It was a dark and stormy night in Santa Barbara. January 19, 2017. The next day’s inauguration drumroll played on the evening news. Huddled around a table were nine Corwin authors and their publisher, who together have devoted their careers to equity in education. They couldn’t change the weather, they couldn’t heal a fractured country, but they did have the power to put their collective wisdom about EL education upon the page to ensure our multilingual learners reach their highest potential. Proudly, we introduce you now to the fruit of that effort: Breaking Down the Wall: Essential Shifts for English Learners’ Success. In this first-of-a-kind collaboration, teachers and leaders, whether in small towns or large urban centers, finally have both the research and the practical strategies to take those first steps toward excellence in educating our culturally and linguistically diverse children. It’s a book to be celebrated because it means we can throw away the dark glasses of deficit-based approaches and see children who come to school speaking a different home language for what they really are: learners with tremendous assets. The authors’ contributions are arranged in nine chapters that become nine tenets for teachers and administrators to use as calls to actions in their own efforts to realize our English learners’ potential: 1. From Deficit-Based to Asset-Based 2. From Compliance to Excellence 3. From Watering Down to Challenging 4. From Isolation to Collaboration 5. From Silence to Conversation 6. From Language to Language, Literacy, and Content 7. From Assessment of Learning to Assessment for and as Learning 8. From Monolingualism to Multilingualism 9. From Nobody Cares to Everyone/Every Community Cares Read this book; the chapters speak to one another, a melodic echo of expertise, classroom vignettes, and steps to take. To shift the status quo is neither fast nor easy, but there is a clear process, and it’s laid out here in Breaking Down the Wall. To distill it into a single line would go something like this: if we can assume mutual ownership, if we can connect instruction to all children’s personal, social, cultural, and linguistic identities, then all students will achieve.

"Everyone involved in the performing arts, from professors to casting directors to actors to students, especially those just starting out, should read this eye-opening work." Library Journal, Starred Review A practical guide that shows BIPOC actors how to break down the audition process rather than being broken down by the entertainment industry and its practices of exclusion and bias. Working in an environment that often stereotypes or attempts to “universalize” experiences, it’s more important than ever that actors consider how culture, race, ethnicity, gender, sexuality, and ability are inseparable and important parts of their identity that should not be minimized and can instead enhance their work. In Breaking It Down: Audition Techniques for Actors of the Global Majority, Nicole Hodges Persley and Monica White Ndounoushare real-world audition strategies that centers the experiences of actors of color. They combine practical advice, cultural studies, Black feminist perspectives, and lived experiences to offer intersectional approaches to auditioning. The ten steps outlined in this book aid actors across racial lines seeking to develop the necessary skills to break down a character and script while affirming their full selves into the audition to book the role. Building on the momentum of the #BlackLivesMatter, #MeToo, and Time’s Up movements, Breaking It Down emboldens actors of the global majority to embrace every aspect of their identities rather than leaving themselves behind in an effort to gain entry and access to the entertainment industry

“These stories . . . offer a peephole into a distinct fictional world . . . they attest to the author’s gift as an observer and archivist of emotion.” —The New York Times The thirty-four stories in this seminal collection powerfully display what have become Lydia Davis’s trademarks—dexterity, brevity, understatement, and surprise. Although the certainty of her prose suggests a world of almost clinical reason and clarity, her characters show us that life, thought, and language are full of disorder. Break It Down is Davis at her best. In the words of Jonathan Franzen, she is “a magician of self-consciousness.” Praise for Lydia Davis “Davis is one of the most precise and economical writers we have.” —Dave Eggers, McSweeney’s “An American virtuoso of the short story form.” —Salon “The best prose stylist in America.” —Rick Moody “[Davis has] a capacity to make language unleash entire states of existence.” —Siddhartha Deb, The New York Times

Two authors with broad experience in inner city life and ministry share eight practical and biblically-based principles that they believe will contribute to the healing of racial strife in America.

For nearly sixty years, the University of Oklahoma, in obedience to state law, denied admission to African Americans. Only in October 1948 did this racial barrier start to break down, when an elderly teacher named George McLaurin became the first African American to enroll at the university. McLaurin’s case, championed by the NAACP, drew national attention and culminated in a U.S. Supreme Court decision. In Breaking Down Barriers, distinguished historian David W. Levy chronicles the historically significant—and at times poignant—story of McLaurin’s two-year struggle to secure his rights. Through exhaustive research, Levy has uncovered as much as we can know about George McLaurin (1887–1968), a notably private person. A veteran educator, he was fully qualified for admission as a graduate student in the university’s School of Education. When the university denied his application, solely on the basis of race, McLaurin received immediate assistance from the NAACP and its lead attorney Thurgood Marshall, who brilliantly defended his case in state and federal courts. On his very first day of class, as Levy details, McLaurin had to sit in a special alcove, separate from the white students in the classroom. Photographs of McLaurin in this humiliating position set off a firestorm of national outrage. Dozens of other African American men and women followed McLaurin to the university, and Levy reviews the many bizarre contortions that university officials had to perform, often against their own inclinations, to accord with the state’s mandate to keep black and white students apart in classrooms, the library, cafeterias and dormitories, and the football stadium. Ultimately, in 1950, the U.S. Supreme Court, swayed by the arguments of Marshall and his co-counsel Robert Carter, ruled in McLaurin’s favor. The decision, as Levy explains, stopped short of toppling the decades-old doctrine of “separate but equal.” But the case led directly to the 1954 landmark decision in Brown v. Board of Education, which finally declared that flawed policy unconstitutional.

Leaving is what Julia Finch does best. When a meeting with her birth parents goes horribly wrong, Julia escapes on a hastily planned road trip and winds up breaking down in a Colorado town so small the cows outnumber the people. Completely out of her element, she takes a temporary job as a ranch hand at Bennett Ranch. She only has to survive long enough to get her car fixed, and then she’s out of there for good. Her bad luck continues when she meets the ranch owner, Elena Bennett. Elena is unhappy, abrasive, and annoyingly breathtaking. But the longer Julia stays, the more the ranch starts to feel like home, and her feelings for Elena become impossible to ignore. She’s spent years building her defenses high and running from her past. Could a love worth staying for be the key to breaking down her walls?

"Breaking Down Joker offers a compelling, multi-disciplinary examination of a landmark film and media event that was simultaneously both celebrated and derided, and which arrived at a time of unprecedented social malaise. The collection breaks down Joker to explore its aesthetic and ideological representations within the social and cultural context in which it was released. An international team of authors explore Joker's sightlines and subtexts, the affective relationships, corrosive ideologies and damning if ambivalent messages of this film. The chapters address such themes as white masculinity, identity and perversion, social class and mobility, urban loneliness, movement and music, and questions of reception and activism. With contributions from scholars from screen studies, theatre and performance studies, psychology and psychoanalysis, geography, cultural studies, and sociology, this fully interdisciplinary collection offers a uniquely multiple operational cross-examination of this pivotal film text, and will be of great importance to scholars, students and researchers in these areas"--

An exciting look at 75 contributors under age 20 who have done remarkable things, from entrepreneurship to athletics to music and more.

A Washington Post Bestseller Not all collaboration is smart. Make sure you do it right. Professional service firms face a serious challenge. Their clients increasingly need them to solve complex problems—everything from regulatory compliance to cybersecurity, the kinds of problems that only teams of multidisciplinary experts can tackle. Yet most firms have carved up their highly specialized, professional experts into narrowly defined practice areas, and collaborating across these silos is often messy, risky, and expensive. Unless you know why you’re collaborating and how to do it effectively, it may not be smart at all. That’s especially true for partners who have built their reputations and client rosters independently, not by working with peers. In Smart Collaboration, Heidi K. Gardner shows that firms earn higher margins, inspire greater client loyalty, attract and retain the best talent, and gain a competitive edge when specialists collaborate across functional boundaries. Gardner, a former McKinsey consultant and Harvard Business School professor now lecturing at Harvard Law School, has spent over a decade conducting in-depth studies of numerous global professional service firms. Her research with clients and the empirical results of her studies demonstrate clearly and convincingly that collaboration pays, for both professionals and their firms. But Gardner also offers powerful prescriptions for how leaders can foster collaboration, move to higher-margin work, increase client satisfaction, improve lateral hiring, decrease enterprise risk, engage workers to contribute their utmost, break down silos, and boost their bottom line. With case studies and real-world insights, Smart Collaboration delivers an authoritative case for the value of collaboration to today’s professionals, their firms, and their clients and shows you exactly how to achieve it.

Sometimes picking up the pieces after a divorce or break-up can prove to be more of a challenge than the relationship was. What if you had a manual to help guide you through the ruins of a messy break-up; a road map that could light the way as you navigate through the murky waters of heartache? What if you knew what series of emotions you could expect to feel and then armed yourself with ways to channel those emotions effectively? Breaking Up Without Breaking Down puts you back into the driver's seat of your life. Using a step-by-step approach, it offers valuable insight and provides readers with common sense as well as innovative ideas to facilitate healing. Additionally, readers are invited to take a glimpse into the personal struggles of both men and women who have endured and ultimately survived a painful break-up. By addressing potential obstacles faced by people from all walks of life, Breaking Up Without Breaking Down adopts a universal approach to healing so that you can start picking up the pieces to become whole again.