Education

Held November 3-6, 2010, the theme of the 2010 Charleston Conference, the annual event that explores issues in book and serial acquisition, was “Anything Goes.” 2010 marked the thirtieth anniversary of the conference, and the theme revealed a sense of uncertainty about the future of librarianship in a digital environment marked by rapidly changing systems and practices. The conference focused on topics and themes in collection development, journals and serials management, technology and product development, collaboration between and among libraries and their communities, and managing e-book and monograph collections. The Charleston Conference continues to be a major event for information exchange among librarians, vendors, and publishers. Conference attendees always remark on the informative, thought-provoking sessions and the collegial atmosphere where information professionals can talk directly about issues facing their industry. This volume shares the best of the presentations and panels.

Through archival photographs and engaging stories, More than Bridges celebrates 125 years of the School of Civil Engineering at Purdue University. Since 1887, Purdue Civil Engineers have taken their degrees into the world and touched lives. From the water we drink to the roads we traverse to the power that charges our cell phones, a Purdue Civil Engineer plans, designs, constructs, maintains and operates the infrastructure that is the underpinning of society. Advances through Civil Engineering research and education at Purdue have significantly impacted the world in the last 125 years. More than Bridges takes the reader from the early years of Civil Engineering when Purdue’s campus consisted of a smattering of red brick buildings surrounded by grassy meadows and roads flanked by white, wooden fences to today’s state-of-the-art facilities such as the Bowen Laboratory for Large-Scale Civil Engineering Research and the online hub for the Network for Earthquake Engineering Simulation (NEES). The highly illustrated book touches on major milestones in Purdue Civil Engineering history from Road School, to the Ross Summer Surveying Camp, to Purdue’s involvement in world landmarks such as the Panama Canal, Hoover Dam, the Golden Gate Bridge and the Tower of Pisa. Often, Purdue Civil Engineers are public servants, evolving research that helps to prevent disasters like building collapses and bridge failures. More than Bridges honors Purdue’s School of Civil Engineering with historic images and an appealing account of 125 years of education, research and a profession that is, as the title suggests, about so much more than bridges.

Perspectives in Ethics, Policy, and Science, offers an engaging ecological perspective on bioethical issues relevant to ethicists, policy-makers, and scientists. It offers three sections organized around human relationships to the environment, non-human animals, and biotechnologies. Each section presents clear and authoritative perspectives that develop each theme as central to bioethics. These perspectives can be used to lead discussion in classroom use either for students studying bioethics or for researchers interested in the ethical implications of specific topics. Questions for such discussion will follow each chapter that will help readers think critically about the essay and also the bioethical framework more generally. Unlike traditional case study approaches or philosophical treatises, this book draws together a collection of the finest thinking on each respective theme while foregrounding the interconnection between those ethical, political, and scientific themes. Unlike other edited volumes, this collection of essays, originally given as public lectures, offers engaging and readable monologues on key issues by the very best scholars in their respective areas. The editors’ introduction frames the complex history of bioethics and present an ecological consideration of the discipline as related to not only human well-being but also to the relations between humans, nonhuman animals, the environment, and biotechnologies. The first section starts from our best understanding of nonhuman animal pain and then moves to a discussion of nonhuman animal understanding. The second section sets the stage, first considering environmental ethics broadly and then narrowing to human impact on the climate and finally bringing technology and environment together concerning nanotechnology. The final section begins with discussion of a human-centered technology, moves to a biotechnology with broader potential environmental impact, and ends with the impact of biotechnologies on life itself. These three parts each tie together ethics, policy, and science as central to bioethics.

This book lists the work and contributions of thousands of people from many countries, representing numerous fields of endeavor, over many centuries. This work contains the necrologies (names, dates, and a brief biography) up to the year 2000 of people involved in engineering and invention literature. This book is a must for reference collections and those in the media who cover the field of engineering advancement.

This coffee-table book uses color photographs and captions to tell the story of the first one hundred years of the Purdue University School of Chemical Engineering. Formed four years after a chemical engineering curriculum was established at the University, the School grew rapidly in size and reputation. It was a leader in encouraging women and minority students to become engineers, and it produced many substantial scientific contributions. The School continues to provide expertise and solutions to the “grand challenge” problems that the world faces today, whether in energy, nanotechnology, biotechnology, health care, or advanced materials. Among its thirty faculty members, five are members of the National Academy of Engineering.

On Christmas Day in 1854, teachers and advocates of education came together to form the Indiana State Teachers Association. At that time, many Hoosiers did not embrace the concept of "free education," instead believing that schools ought to be funded by those who were being educated. Immediately after ISTA's founding, its members began their advocacy of education, especially free public education for all children. Over the next 150 years, members of the Association stood ready to advance the cause of education. This advancement was neither steady nor easy. The Association endured many crises, some financial and in organizational. Pushed at times by charismatic leaders and driven at other times by the winds of cultural change, the Association was, and still is, an organization of individuals. The history of ISTA is divided into three eras. The first period deals with the defining of the Association and chronicles its quest for universal public education, and its efforts to establish professional standards and secure benefits for teachers. Although this group of educators was a loosely knit association of individuals, they were able to accomplish much. Next the Association became "professional" with a paid staff instead of volunteers, only to be faced with the crisis of the Great Depression. Robert H. Wyatt, a progressive educator, was selected to lead this organization as the depression ended, and he embraced education as a means for social change. Wyatt persistently lobbied legislators for increased funding, which included federal aid for education, although it was a radical idea at the time. Under his direction, ISTA soon became a powerful lobbying group. The final period looks at the Association as it was transformed into a union while still maintaining its success as a lobbying organization. Various issues were key during this period - unification, collective bargaining, rebuilding and refocusing.

Animals in Schools explores important questions in the field of critical animal studies and education by close examination of a wide range of educational situations and classroom activities. How are human- animal relations expressed and discussed in school? How do teachers and students develop strategies to handle ethical conflicts arising from the ascribed position of animals as accessible to human control, use, and killing? How do schools deal with topics such as zoos, hunting, and meat consumption? These are questions that have profound implications for education and society. They are graphically described, discussed, and rendered problematic based on detailed ethnographic research and are analyzed by means of a synthesis of perspectives from critical theory, gender, and postcolonial thought.

Reading about leadership is like walking through dense forest. The literature goes in so many different directions, a person can become lost. As a result, leadership studies struggles for academic credibility while it tries to bring some kind of order to this fascinating, complex, and important social phenomenon. Let Nathan Harter be your guide. As an Associate Professor of Organizational Leadership, he has found it helpful to orient students using the metaphor of a forest, where you can follow the streams down toward analysis or climb the peaks toward synthesis. The book reveals itself to be a work of philosophy. Specifically, it relies on Pragmatism to resolve thorny theoretical issues, since leadership studies must be eminently practical. The reader acquires analytical skills along the way, while touring different paths of the forest. This book targets an emergent market comprised of scholars and educators, as well as the libraries that serve them. People come to study leadership from different disciplines and expect to find an integrated, theoretical treatment of the subject. Despite the growing popularity of leadership programs, however, theoretical works are rare. As a few post-secondary programs introduce graduate programs in leadership, this book could also serve as their textbook.

In the early 1900s, Mary Matthews and Lella Gaddis forged trails for women at Purdue University and throughout Indiana. Mary was the first dean of the School of Home Economics. Lella was Indiana’s first state leader of Home Demonstration. In 1914, Mary hired Lella to organize Purdue’s new Home Economics Extension Service. According to those who knew them, Lella was a “sparkler” who traveled the state instructing rural women about nutrition, hygiene, safe water, childcare, and more. “Reserved” Mary established Purdue’s School of Home Economics, created Indiana’s first nursery school, and authored a popular textbook. Both women used their natural talents and connections to achieve their goals in spite of a male-dominated society. As a land grant institution, Purdue University has always been very connected to the American countryside. Based on extensive oral history and archival research, this book sheds new light on the important role female staff and faculty played in improving the quality of life for rural women during the first half of the twentieth century. It is also a fascinating story, engagingly told, of two very different personalities united in a common goal.

In 1991, Lawrence Grossman wrote that "a new political system is taking shape in the United States. As we approach the twenty-first century, America is turning into an electronic republic, a democratic system that is vastly increasing the people's day-to-day influence on decisions of state." Grossman's forecast implied a sea change in the way citizens would interact with, and participate in, their representative government; a revamping of the way Americans would 'do' citizenship. Harnessing the power of technology to promote the ideal of democracy that first pulsed through our nation over 230 years ago may be a feasible achievement in a technocratic age, but whether technology can help achieve a revolution as seismic as the political one that our founding fathers initiated may be a practical impossibility. Fusing the power of technology and democratic ideals opens opportunities for greater access to information and offers a medium for people to be heard and express their voice with dissemination to the masses through digital tools, such as blogs, podcasts, and wikis. Indeed, the emergence of the Internet as a nearly ubiquitous element of American society has brought about new opportunities to enhance citizen engagement in democratic politics and to increase the level of civic engagement among American citizens. Despite such rhetoric, however, research has indicated that Grossman's "electronic republic" has, for the most part, failed to come to fruition

Engineering in a Land-Grant Context is volume of well-crafted essays considers the federal government's first foray into higher education by examining engineering education at the nation's land-grant universities over the past 140 years. The authors demonstrate how that history has framed the present and suggest how it is likely to influence the foreseeable future. The expert contributors, all of whom have studied and written prominently on the history of engineering education, concentrate on revealing the critical trends and major events of this 140 year history. Treating their essays as symptomatic and symbolic of the larger issues, they create a volume accessible to engineers, historians and the interested lay readers. Three central themes and important topics are outlined and explored. Each is locked in time. The first, integration of engineers and engineering education within the newly created and not yet defined land-grant colleges, was particularly important in the initial half-century of land-grant university development; while the second, the forces external to the college and the state that help direct the course of engineering education, is especially appropriate in the half century after World War I. The third, the conscious reformulation of the land-grant ideal, stands as testimony to the introspection and assessment of the last several decades.

Over the last ten years, Purdue University has undertaken a culture-change initiative. With leadership changes imminent at Purdue University in spring 2007, it seemed wise to document this effort to increase the awareness, knowledge, and skills of faculty and staff in the many areas of diversity. This work focuses on the faculty and staff in the colleges and schools of the University. The data for this report were gathered by the researcher and author of this document, who interviewed key informants and examined documents, archives, and websites during spring 2007. What is reported here does not represent the history of diversity at Purdue: There is a long history of recruiting and retaining underrepresented minority students and women (in the more technical fields) that is not covered here. There is also ongoing training and intervention work in the administrative side of the University and in the support units. This report describes work with faculty and staff in the colleges and schools to change the academic culture so that students, whatever their diversity and gender, will feel welcomed, supported, and included. It begins with the narrative of the ten-year development of this diversity initiative, which includes data on changes that have occurred in the academic culture at Purdue. A section on change in universities and the concepts that underlie the change process concludes the discussion.