In Subtle Webs: How Local Organizations Shape US Education (Oxford UP, 2025), Jose Eos Trinidad reveals how organizations outside schools have created an invisible infrastructure not only to affect local school districts but also to shape US education. He illustrates this by providing a behind-the-scenes look at how local organizations in Chicago, Philadelphia, and New York City have transformed data and worked with high schools to address the problem of students dropping out. The book argues that changes in a decentralized system happen less through top-down policy mandates or bottom-up social movements, and more through “outside-in” initiatives of networked organizations spread across various local systems. By detailing change across multiple levels and across multiple locations, Trinidad uncovers new ways to think about educational transformation, policy reform, and organizational change.

João Souto-Maior (website: here) is a postdoc at Stanford University.

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An eye-opening look at how all American workers, even the highly educated and experienced, are vulnerable to the stigma of unemployment.

After receiving a PhD in mathematics from MIT, Larry spent three decades working at prestigious companies in the tech industry. Initially he was not worried when he lost his job as part of a large layoff, but the prolonged unemployment that followed decimated his finances and nearly ended his marriage. Larry's story is not an anomaly. The majority of American workers experience unemployment, and millions get trapped in devastating long-term unemployment, including experienced workers with advanced degrees from top universities. How is it possible for even highly successful careers to suddenly go off the rails?

In The Stigma Trap: College-Educated, Experienced, and Long-Term Unemployed (Oxford UP, 2024), Ofer Sharone explains how the stigma of unemployment can render past educational and professional achievements irrelevant, and how it leaves all American workers vulnerable to becoming trapped in unemployment. Drawing on interviews with unemployed workers, job recruiters, and career coaches, Sharone brings to light the subtle ways that stigmatization prevents even the most educated and experienced workers from gaining middle-class jobs. Stigma also means that an American worker risks more than financial calamity from a protracted period of unemployment. One's closest relationships and sense of self are also on the line.

Eye-opening and clearly written, The Stigma Trap is essential reading for anyone who has experienced unemployment, has a family member or friend who is unemployed, or who wants to understand the forces that underlie the anxiety-filled lives of contemporary American workers. The book offers a unique approach to supporting unemployed jobseekers. At a broader level it exposes the precarious condition of American workers and sparks a conversation about much-needed policies to assure that we are not all one layoff away from being trapped by stigma.

Stephen Pimpare is a Senior Fellow at the Carsey School of Public Policy at the University of New Hampshire.

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Exploring what academic podcasting is and what it could be, Ian Cook's Scholarly Podcasting (Routledge, 2023) is the first to consider the why, what, and how academics engage with this insurgent, curious craft.

Featuring interviews with 101 podcasting academics, including scholars and teachers of podcasting, this book explores the motivations of scholarly podcasters, interrogates what podcasting does to academic knowledge, and leads potential podcasters through the creation process from beginning to end. With scholarship often trapped inside expensive journals, wrapped in opaque language, and laced with a standoffish tone, this book analyses the implications of moving towards a more open and accessible form.

This book will also inform, inspire, and equip scholars of any discipline, rank, or affiliation who are considering making a podcast or who make podcasts with the background knowledge and technical and conceptual skills needed to produce high-quality podcasts through a reflexive critique of current practices.

Ian M. Cook is Editor in Chief at Allegra Lab.

Caleb Zakarin is the Assistant Editor of the New Books Network.

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This open access book describes and explains a fifty-year-old woman’s process of developing trade competences. Drawing from daily journal entries, photographs, interviews from 10 fabrication shops, and online forums about trades, this autoethnography details the author's learning process at Howe’s Welding and Metal Fabrication, where she has worked for over three years. This book uses accessible, everyday language and draws heavily from personal experience in trades, taking the value of trades as a given and explaining the process of developing the depth and breadth of conceptual and procedural knowledges—the competences—required to work in repair and fabrication shops like Howe’s. This book combines a research-derived framework for analyzing scaffolded learning and expertise development with stories of learning how and learning what. Readers will gain a better understanding of knowledge development in trades workplaces, including how one-to-one interactions scaffold knowledge, how workers gradually enter a community of practice, and how workplaces can constrain learning. This book also gives readers a view of workplace learning over time and helps readers—researchers and practitioners—recognize opportunities for development toward expertise. The book is useful for tradespeople, especially newcomers to trades and, in particular, women.

Jo Mackiewicz, is a professor at Iowa State University. She studies communication and learning in pedagogical and workplace interactions. She has published four books about writing centers including 'Writing Center Talk over Time' which won the 2019 award for best monograph from the International Writing Centers Association and an edited collection 'Theories and Methods of Writing Center Studies' which won the 2021 award for best edited collection from the writing across the Curriculum Association. She has also written and cowritten numerous articles. Her book, 'Welding Technical Communication: Teaching and Learning Embodied Knowledge', was published by SUNY Press in May 2022.

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Valuing the Community College Library: Impactful Practices for Institutional Success (2025, ACRL) provides a holistic approach to exhibiting community college library value through historical context, practical applications, and future thinking. Through case studies, editorials from administrators, and practical approaches, it addresses why community college libraries exist and should exist, and the nuanced approaches to how library workers situate themselves at their institutions. Community college libraries need to provide access to content, people, space, and technology and offer instruction, but can also serve as an outreach arm in advancing the mission of open enrollment and affordable access to higher education. Valuing the Community College Library can help you be an advocate for your library on campus and in your community.

Guests: Terra B. Jacobson (Chicago, IL) has been the dean of the Learning Resource Center at Moraine Valley Community College (Palos Hills, IL) since 2016 and has worked in community college libraries since 2009. She has a M.S. in Information Science (Indiana University, Bloomington) as well as a M.S. in Library Science (Indiana University, Bloomington). Terra received her Ph.D. in Information Studies (Dominican University, IL). Her dissertation title is: The Value of Community College Libraires: Executive Leadership Team Perceptions of the Community College Library.

Terra is the 2021 recipient of the Illinois Library Association’s Valerie J. Wilford Scholarship Grant for Library Education. She also received the ALA College Libraries Section Innovation in College Librarianship award in 2014. Terra participates locally as a board member for the Consortium of Academic and Research Libraries and works extensively with the Network of Illinois Learning Resources in Community Colleges (NILRC). She recently published the book Valuing the Community College Library: Impactful Practices for Institutional Success (2025) with ACRL. She currently teaches online at the State University of New York and at Dominican University in the School of Information Studies.

Spencer Brayton is director of Library Services at Waubonsee Community College (northeastern Illinois, USA). His research and publication interests include media and information literacy, community college libraries, coaching and leadership. Spencer received his Master of Arts in Library and Information Studies from the University of Wisconsin-Madison, a Master of Science in Management from the University of St. Francis (Joliet, IL), and is currently pursuing a Doctorate of Education in Higher Education from the University of Southern Mississippi.

Host: Dr. Michael LaMagna is the Information Literacy Program & Library Services Coordinator and Professor of Library Services at Delaware County Community College.

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In Sesame Street: A Transnational History (Oxford UP, 2023), author Helle Strandgaard Jensen tells the story of how the American television show became a global brand. Jensen argues that because the show's domestic production was not financially viable from the beginning, Sesame Street became a commodity that its producers assertively marketed all over the world. Sesame Street: A Transnational History combines archival research from seven countries, bolstering an insightful analysis of how local reception and rejection of the show related to the global sales strategies and American ideals it was built upon.

Contrary to the producers’ oft-publicized claims of Sesame Street’s universality, the show was heavily shaped by a fixed set of assumptions about childhood, education, and commercial entertainment. This made sales difficult as Sesame Street met both skepticism and direct hostility from foreign television producers who did not share these ideals. Drawing on insights from new histories about childhood, education, and transnational media, the book lays bare a cultural clash of international proportions rooted in divergent approaches to children's television. In doing so, it provides a reflective backdrop to the many ongoing debates about children's media.

In contrasting the positive receptions and renunciations of Sesame Street, Jensen demonstrates that it was only after a substantial rethinking of Sesame Street’s aims and business model that this program ended up on numerous broadcasting schedules by the mid-1970s. Along the way, this rethinking and the constant negotiations with potential international buyers created and shaped the business and corporate brand that paved the way for the Sesame Street we know today.

Peter C. Kunze is a visiting assistant professor of communication at Tulane University.

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In High School Students Unite! Teen Activism, Education Reform, and FBI Surveillance in Postwar America (UNC Press, 2025), Aaron G. Fountain Jr. highlights the crucial impact of high school activists in the 1960s and 1970s. Mid-twentieth-century student activism is a pivotal chapter in American history. While college activism has been well documented, the equally vital contributions of high school students have often been overlooked. Only recently have scholars begun to recognize the transformative role teenagers played in reshaping American education.

Inspired by civil rights and antiwar movements, students across the nation demanded a voice in their education by organizing sit-ins, walkouts, and strikes. From cities such as San Francisco and Chicago to smaller towns such as Jonesboro, Georgia, these young leaders fought for curricula that reflected their evolving worldviews. Drawing on archival research and interviews, Aaron G. Fountain Jr. reveals how teenagers became powerful agents of change, advocating for constitutional rights and influencing school reform. Ironically, the modernization of school security, including police presence, was partly a response to these student-led movements. Through oral histories and FBI records, this fascinating history offers a fresh perspective on high school activism and its lasting impact on American education.

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In Home Work: Gender, Child Labor, and Education for Girls in Urban America, 1870-1930 (U Chicago Press, 2025) historian Ruby Oram tells the story of how middle-class, white women reformers lobbied the state to implement various public education reforms to shape the lives of girls and women in industrial cities between 1870 and 1930. Women such as Jane Addams and Florence Kelley used education reform to target working-class communities and advocate for their middle-class ideals of girlhood and femininity, which could vary depending on the racial or socio-economic backgrounds of the girls. For example, reformers generally encouraged white girls to care for their future families, while pushing Black girls toward becoming domestic workers in others’ homes. Using Chicago as a case study, Oram also explores how many of the reforms sought by white women were in response to evolving anxieties about immigration, health, and sexual delinquency.
An illuminating addition to the history of urban education in America, Home Work enriches our understanding of educational inequality in twentieth-century schools.

Allie Morris ([email protected]) is a joint Ph.D. student in Educational Policy Studies and History at the University of Wisconsin—Madison. She broadly studies gender, age, and education in the late 20th-century United States. Her current research focuses on the political history of girlhood from the 1960s to the 1990s, examining girls’ culture and activism in the American high school.

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Today’s battles over Christianity in U.S. public schools have deep roots. In the nineteenth century, disputes were largely between Protestants and later-arriving Catholics, but in 1905 Jews entered the conflict in a dramatic way. That Christmas, Frank Harding, a Presbyterian principal in Brooklyn, urged his Jewish students to be more like Jesus. For Orthodox activist Albert Lucas, already fighting Christian settlement houses that sought to convert Jewish children, Harding’s remarks were the last straw. He accused the public schools of illegal proselytizing, and Jewish leaders quickly mobilized, petitioning for Harding’s removal and demanding clear limits on religious practices in public education—limits they argued were violated by Bible readings, the Lord’s Prayer, religious imagery, and Christmas pageants.

When the New York Board of Education refused to act decisively, Jewish parents staged a citywide boycott of the 1906 school Christmas pageants, keeping as many as three-quarters of students home in some neighborhoods. The board briefly barred sectarian hymns and religious material, but the decision provoked a fierce antisemitic backlash, framed in the press as a Jewish attack on Christmas, and most of the restrictions were soon reversed. The Great Christmas Boycott of 1906: Antisemitism and the Battle Over Christianity in the Public Schools (U Nebraska Press, 2025) shows how this conflict—over law, tradition, and the place of religion in public schools—has never truly ended. With decisive victories elusive, Jewish organizations today have shifted toward other, more strategic ways of confronting Christian nationalism.

Scott D. Seligman is a writer and historian. He is the author of numerous books, including The Great Kosher Meat War of 1902: Immigrant Housewives and the Riots That Shook New York City (Potomac Books, 2020), the award-winning The Third Degree: The Triple Murder That Shook Washington and Changed American Criminal Justice (Potomac Books, 2018), and The First Chinese American: The Remarkable Life of Wong Chin Foo.

Rabbi Marc Katz is the Senior Rabbi of Temple Ner Tamid. He is the author of Yochanan's Gamble: Judaism's Pragmatic Approach to Life.

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Higher education is about transformation: research shows that the most well-prepared graduates are those who have experienced changes in how they think about and experience the world around them. Combined with flexible information-seeking and evaluation skills, learning ways to break information bubbles is essential for dealing with today's challenging, complex information environment. Jack Mezirow's transformative learning theory, which frames how adults think about and interact with the world around them, offers a way forward. In Information Literacy and Critical Thinking: Using Perspective Transformation to Break Information Bubbles (2025, ALA) Amanda Nichols Hess invites academic librarians to consider critical librarianship, pedagogy, and information literacy instruction in tandem with transformative learning theory, demonstrating tangible ways to integrate these concepts into their practice. Readers will discover an overview of critical library pedagogy and transformative learning theory, showing how reflection and action lie at the core of both ideas; in-depth exploration of the ten phases of the perspective transformation process and how they relate to key facets of critical librarianship, critical pedagogy, and critical information literacy; important theoretical and research viewpoints that elucidate perspective transformation; real-world scenarios modelling how one's own praxis can support learners; and a myriad of ideas, reflection questions, opportunities for action, and additional resources to spur readers to look beyond their own information bubbles and facilitate environments where learners can do the same.

Guest: Amanda Nichols Hess, PhD, is the coordinator of instruction and research help at Oakland University in Rochester, Michigan. She holds a PhD in educational leadership, an education specialist certificate in instructional technology, and a Master of Science in information. Amanda’s research focuses on information literacy, instructional design, online learning, and the intersections of these topics—particularly in library-centric professional learning. Her work has been published in College & Research Libraries, Communications in Information Literacy, Journal of Academic Librarianship, and portal: Libraries and the Academy, among other venues. In addition to editing and authoring books for ACRL and ALA Editions, Amanda also authored Transforming Academic Library Instruction (Rowman & Littlefield, 2019).

Host: Dr. Michael LaMagna is the Information Literacy Program & Library Services Coordinator and Professor of Library Services at Delaware County Community College.

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