A practical primer for those seeking to reduce the hegemony of bias in everyday life.
Nordell, a longtime student of prejudice and its origins, observes that there is a gulf “between the values of fairness and the reality of real-world discrimination,” a gulf defined by the term implicit or unconscious bias. It is costly: Undervaluing women, ethnic minorities, or other marginalized groups deprives society of potentially valuable contributions on the parts of those who are discriminated against. While recognizing that many barriers are deliberate, Nordell argues that most people don’t set out to make the sharp distinctions that engender them; the biases truly are unintended and, while learned, largely unexamined. The author’s case studies include a transgender research scientist who, having transitioned to a male, found that his abilities were far more valued than when he was female; an Asian American man who lacked math skills but was promoted into jobs that assumed he was a stereotypical numbers whiz; and an imaginary Black teenager who, presented to White audiences as having “behaved in an antisocial way,” was assumed to be a future felon and therefore more deserving of punishment than a White peer accused of the same thing. Nordell’s examples are revealing but lead to the same general set of conclusions, so there’s a certain sameness to the narrative that becomes more pronounced as it progresses. More useful are some of the recommended remedies, including “mindfulness meditation”—which, when adopted by one Oregon police department, led to a rapid decline in the use of force and citizen complaints—and counseling approaches that minimize shame while building awareness of bias and the motivation to imagine others' perspectives. "Colorblind" approaches, she writes, can backfire. These efforts pay off, she writes. Trust builds, relationships deepen; in a business context, “racially diverse teams where all employees were able to feel psychologically safe enough to learn from one another outperformed homogenous teams."
A practical primer for those seeking to reduce the hegemony of bias in everyday life.Pub Date: Sept. 21, 2021
ISBN: 978-1-250-18618-8
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Metropolitan/Henry Holt
Review Posted Online: July 23, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2021
Essential guidance on proactively navigating the challenges of gender-diverse student bodies.
A comprehensive look at gender-diverse youth in the classroom.
As the transgender student population continues to become more widely visible, navigation tools have become critical for educators and parents alike, notes Key, a veteran gender diversity educator. While written with parents of trans+ children in mind, the book is primarily directed at teachers, administrators, and school staff who directly impact students’ lives on a daily basis. Key shows readers what is involved when a child considers a gender transition process, and he confronts the challenges of gender inclusion, which may be a new topic for some readers. Particularly striking are the stories from parents of trans+ students who are managing the stages of their own apprehension alongside those of their child. Key incorporates learning points on gender vernacular and fighting community stigmatization. Personal anecdotes and timely discussions from school educators complement instructive illustrations and Q&A sections that answer sensitive questions regarding sports participation, bathroom choices, and changing areas. In an encouraging, consistently positive manner, Key addresses the overt political and/or cultural resistance that proliferates within heated debates and public forum discussions, and he asserts that accurate information is the best way to educate and collaborate. He stresses the importance of delivering practical, real-world discussion tools and assistance to parents and educators of trans+ children, who often find themselves without resources, advice, answers, or support to fortify what can often be an overwhelmingly complex experience. Key’s checklists of suggestions successfully bridge the gap between trans+ kids, adults, and school educators with strategically supportive approaches and behaviors. Authoritative yet written in pleasant, straightforward language, this book is an invaluable resource for understanding what it clearly means (and doesn’t mean) to be transgender while ensuring that every student has access to an optimal learning environment free from discrimination.
Essential guidance on proactively navigating the challenges of gender-diverse student bodies.Pub Date: June 27, 2023
ISBN: 9780190886547
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Oxford Univ.
Review Posted Online: April 24, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2023
PERSPECTIVES
PERSPECTIVES
American schools at every level, from kindergarten to postgraduate programs, have substituted ideological indoctrination for education, charges conservative think-tanker Sowell (Senior Fellow/Hoover Institution; Preferential Polices, 1990, etc.) in this aggressive attack on the contemporary educational establishment. Sowell's quarrel with "values clarification" programs (like sex education, death-sensitizing, and antiwar "brainwashing") isn't that he disagrees with their positions but, rather, that they divert time and resources from the kind of training in intellectual analysis that makes students capable of reasoning for themselves. Contending that the values clarification programs inspired by his archvillain, psychotherapist Carl Rogers, actually inculcate values confusion, Sowell argues that the universal demand for relevance and sensitivity to the whole student has led public schools to abdicate their responsibility to such educational ideals as experience and maturity. On the subject of higher education, Sowell moves to more familiar ground, ascribing the declining quality of classroom instruction to the insatiable appetite of tangentially related research budgets and bloated athletic programs (to which an entire chapter, largely irrelevant to the book's broader argument, is devoted). The evidence offered for these propositions isn't likely to change many minds, since it's so inveterately anecdotal (for example, a call for more stringent curriculum requirements is bolstered by the news that Brooke Shields graduated from Princeton without taking any courses in economics, math, biology, chemistry, history, sociology, or government) and injudiciously applied (Sowell's dismissal of student evaluations as responsible data in judging a professor's classroom performance immediately follows his use of comments from student evaluations to document the general inadequacy of college teaching). All in all, the details of Sowell's indictment—that not only can't Johnny think, but "Johnny doesn't know what thinking is"—are more entertaining than persuasive or new.
Pub Date: Jan. 4, 1993
ISBN: 0-02-930330-3
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Free Press
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 1992
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
© Copyright 2025 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
