms of environmental education in institutional and public contexts. Even if we can agree to move on from this model, where might we go from here?

Activating empathy

Research indicates that people view climate change through political affiliation more than science. Communicating through what politicians now excel at—speaking to perceived values and beliefs more than policy and facts—might be a significant indicator of how to reach people. A way to do this could be by promoting pro-social programs of empathy education that activate shared values.

Professor Pat Dolan, who is the UNESCO Chair in Children, Youth, and Civic Engagement, shows that empathy arises from both static forms (identifying with people) and active forms (acting on the feelings of static empathy to activate change) of engagement. “Empathy isn’t sympathy,” as Dolan says in The Irish Times. “It’s about valuing, respecting and understanding another person’s view.” Without understanding social, cultural, economic, or racial differences, we cannot fully engage in or promote static and active empathy.

Deficit models of education and learning are built upon the Western paradigm of individualism, where individuals alone are responsible for their lack of knowledge. This approach to education isn’t only ineffective and inequitable, it also contributes to creating a civic society rooted in discord and opposition. The culture of deficit is a central reason contentious issues often remain deadlocked.

Empathy education, in contrast, is built on reciprocity and relationships; it’s forged by connection and belonging through relational models. Empathy is ultimately created through social conditions, informing a person’s interactions or the ways people understand and respond to each other.

Research highlights how activating empathy can deter anti-social acts, such as racism, violence, or climate denial, and enable pro-social behaviours. Empathy also increases cooperation and participation on collectively shared issues.

The practice of empathy, which is a product of a social situation as much as an individual’s response to social dynamics, requires establishing relationships across social divides. Empathy education allows people to build on overlapping values and relate to each other. Only through relational learning will we build empathy and overcome divisive communications about climate change and other environmental or social issues.

Finding consensus

When activating empathy rather than deficit, the key ingredient isn’t necessarily absolute agreement. Despite a seeming trend to focus on absolute agreement, whether it’s in politics, social media, professional contexts, or in our own families, what may be more important is remembering how we can build consensus. This leads to finding places of intersection on collectively held pro-social issues.

Building empathy in social and civic contexts relies upon a commitment to consensus more than complete agreement. Empathetic approaches to climate justice might just lead to greater social change as well as a more connected society.

Featured Image Credit by M. Maggs from Pixabay 

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Can children’s rights be the scaffold for love in the care system?

Recently, Scotland has incorporated in its legislation the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child (UNCRC). This is part of an ambitious process aiming to reform the care system following a root-and-branch review led by care-experienced people. Its outcome, “The Promise,” has received cross-party support and is now entering its implementation phase.

I have been using the UNCRC in my work since 1999 when I first started to work for children in state care. In my view, its provisions passed the test of time and it is a great framework if it is not misinterpreted and if it is used correctly. And there are some great resources to avoid misinterpretation such as The UN Convention on the Rights of the Child–A Commentary edited by John Tobin. In my study analysing the care experiences of young people from Romania, the UNCRC was a useful way to understand what went wrong in the care system as they were growing up in different types of placements (residential care, foster care or adoption).

The fundamental difference between a human rights approach and psychologised one, in which children are seen through their adversity rather than through their potential, is that the former brings care to the moral domain. Such an approach places children’s dignity (and their voice) at the heart of the care system. This has a number of implications. A rights-based approach can be at odds with systems dominated by a “risk” culture that regard children as potential victims of abuse (and adults as potential perpetrators) because these tend to overprotect children and limit their participation in decisions that affect their everyday life. Research indicates that children raised in low-risk environments by overprotective parents carry a risk of developing anxiety or challenging behaviour. Risk-oriented systems tend to make care a red tape exercise for professionals and a disempowering and a potentially oppressive experience for the young people, impacting negatively on the child’s self-esteem.

In order to be a good parent, the state must aim and act similarly to good parents: helping children to gradually develop their autonomy even if that involves making mistakes; ensuring that they are raised in fairness, with unconditional support and respect; and nurturing their talents. Ensuring that carers and professionals engage with children in a meaningful way is the cornerstone for a system based on ethics of care and children’s rights. Listening to children will make them feel important and it will help them develop their self-trust, self-respect, and self-esteem.

The safest way to protect children against abuse is not to ban carers from hugging children they care for but to help children recognise abuse and create complaint mechanisms they trust in, where they feel confident to speak about it if necessary. Care must be an empowering experience and not a stigmatising one. Listening to children’s worries, giving them the confidence to ask questions they have on their mind and involving them in decisions about their care will create a different foundation for how they feel about growing up in care. A rights-based approach will make care experience a dignified one and a matter of justice rather than a matter of moral luck.

Care-experienced people in Scotland and in England demanded “love” in the care system. This is not only a legitimate request but also one that can be achieved. In one of his Notebooks, Albert Camus says that “the loss of love is the loss of all rights even though one had them all.” By twisting it around, treating children in care as rights holders will perhaps contribute to them feeling that they are loved, at least in the way C.S. Lewis understood love: not necessarily as an affectionate feeling but “a steady wish for the loved person’s ultimate good as far as it can be obtained.”

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On SHAPE: a Q&A with Lucy Noakes, Eyal Poleg, Laura Wright & Mary Kelly

OUP have recently announced our support for the newly created SHAPE initiative—Social Sciences, Humanities, and the Arts for People and the Economy. To further understand the crucial role these subjects play in our everyday lives, we have put three questions to four British Academy SHAPE authors and editors—social and cultural historian Lucy Noakes, historian of objects and faith Eyal Poleg, historical sociolinguist Laura Wright, and Lecturer in Contemporary Art History Mary Kelly—on what SHAPE means to them, and to their research.

SHAPE subjects are well-named—they help us shape the world we live in and the future we’re building. What distinctive potential and skills do you think Arts and Humanities and Social Science disciplines bring to the lives of those learning them, as well as to society?

Lucy Noakes: I think that these disciplines, though they vary widely in approaches and methods used, all have one essential element in common: they help our students to learn how to be effective, engaged, and critical citizens. For example, the pernicious nature of “fake news” today, from the wilder extremes of QANON fantasists to the advice circulating on social media suggesting that people can protect themselves from COVID-19 by inhaling steam or drinking hot water with lemon juice, can be harmful to both individuals and to wider societies. SHAPE students learn to be active and participatory readers and listeners. A student researching an essay topic will ask: who is arguing this? Why? What is their evidence? Where was it published? They also learn how to develop arguments based on evidence, not opinion—crucial skills in today’s world.

Eyal Poleg: Critical thinking and the ability to reflect on events, past and present, are vital for our existence as a dynamic and pluralistic society. Our students learn how to analyse sources, be they written accounts, artwork, mundane objects, or buildings. These skills are invaluable in becoming active and engaged citizens within modern society, especially in the face of empty rhetoric and fake news. Their ability to clearly communicate complex ideas is likewise instrumental in shaping the world we live in. History does not simply repeat itself, but, by learning about past societies, we gain a better understanding of the nature of our own, and of possible future directions.

Laura Wright: I’m a word-historian so I’ll give a specific answer with regard to my discipline: looking at how people used language in the past holds a mirror up to who we are now. For example, names Alice, Emma, Joan, John, Katherine, Margery, Peter, Richard, Robert, Thomas, William entered English via the Anglo-Norman language and knocked out the Old English namestock of Beowulf, Cyneheard, Ealdraed, Frithuswith, Ohthere. So, if you are called Alice or John you signal to the world at large that your parents were members of the Anglo-Norman family. But they might not have known it or thought of it that way: Alice or John might have just sounded suitable for a baby—traditional, not too outlandish. Society and its traditions shape us and the choices we make and studying SHAPE subjects causes us to question those assumptions—and in the case of historians, track them back to their source.

Mary Kelly: Students and scholars of the Arts, Humanities and Social Sciences open important questions about, for example, human difference and why people maintain certain belief systems over others. Students are encouraged to analyse, to be critical, to be diplomatic, to challenge when required, and to think creatively when locating solutions. The Arts, Humanities, and Social Sciences exist in the service of human development, always enhancing our quality of life.

For example, in 2016, University College Cork became the first Irish-based university to formally integrate modern and contemporary art from the Middle East and North Africa into its History of Art curricula. The teaching philosophy, which underpins the building of my courses, is to create an awareness among students about the current decentred world as well as our responsibility to equip students (potential future leaders) with robust cross-cultural competencies through innovative practices in teaching and learning. Our students are gaining valuable skills and insights which will galvanise them to engage with challenging conversations relating to human difference. Arts, Humanities, and Social Sciences disciplines are actively enhancing human diplomacy.

As a SHAPE researcher, how are your concerns and needs different from your colleagues in STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics)?

Lucy Noakes: There is perhaps more in common between STEM and SHAPE subjects than we might first think. The key, and most important, similarity would be that we all work with evidence; it is just as important that a historian build their analysis based on the evidence available as an engineer or a biochemist, even though the outcomes might be very different. I would also argue that the overwhelming majority of academic research, across all subjects, is shaped by the historical context, concerns, needs, and values of the time and place in which we work. But perhaps the biggest difference is that in SHAPE we have more space for the development of arguments and perspectives—while 2 + 2 will always equal 4 in mathematics, historians’ analyses of a subject like the Second World War are endlessly varied and ever-changing. For me, this is a huge part of SHAPE’s appeal.

Eyal Poleg: STEM colleagues often pursue innovation, looking for ever more advance technologies, for ways of improving our quality of life and of understanding the natural world. SHAPE disciplines, on the other hand, tend to be more reflective, taking into account past accomplishments, and thinking more clearly about why and how should progress be made. This being said, I do not think of our work in opposition. Much of my recent research has been in collaboration with scientists, employing cutting-edge technologies in the analysis of historical objects. The two perspectives complement one another, with SHAPE defining the historical questions and STEM providing new means of answering them. At best, such collaboration contributes to both disciplines, unearthing hitherto unknown information about historical objects and learning about the past, on the one hand, while finding new uses for innovative technologies, on the other.

Laura Wright: What I need is historical text, and I suppose STEM researchers don’t—but in terms of research questions, we’re probably not very different. As a historical linguist I study creative literary texts as well as other kinds, but so do clinicians and scientists concerned with the brain, because people spend a lot of time talking about imaginary states—what might happen, what could happen, as well as what does happen. Whatever humans do ends up expressed in language, one way or another, and much of my source material consists of historic STEM text—people inventing things, in particular.  For example, the term pickled salmon was correlated with the London poor in the 18^th and early 19^th centuries as it was what they ate, sold from street barrows. Then the tin can was invented in 1813, pickled salmon was replaced, and the poor turned to tins, with the term tinned salmon having connotations of “working-class” for a century or so.

Mary Kelly: SHAPE and STEM address major societal challenges, however in very different ways. In addition, SHAPE researchers’ empirical and analytical needs, as well as divergent and convergent thinking processes, differ greatly to those applied in STEM.

In order for us to truly maximise the impact of STEM ideas and technologies, public and private sectors must engage with the Arts, Humanities, and Social Sciences in order to understand how human groups and individuals are formed and how they behave, produce, evolve, and co-exist.

Right now, however, the most urgent need for the Arts, Humanities and Social Sciences is the need for fair and adequate financial resources for SHAPE research and development. SHAPE research is undervalued by many in the public and private sectors: this is clearly evident from the limited funding and support which the Arts, Humanities and Social Sciences receive from numerous funding bodies and in the education system.

SHAPE subjects are hugely diverse, but they do share a focus on understanding more about people and societies, and what it is to be human. How does your research go about investigating these concepts? How do you see your work contributing to and informing these broader discussions?

Lucy Noakes: My most recent work has been on death and grief in Second World War Britain, and on the insights that approaches to the past that are attuned to the emotional lives of those we study can bring to our understanding of what it might be like to live through and navigate crises and changes that feel out of our control. I have been struck again and again this year by how much our experiences of fear, loss, and changes to our day to day lives have shaped my students and my own understandings of the lives of those who experienced total war. I also have a new awareness of the changes that the crisis of war helped to bring about in Britain, particularly the creation of the Welfare State at the war’s end. If only we listen, history has a lot to teach us about not only how societies manage crises, but about how we can use these moments of rupture to rethink our priorities, and how we want to live.

Find out more about Lucy’s recently published title, Total War, edited alongside Claire Langhamer and Claudia Siebrecht.

Eyal Poleg: My earlier work has explored how people engaged with the Bible in the Middle Ages, demonstrating a reliance on mediated access, surprisingly similar to knowledge of people and events of the Bible among secular societies nowadays. More recently I have studied hundreds of manuscripts and early printed Bibles to trace continuity and change across three and a half centuries, reevaluating the impact of print and Reformation on English religion. This perspective enabled me to unearth the long and complex process of innovation and change. Some features familiar to us, such as chapter division, took centuries to implement, very gradually moving from the nascent universities, through nunneries and chapels, to be embraced by lay women and men. The parish Bible, an early modern innovation, was first met with confusion and uncertainty. Understanding the limits of innovation, and putting things we take for granted in new perspective, helps us better understand our own society, past, present and future.

Find out more about Eyal’s recently published title, A Material History of the Bible, England 1200-1553.

Laura Wright: Well I research things we tend to take for granted, and one of these is house-names.  Humans need shelter. Humans give things names. Numbering houses is modern—18th century—but house-names are old. The ubiquitous house-name “Sunnyside” started as a medieval Scottish legal term in dividing up farm land, and then became an 18th-century English house-name particularly used by Quakers—ceasing to be a legal term and becoming a cultural marker, insider-code for “a Quaker lives here.” Certain Quakers and Nonconformists became extremely rich and their Sunnysides were mansions, and American author Washington Irving, visiting Sir Walter Scott at Abbotsford in the Borders borrowed the name of a nearby farm called Sunnyside and named his highly-influential New York mansion Sunnyside too. There’s more to the story, but who influences who linguistically shows how culture spreads, and all humans are shaped by their culture. It’s good to be aware of one’s prejudices.

Find out more about Laura’s recently published title, Sunnyside.

Mary Kelly: My current research project looks beyond the purely European canon of historical Orientalist art objects to explore contemporary artistic responses from the Middle East and North Africa (MENA). I argue that this approach will further contextualise art objects as being an important part of an ongoing, reciprocal socio-cultural dialogue between the global north and south. Specifically, I work in the space between 19th- and 20th-century European Orientalism and 21st-century responses to Orientalism from women artists located in various Middle Eastern and North African countries. Many historical and contemporary women artists from across the globe address the conflicting experiences of female identities and—through their art—they are “speaking back” to local, national and international marginalising views which present stereotypical ideas of oppressed or powerless women. I engage with Transnational Feminism in my work because it is rooted in the local and translocal experiences of women—after which women’s narratives cross “borders” in order to create meaningful conversations and collaborations internationally. My work evokes themes such as Orientalism, gender, female agency, female oppression, religion, heritage, diaspora, and difference all for the purpose of:

1. bringing art made by women to the fore.
2. the decolonisation of the History of Art.
3. using art to galvanise meaningful cross-cultural and transnational discourse about women in various societies.

Art builds progressive and positive bridges between different people.

Find out more about Mary’s recently published title, Under the Skin, edited alongside Ceren Özpınar.

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SHAPE today and tomorrow: Q&A with Sophie Goldsworthy and Julia Black (part two)

SHAPE (Social Sciences, Arts, and Humanities for People and the Economy) research helps us to make sense of the past, to inform the present, and develop a vision for the future. Considering the last year alone in which the vital work of STEM researchers in developing vaccines and treating COVID-19 has been closely followed across the globe, it is also important to acknowledge that SHAPE research has played an important role in our response to the pandemic. From considering ethics to inform how vaccines should be allocated amongst the population, to looking back at the societal and economic impact of pandemics through history, SHAPE research has provided us with valuable insights across a vast spectrum of different areas.

This second part of our Q&A with Sophie Goldsworthy, Director of Content Strategy & Acquisitions at OUP, and Professor Julia Black CBE FCA, Strategic Director of Innovation and Professor of Law at the London School of Economics and Political Science, and President-elect of the British Academy, reflects on how SHAPE disciplines can help us to understand the impact of the events of the pandemic and look towards the future of SHAPE.

In part one of our Q&A with Sophie Goldsworthy and Professor Julia Black, they introduce SHAPE and what it means to them—if you missed it, you can read it here.

In the current context of the coronavirus pandemic, how can SHAPE subjects help us make sense of how the last year has impacted us and the world in which we live?

Sophie Goldsworthy: The last year has been testing in many ways. But we might turn to SHAPE subjects as we start to evaluate what life looks like after the pandemic, assessing the human impact, finding new ways to connect, and working out how to salvage the best of what we have been left with.

SHAPE subjects can help us start to understand where we are now and drive innovative solutions. We can draw on what these subjects tell us as we endeavour to improve on the inclusivity of our virtual networks; and to figure out how we retain balance in our ways of working and flexibility around our caring and other social responsibilities; and as we think again about how we might inhabit global city spaces and reimagine transport networks with sustainability and environmental impacts in mind. Scientists tell us that birdsong changed during the shutdowns, that wild animals moved quickly to inhabit the spaces we vacated, that air quality improved as transport ground to a halt. SHAPE subjects can help us to think about the ways in which we learn from and build on this enforced hiatus.

Julia Black: It’s difficult to think of a single area where SHAPE subjects don’t help us make sense of how COVID has impacted us and where they won’t be relevant in thinking about the future. The enforced lockdown of the world’s population has been a natural experiment of a scale no policy maker would never have volunteered to undertake, but our clearer skies, quieter roads, and noisier wildlife have made us all acutely aware of the impact our ways of living were having on our planet, and to the vulnerabilities to which we are thereby exposing ourselves as well.

We have turned to literature and, virtually at least, to the arts to provide us with solace, enrichment, entertainment, and sheer relief. We have turned to history for insights into how societies in the past have been fundamentally changed due to pandemics and to philosophy for reflections on how we want our societies to be. As we re-think how we will live, how we will travel, how we will work, insights from anthropology, geography, economics, psychology, politics, literature, design, architecture, and art, to name but a few, will all be essential.

We also face other challenges which COVID has revealed or exacerbated: to equality and inclusivity, to democracy and to human rights, to the shifting imbalances in power within societies and across nations. And meanwhile the need to address climate change and enhance biodiversity are becoming ever more pressing. Ultimately SHAPE subjects help us imagine and evaluate what kind of world we want to live in, and what kind of life we want to have.

The pandemic has undoubtedly had a profound impact on universities and the student experience. Why should prospective students choose to study a SHAPE subject, and what unique skills do you think SHAPE graduates bring to the workforce?

SG: SHAPE graduates are highly employable, bringing a wealth of skills to the workforce, and prospective students might be attracted to these subjects for the same reasons. They help us make sense of the human experience and develop our capacity for critical thinking and communication. They encourage problem solving, creativity, and curiosity, and help graduates approach a question from many angles, working collaboratively and with empathy. In a world beset by challenges, among them not only the pandemic, but climate change, structural inequalities, the rise of populism in some quarters and nationalism in others, SHAPE graduates are central to the development of the versatile, resilient workforce that will help us respond to these challenges, identify future opportunities, and nurture innovation.

JB: Studying SHAPE subjects provides both knowledge and skills which are valuable to all aspects of society, whether a person is working in a business or the public sector, or for a charity, or in the voluntary sector, or as a freelancer, or an entrepreneur. Some of the subjects have more direct application than others, such as law, finance, journalism, languages, education, design, or the arts, but in different ways all provide knowledge of how to analyse complex problems, interpret and integrate information and ideas, test the strength of competing arguments, see things from another’s point of view, create new inspirations and forms of expression, and understand how and why context matters.  Many of the skills of analysis, rigour, interpretation and creativity can be learned studying either SHAPE or STEM subjects, but it is their focus on the human world which helps those who study SHAPE understand people and the societies they live in, and the values they live by.

Where do you see SHAPE in the future? How do you think these fields of study might change?

SG: Just as we think about SHAPE and STEM as complementing each other, so we’re seeing an increasing move towards interdisciplinarity within SHAPE subjects, both in the academy—with university trends including the amalgamation of departments and interdisciplinary research programmes—and in our publishing programme, with multi-disciplinary content one of our fastest growing areas. Our disciplinary analysis shows a fascinating web of connections between subjects, showing how our existing content clusters and is used online, and we’re excited to explore this more at OUP, developing our acquisitions approach to reflect changing practices within the academy and encourage emerging spheres of research, as these subjects aggregate to redefine fields of study.

JB: I think the SHAPE subjects are changing in three ways. The first is a growing inter- or multi-disciplinary engagement across SHAPE disciplines and with those of STEM, often focused around particular challenges or themes, such as health, climate change, or conservation. The second is the awareness that the languages of mathematics and computer codes can be used to interrogate questions which preoccupy social scientists and humanities scholars, just as they can those of physicists or biologists. Digital humanities and computational social sciences combine knowledge from languages, history, media and communications, economics, information studies, graphic design, computer sciences, data analytics, machine learning, AI, and more to analyse texts, music, or data on a scale which was previously unimaginable, providing powerful new insights. Thirdly, both SHAPE and STEM disciplines are adopting critical stances towards the other in ways which are, or have the potential, to change the way in which each are conducted: the challenge to social sciences to produce results which are replicable, verifiable, and falsifiable, for example; and the challenge to science and technology to be conducted in ways which are ethical, non-discriminatory, and which take into account their impact on societies. The core disciplinary pillars within SHAPE and STEM subjects remain strong, but increasingly we are seeing them combined in new and exciting ways.

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Introducing SHAPE: Q&A with Sophie Goldsworthy and Julia Black (part one)

OUP is excited to support the newly created SHAPE initiative—Social Sciences, Humanities, and the Arts for People and the Economy. SHAPE has been coined to enable us to clearly communicate the value that these disciplines bring to not only enriching the world in which we live, but also enhancing our understanding of it. The contributions that SHAPE subjects make are more important now than ever as they can help us to navigate how the COVID-19 pandemic has impacted the global economy, dramatically altered our quotidian routines, and changed the way we communicate with one another, against the backdrop of climate change and urgent calls to address structural injustice.

In the first instalment this two-part Q&A, we spoke to Sophie Goldsworthy, Director of Content Strategy & Acquisitions here at OUP, and Professor Julia Black CBE FCA, Strategic Director of Innovation and Professor of Law at the London School of Economics and Political Science, and President-elect of the British Academy, to find out more about SHAPE and what it means to them.

Firstly, could you tell us a little bit about your background and current position, and what SHAPE means to you?

Sophie Goldsworthy: I’ve worked in publishing for approaching 30 years, 25 of them at OUP. My first role at the Press was on the Literature list and I currently run our humanities, social sciences, and trade programmes in the UK, as well as directing Oxford’s content strategy more broadly across the research publishing business.

At a time when the content needs of the university sector are evolving, leading to shifts in research publishing, my role is about developing our focus and building data and evidence into our approach to content acquisition, more closely aligning commissioning with what librarians, researchers, and readers want, and working to maximise the reach, impact, and amplification of the scholarship we publish.

Oxford is the world’s largest university press, and SHAPE subjects sit at the very heart of our offering, giving us breadth which in turn underlines a complementary view of the subjects. SHAPE gives us a better way to articulate that mutual, porous relationship, helps us move past an arts/sciences dichotomy to a place where each enhances and supports the other.

Julia Black: My academic interests span social sciences and humanities. I focus on how governments and other organisations regulate behaviours, systems, and processes to address complex problems, such as environmental management, or financial stability, or AI, and what values guide, or should guide, those processes. Given that problems are multi-dimensional, trying to address them requires engaging with technical, scientific aspects of the issues as well as the social and ethical elements. As my principal research questions are always centred around people and organisations, social sciences and humanities dominate, but for me, it seems quite natural to engage with several disciplines, across SHAPE and STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics), in order to understand and address the multiple dimensions of a problem.

I’ve also always worked quite fluidly across the worlds of academia and public policy, and I’m constantly struck by the huge reliance which government places on social science and humanities in seeking guidance and evidence for its policies, and yet the contribution those disciplines can make, and are making, is often under-recognised and under-valued. And when I look beyond policy to the vibrancy of the arts, the richness of literature, the diversity of our society, and even to the structure and dynamics of our economy, SHAPE subjects are everywhere. So for me SHAPE is a way to celebrate the value of social sciences, humanities, and the arts, and to demonstrate their relevance and value to ourselves and to society. It’s also to encourage people to study them, and to build meaningful lives and contribute to society using the knowledge and skills they gain in doing so. For we need them now, more than ever.

What are the benefits in bringing together the arts, humanities, and social sciences disciplines under the SHAPE umbrella?

SG: How we describe a thing has the potential to accord or diminish its power. At its heart, SHAPE offers us the opportunity to begin to tell the story of a set of subjects which might seem at first glance to be disparate. It allows us to draw together the ways in which they contribute value to society, helping us make sense of the human experience, develop our understanding of global issues, and work to find solutions.

JB: SHAPE is offering social sciences, humanities, and the arts their own descriptor, providing a coherence to a heterogenous set of subjects in a way which celebrates their diversity but emphasises what connects them: a focus on the human world—on people and societies across time and space.

It’s important to emphasise that we are not “setting up” social sciences, humanities, and the arts in opposition to STEM. SHAPE subjects have their own value which is on a par with STEM, they are just differently focused: on the human world, rather than the natural or physical worlds. There are areas within each where they operate largely separately, but if we want to understand how humans interact with the natural and physical world, then we need the insights gained from connecting both sets of disciplines. There are also opportunities to use the knowledge and insights from each to inform the other.

How can SHAPE and STEM disciplines complement each other in our pursuit of knowledge?

SG: The pandemic has reinforced how essential STEM subjects are, as we look to medical and technical solutions: witness only the breath-taking speed at which vaccines have been developed. But SHAPE disciplines complement STEM in myriad ways—and conversely leaving them out of the mix can have troubling implications.

We might need to draw on behavioural economics and “nudge” theory to help influence how people act, changing the message around mask wearing from “protect yourself” to “protect others,” for example. Or to take a holistic approach to data interpretation to circumnavigate structural inequalities, where the price we otherwise pay is a high one. The past year has been full of stories about “one size fits all” PPE that leaves female health workers poorly protected, or remote education initiatives that overlook those children for whom a school lunch provides the only meal of the day.

At its most straightforward, learning the stories of past pandemics can enlighten us in the present. How and why do conspiracy theories and misinformation proliferate in an outbreak, for example, and what should we learn as we navigate precisely that set of circumstances all over again in the rollout of a new vaccination programme.

JB: SHAPE subjects can complement STEM, and STEM subjects can complement SHAPE. In some cases, one discipline may be more in the lead than the other, but the synergies still exist. Some SHAPE subjects are through their approaches closer to STEM, for example in their use of quantitative and statistical methodologies and data analytics, and some directly cross the boundaries, such as mental health and wellbeing. However, we could do more to illustrate how STEM and SHAPE subjects can together enhance our knowledge, and what we create from that knowledge.

Some have asked why we aren’t satisfied with the term STEAM to describe this interaction. The answer is that STEAM focuses only on the interaction of art and design with STEM subjects, in other words it only looks at the “A” in SHAPE, not the “S” and the ”H.” Whilst art and design are hugely valuable to the design of products developed by technology, or as ways to visualise the natural and physical worlds, for example, there are many more benefits to be gained from the interaction of STEM disciplines across the social sciences, humanities and the arts. Changes in an ecosystem are frequently rooted in human behaviour; managing pandemics requires knowledge of history, cultures and behaviours, as well as economics and logistics; the search engines we have become so reliant on use natural language programming based on linguistics; and for science and technology to be legitimate it is imperative that it is developed and used in ways which are aligned with our ethics and values.

But these examples are the tip of the iceberg; there are multiple instances where the insights of each enhances the other, and it is often when they are combined that truly transformative developments in our knowledge, understanding, innovation, and creativity can occur.

Read part two of our Q&A, in which Sophie Goldsworthy and Professor Julia Black discuss the importance of SHAPE today in light of the pandemic, and how consider how it may evolve in the future.

Featured image by Janko Ferlič on Unsplash

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Tips for adapting the elementary music curriculum to online teaching

Teachers of the performing arts are adapting their classes to go online. The problems and challenges range from ensuring enough physical space for movement around each student’s computer to overcoming audio and video syncing delays during the live feed. Some of the solutions include doing less movement during the class and turning off students’ video so there is less latency in the audio. But what about elementary music?

Young students are inspired by seeing others move with them. The teacher can assess comprehension by observing student movement. Moving to contrasts like fast-slow, loud-soft, and high pitch-low pitch helps internalize this knowledge. Movement helps for deeper understanding and engages the student in a richer experience. In Praxial Music Education, Heidi Westerlund and Marja-Leena Juntunen make the argument that movement demonstrates musical thinking. How then do we adapt this inherent part of the elementary music experience? How do we adapt movement for online?

This article offers tips for elementary teachers who want to include music in their online lessons on how to build a successful set up and lesson strategy.

Creating an online music environment

First, develop easy to follow guidelines for parents to setup their home computer area for limited movement. Suggest that the kids sit in a chair facing the screen with at least four feet open space behind them for standing and moving in place. It’s helpful if a parent or older person can stay with the child during the lesson and do the movements with them.

Then, structure your class schedule while keeping in mind the electronic issues. Feisworld Media recommends turning off your students’ video; their website says it helps reduce audio delay. Evaluate your own situation and notate the issues. How bad are the syncing issues with all students unmuted with video? Does it work better with half the students muted and off screen? Maybe just a few students at a time? While working this out, confer with your school to determine their flexibility. Karen Salvador and Rob Lyda from the NAfME Webinar: Teaching Elementary and Early Childhood Music in the Time of COVID-19 recommend writing a letter to your administration to clarify how you want to approach your music classes. Maybe instead of having an entire class at once, you could schedule several shorter classes with less students at a time. This may make it more manageable and the students can get more individual attention.

Adapting the lessons

Salvador and Lyda also suggest going back to the “anchor standards” during this extended online school year. Teachers can create lessons for all their different grade levels on the same basics but approach them differently for each grade level. A recent Frau Musik USA article suggests using the same songs for all the grades but adapt the learning level appropriately. An added bonus is that this will help parents with practice time if all their elementary age children are learning the same song. They include a great example of how to do this with the song “Hot Cross Buns.” Choir Directors Kathy Alexander and Bev Grant say that using vocal recorded music can make online singing more enjoyable, helping the students experience something closer to in-person classes.

The main idea is to teach the basic concepts in smaller “chunks” or “capsules” using simplified objectives and reduced activities. Here’s an example. Students learn the song “Lucy Locket,” but instead of playing the circle game, students can stand in place and march to the beat or clap to the rhythm. Have students make up their own “beat” movements like shrug their shoulders or dance. Play follow the leader. Practice the solfege (sol, la, sol, mi) with the hand signs, but save reading the notation for another time. Use pictures to help with the vocabulary words “pocket” and “ribbon.”

Other ideas are to reduce the amount of movement to what stays manageable. Include more call and response songs and taking turns. Another option is to do alternate activities. Elizabeth Caldwell from NAfME suggests use other types of music learning like interviewing family members, drawing instruments, using recorded music or creating lists of songs. This will inspire engagement and help get the most out of the online music experience.

Tips for adapting the anchor curriculum

• Movement: run, jog, skip, jump, hop, tiptoe, gallop, side-step (sashay), patsch (pat the legs), pantomime, and movement-in-space.TIP: Remove gallop and sashay. Retire any dance or partner dance moves for now. Adapt run, and jog to movement-in-place that can be performed in front of the screen.
• Beat and rhythm: beat, tempo (fast/slow), stop/go (sound/silence), rest, note duration (long/short), rhythm (feeling quarter, eighth, and sixteenth variations), inner hearing, increased subtlety in rhythmic changes, strong and weak beat, bar-line, reading rhythmic notation, identifying written songs using rhythmic notation, time signature.TIP: Retire percussion instruments for now except for making and using homemade instruments. All of these concepts are doable online by adapting your presentation to a small screen. For example, to demonstrate strong and weak beat, flip your hands palm to back, back and forth while singing or listening to music in front of the camera.
• Melody and singing: pitch (high/low), note duration (legato/staccato), dynamics (loud/soft), form (verse, chorus, phrasing), solfege (do, re, mi…), group singing, individual singing, reading pitch notation, identifying written songs using pitch notation, key signature.TIP: The main change will be less group singing. and more listening to each other. Retire melodic instruments like the xylophone for now. While learning the solfege hand signs, have students practice, demonstrate, and perform for each other. Work on music notation with melody separate from rhythm. Then later put them together to form songs to read.
• Other ideas: Do instrument families, classical music listening, composers, elementary acoustics, composition, and conducting. By using pictures, charts, and worksheets students can experience all of these activities. Preparation is needed for handouts and the teacher needs PDF files ready to display for students.TIP: Retire specific STEM activities like language arts unless there’s time. Focus primarily on music anchor objectives.

For many first-time online teachers, this will be a year of trial and error. Be kind to yourself and know that some things will work and others won’t. Keep on the look-out for resources online that will help.

Featured image: Kim Milai teaching a song to students online

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Technology in the elementary music classroom after the pandemic

The pandemic will leave a lasting impression on music education for years to come. Even when the ending of the pandemic is finally in sight, music education will reel from the effects. When it comes to elementary music education, we thrived on incorporating ensemble performances using instruments from ukuleles to xylophones. We adored allowing our students to improvise using movements, chants, poetry, and instruments. We integrated cultural dances with social-emotional learning skills. When the pandemic hit, most of this was not possible anymore and we had to “reinvent the wheel” and teach in ways that we never thought possible.

One aspect that became a necessity was teaching with technology. Whether one was teaching remote, in-person with numerous restrictions, or hybrid, technology became a tool that was necessary for an elementary music educator to teach and communicate with their students. I witnessed teachers become proficient in an area that they never thought they could. Educators learned numerous learning management systems (LMS) such as MusicFirst, Google Classroom, Schoology, Canvas, and Seesaw, so that they could make music with their students when they could no longer meet with them in-person. They mastered video communication tools like Zoom, Google Meets, and Microsoft Teams so that they could work with their students in a more personable way. When they could no longer have their students perform together, they learned how to create a platform like Noteflight Learn, Soundtrap, Bandlab, or Flat.io, where the students could record and collaborate so that they could still perform in a way that created a virtual ensemble.

I witnessed elementary music educators use video editing apps and screen recording tools like Loom, Screencastify, Screencast-O-Matic, Flipgrid, and more, to create rhythm, percussion, and melodic play-along videos, as well as “follow the bouncy ball” videos, so students could continue to read, perform, and make music from their devices. I saw music educators find alternative ways for young students to create music by using Chrome Music Lab and Groove Pizza when they could no longer create music in traditional ways. When music educators were asked to assess their students, even if they were limited to meeting with them in-person or remotely, I saw educators use interactive platforms like Nearpod and Peardeck to gauge their students’ learning and progress. Finally, when students were not allowed to share instruments and educators could not use their acoustic instruments, I saw teachers find virtual instrument websites and code virtual instruments with Scratch so that their students could turn their 1:1 device into a musical instrument.

When this pandemic ends, many elementary music educators will embrace their traditional learning styles of playing acoustic instruments, performing folk and cultural dances together, playing in ensembles together, singing together, and so much more because we have been lacking that human connection to music. This should happen and it must. However, this does not mean that technology should be completely taken out of the elementary music classroom. Though we do not have to use technology every day after the pandemic ends, since the tool is more familiar with teachers and students, there are ways to use technology that can level up and benefit music-making with elementary students.

1. Continue to use the LMS that was set up. Those systems can be a great way to communicate with your students and your students’ caregivers about what they are learning in music class. Also, they become wonderful digital music portfolios that can follow the students as they grow throughout their school years. Finally, they can flip your music classroom so students can access it when they are at home.
2. Utilize interactive tools such as Nearpod, Peardeck, Google Forms, etc., to check in with students as exit tickets, pre- and post-tests, and assessment tools to gauge their progress and achievements.
3. Make use of screen recording tools and video editing apps to create more digital resources for your students. You can create more rhythm, percussion, and melodic play-along videos that follow your curriculum and approach, as opposed to finding ones that are pre-made but do not coordinate with your teaching method. You can also place those videos on your students’ LMS so that they can access them from home and record themselves performing them.
4. Have students use screen recording tools to record their reflections and music creations that they create with Chrome Music Lab or Groove Pizza. Students can use the screen recording tools to reflect on how they created a song and then share it with you. This gives you more insight into their thinking and their music-making process.
5. If the budget allows, use the music collaboration platforms such as Noteflight Learn, Soundtrap, Bandlab, Flat.io, so that students can collaborate with various classes and grade levels. Level up their music creation skills by having students in different grade levels collaborate to compose a song.

Those are just some of the ways that technology can continue to enhance the elementary music classroom after the pandemic ends. Technology can be a useful and wonderful tool when used in a way that can enhance music-making in ways that traditional methods might not have been able to in the past.

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Obama, Trump, and education policy in US federalism

In just a few weeks, Joseph R. Biden Jr will take his oath as the 46^th President of the United States. Like his predecessors in recent decades, Biden intends to use executive and administrative actions to pursue his policy agenda. In public education, a policy domain for which states assume constitutional responsibility, administrative presidency faces the forces of federalism. The presidencies of Barack Obama and Donald Trump offered contrasting lessons on the exercise of presidential power in a system of decentralized policymaking. While Obama broadened the equity agenda and strengthened federal oversight on state roles, Trump used executive tools to promote state policy authority, diminish federal direction on civil rights, and expand private school choice.

Shift in federal-state relationship

Obama was actively engaged in education policy. He granted waivers to over 90% of states on meeting proficiency goals under the 2001 No Child Left Behind Act (NCLB); created multiple financial incentives for states to adopt the Common Core of academic standards and to improve teacher quality; and guided states on intervention strategies to turn around the lowest performing schools. The Obama presidency purposefully used administrative power to address the nation’s challenge of inequality in education.

Trump was ready to scale back on Obama’s engagement in education. Trump’s unilateral action faced particularly favorable political conditions during the first two years of the administration when the Republican Party had control over both houses of Congress and about 60% of the states. The Trump administration adopted a deferential approach to the 2015 Every Student Succeeds Act. Guided by Trump’s executive order, the Republican-controlled Congress used the Congressional Review Act to repeal the Obama-era rules on the states’ accountability plans. Granting states significant flexibility created uncertainties on state actions to address educational equity. Trump’s deferential approach enabled significant state variation in selecting accountability standards, performance timeline, and school improvement strategies.

Federal role in equity

Historically, equity has been a key justification for federal involvement in K-12 education. Throughout his two terms, President Obama used administrative action to elevate the nation’s attention to racial/ethnic, income, gender, and sexual orientation inequity in schools. Obama’s Office for Civil Rights (OCR) in the US Department of Education conducted extensive monitoring of civil rights violations related to gender discrimination (Title IX), the rights of lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBTQ) students, as well as students with disabilities and other needs. Obama established an interagency task force to address complex challenges that African-American children and youth faced, including violence, an achievement gap, chronic absenteeism, and poor school quality. To improve schools for Native Americans on reservations, Obama supported tribal self-governance, promoted early access to integrated services, and strengthened teacher recruitment and retention.

The Trump administration scaled back investigations into civil rights violations and shifted away from Obama’s focus on systemic barriers in public schools and universities. Trump’s OCR revised the guidebook on investigation by removing the procedures to be used in establishing systemic bias. Starting in February 2020, OCR granted state flexibility and regulatory relief in administering civil rights issues. Consequently, the pace of case closures and dismissals was much faster than that of the Obama years, which had required signoffs from DC headquarters for case closures.

The Trump administration’s reversal on civil rights enforcement also affected issues pertaining to racial/ethnic discrimination in school disciplinary actions. Trump’s Department of Justice and the Department of Education jointly issued a Dear Colleague Letter notifying schools of their withdrawal of the policy guidance that the Obama administration had issued on nondiscriminatory school discipline in 2014. The Trump administration justified its action on grounds that “states and local school districts play the primary role in establishing educational policy.” The decision triggered sharp opposition from Democratic lawmakers and civil rights organizations. California, New Hampshire, and several states responded to the weakening of federal support by bolstering their own protections for students with disabilities.

Private school choice

Trump aimed to scale up his school choice initiatives with a large infusion of federal funds. He made this promise during the 2016 campaign, pledging $20 billion in federal funding. In his first appearance before a joint session of Congress in February 2017, Trump proposed using federal funding for private school choice. Even though Trump’s proposal did not receive Congressional support, his administration took actions to promote school choice across states.

The Trump administration moved to ease the administrative burdens of states to support school choice and services for private school students. Education Secretary Betsy DeVos joined Republican lawmakers in championing legislation that would allow states to provide individual and corporate donors dollar-for-dollar tax credits for contributing to scholarship programs that help families pay private-school tuition. Clearly, Trump’s agenda to promote private school choice aligned with initiatives adopted by the Republican leadership in several states. Florida, Oklahoma, New Hampshire, and North Carolina allocated state and other funds to establish private school scholarships. The Florida Tax Credit Scholarship, for example, supported students who previously attended public schools that experienced a significant enrollment decline. South Carolina offered an example of a major state initiative that would have involved millions of federal funding from the Coronavirus Aid, Relief, and Economic Security (CARES) Actto support students to attend private schools. However, the state court in South Carolina prohibited Governor Henry McMaster from implementing the CARES-funded Safe Access to Flexible Education program to enroll 5,000 students to attend private and religious schools.

Federalism endures

Beginning on 20 January 2021, the Biden presidency will shift away from Trump’s agenda and restore an active federal role. To be sure, the dynamics of federalism endures. While Republicans control both the executive and the legislative branches in 24 states, Democrats dominate in 15 states in 2021. Divided governance prevails in the remaining 11 states. Clearly, the governing landscape across states will continue to define the federal-state relationship as the president prioritizes administrative action to pursue equity and quality goals in public education.

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Teaching peace in a time of violence

In September 2020, President Trump signed an order calling for a commission on “patriotic education,” in response to what he considered anti-American sentiments seeping into school curricula around the United States. He accused teachers of teaching a “twisted web of lies” by including lessons from the New York Times’ 1619 Project, which examines American history through the lens of the African slave trade. His remarks were denounced by the American Federation of Teachers and the Association of History Teachers, and raised important questions about the roles of teachers in American society. Should teachers teach content that avoids controversy? Is it a teacher’s duty to teach love for country, even when that country has a legacy of violence?

These questions have been at the core of my own work as an educator and scholar since 1999, when I began teaching high school English, but became even more important after September 11, 2001. In the months and years that followed the 9/11 attacks, I observed the ways that patriotism was used as a cudgel against dissent by people like myself, Americans frightened by the popular embrace of racism, Islamophobia, and militarism across the country. When my students expressed these sentiments in class, I did not know how to intervene or respond, and wondered if it was even my job to do so. Yet, as the War on Terror became more deadly, and the country devolved into culture wars over immigration and gay marriage, my students increasingly looked to me for explanations about the violence both at home and abroad. As their teacher, I wanted to have answers, but was coming up short.

Things changed in 2005, when I attended a two-week training for K-12 teachers on nonviolence and social change, at the Ahimsa Center for Nonviolence at the California State Polytechnic University in Pomona. Along with a cohort of 30 other educators, I learned about nonviolence as a philosophy, as a political strategy, and as a force for reconciliation in diverse contexts. At the institute, I learned that the decade of 2000-2010 had been designated by the UN General Assembly as the “International Decade for a Culture of Peace and Non-Violence for the Children of the World.” The UN Resolution references the Constitution of UNESCO, which stated that “since wars begin in the minds of men, it is in the minds of men that the defences of peace must be constructed.” Learning about the International Decade empowered me to think of myself as a defender of peace; as a constructor of peace in the minds of my students and colleagues whom I saw every day at school.

Inspired by my experience in 2005, I became a facilitator at subsequent institutes, allowing me to work closely with over 200 K-12 teachers hailing from all over the United States, from Hawaii to Maine, Washington to Florida. Through this work, I recognized that teachers are indeed essential to cultivating a culture of peace and nonviolence; they are embedded in schools and communities and witness how various forms of violence manifest in the lives of their students. Some seek nonviolence because they see anti-gay bullying and anti-immigrant bashing in their schools; others are concerned by the way violence is emphasized in curriculum.

One of the goals of the institute is to help teachers, called “Ahimsa Fellows,” learn how to build nonviolent relationships with students and colleagues, drawing on nonviolent principles and practices. In my role as a facilitator, I worked with the teachers as they created standards-based lesson plans exploring nonviolence; within these 400 lesson plans created over the last 15 years, teachers explored peaceful conflict resolution for 1^st graders, nonviolent marches in the United States for 7^th grade history, the monetary impact of boycotts in 9^th grade Algebra, and environmental justice for 12^th graders. Throughout the new curricula, teachers draw on a wide range of nonviolent leaders, such as Martin Luther King, Mahatma Gandhi, César Chávez, and Nelson Mandela, as well as a range of concepts, like forgiveness and ahimsa (Sanskrit for nonviolence), to help students understand how they might choose nonviolence in their everyday lives.

The French philosopher Jean-Marie Muller, in Non-violence in Education (2002), wrote that “Teachers must have the initial and in-service training needed to enable them to question and re-adjust their educational choices in the light of the philosophy of non-violence.” Recently, 18 teachers trained at the Ahimsa Center wrote about their experiences learning about nonviolence for a book, Teachers Teaching Nonviolence. In their narratives, the teachers describe the forms of violence that compelled them to go beyond the delivery of academic content, and illuminate how the lens of nonviolence helped them make educational choices galvanized by a belief that teachers can be agents of nonviolent social change. Their stories reveal that teachers must be willing to talk about the violence of the past, and the injustices of the present, in order to provide an education that prepares them to create a better future. Perhaps, in doing so, they demonstrate a love for country grounded less in patriotism, and more so in peace and mutual understanding.

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Scientism, the coronavirus, and the death of the humanities

“Nearly everyone seems to believe the humanities are in crisis,” huffed the literary scholar Paul Jay in 2014. But Jay wasn’t sold: his skepticism was sufficiently strong, in fact, that he put the word crisis in scare quotes in his book The Humanities “Crisis” and the Future of Literary Studies. Jay turned out to be one among a prominent collection of professors in the 2010s who gainsaid the crisis-talk surrounding the modern humanities.

A few short years later, does anyone still believe this? Although at the time Jay wrote his book the outlook for the humanities in American higher education was far from rosy, the COVID-19 crisis has accelerated the dire circumstances for contemporary humanistic study. Cash-strapped colleges and universities have begun closing humanities departments and ousting faculty members. Carthage College in Kenosha, Wisconsin, for example, announced the discontinuation of its classics, philosophy, and “great ideas” majors, which will put 23 faculty members out of work. Its president concomitantly proclaimed that “Carthage has always been, is, and will always be a liberal arts institution.” Given that the school boasts majors in accounting, finance, and public relations and has dismantled its classics and philosophy departments, one wonders whether its leaders know what the liberal arts are.

To add insult to injury, Illinois Wesleyan University has recently disclosed the shuttering of its classics department and slated programs in religion, French, and Italian for the chopping block. Who’s the president of Illinois Wesleyan? S. Georgia Nugent, a classical scholar and the 2017 president of the Society for Classical Studies. A few years ago, when Paul Jay was denying the crisis for the humanities, Nugent was composing editorials in favor of liberal learning. Now she’s busy stripping away the humanities from her university.

How has this happened? How have humanistic disciplines such as philosophy and classics—which previously played a dominant role in American higher education—found themselves the odd man out of our contemporary curricula? For decades, conservative critics have blamed the bogeyman of postmodernism. In the aftermath of the 1960s, they claim, radicalized humanities professors transformed their disciplines into vehicles for their left-wing politics. College students, sensing that the contemporary humanities offer little but impenetrable prose and radical ideology, have supposedly fled from the study of such subjects for more practical fare.

Unfortunately, though, the cause of the humanities’ current crisis is far older than critics of postmodern relativism allow—and more baked into the heart of the modern American university. In fact, one must look back to very creation of the American universities in the late nineteenth century to see why their triumph precipitated the marginalization of the modern humanities. The scientizing of our higher education amounts to the root of the problem, and without a deep-seated revolt against this process, the humanities will continue to wither.

From the colonial period up until the Civil War in America, the classical humanities were the lynchpin of higher education. The intellectual and moral inspiration for early American higher education derived chiefly from the Renaissance humanists, who contended that the study of ancient Greek and Roman literary masterpieces—when studied in their original languages—could perfect a human being. The young, they thought, should take in the wisdom of authors such as Homer, Plato, Sallust, Vergil, and Augustine, thereby recognizing their own higher potentialities. Given the paramount influence of Renaissance humanism, the early American colleges possessed almost completely prescribed curricula: they required all students to experience those literary masterworks that could best shape students’ souls.

Many Americans proved acutely critical of this classics-heavy curriculum. But such critics did not make much headway against it prior to the mid-nineteenth century. At this time, a group of reformers whom the historian Andrew Jewett has labeled the first generation of “scientific democrats” began to revolutionize higher education in the US, turning it away from Renaissance humanism toward the professionalized sort of scholarly study emanating from Germany. These scientific democrats aimed to center American higher education around the natural and social sciences, believing that the scientific method could supply the tools to maintain a robust democratic society. They therefore shunned the old prescribed course of studies promoted by the Renaissance humanists in favor of a choose-your-own-adventure curriculum inspired by Darwinism and laissez-faire economics. In 1884, Charles W. Eliot, the president of Harvard University and the most energetic promoter of elective coursework, thus maintained that “In education, as elsewhere, it is the fittest that survives.” Rather than provide for students a vision of a well-educated person based on the masterworks of ancient literature, such scientific democrats promoted a Spencerian fight to the death among the disciplines.

Even casual observers of contemporary higher education in the US should recognize how successful these reformers have been in reshaping American colleges and universities. Just as they had hoped, the natural and social sciences—along with various vocational studies first ushered into the curriculum by the scientific democrats—now rule the roost, and the humanities have been brushed aside.

The triumph of the sciences would spell serious trouble for humanism. The latter, after all, foregrounds the wisdom of the past as the means to shape a student’s character. The sciences, by contrast, promote the creation of new knowledge. And the dominance of the scientific outlook in higher education has turned the modern humanities distinctly un-humanistic. Many contemporary humanities professors no longer even seem to believe in humanism. Thus, the professor of English Stanley Fish can announce that “teachers cannot, except for a serendipity that by definition cannot be counted on, fashion moral character, or inculcate respect for others, or produce citizens of a certain temper.” Likewise, in their scholarly publications such humanities professors don’t foreground the ability of masterworks to provide answers to life’s great questions; rather, they typically focus on minute arcana, as if Homer, Confucius, and Jane Austen can best be studied in a lab coat.

All this underscores the serious and longstanding difficulties for the modern humanities. The dominant Darwinian approach to the college curriculum fights against humanistic values: it devalues the wisdom of the past and esteems disciplines on the basis of their popularity alone. The professionalization of American higher education in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries has cut professors off from the humanistic tradition, allowing a literary scientism to flourish that is anathema to the proper goals of humanism. Although obviously the natural and social sciences must play an important part in contemporary American education, we must recognize that for well over a century the deck has been stacked against the humanities.

How can we fight against such longstanding troubles for the humanistic disciplines? A revolt against our Darwinian approach to general education would supply a salubrious start. Rather than encourage a curricular survival of the fittest that by design sidelines the humanities, we must demand a globalized core curriculum—one based on required courses devoted to the study of literary masterworks from manifold cultures. Such books can provide for students the most profound responses to the human predicament, enabling the young to determine a sound philosophy of life. Our scientized universities focus almost exclusively on what the great humanist Irving Babbitt called humanitarianism: the drive to improve the material conditions of the world. They desperately require a balancing emphasis on humanism: the drive to improve the self. Bereft of the humanities, education only accomplishes half of what it should. We cannot, of course, improve the world if we cannot improve ourselves. And the humanities cannot thrive without the spirit of humanism.

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Campus activists show us how to end gender-based violence

Protest and resistance thrive proudly on many university campuses. In recent history, students and faculty have organized to protest the Vietnam war in the United States, recognize the occupation of Tiananmen Square in China, resist capitalism in France, and react to many other injustices. More recently, activism to decolonise SOAS in the United Kingdom, to challenge ongoing racism at the University of Missouri, and to push back against tuition hikes in Montréal, Canada, have resulted in meaningful policy changes, signaling the effectiveness of raising collective voices in the service of change. Activism on campuses has been especially fruitful when students and faculty coalesce in opposition to sexual harassment. Sara Ahmed’s campaign against such harassment at Goldsmith’s in London is an especially vivid example of what happens when principled feminist actors take strong stands against repressive systems.

Stories of opposition to harassment rarely make international news, but quieter work is instructive nonetheless. Case in point: the work advanced by a group of academic faculty and university staffat the University of Glasgow. Recognizing the problem of sexual violence at her university, criminology professor Michelle Burman and colleagues formed a whole-university approach to addressing it, highlighting the importance of building sustainable coalitions that center the expertise of faculty and community grassroots workers alike.

Student activists at the university from a broad swath of groups– including Amnesty International, the feminist societies, and a group dedicated to student mental health– forged an alliance to respond to the deficits in policy and practice that upheld rape culture at their university. Faculty joined their efforts, amplifying the impact of their public campaign to end violence, known as Let’s Talk. Recognizing the limits of their knowledge and expertise, the coalition (also formed of representatives from neighboring Glasgow Caledonian University), forged a strong partnership with the staff of Rape Crisis Scotland.

The coalition pursued three areas of focus: research and evaluation; prevention, response and support; and analysis and messaging. At every turn, the work of the group was characterized by collaboration, by developing jointly defined goals and mileposts, and by enacting shared strategies to advance the work. The group’s persistence led it to obtain grant funding, implement multi-tier training for all faculty and staff, and create a partner-led video to raise awareness of the problem on their campuses. Not everything went perfectly: A policy designed to require the universities to safeguard all vulnerable children and adults in its care stalled. When the universities finally adopted a policy it was considered tokenistic by activists, especially the students.

Scholars know more than enough about the scope of the problem of sexual violence on university campuses. We know much less about how we work to change this present reality and how we can transform university campuses. Who feels passionately about ending sexual violence on campuses, and what do they do about it? How do campus activists, whether students, faculty, or staff, come together to theorize and enact cultural transformation? How do such collaborations provide new ways of thinking, acting, and responding to the threats posed by rape culture? How does the act of collaborative transformation change both campuses and those who engage in it?

Collaboration happens meaningfully among coalitions of faculty, staff, and student activists, particularly when they work together with specialist community organisations. Together, these coalitions endeavour to engage in deep culture change, often in the face of institutional and bureaucratic barriers, and often at great risk to the careers of those involved. Student activists are equally resolute, and often feel the backlash keenly from their peers.

Efforts that seek to transform, rather than reform, cultures and institutions, hold as their goal the uprooting of the myriad entrenched conditions that foster tolerance of violence. Such work not only sets ambitious goals of the eradication of gender-based violence, but also centers the complex and lengthy processes required to engage in truly meaningful collaboration which can themselves be transformative for individuals, groups and institutions.

This focus on process rather than just outcomes rejects the notion of commodified solutions, such as video-based seminars often offered by private companies. These kinds of things allow institutions to say that they are doing something to end gender-based violence. However, activists—steeped in relationships with and familiar with the strengths and values of the community—can do a better job. Their work shares a long connection with feminist change efforts around the globe, which have generated a myriad of successful localised collaborations, campaigns and services to challenge women’s oppression and men’s domination.  It’s important for people and groups to take the initiative to act against gender-based violence, instead of waiting for national or institutional leaders to turn their attention to its harms.

Those who would wish to see progressive transformations in universities are responding not only to the challenges of the COVID-19 pandemic, but also to forces of increasing marketisation and bureaucratisation, to struggles over the nature, purpose and value of higher education and, in some countries, the rolling back of gains made in terms of gender equality. In Hungary, women’s studies as an academic discipline is under attack while in the United States, the Department of Education has recently weakened the legal protections of sexual assault survivors. We are at a time of tremendous change for higher education.  Now, more than ever, it is vital we work to transform our institutions into more equitable environments where gender-based violence is no longer tolerated and where all students, staff, and faculty can live free of its harms.

Featured image by Miguel Bruna on Unsplash.

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How emerging adults can manage the uncertainty of the future [reading list]

Jeffrey Arnett describes emerging adulthood as a distinct stage of development from the late teens through the twenties; a life stage in which explorations and instability are the norm. As they focus on their self-development, emerging adults feel in-between, on the way to adulthood but not there yet. Nevertheless, they have a high level of optimism about what the future holds for them.

In the current climate, emerging adults are facing more instability than ever before. Whether it’s starting university, forging new relationships, or entering the job market – the uncertainty surrounding these milestones has presented many new challenges, and exacerbated the more common anxieties of adjusting to change. We’ve put together a reading list of books that address some of the key issues facing emerging adults – in areas such as education, work, relationships, and mental health – and provide advice and approaches for managing this turbulent stage of life.

Mood Prep 101: A Parent’s Guide to Preventing Depression and Anxiety in College-Bound Teens by Carol Landau

This book answers the question most parents have – “What can we do?” – when it comes to college-bound teens who may be vulnerable to anxiety and depression. This timely book empowers parents by providing strategies for helping their children psychologically prepare for college and adulthood, as well as by addressing and alleviating the anxiety parents themselves may feel about kids leaving home for the first time. Landau shows parents how they can promote healthy communication and problem-solving skills, and how they can help young people learn to better regulate emotions and tolerate distress.

Cognitive Skills You Need for the 21st Century by Stephen Reed

How can young people today prepare for the workplace of the future? Stephen Reed discusses a Future of Jobs report that contrasts trending and declining skills required by the workforce in the year 2022. Trending skills include analytical thinking and innovation, active learning strategies, creativity, reasoning, and complex problem solving. This book aids undergraduate and graduate students in planning their education by recommending courses and projects that will help them to gain important 21st century skills.

Mindfulness for the Next Generation: Helping Emerging Adults Manage Stress and Lead Healthier Lives by Holly Rogers and Margaret Maytan

College students and other emerging adults today experience high levels of stress as they pursue personal, educational, and career goals. These struggles may increase the risk of psychological distress and mental illness. This book describes an evidence-based approach for teaching the useful and important skill of mindfulness to emerging adults. The manualized, four-session program outlined here, Koru Mindfulness, is designed to help young people navigate challenging tasks, and achieve meaningful personal growth.

The Science of College: Navigating the First Year and Beyond by Patricia Herzog et al.

This book aids entering college students—and the people who support them—in navigating college successfully, with up-to-date recommendations based upon real student situations, sound social science research, and the collective experiences of faculty, lecturers, advisors, and student support staff. There is no single template for student success. Yet, this book highlights common issues that many students face and provides science-based advice for how to navigate college. Each topic covered is geared towards the life stage that most college students are in: emerging adulthood.

Emerging Adulthood: The Winding Road from the Late Teens Through the Twenties by Jeffrey Jensen Arnett

In his provocative work, Jeffrey Jensen Arnett has identified the period of emerging adulthood as distinct from both the adolescence that precedes it and the young adulthood that comes in its wake. Merging stories from the lives of emerging adults themselves with decades of research, Arnett covers a wide range of topics, including love and sex, relationships with parents, experiences at college and work, and views of what it means to be an adult.

As emerging adults continue to navigate a difficult period, it is crucially important that they are able to maintain wellbeing and seek support where needed from those around them. These books have highlighted just some of the ways in which young people, and their loved ones, can implement strategies to adapt and build resilience.

Featured Image Credit: Image by Javier Allegue Barros via Unsplash.

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How to prepare students for jobs in the 21st century

A common goal for educators is to identify, and then teach, cognitive skills that are needed for the workplace. In 2017 a group of investigators at the Educational Testing Service in Princeton, New Jersey, investigated which skills are needed as a result of the rapid changes occurring as the United States shifted from an industrial to an information-based economy. The organization analyzed 142,000 online job advertisements that were posted between February and April of that year. The most highly requested skills were oral communication (28%), written communication (23%), collaboration (22%), and problem solving (19%). The Educational Testing Service decided to label them “21^st-century skills.” These skills are a combination of cognitive (nonroutine problem solving, critical thinking, metacognition), interpersonal (social), and intrapersonal (emotional, self-regulation) talents.

The World Economic Forum’s Future of Jobs Report 2018 took a different approach by asking executives of some of the world’s largest employers to report on the latest employment, skills, and human investment trends across their industries. The survey revealed an accelerating demand for new specialist roles related to understanding and using the latest emerging technologies – AI and machine learning specialists, big data specialists, process automation experts, information security analysts, human-machine interaction designers, and robotics engineers. Skills such as creativity, originality, critical thinking, negotiation, and complex problem solving will, according to the report, become more valuable. The World Economic Forum predicted that there will also be more demand for leadership, emotional intelligence, and social influence skills.

These cognitive skills should be incorporated within courses taught at high schools, community colleges, and universities. An introduction to technological skills can begin in high school. In 2016, the College Board’s Advanced Placement Program oversaw the largest course launch in the program’s 60-year history with the release of AP Computer Science Principles. The course introduces students to the foundational concepts of the field and challenges them to explore how computing and technology can impact the world. In the 2018-19 school year more than 5,000 schools were offering the course. A second course, AP Computer Science A, focuses on computing skills related to programming in Java. The course teaches the foundational concepts of computer science to encourage broader participation. Its big ideas are creativity, abstraction, data and information, algorithms, programming, the internet, and global impact.

The College Board announced that nearly 100,000 students took the AP Computer Science Principles Exam in 2019, more than double the participation since the course launched during 2016-17 school year. During that period the number of female students, the number of Black/African American students, and the number of Hispanic/Latino students more than doubled.

A challenge for community colleges and universities is to design instruction for the increasing number of students who enter higher education without a declared major. A 2019 article in The Chronicle of Higher Education discussed how some institutions are preventing these students from wandering among courses. One solution is to ask incoming students to select an academic focus area or meta-major to help them explore topics that should appeal to them. In the fall of 2019, the entire University System of Georgia asked incoming freshmen to declare an academic focus area if unable to select a major. The University of Houston has a similar program based on the same concept.  These programs have been influenced by studies that find college students have trouble succeeding because they are faced with an overwhelming number of options.

Community colleges are evaluating a related project. The Association of American Colleges and Universities announced that it had selected 20 colleges to participate in a two-year evaluation project. The goals of the project are to map students’ goals to pathways, help students choose and enter a program pathway, keep students on the path, and ensure that students are learning.

A guided approach can also be helpful for reducing changes in majors. Within three years of their initial enrollment approximately 30% of undergraduates in associate and bachelor’s degree programs change their major at least once. But Georgia State University reduced changes in a major by 30 percent since it began its meta-majors program seven years ago. Those students who did change majors were more likely to have crossover credits.

Although clustering courses around a meta-major may be helpful for students with undeclared majors, the courses do not necessarily teach skills that are important for the future workplace. These skills include oral communication, written communication, collaboration, and problem solving. They also include creativity, originality, critical thinking, negotiation, and complex problem solving. These cognitive skills should be incorporated within cluster courses to prepare freshmen for skills that are likely to be in demand when they graduate. The creation of generic courses for all majors should also focus on these skills because they are relevant to all college graduates. Such generic courses have the advantage that they do not require students to select a major or even a cluster area.

Featured Image credit: Image by Gerd Altmann via Pixabay.

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It’s cheaper to preserve the Amazon than we might think

“The cattle need ladders to graze here.” That is what my wife’s relatives used to tell her after they moved to the Amazon rainforest. She visited their farm when she was 13, and the planted grass was taller than she was. Grass grows tall there because of the substantial amount of nutrients left on the ground immediately after deforesting. A few years after clearing the land, though, most nutrients were gone and the grass became thin. That is hardly surprising as the Amazon soil is known to be among the poorest on the planet. By that point, as the locals say, the cattle would need to bend their knees to graze.

Despite the poor soil, the accumulated deforested area in the Brazilian Amazon since 1988 comprises an area larger than California. About two-thirds of that area is used for extensive pasture (the most common land use there). Extensive farming is to be expected in places where land is abundant and of poor quality.

The high deforestation rates have been a source of international concern for at least the past 30 years – and especially in the last two years. There has been many discussions among academics, policy makers, and in society in general, about different ways to curb the deforestation process. Examples of such policies include pre-established limits to deforestation in public and private lands, and the so-called “incentive-based” policies, which – as the name suggests – provide incentives for farmers to not deforest, such as taxing agricultural land or subsidizing forested areas. While all these policies can be effective in preserving forests if properly implemented, monitored, and enforced, their economic costs are not the same. Reducing the costs of policies is an important goal by itself, as it eliminates wasteful expenditures, and it can help avoid political strife. The greater the costs, the less likely are farmers to abide by the rules.

Key to reducing economic costs of environmental policies is to note that, although the soils are generally poor in the Amazon, they are not equally poor. Nor are farmers’ resources or entrepreneurial abilities. Differences in farms’ profitability means that some farmers need to forgo substantial profits to preserve the land, while others lose much less. A cost-effective policy minimizes farmers’ losses by avoiding unnecessary sacrifices. In order to preserve a certain amount of forested area, a cost-effective policy induces farmers who lose less from preservation to preserve larger areas, while inducing farmers who lose more from preservation to sacrifice smaller agricultural areas.

Some environmental policies are considerably more expensive than others. Currently, the Brazilian Forest Code requires that each farm in the Amazon must keep 80% of its area in natural vegetation. There is ample evidence that this rule has not been fully enforced: Forest coverage on private properties there has been approximately 40%. Farmers would lose about US$ 4 billion per year in forgone profits if the legislation were perfectly enforced. Not surprisingly, farmers have tried, systematically, to alter the Forest Code since it was implemented; the senator Flavio Bolsonaro (one of the president’s sons) had even proposed recently to eliminate the 80% rule completely.

In contrast, taxing agricultural land in a way that preserves 80% of forest cover in total would be approximately eight times less costly to farmers (about US$ 480 million per year of forgone profits). This corresponds to a cost saving from the land-use tax of approximately 90% of the cost of a perfectly enforced 80% rule. To have a sense of magnitudes, this is substantially higher than the cost saving estimates from allowance trading in pollution markets, ranging from 20 to 47% of the cost of standard quantitative limits to pollution emissions. Taxing agricultural land puts in place a price for everyone that considers that activity. In this way, the less productive farmers would find it profitable to use less land for agriculture, while the more productive farmers would still use more land and forgo fewer profits. (As a by-product, noting that the most productive farms are located in the south Amazon, toward the edge of the rainforest, forests in the central regions would be more preserved and less fragmented, which is advantageous from a biodiversity point of view.) The 80% rule disregards differences in profitability and so penalizes the more productive farms disproportionally, raising the total costs of the policy (and allowing for more forest fragmentation).

Instead of taxing agriculture, we could subsidize farmers to keep their forested areas. The total economic costs of payments would be similar to taxing, as it similarly puts a price on land use, but with the difference that farmers would not bear the burden of preservation – those who pay to preserve (and presumably benefit from) the forests would bear the conservation costs, which may sound fair. It could be politically difficult to do so in practice, either by taxing Brazilian families and business or by obtaining resources from foreign sources. Still, the benefits could be enormous. If we paid farmers to preserve the land based on the amount of carbon on the ground, a payment as small as US$10 per ton of CO2 per year could virtually eliminate all agricultural land in the Amazon. That is because of the overall low agricultural returns and the large stock of carbon on the ground there.

Evidently, no policy can be successful without efficient monitoring and enforcement systems, which in turn depend on political will – a by-no-means small issue, as we have been experiencing during the presidency of Jair Bolsonaro. Yet Brazil has a well-established, almost real-time, satellite-based monitoring system that have proved to work in deterring deforestation. Also, the country has been in the process of geo-referencing all rural properties, including the location of the required preservation areas within farms. Further, the Forest Code permits farmers who use more agricultural land than allowed by the 80% rule to buy quotas from farms that use less land than required – this effectively allows for a trading quotas market to emerge, which, like taxing or payments, is another “incentive-based” tool that puts a price on land use, and so can be a cost-effective policy.

In sum, despite the current increases in deforestation rates, all these recent advances point to a state with an increased capacity to implement preservation policies with small (or at least as small as possible) economic costs. Hopefully, cattle won’t need to be climbing ladders nor bending their knees, and perhaps not even travelling to the Amazon, to graze in the future.

Featured image credit: Rio Teles Pires by Frederico Oliveira. Photo owned by the author. 

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Black studies for everyone

It is a sad commentary on the state of education in this society that educators hesitate to include a subject in the curriculum because students want to learn about it.

—Armstead Robinson

In 1968, Yale University hosted the Black Studies in the University symposium. A product of the student activism of Yale’s Black Student Alliance, the symposium would be important for the foundation of what is now Yale’s Department of African American Studies. One of the symposium’s 16 participants was Armstead Robinson, a founding student member of the Black Student Alliance and co-editor of the book, Black Studies in the University: A Symposium. In the midst of the uprisings throughout the United States (civil rights, anti-Vietnam War, the women’s movement, etc.), Robinson’s goal was to place the university in the service of black liberation, which for him meant a university concerned with the needs of the black community. For Robinson, universities like Yale shrouded themselves in a cloak of “professionalism,” which often equated to white & Western knowledge frames. But Robinson argued that, like society, the system of higher education was on trial, and one thing was certain: “Trouble in schools will continue and increase” if black Studies was left off the agenda. Robinson would go on shape the legacy of Black Studies at the University of Virginia, founding the Carter G. Woodson Institute for African American and African Studies in 1981.

We are over 50 years away from Robinson’s statement, but the “liberation” that he associated with Black Studies remains as important today as ever. The racial violence that prematurely ended the lives of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, Ahmaud Arbery, and many more shows the necessity of bringing together critical knowledge & liberatory political practice, that which Robinson called Black Studies. And like Robinson, I suggest that we draw inspiration from the uprisings of the current moment to call for black liberation at the university level; building off the works of Angela Davis and Ruth Wilson Gilmore, along with the abolitionist university studies work, we should demand more from academic institutions. Put more bluntly, like the protests in the past, today’s protests can inspire us toward a trans/national establishment of Black Studies at all universities. By establishment, I do not mean adding another line to the list of diversity programs that many schools are promoting. I mean the material and epistemological backing (departmentalization, center-formation, and programization) of Black Studies to the point that it becomes as commonplace as our Mathematics Departments.

In 2000, Black Studies and cultural studies scholar bell hooks released Feminism is for Everybody. In it, she argued that the project of feminism was often popularly perceived by men as a project solely by and for “man-hating” women. But hooks counters: the institutionality of racism, sexism, homophobia, and transphobia ensured that people of all backgrounds could enact oppression, and feminism was one mode of introducing alternative politics for all. As such, she produced a book that was designed to show us how sexism harmed all of us, and to liberate some people would necessarily liberate all. For hooks, this was a project that included and exceeded the university.

What hooks suggested 20 years ago was that liberation struck at the heart of epistemology, both within and outside the university. Likewise, Black Studies should be a leading mission of universities going forward, even as it exceeds the university, as we see on our streets right now. To some extent, the protests are not about Black Studies in the university, as universities have traditionally negated calls for any form of change with the conservative goal of equilibrium.

Yet, the protests are about Black Studies because they materialize a central critique made in Black Studies: scholars like Sylvia Wynter,Hortense Spillers, and C.L.R. Jameshave all noted that blackness is a movement against the grain of modern, Western ontoepistemological investments in the replication of one pure being—so often overrepresented as white, male, heterosexual, cis-gender, able-bodied, and wealthy.  In other words, Black Studies is not the study of race, per se (or rather, only race); it is the study of the ways that, despite the colonial and slavery frameworks that have pronounced some of us as dead on arrival, black people have expressed life not easily categorizable by the frameworks of Western humanness. In many ways, then, Black Studies exceeds black people, to consider the overlapping and contradicting ways in which people of all races have scratched out some semblance of life (and created solidarities) within/against/between Western neocolonial-capitalistic projects. Black Studies provides one framework to think the uprisings we now see worldwide. Indeed, Black Studies is for and about everybody.

On the streets of Richmond, Virginia, the heart of the former Confederate States of America, I see the continued importance of Robinson’s liberation. Here, Black Study/ies exceeds the university, calling for a transformation of knowledge and power. As per Robin Kelley’s definition, Black Study is happening on Monument Avenue in Richmond right now, with or without degrees in hand. Such study, between protesters, between pedestrians who stop and talk to those protesters, between those driving by protesters to pass out food and to honk support from their vehicles in the midst of a global pandemic, is why the formalization and support of Black Studies throughout higher education should not be controversial.

If universities and colleges throughout the country can release statements in support of the protesters, they also should be materially invested in the continuance (in some cases, the establishment) of Black Studies on their campuses. To do so is not to focus on one race of people, but to provide a necessary rethinking of the project of Western knowledge itself—what Ronald Judy called (dis)forming the canon. The point, then, is that Black Studies is for everybody. The question is: how long will it take for higher education to catch up to such a realization?

Featured Image Credit: by Archives Foundation via Flickr

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Six tips for teachers who see emotional abuse

The scars of emotional abuse are invisible, deep, and diverse; and unfortunately, emotional abuse likely impacts more students than we think.

Emotionally abusive behavior broadly consists of criticism, degradation, rejection, or threat. Emotional abuse (also known as psychological maltreatment or verbal assault) can happen anywhere, both within and outside of families, and can refer to a single severe incident or a chronic, ongoing pattern. Educators, caregivers, coaches, school mental health professionals, administrators, and peers are all capable of acting emotionally abusive toward school-age youth. That is part of its insidious invisibility; despite emotional abuse being highly involved in childhood abuse cases, it is often forgotten and overlooked. This type of interpersonal trauma is typically chronic and cuts deeply, as it is associated with mental and physical health issues (e.g., anxiety, depression, stress, sleep problems, self-harm) during the school years and beyond.

Even with this existing knowledge, emotional abuse remains misunderstood, minimized, unseen, and unreported by many, including school professionals. We outline three things teachers need to know about emotional abuse and three things they can do to meet the needs of students experiencing emotional abuse.

What to know

The impact on the student determines the occurrence of emotional abuse more than the behavior that caused it. 

There is no legal or clinical universal definition of emotional abuse. For example, two students with a parent teasing them about their appearances may react differently, in part based on context and relationship with the parent. Emotional abuse would be determined by the impact on the student, rather than the teasing alone.

Emotional abuse is detrimental to both a student’s way of thinking and feeling. 

Children create their sense of self from stories that others construct about them. Students may believe the destructive narratives that are told to them. That is, these harmful words may impact students at their core—shifting how they think about themselves and the world, and how they feel about themselves and others.

There are numerous ways that emotional abuse may manifest. 

Emotional abuse is not simply hearing harmful words. The context around the experience of emotional abuse are varied and diverse. A student may internalize or externalize their behaviors, or something in between. If a school-aged youth is repeatedly told that she is worthless, then the student may be meek in class. If a student is threatened repeatedly, then she may act aggressively toward others.

What to do

Take care of your emotional needs and your emotional health.

Educators cannot support students if they cannot support themselves. As some students may constantly hear emotionally destructive words in their home environments, teachers certainly do not want to bring any semblance of that into their schools. Nevertheless, working with students can be tiring and frustrating. If their emotional energy is low, teachers may react rather than respond to difficult situations that unexpectedly arise. Rather than taking a breath, teachers might begin to punitively scold or admonish a student. Teachers need to take care of their emotional needs so that they do not parallel any unhealthy at-home behaviors in the classroom.

Foster sharing through strong relationships. 

Try to examine the life contexts behind a student’s behaviors. Rather than focusing on what is wrong with students, be curious about the circumstances in students’ lives that may influence how they act in school. To have a firmer understanding, teachers need to create brave spaces in our schools and classrooms so that students may feel comfortable sharing with adults. Students often regard educators as more effective guardians in violence protection than police or security, which speaks to the importance of continuing to cultivate this trust. When students share feelings, provide positive reinforcement by expressing your gratitude or by giving a thoughtful, affirming response.

Know the laws around mandated reporting, and communicate with transparency.

Check state regulations and learn to whom to report and how to report within your district or county. If and when suspicion or reports of abuse arise, reach out to your school mental health professionals. Encourage your administrators to grow emotional abuse awareness, prevention, and intervention initiatives so that others feel willing to report even in instances of suspected abuse. Openly discuss what happens after a report is made, as this transparency allows for students to feel more comfortable with the idea of reporting.

Words are powerful, and as such, can be weaponized and wounding. Words can also be healing, spoken with gentleness and justice. Teachers should listen wholly to their students and their unstated needs; let teachers use their minds and words wisely and act knowingly.

Featured Image Credit: Image by Okan AKGÜL on Pixabay

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