Are you an educator or interested in education? We have assembled the perfect list of books and journals to check out during the winter break.

Teaching Art, (Re)imagining Identity
Edited by: Laura Hetrick

Artmaking and art education helps students explore their identities in positive and constructive ways. In these situations, educators create a supportive space for young people to work through the personal and cultural factors influencing their journey. Laura Hetrick draws on articles from the archives of Visual Arts Research to guide educators’ in using art to help students—and particularly marginalized students—explore and shape personal identity.

Contributors: D. Ambush, M. S. Bae-Dimitriadis, J. C. Castro, K. Cosier, C. Faucher, K. Freedman, F. Hernandez, L. Hetrick, K. Jenkins, E. Katter, M. Lalonde, L. Lampela, D. Pariser, A. Pérez Miles, M. Richard, and K. Schuler.

In a Classroom of Their Own
Keisha Lindsay

Many advocates of all-black male schools (ABMSs) argue that these institutions counter black boys’ racist emasculation in white, “overly” female classrooms. This argument challenges racism and perpetuates antifeminism.

Keisha Lindsay explains the complex politics of ABMSs by situating these schools within broader efforts at neoliberal education reform and within specific conversations about both “endangered” black males and a “boy crisis” in education. Lindsay also demonstrates that intersectionality, long considered feminist, is in fact a politically fluid framework.

Teaching with Tenderness
Becky Thompson

Teaching with Tenderness follows in the tradition of bell hooks’s Teaching to Transgress and Paulo Freire’s Pedagogy of the Oppressed, inviting us to draw upon contemplative practices (yoga, meditation, free writing, mindfulness, ritual) to keep our hearts open as we reckon with multiple injustices. Teaching with tenderness makes room for emotion, offers a witness for experiences people have buried, welcomes silence, breath and movement, and sees justice as key to our survival. It allows us to rethink our relationship to grading, office hours, desks, and faculty meetings, sees paradox as a constant companion, moves us beyond binaries; and praises self and community care.

Transformation Now!
By AnaLouise Keating

In this lively, thought-provoking study, AnaLouise Keating writes in the traditions of radical U.S. women-of-color feminist/womanist thought and queer studies, inviting us to transform how we think about identity, difference, social justice and social change, metaphysics, reading, and teaching. Through detailed investigations of women-of-color theories and writings, indigenous thought, and her own personal and pedagogical experiences, Keating develops transformative modes of engagement that move through oppositional approaches to embrace interconnectivity as a framework for identity formation, theorizing, social change, and the possibility of planetary citizenship.

Jane Addams in the Classroom
Edited by David Schaafsma

Once intent on being good to people, Jane Addams later dedicated herself to the idea of being good with people, establishing mutually-responsive and reciprocal relationships with those she served at Hull House. The essays in Jane Addams in the Classroom explore how Addams’s life, work, and philosophy provide invaluable lessons for teachers seeking connection with their students.

Journal of Aesthetic Education
Edited by Pradeep Dhillon

Journal of Aesthetic Education (JAE) is a highly respected interdisciplinary journal that focuses on clarifying the issues of aesthetic education understood in its most extensive meaning. The Journal thus welcomes articles on philosophical aesthetics and education devoted to problem areas in education critical to arts and humanities at all institutional levels, to an understanding of the aesthetic import of the new communications media and environmental aesthetics, and to an understanding of the aesthetic character of humanistic disciplines. The Journal is a valuable resource not only to educators, but also to philosophers, art critics and art historians.