Constructing Books

I participated in the development of this text as a student in the course for which it was created. The text provides a step-by-step walkthrough of several key elements of course design:
1) The environment for learning, and the notions of scholarly teaching and the scholarship of teaching and learning;
2) Background on learning processes (learning styles, types of intelligence, cognitive development), particularly as they affect the design of effective courses; and
3) Course design material for documenting and assessing learning, with structured models for how to create assessment tools that measure what you believe the students should have learned (the learning objectives).

In addition, it provides a number of appendices with templates, rubrics, assessment instruments, and references to other related tools.

As a first-year professor, I've already found this to be a valuable reference to work from, and I highly recommend it.

This book is very good and is a wonderful overview of the Caborn-Welborn peoples. I am, at the time of this review, working on a publication about the dental remains and pathologies of the Caborn-Welborn site of Mann. It is located near the outskirts of the culture area, but retains the same cultural styles and other items. This book give a great overview of what defines the Caborn-Welborn peoples and focuses on how they formed out of the antecedent Angel chiefdom. It also speaks a lot on the pottery. Unfortunately, it does not review the bioarchaeological remains of these peoples.

Families Making Sense of Death (Understanding Families series)
An interesting, important book, full of wisdom about how to conceptualize and carry out therapy with grieving individuals, couples, and families. Wonderful case examples.

Weldon Matthews, an Assistant Professor of History at Oakland University in Michigan, has written a fascinating book on the growth of nationalism in 1930s Palestine under British rule. This is a brilliant study of the methods of British colonial rule, especially of divide and rule, in response to the activities of the Arab Istiqlal (Independence) Party, Palestine's first true nationalist party.

Founded in 1932, this party mobilised the Palestinian people for an independent and sovereign Palestine, against the British administration and against the Zionist project. It sought Arab unity and promoted non-cooperation with the administration. It supported the demonstrations by organised workers against the sharp increase in Jewish immigration in 1933. (The Zionists used immigration to undermine the Palestinian nation.) It also organised the six-month general strike in 1936, which started the three-year rebellion. It mobilised the people through newspapers, mass education and mass action. These actions succeeded in destroying the British system of colonial control.

British methods of rule in Palestine, as in its colonies and protectorates across Asia and Africa, derived from the Raj. They were designed to keep the colonies as non-nations. The administration proposed advisory and legislative councils, composed of government appointees and leaders of the religious `communities'. These were `mock parliaments', as Egypt's ruler Lord Cromer sneered.

The administration treated Palestine as a collection of religious communities, itself posing as the indispensable umpire. It refused to recognise the executive committee of the Palestinian Arab Congress, preferring confidential and personal relations with `community leaders' of `faith groups', especially with the mufti Hajj Amin, and it regularly funded his Supreme Muslim Council. Its censuses categorised the Palestinians as Muslims, Christians and Jews: there was no category of Arab.

The administration ran down the education service: only a fifth of Palestinian children attended school. It privatised education, devolving responsibility for schools to religious institutions. It opposed mass education because schools produced what Lord Cromer derided as the `political charlatan' with `perfervid eloquence and political quackery'. It controlled the press and all expressions of popular dissent.

The administration consistently backed Zionism. It secretly installed shotguns in sealed armouries in the Zionist settlements, taught Zionist settlers how to shoot, and collaborated with Zionists to spy on, harass and arrest Arab nationalists.

The humorous title to this review is from page 130 of Dvora Yanow's book and is an excerpted interview between a policeman and a crime suspect. Yanow's serious book is a timely historical overview of the use of racial and ethnic categories by government bureaus. Her book contains example government affirmative action forms, college applications, vendor certification forms, housing fair lending notices, job training forms, and police department statistical crime report forms. Perhaps most amusing is a Matrix for Generating Race/Ethnicity of a Child by the California Department of Health Services that is reminiscent of something out of a Rube Goldberg cartoon.

Her thesis is that race and ethnicity have always been state-constructed categories and are an (quote) anthropological and scientific joke (end quote). Her book points out the absurdity of trying to categorize people of mixed race or who can pass as white, of categorizing criminals by eye-balling, of lumping groups that have nothing in common, such as Asian-Pacific Islanders, and of obscuring more important groupings such as poor whites. She believes racial and ethnic categories are proxies for group origin identity stories. But Yanow asks (quote) why are identity stories largely confined to race-ethnic terms, especially when those terms aren't real? (end quote). She states that the continuing use of such categories runs against the grain of classical liberalism and what it means to be American. She reminds us that the public has apparently largely forgotten the Nazi regime in which population control and genocide depended on race-ethnic labeling and marking by central government.

In a closing Yanow minces few words when she states that racial and ethnic categories have become the (quote) foundations for the redistribution of wealth in the form of various publicly funded programs and eligibilities for their services (end quote). She emphatically states:

(start quote) Yet we cannot - I cannot conceive of a way in which we can - achieve a socially egalitarian society when we constantly remind ourselves, almost daily, of differences of the sort that are built - conceptually, cognitively, linguistically - into the race-ethnic language that we use. The categories "sell" concepts of race and ethnicity through dispassionate documents and administrative means that most people would not give a second thought to, but that have material consequences...It seems to me, in light of the preceding case examples, quite evident that in order to achieve a socially just society, we need to give up these ways of counting ourselves and find others....Yet perhaps it is time to stop using race-ethnicity as a proxy for
economic and behavioral problems, lest our very language continue to perpetuate inequality...Race and ethnicity data, as established under the OMB (Federal Office of Management and Budget) definitions and Guidelines, provide ways of naming discriminatory practices and seeking legal redress, and they legitimate and provide credibility for claims for
governmental assistance (funds for schools, hospitals, health services, Housing, jobs, etc.) and political representation (end quote).

Yanow believes that we need to rethink and reframe racial and ethnic categories, but points out that the process won't be easy.

However, a weakness of Yanow's book for politicians is that she avoids devising any new categories that might eliminate some of the abuses of the widely accepted five category system presently used on government forms (e.g., White, Black, Hispanic, Asian-Pacific Islander, and American Indian-Alaskan Native). Yanow's book would have been complemented by recent sociological research on how Italian Americans were once considered as Non-White, but eventually became White (see Jennifer Guglielmo and Salvatore Salerno, Are Italians White? How Race is Made in America, Routledge Publishers, 2003). Not widely known in academia or the media is that 600,000 Americans of Italian-American descent were forced to carry identification cards during World War II, were restricted from freedom of movement, 10,000 were forced to relocate, and even baseball hero Joe DiMaggio's mother was deported to Italy (see Una Storia Segreta: The Secret History of Italian American Evacuation and Internment during World War II, Heyday Books, 2001). How did Italian-American immigrants assimilate without all the redistribution programs of today even though many were identifiably different by skin color and other physical attributes? How did Italian Americans avoid the sense of entitlement that pervades so many groups that immigrate to the United States today? Why haven't Italian Americans come forward with claims for special treatment under Affirmative Action programs? Perhaps the reason that the Italian-Americans have been largely ignored is that their story contradicts the victimology paradigm prevalent in most of academia and enshrined in government programs.

Yanow's book is a nuanced and balanced contribution and, as such, perhaps does not lend itself to being used as ammunition for the proponents or the opponents of perpetuating the current racial and ethnic categories. Says Yanow:

(quote) I am convinced that we must stop giving accounts of ourselves in terms of the five gross, lumpy race-ethnic categories (White, Black, Hispanic, Asian-Pacific Islander, American Indian-Alaskan Native): they create, impose, and maintain identities that are, by and large, not embracing of individuals' lived experiences and, because of the baggage of meaning that they carry, detrimental to human dignity. And yet, as convinced as I am of that position, I am equally convinced of the fact that we need modes of storytelling for collective and individual identity purposes, including a story of national origins (end quote).

Dvora Yanow's book contains some interesting quotes at the beginning of each chapter. It is perhaps fitting that we close this book review with the following excerpted quote from a noted Black scholar:

(quote) The mistake is to assume that birth
certificates and biographical sketches and all the
other documents generated by the modern bureaucratic
state reveal an anterior truth - that they are merely
signs of an independent existing identity.
But in fact they constitute it.
The social meaning of race is established
By these identity papers - by certificates...
And all the other verbal artifacts that proclaim race
to be real and, by that proclamation, make it so (end).
--- Henry Louis Gates, Jr.

Constructing A Market Economy: Diverse Paths From Central Planning In Asia And Europe by Richard Pomfret (Professor of Economics at the University of Adelaide, Australia) is a meticulous and scholarly study of recent economic upheavals among the small nations in Europe and Asia during the 1990s. Accessibly presented empirical evidence underlies the broader postulates and conclusions in this insightful analysis, which primarily focuses upon the different types of international transition economies, rather than dwelling inordinately upon the economy of any one nation. A serious, thoughtful, college-level account, Constructing A Market Economy is a welcome and significant contribution to academic International Economic Studies reference collections and supplemental reading lists.

Constructing and Reconstructing Gender is an excellent compendium of current research [circa 1992], and will be appealing and useful to those interested in gender issues in a wide variety of disciplines. This book cuts across disciplines and scholarly methods, drawing from many backgrounds, including Communication, Linguistics, English, Business, Law and Psychology. The interweaving of rhetorical, critical, phenomenological, and statistical methods gives readers a multifaceted analysis of gender.

At the same time that this book shows the value of gender research in provoking new currents of thought, it also brings into focus two aspects of gender that are often confused: how gender operates as a cultural category that affects communication behavior, and how communication and language function to create gender categories.
--- from book's back cover

Majia Nadesan's book on autism is one that must be read before or in conjuction with existing works on the subject; particularly research that emphasizes the biological nature of the disease. Nadesan's book offers those diagnosed with autism and their families a much greater chance of mediating autistic characteristics by focusing on culture and society as factors that contribute to the construction of the affliction.

The overpowering result of Nadesan's research, in my opinion, is that medical science itself, ironically, is circumscribed by society's refusal or inability to recognize it's own role in creating and treating illnesses such as autism. Nadesan's rationale that autism (or any mental illness for that matter) is created through society's verbal and symbolic articulation of the illness as well as one's genetic history allows science and society to work in concert rather than in opposition.

As both a researcher and the mother of an "autistic" child, Nadesan's work offers a much more balanced and insightful understanding of autism and its implications for society.

Few scholars can write with ease; and even fewer write without verbosity and pomposity. Professor Bluestone's book on Chicago's development is a source of invaluable information presented in a literary fashion. His scope is wide ranging, but not shallow in any respect. He deals with philosophy, history, personalities, the influence of men and movements upon each other in the city where 20th century architecture was born. Whether you are a scholar, an architect or just a buff, this is a book that offers information, knowledge and wisdom.

Kersch challenges the conventional wisdom and offers a compelling rejoinder to what he terms "the Whiggish New Deal narrative" (p. 5). Such Whiggish accounts, he maintains, treat history as a morality play and "import a particular set of unifying myths into the study of constitutional development concerning civil rights and civil liberties" (p. 11). Instead of the flawed tale of a triumphant concern for civil rights and civil liberties overcoming the judicial solicitude for economic rights that characterized pre-1937 constitutionalism, Kersch presents a more complex and equivocal story. Important claims of right often conflicted, and some traditional liberties were rejected in order to advance newer understanding of which rights deserved protection. As Kersch explains, to picture this messy process involving difficult choices as a seamless march of progress, scholars have ignored inconvenient facts and made "extensive historical erasures" (p. 17). Indeed, he points out that progressives and liberals have not been consistent champions of personal rights and have frequently shifted from one cause to another while couching their essentially political choices in moralistic terms. Progressives and liberals often privileged group rights--on behalf first of organized labor and thereafter of blacks, for example--over individuals' rights claims.

Kersch assesses the accuracy of the Whiggish narrative by examining the evolution of privacy rights, criminal justice procedures, labor law, civil rights, and educational policy from the late nineteenth century to the present. He finds a substantial disconnect between an imagined past, conjured up by progressives and liberals, and the historical record. He concludes that "progressives and civil libertarians were just as likely to be opponents of individualistic freedom as its champions" (p. 28). Indeed, he emphasizes that progressives and liberals in the early twentieth century were in fact preoccupied with strengthening governmental power, not defending individual rights. They tended to regard claims of rights as barriers to their state-building project....

Quibbles aside, Kersch has written a fascinating book that offers a fresh look at constitutional history and demolishes the Whiggish narrative as an exercise in historical whimsy calculated to serve political ends. This work, which covers many subjects well, should set the stage for a far-ranging debate over the meaning and direction of our constitutional past. It deserves a wide audience.