by Kristen Kennedy

Calls for change—from student attitudes toward the subjects we teach to the conditions under which adjunct faculty labor—are familiar topics around the water cooler in academe. Rarely, though, do our calls come with specific directions for mapping out the means of achieving those desired ends. But two recent books take on the challenges of both. The first, Teaching Defiance: Stories and Strategies for Activist Educators (Jossey-Bass, 305 pp.), by Australian educator Michael Newman, is an impassioned argument for change with a few forays into general procedures for getting there, while the second, Ernst Benjamin and Michael Mauer’s Academic Collective Bargaining (MLA, 410 pp.), delivers an exquisitely practical guide to collective representation in higher education.

In Teaching Defiance, Newman makes no bones about his business here:
“As must already be obvious, this book is a polemic. I will put a case. I will take sides. I will argue that activist educators should teach people to make up their own minds and take control of their own lives. I will argue that we should teach ourselves and others to be defiant.”

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