Selected as a 2025 Doody's Core Title

Cultural Humility in Libraries: A Call to Action and Strategies for Success explores cultural humility as a framework for encouraging ongoing self-education and empathy to enhance understanding of the lived experiences of others. Including insights from more than 30 contributors, it offers best practice strategies tempered by experiences and wisdom and challenges information professionals to embrace cultural humility as a powerful tool for nurturing dialogue, understanding, and positive transformation.
The book is divided into three parts: "What is Cultural Humility?", "Applications in Libraries," and "Voices from the Field." Part I addresses what cultural humility is and the importance and relevance of its role in healthcare. In Part II, the authors describe how they apply principles of cultural humility in their work environments via lessons learned, practical strategies, development opportunities, and challenges when integrating cultural humility in library settings. In Part III, the voices of diverse professionals unpack the application of cultural humility through their lens, sharing their stories of what cultural humility has meant in their lives, how they have applied it in their work, and the challenges they have faced in doing so.
Cultural Humility in Libraries is a call to action for readers to look inward to assess the role and impact of cultural humility in their own lives. In particular, readers are encouraged to deliberately reflect and think critically about how their thoughts, words, and actions impact the people around them.

Our nation is rocked by ideological divisions threatening both the work of educators and the core of our democracy. Individuals and groups are attacking public education and implementing policies antithetical to education in a democratic society. They seek to impose their own beliefs upon students and educational institutions by censoring materials, ideas, and practices they find objectionable. They promote intolerance through exclusionary and discriminatory policies and practices concerning persons of different racial, ethnic, religious, national origin, gender, or political identities. They advocate abandoning discussion of culture and identity-despite their importance to student success-to ensure that preferential consideration continues for the prevailing culture. And they close off open dialogue and scrutiny of factual evidence, instead imposing their own agendas. In doing so, they politicize education, bring partisanship into the classroom, promote indoctrination, and undermine education's democratic goals.

At their best, public schools are an anathema to indoctrination and authoritarianism because they bring a wide range of perspectives into the classroom and teach students to think independently. A democratic and pluralistic society requires that individuals honor and respect differences in identities and beliefs, endorse the pursuit of truth through examination of factual evidence, and participate in open dialogue to resolve issues of difference. Education in a democratic society must support the development of these attitudes, skills, and values in young people. Yet our nation's culture wars are being fomented by those who have a contradictory vision of American education.

The current times call on each of us to understand what is at risk and to summon the courage to stand up for the pursuit of justice, equity, and a meaningful democracy. But how do we develop and express that personal courage to support schools in promoting respect for diversity and inclusivity, enhancing children's well-being and social-emotional development, affirming the goals of equitable access and opportunity for all, and providing students with the knowledge and skills to sustain and strengthen our democratic society? At the state and local levels, how do we change the culture of educational endeavors from divisive to collaborative?

This book is a clarion call to parents, educators, students, community members, and education leaders to take courageous action in response to the current threats. To support these individuals in bravely choosing to stand up and speak out, The Call to Courage shares the stories and strategies of others who are boldly and publicly embracing that very challenge.

This open access book presents the final findings from the case studies developed within the Horizon 2020 SMOOTH project Educational Spaces. Passing through Enclosures and Reversing Inequalities through Educational Commons. The overall objective of the project was to understand, develop, and accelerate the potential impact of education on reversing inequalities for active social inclusion of children and young people at risk in Europe, through introducing the emergent paradigm of the "commons" as an alternative value and action system in the field of education (preschools, schools, and after-school programs). SMOOTH critically draws out the implications of the commons for refiguring education and for social change in general, on a footing of equality, sharing, participation, togetherness, caring, and freedom. Universities, research laboratories, municipalities, NGOs, museums, and youth organizations, in different European countries, have worked together to achieve the aboveaim involving almost 200 educators and teachers, and 800 children, and providing interesting insights and suggestions on how to implement educational commons in many different educational contexts. The target audience comprises policymakers and education leaders, students from Education and Communication degrees, researchers, and educators from both formal and non-formal educational contexts.

In Liberal Education and Democratic Citizenship, Michael H. McCarthy carefully describes the many crises confronting American democracy and identifies their philosophical, cultural, and institutional origins. He argues that a liberal education, properly understood, can address several of these crises effectively.
The book's successive chapters explore the sources, areas, and levels of division in contemporary America, and show how they have created important disagreements about the major challenges we presently face and the credible solutions they require. McCarthy articulates what a liberal education actually is and why it is vitally important for both our personal and civic lives. He also clarifies the critical contrast between effective freedom, the aim of a liberal education, and the concepts of freedom within economic and political liberalism.
McCarthy addresses the distinctive educational challenges presented by modernity and post-modernity: their moral aspirations, acute historical consciousness, and passion for radical criticism, as well as the traditional (Tocqueville) and contemporary (William Galston and Charles Taylor) discontents of American democracy. A central part of the book's unfolding argument is the enduring cultural contrast between the principles and aspirations of civic republicanism and the imperial assumptions of economics. This juxtaposition helps us to understand the power and limitations of the "stories we Americans live by" as well as the civic virtues we commonly need to create a free, just, and multi-racial America. These critical virtues, McCarthy argues, are the specific goal of a liberal and democratic education