Harvard University Press Blog

Every Loeb at a Single Site

We went live this week with the digital Loeb Classical Library, a platform representing only the most recent in a line of many technological upgrades survived by “the beauty and learning, the philosophy and wit of the great writers of ancient Greece and Rome.” Loeb Classical Library General Editor Jeffrey Henderson introduces the site in the exchange below. 

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Q: What inspired the creation of the digital Loeb Classical Library, and what needs does it seek to meet?

When he introduced the LCL in 1912 James Loeb wrote, “means must be found to place these treasures within the reach of all who care for the finer things of life,” and in the 21st century that means online as well as print. We wanted to assure that the LCL made that transition as soon as it was technologically feasible and in a form befitting the elegance of the iconic print volumes. The digital LCL meets needs thinkable only in this form: not merely another format for reading a given volume but for having the whole Library, a wallful of volumes, on any connected device anywhere, all the Latin, Greek, and English easily searchable, with a personal online workspace for storing, sharing, and teaching.

Q: How long has it taken to create the digital Loeb Classical Library? What have you and your colleagues learned along the way?

Five years. We’ve learned a lot: machines can reveal many things we take for granted after a couple of millennia using books with pages, for example we needed a new unicode font that would look good online and in print, and to determine what characters it should have—which ones are in the Library now and which are we likely to need in the future? how we would represent footnotes, marginal notes, textual variants; how we could navigate the works themselves, since each has its own internal reference system; and who knew that the LCL has over 300 different style sheets!

Policing Plagiarism vs Increasing Learning

Earlier this week NPR’s All Things Considered ran a story on Turnitin, which describes itself as “the most innovative and effective online technology for evaluating student learning.” Its main feature is an enormous database against which instructors can check their students’ writing for “originality.” As the NPR segment explains, students are directed to upload their work straight to Turnitin, which compares the text against over 45 billion web pages, more than 337 million student papers, and well over 100 million articles from academic books and publications. Turnitin determines how much of a submission matches content from the database, flagging potential plagiarism for instructors to evaluate.

Last fall we published James Lang’s Cheating Lessons: Learning from Academic Dishonesty, a practical guide to creating learning environments with fewer opportunities and lesser incentives to cheat. Lang closes the book by considering Turnitin and its ilk:

The future of cheating also includes the future of technologies to prevent and reduce cheating, which are constantly evolving in response to new cheating techniques, pushing and pulling at one another uncertainly in an awkward waltz. Many institutions and faculty members now rely on plagiarism detection software, which itself of course constantly evolves in the wake of new technological developments. Smart theorists of these programs, like Sharon Flynn, the Assistant Director of the Centre for Excellence in Learning and Teaching at the National University of Ireland-Galway, will tell you that, contrary to popular belief, they do not catch plagiarists. As Flynn puts it in an excellent blog post introducing new users to the software program Turnitin.com, “Turnitin does not detect plagiarism, it highlights matching text. It is very good at what it does, but it cannot tell you that a student has plagiarised. You, as the teacher, are the one who decides if the matching text indicates a problem, or otherwise.” As she also point out, the program can only detect “matching text,” and will not help you with “plagiarism of ideas” or “ghost-written materials.” Faculty members cannot expect that running every student’s paper through Turnitin or any compatible program will solve their cheating problems for them—especially since Turnitin offers a comparable service for students that allows them to submit their papers to the same database used by faculty members in order to see what their reports will look like—and, presumably, modify plagiarized text just enough to avoid detection.

Instead, faculty members who choose to make use of Turnitin and its equivalents should think of it like they think of anything else they might make use of in their teaching: as a tool that can help or hinder student learning. For example, faculty members who want to help students understand more clearly how to incorporate the words of others into their research or scholarly writing can use Turnitin’s originality reports for that purpose. Projecting for students in class an originality report from an unpublished piece of academic writing—such as a forthcoming bit of your own work—will allow them to see the extent to which scholarship relies on direct quotations from the work of scholars in dialogue with the writer’s original interpretations; doing so with multiple pieces of writing, and discussing it with them, will allow them to gain a general sense of the amount of original writing typically required from an academic essay in your discipline. As long as you inform students in advance that you will be doing so, projecting in class selected originality reports from your students can help accomplish the same objective, especially if the students have already seen comparable reports from published work, and can begin to make those comparisons themselves.

Lang’s research found that students cheat for understandable reasons, and that tweaks to course design and classroom practice can both better motivate students to learn and give them better tools to do so. For Lang, simply improving technological tools with which to police academic dishonesty does nothing to actually improve student learning, which should always be the goal.

Who Pays the Price for the College Party Scene?

After a five-year study of a flagship Midwestern public university, sociologists Elizabeth A. Armstrong and Laura T. Hamilton found that the social and academic infrastructure of the school seemed to prioritize a particular type of affluent, socially oriented student. A “party pathway”—built around an implicit agreement between the university and students to demand little of each other—was impossible to avoid, and for students who couldn’t or wouldn’t join the fun it served as a constant reminder of their place as outsiders. Armstrong and Hamilton’s Paying for the Party: How College Maintains Inequality exposes the unmet obligations and misplaced priorities of public universities whose students leave college with so little to show for it. Below, the authors contrast the experience of thriving on the party pathway with the far more common experience of being failed by it.

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Naomi and Karen started college the same year at a mid-tier public university in the Midwest. They lived on the same residence hall floor and shared a taste for partying. Both majored in sports broadcasting. Neither performed well academically, earning GPAs below 3.0. Yet Naomi graduated in four years, moved to New York City, and quickly secured a desirable entry-level job in a media firm. Karen, on the other hand, had changed her major to education, transferred to a regional branch campus, and was struggling to graduate within six years.

In an era of skyrocketing tuition and concern over the value of college, these divergent outcomes matter. In Paying for the Party: How College Maintains Inequality, we trace a dormitory floor of fifty-three women, including Naomi and Karen, from the day they arrived on campus to a year after they were slated to graduate. The women were similar in many respects; however, they came from a wide range of social class backgrounds.

Based on this research we argue that how this university—and many other large state schools—organizes the college experience systematically disadvantages all but the affluent. The university supported a robust “party pathway”—a social and academic infrastructure with a powerful Greek system at its heart, and an array of easy majors on offer. Naomi—an out-of-state student whose father owned a successful business—was well served by the party pathway. Karen—a middle-class woman from in-state—was not.

Naomi and Karen—like one third of the incoming freshman class—were assigned to a “party dorm.” Little partying took place in the heavily-policed residence halls, but party dorms served as a pipeline into the under-aged party scene housed in the Greek system, which both women joined.

Launch of the Digital Public Library of America

The Digital Public Library of America launches today, having gone from concept to concrete more swiftly than anyone could have hoped. As has been envisioned from the beginning, the DPLA is “an open, distributed network of comprehensive online resources that draws on the nation’s living heritage from libraries, universities, archives, and museums in order to educate, inform, and empower everyone in the current and future generations.” The DPLA begins with an already-impressive array of materials, but has even bolder ambitions, along with an encouraging concern with sustainability.

No individual has been as important to the DPLA’s trajectory as Harvard’s University Librarian (and many-time HUP author) Robert Darnton, who has tracked the project’s progress in a series of articles for the New York Review of Books. In his most recent, he recaps the initiative’s brief history and explains its intentions:

How to think of it? Not as a great edifice topped with a dome and standing on a gigantic database. The DPLA will be a distributed system of electronic content that will make the holdings of public and research libraries, archives, museums, and historical societies available, effortlessly and free of charge, to readers located at every connecting point of the Web. To make it work, we must think big and begin small. At first, the DPLA’s offering will be limited to a rich variety of collections—books, manuscripts, and works of art—that have already been digitized in cultural institutions throughout the country. Around this core it will grow, gradually accumulating material of all kinds until it will function as a national digital library.

Darnton goes on to detail a DPLA-affiliated project that is particularly exciting for us here at the Press:

At one time or other, nearly every student comes in contact with a poem by Emily Dickinson, who probably qualifies as America’s favorite poet. But Dickinson’s poems are especially problematic. Only a few of them, horribly mangled, were published in her lifetime.

As Darnton notes, the manuscript copies of Dickinson’s poems “pose important puzzles, because they contain quirky punctuation, capitalization, spacing, and other touches that have profound implications for their meaning.” The originals, which are held in a few invaluable collections—notably at Amherst College Library, the Boston Public Library, and Harvard’s Houghton Library—have now been digitized and combined with printed editions edited by Thomas H. Johnson in 1955 and by Ralph W. Franklin in 1981, both of which are jewels of HUP’s own catalog. The manuscripts and printed poems will be brought together with a wealth of other supplementary documentation to create an Emily Dickinson Archive. Brigham Young University has also partnered with Amherst College, the BPL, Harvard, HUP, and the DPLA in this project that will greatly expand access to our collective knowledge of one of the country’s great literary icons while also inspiring new scholarship and discourse on her life and work.

The Copley branch of the BPL—the first large free municipal library in the United States—was to host a gala launch for the DPLA today. The Copley library is now at the center of a crime scene, though, directly beside the terrible and tragic Boston Marathon explosions, and so today’s events have been cancelled. In his statement on the cancellation, DPLA Executive Director Dan Cohen called the building of a new library “one of the greatest examples of what humans can do together to extend the light against darkness,” and the site’s launch will proceed today as planned. An even larger event to properly celebrate the creation of the DPLA is now in the works for this fall.

The Process of Education, 1960

Throughout our centennial year of 2013, we’ll be reflecting on the 100 significant titles we’ve chosen to represent our first 100 years. In the post below, HUP Executive Editor-at-Large Elizabeth Knoll looks back on the 1960 publication of Jerome Bruner’s The Process of Education.

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University presses seldom find themselves with spectacular best-sellers, and when they do, it’s never the books that anyone would have predicted. A technical monograph on 16th century astonomy, in a series forbiddingly entitled the International Encyclopedia of Unified Science? The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. A small-town poet’s report of his conversations with an elderly Oglala Sioux man? Black Elk Speaks.

And in 1960, no one expected the report of a Woods Hole conference of eminent scientists and psychologists, spurred by the political shock of Sputnik to imagine reforms in American schools, to fascinate and inspire book reviewers, university students, neighborhood book groups, and school teachers for decades. But that’s what happened with Jerome Bruner’s The Process of Education.

The Press printed a respectable 5000 copies, “and then the astonishments began,” as Bruner said at a conference in 2011. The little book got a front-page review in the New York Times Book Review and the first edition sold 83,000 copies (notes still in the file show the Press scrambling to reprint fast enough). It ended up selling several hundred thousand copies in various editions, and has been translated into 21 languages. (The first, ironically enough, was Russian—in a pirated edition.)

How did a book on theories of learning, written by a Harvard professor, without personal stories or heartwarming anecdotes or one-liners, strike such a chord?

In part it was the grandness of the subject and the boldness of the argument. As Bruner summed it up in 2011—“the nature of mind, and how mind might be used, and the idea that the young were not idiotic because they were young, but as rational as anyone else.” Thanks to Bruner’s omnivorous curiosity and wide reading (a photograph from about this time shows him deep in conversation with Aldous Huxley and J. Robert Oppenheimer), The Process of Education surveyed the domains of academic knowledge—science, literature, history—and characterized them briefly, vividly, memorably. Paying particular attention to science (after all, it was the fear that the Soviet Union would outpace the US in science and technology that sparked plans for school reform), Bruner insisted on the part played by intuition and imagination in the discovery and creation of knowledge. “The shrewd guess, the fertile hypothesis, the courageous leap to a tentative conclusion—these are the most valuable coin of the thinker at work.”

At the same time, what these “thinkers at work” were thinking about could be within reach of teachers and children. Unlike many of today’s school reformers, Bruner understood the delicate and demanding nature of effective teaching. “It is easy to ask trivial questions or to lead the child to ask trivial questions. It is also easy to ask impossibly difficult questions. The trick is to find the medium question that can be answered and that takes you somewhere.”

My Blue-Bound Loves

This year marks the 75th anniversary of the founding of the Association of American University Presses, of which we’re a proud member. To note the occasion we’re joining the rest of AAUP in celebrating university presses all this week with, among other exciting things, a University Press Week blog tour. This morning we’re happy to be serve as the tour’s first stop, and very pleased to offer a post from Anthony Grafton, past president of the American Historical Association and longtime HUP-author. Below, Grafton recalls how university press books introduced him to a world of discovery and argument as a young man, and explains how the importance of UPs in that process of discovery has only grown. After reading of Grafton’s “blue-bound loves,” head on over to the Duke University Press blog for the tour’s next stop, a post from the great Jack Halberstam.

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The first university press whose books I fell in love with was Oxford (the one in Oxford). As a teenager learning Latin and Greek in the 1960s, I used and loved slim, handsome Oxford Classical Texts. They looked like no other books. Their austere Latin title pages and severe dark blue bindings, so plain they were almost ostentatious, surely enclosed mysteries. In fact, they did: Virgil and Catullus, Tacitus and Homer. It wasn’t easy, in those days, to collect OCTs. Amazon was not even a gleam in a science fiction writer’s eye, and Blackwell’s seemed unimaginably distant. But somewhere there must be a realm where these treasures were more commonplace.

When I became an undergraduate, OCTs were suddenly available, in libraries and academic bookshops. But so were the products of dozens of other university presses, American as well as British. They revealed a whole world of discovery and argument. Looks still mattered, to a young reader. Happily, each great press had a visual as well as an intellectual style—from Harvard’s handsome, erudite studies in literature and intellectual history to Chicago’s raucous, generously illustrated investigations of popular culture. Every month, the new books multiplied. The new book table at the Seminary Co-Op in Hyde Park was a sight to make the bibliophile shudder with desire—and with panic, when several of these presses ran into financial crisis around 1970, and it looked as if some of them might close.

Happily, they survived. You can still find me, a couple of times a week, going through the new offerings at our local academic bookshop—and, more often than I should, carrying a pile of them to the cashier. And you can still accuse me, with perfect justice, of taking more interest than I should in their physical beauty. It’s true, I still love university press books for their bodies as well as their minds.

But university presses matter to me now for other, deeper reasons as well. First of all, they play a more distinctive role now than they did back in the day. In the Sixties and Seventies, trade presses took chances on erudition. Pantheon brought demanding, radical thinkers and writers like Michel Foucault and Eric Hobsbawm to the American market. Most of the university press books that I could afford were Torchbooks: paperback reprints, produced by a single commercial press, Harper.

The university presses formed one continent of a larger world of serious publishing. This was financed by the expanding libraries and course enrollments of the sixties, but also driven by ideals. Over the last thirty years or so, the universities have continued to grow, but the ideals seem to have shrunk—or at least migrated. Harvard, Chicago and MIT now print most of the high-risk titles. They bring European and Asian scholars and thinkers to the English-speaking world, and take chances on new writers in English as well. We need university presses because they refresh the wells of learning.

Second, the university presses matter because they keep up the Slow Food methods that make books that will last for generations. Back in the day, editors at every good house did more than acquire manuscripts. They knew their authors, suggested topics, offered criticism, underlined the purple passages that had to go and fought for the footnotes that had to stay. By doing so they kept up a tradition that began hundreds of years before, when Aldus Manutius and Johann Amerbach, the experimental scholar printers of the exciting years around 1500, realized that they had to hire highly educated staffers who could edit texts before they were printed.

The (MBA) Program Era

A few years back we published Mark McGurl’s award-winning reconsideration of American literature, The Program Era: Postwar Fiction and the Rise of Creative Writing. The book outlines how the growth in popularity of creative writing programs has shaped American fiction. Contra those who bemoan the uniformity that they think MFA-style training has brought to American writing, McGurl argues that American literary culture of this era has been rich, deep, and often brilliant, but that the generating force of higher education plays a constitutive role we have to understand:

We need to start documenting this phenomenon, moving out from the illustrious cases of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and Stanford University and a few others to grasp the reality of an enterprise that now numbers some 350 institutional participants and continues to grow. This enterprise is our literary history.

So, okay. Terrific book, a joy to read, you should check it out. Today, though, let’s imagine taking that structural lens and applying it to another ubiquitous graduate program that seems from the outside to inculcate a particular perspective on the world: the Master of Business Administration. This year we’ve all been privy to what a cynic could call the MBA industry’s greatest-ever bit of guerilla marketing, the presidential candidacy of Mitt Romney, surely the most celebrated MBA in the world today.

The rightful focus on the economy throughout this campaign has given us ample exposure to MBA thinking. And what’s been fascinating to many observers is the way in which that thinking is being repurposed, with Romney making the case that the skills and knowledge required to run a business are the very same as those required to govern a country. Current polls give nearly even odds that we’ll get the chance to see if he’s right.

But why wait? Let’s take that McGurl-style approach and imagine a book on the MBA program era. What would it teach us about this mode of training and its uses? Maybe it would help us think about the ramifications of imagining everything as a market to exploit, which may, in turn, help us understand a perspective in which thirty thousand dead in Syria can be considered an “opportunity,” as Governor Romney described the situation in this week’s foreign policy debate:

Well, let's step back and talk about what's happening in Syria and how important it is. First of all, 30,000 people being killed by their government is a humanitarian disaster. Secondly, Syria is an opportunity for us because Syria plays an important role in the Middle East, particularly right now.

The thing with markets is timing, right? Buy low, sell high. We see the politics of that mindset in the Governor’s comments on the need to swiftly arm Syrian opposition forces, despite America’s (long) history of training and equipping foreign rebels who’d later employ those capabilities against the U.S. and its interests.

Now, there are obviously contradictions here, which perhaps a book like The (MBA) Program Era could help us to understand. Like, for instance, why the MBA candidate is the one so unsatisfied with the efficacy of economic sanctions. Or why seemingly every politician is so blind to the humanitarian tragedy of those sanctions, as if the economy exists as an entity apart from the lives within it. Even if countries were businesses, as this conception of sanctions encourages us to imagine, shouldn’t businesspeople understand that squeezing a business hurts the workers well before it hurts the owners, and so sanctions hurt the people well before they affect the leaders? Surely the CEOs of American Fortune 500s—doing so well themselves after the crisis while not rehiring the workers who’d been downsized—could explain that.

We need to start documenting this phenomenon, moving out from the illustrious cases of the Harvard Business School, Wharton, Sloan and a few others to grasp the reality of an enterprise that now numbers some 4,000 institutional participants and continues to grow. This enterprise is becoming our leadership history.

The Bain Ubiquity

As we welcome fall, we leave behind a summer that’s been the season of Bain. From the ongoing consideration of Mitt Romney’s Bain Capital, to the big-screen-dominance of The Dark Knight Rises and its homophonic and horrifying Bane, there’s been just no hiding.

But while Bain Capital lingers, and Bane the villain mostly gives way, we enter the moment of a Bain far closer to our hearts. That’s Ken Bain, of course, whose 2004 book What the Best College Teachers Do continues to help countless educators prepare themselves each fall. Whether they’re tried and tenured or still all splashy behind the ears, Bain’s book has served as a peerless guide for college teachers who’re dedicated to helping their students get the most of their time together.

And now Bain’s turned his attention to the other side of that classroom relationship. His broadly-conceived (even if narrowly-titled) new book, What the Best College Students Do, is at base a book about creative people and how they became that way:

These creative people went to college and emerged from that experience as dynamic and innovative men and women who changed the world in which they lived. How did their college experiences, particularly their interactions with professors, change their patterns of thinking?

Among the most critical traits found in those whom Bain terms “deep learners” is a willingness to confront failure. An approach to as-yet unmastered material or skills that deems them out of reach leaves people with little room to grow. Deep learners, by contrast, are far more likely to take on topics or tools that they don’t yet grasp than to write them off as things they can’t achieve. This distinction, Bain writes, is one of the most telltale differences between highly successful students and mediocre ones:

(A)verage students think they can tell right away if they are going to be good at something. If they don’t get it immediately, they throw up their hands and say, “I can’t do it.” Their more accomplished classmates have a completely different attitude—and it is largely a matter of attitude rather than ability. They stick with assignments much longer and are reluctant to give it up. “I haven’t learned it yet,” they might say, while others would cry, “I’m not good at” history, music, math, writing, or whatever. Traditional schooling rewards quick answers—the person with the hand up first. But an innovative work of the mind, something that lasts and changes the world, demands slow and steady progress. It requires time and devotion. You can’t tell what you can do until you struggle with something over and over.

Though Bain’s book will help students get As if that’s their goal, he argues strongly that it shouldn’t be. He shows that long-term success and contentment with one’s career depend far more on developing the ability to really learn, which is a skill quite distinct from the ability to ace tests. Becoming a Bain-style deep learner has a far broader applicability to one’s life than learning to make Dean’s list, and, as such, this book and its lessons actually have much to offer even to those well beyond their college years. Yes, you can learn new tricks. And the best trick on offer is learning itself.

Is Mathematics Not Beautiful?

Since its reincarnation a year or so ago, the NYT Sunday Review section has usually reserved its front page for articles intent on sparking debate or stirring controversy. The pieces often present counter-intuitive arguments graced with hackle-raising headlines. And so witness this week’s above-the-fold inquiry: “Is Algebra Necessary?”, accompanied by an illustration of a trio of poor souls drowning in waves of notation sure to give even MIT’s finest fits.

Andrew Hacker, a political scientist whose most recent book examines “how colleges are wasting our money and failing our kids,” argues in the article that if math is the greatest stumbling block to educational achievement then perhaps we should just remove it. “There are many defenses of algebra and the virtue of learning it,” he writes. “Most of them sound reasonable on first hearing; many of them I once accepted. But the more I examine them, the clearer it seems that they are largely or wholly wrong—unsupported by research or evidence, or based on wishful logic.” The issue as he sees it is that this forced emphasis on the mathematical sequence causes large numbers of students to fail, thus depriving them personally and society generally of the further development of their non-mathematical talents.

In place of our current model of mathematics education, Hacker envisions an alternative wherein the focus shifts to “citizen statistics” so as to “familiarize students with the kinds of numbers that describe and delineate our personal and public lives.” He imagines such an approach would be exciting, and he urges us to do away with a system in which math is but “a huge boulder we make everyone pull, without assessing what all this pain achieves.”

Now, very few people with any exposure to the teaching of math in our schools would disagree with Hacker’s contention that it’s broken. But many who feel passionately about mathematics would surely also note the absence of appreciation from Hacker for anything but math’s most obscure and utilitarian applications. For all his focus on the pain and fear of mathematics, Hacker has little to say about its beauty. He does suggest that we should treat mathematics as a liberal art, “making it as accessible and welcoming as sculpture or ballet,” but in the service of rationalizing its marginalization rather than encouraging its embrace.

Interestingly, much of Hacker’s analysis echoes that of Paul Lockhart, who gained a certain degree of fame for his “Mathematician’s Lament,” a stinging critique of the state of mathematics education. The difference between Hacker and Lockhart is that while Hacker is interested in public policy and the efficient use of resources, Lockhart is full of passion for the creative art of mathematics. He’s not so worried about how broken mathematics education deprives students of the development of their other talents; he’s worried about how it deprives them of math. For Hacker reform will come through cuts, sweeping math aside to join art, music, and athletics on the margins of American public education. For Lockhart the solution is to adopt an approach to mathematical education that frees students from memorization and exposes them to the wonders of what he calls “mathematical reality.”

We’re soon to publish Lockhart’s Measurement, a wonderful book that puts into practice the method of teaching for which Lockhart argued in his lament. We recently spoke with him about the book, and he showed himself to be a living, breathing, laughing embodiment of the deep beauties of math that any call for reform would do well to recognize.

But don’t take our word for it:

 

Closing the Civic Empowerment Gap

Meira Levinson’s No Citizen Left Behind is a landmark call for the remaking of civic education in America’s schools. In presenting her challenge to the status quo, Levinson documents a number of organizations that demonstrate the progress to be wrung from her prescriptions. We invited friend of the Press and incoming Harvard Graduate School of Education student Jessica Gerhardstein Gingold to describe her experience as a youth council director with Chicago’s Mikva Challenge, one of the programs that Levinson highlights.

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In No Citizen Left Behind Meira Levinson puts some fire into the often dull argument that the United States needs to get serious about civic education, calling for reform for a system that today largely excludes poor and minority students from democratic participation. She begins the book by describing the experience of teaching on 9/11, and shares a remarkable story about her middle school students predicting the Iraq War. Despite their evident understanding, though, she laments that what she calls a “civic empowerment gap” made it unlikely that her students would become participants in the course charted that day:

Whether my students were misguided or prescient, whether their life experiences blinded or exposed them to the true character of our political leaders, there is ample evidence that they are unlikely to become active participants in American civic and political life. As a result, they are unlikely to influence civic and political deliberation or decision-making. This is because there is a profound civic empowerment gap—as large and as disturbing as the reading and math achievement gaps that have received significant national attention in recent years—between ethnoracial minority, naturalized, and especially poor citizens, on the one hand, and White, native-born, and especially middle-class and wealthy citizens, on the other.

Levinson explores the causes of and potential solutions to this gap through many lenses. As a political philosopher, she considers the political, sociological and historical context of the United States and of our education system, closely examining the meanings of citizenship and democracy. She asks hard questions about how we teach civics in a diverse country where our ethnoracial identities invariably dictate our experiences of citizenship. She grapples with how these theories trickle down into practice by sharing personal stories from her years of inner-city teaching. In addressing these questions and others, she doesn’t fantasize about an unreachable Shangri-La of civic education. Instead, she clearly outlines the qualities of her gold standard curriculum, Action Civics, and highlights schools and organizations that have begun to actualize it.

Action Civics is designed to create “an engaged citizenry capable of effective participation in the political process, in their communities, and in the larger society.” It is founded on the principle that young people have authentic civic experiences that matter and that should be part of their civic educational experiences. “I recommend a constructivist approach that helps students construct their own empowering means of engaging in this work,” Levinson writes, “rather than telling them how to do it. As important as it is for students to learn to take multiple perspectives, educators, too, need to be open to students’ diverse perspectives and experiences.” One of the founding organizations of the National Action Civics Collaborative (NACC) is Mikva Challenge, a Chicago-based nonprofit organization whose mission is to create the next generation of civic leaders. Mikva Challenge is one of many organizations that Levinson highlights in her book, and, having been a member of its staff for over two years, I personally witnessed the efficacy of her prescriptions for closing the civic empowerment gap.