Outstanding Academic Titles 2025: Education

Enjoy this week's Outstanding Academic Titles list snippet: Five titles pertaining to Education

Posted on March 26, 2026 in Outstanding Academic Titles

Enjoy these five selections from the Choice Reviews 2025 Outstanding Academic Titles list. This week, we highlight Outstanding Academic Titles about education. A hearty congratulations to the winning authors, editors, and publishers!

1. The struggle you can’t see: experiences of neurodivergent and invisibly disabled students in higher education
Lierman, Ash. Open Book Publishers, 2024

While much literature currently exists that presents disabled students’ lived experiences with neurodivergence and invisible disabilities, Lierman (Rowan Univ.) takes this body of knowledge one step further by providing a broad but detailed analysis of themes and patterns within the literature and provides an insightful commentary informed by their own experience as a disabled and queer educator and librarian. This timely and badly needed text is organized into three sections: “Foundations,” which examines the history of disability education and offers a description of appropriate vocabulary; “Challenges,” which studies some of the barriers to providing equitable service to disabled students; and “Directions for Positive Change,” which offers some potential solutions. Lierman provides insight into the experiences of disabled students and the systemic injustices within the higher education system that both isolate disabled students and fail to give them the tools they need to succeed. A particularly strong chapter relates to the intersection of disability with other marginalized communities, especially students of color, LGBTQ+ students, and gender and ethnicity. This is a powerful text that everyone who works in higher education, or plans to, needs to read. View on Amazon.

2. You are not a kinesthetic learner: the troubled history of the learning style idea
Fallace, Thomas. Chicago, 2025

Since the 1970s, educators from elementary to graduate schools have believed that people are visual, auditory, or kinesthetic learners and that instruction should be tailored to an individual’s learning style. The only problem with this knowledge is that it is false. Since the 2010s, scientific research has consistently debunked learning style theory, although most educators still cling to the concept. Consequently, Fallace’s You Are Not a Kinesthetic Learner, which traces the history of this theory, is essential reading for educators and parents alike. Fallace (William Paterson Univ.) maintains that the implementation of learning style theory has been particularly detrimental to people of color, but the book’s primary value is its documentation of the evidence against the theory broadly and its historical account of how this error became so deeply entrenched. Fallace ultimately advocates for challenging all educational theories with three critical questions: “Where did this idea come from?”, “May I see the research that supports this idea?”, and “Would I want my child to be taught this way?” Fallace demonstrates why those are always the vital questions to raise. This book should garner a wide audience and an even wider application.  View on Amazon.

3. Students to soldiers: secret military education at elite schools, 1815–1945
Morris, John F. Virginia, 2025

The Duke of Wellington, the great British general who defeated Napoleon Bonaparte, supposedly said, “The Battle of Waterloo was won on the playing fields of Eton.” Morris, a lieutenant colonel in the US Army serving as a special advisor to NATO’s Supreme Allied Commander, Europe, examines the tribalism found in those elite public schools in Great Britain, the Corps of Pages in Tsarist Russia, the military academies in Austria-Hungary and Germany, and West Point. Relying on primary source materials, Morris depicts a world more reminiscent of William Golding’s Lord of the Flies than praiseworthy academic institutions, including hazing rituals, harassment, homoeroticism, and sexual exploitation, all done in the guise of a feudal and chivalric educational environment. Such environments were designed mainly to turn boys into men as either soldiers or statesmen and reinforced the existing patriarchy without appreciating women in their world view. For instance, the 1900 edition of the West Point yearbook sarcastically depicted the West Point class of 2000 with a buxom blonde in a short skirt wearing a tar bucket and high-heeled shoes as the future cadet adjutant. Students to Soldiers is a must for anyone interested in understanding the education of the future leaders who guided the great powers into the Age of Total War. View on Amazon.

4. Transformative social and emotional learning: centering equity and social justice in pre-K-6 classrooms
by Madora Soutter, Alessandra E. Ward, and Chu N. Ly Teachers College Press, 2025

Social emotional learning (SEL)—politicized and demonized by some—is not an attempt to indoctrinate students. SEL is central to all students’ well-being, cognitive and social development, and academic success. Yet, SEL may not be enough. Enter Transformative Social and Emotional Learning (TSEL). TSEL, an approach to SEL “implemented through a culturally sustaining equity lens,” honors social justice goals and inclusivity of all. TSEL is not “something else” to be added to a teacher’s plate. It is the plate. The authors of Transformative Social and Emotional Learning provide an engaging and practical guide that “sets the table” for educators and leaders seeking to begin or advance TSEL in pre-K–6 classrooms. Beginning with a succinct review of SEL/TSEL, the authors provide a TSEL planning toolkit with authentic examples of TSEL integration across academic domains. Attention to student identity, developmentally appropriate practice (including play), and varied modes of instruction support inclusivity and center belonging in the classroom. Importantly, the book addresses the challenges and roadblocks accompanying this critical work. Through real-life scenarios and actionable options, the authors are “walking the walk” and inviting the readers to join in the journey. View on Amazon.

5. Para power: how paraprofessional labor changed education
Juravich, Nick. Illinois, 2024

The capacity to draw larger significance and meaning from a small slice of experience is one mark of truly perceptive historical inquiry. Such is the case with Juravich’s compelling study of the forces that led to the unionization of paraprofessionals during the 1960s and 1970s. Here, the movement to elevate lowly “teacher’s aides,” as they were referred to in the 1950s, is seen as part of the larger civil rights struggle to contend with the “crisis of care” that continues to define so much American schooling. Asked to deal with myriad problems associated with classroom overcrowding and underfunding, paraprofessionals (mostly Black and Latinx women) reflected the perspective and interests of the local community and, thus, became agents for an insurgent, community-based educational philosophy, which benefited from the federal War on Poverty funding then available. Richard Nixon’s declaration of the end of that war in 1973 and the New York City fiscal crisis in 1975 heralded the destructive neoliberal educational policies of Mayor Edward Koch and those who followed. Yet, Juravich (history, Univ. of Massachusetts) introduces readers to the inspiring activist work of Velma Murphy Hill, Cleo Silvers, Preston Wilcox, and others. This book arrives at precisely the right moment. View on Amazon.

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