Celebrate the beginning of another school year with South Carolina State Library! Read about education theory, the history of schooling in our state, and more through our collection. Browse our online research databases anywhere you’re located. Plus, ask our reference librarians for any help you need. Happy learning!
Education Month on the Shelves
On the Shelves
Teaching to Transgress: Education as the Practice of Freedom
Hooks uses her decades of classroom experience to question traditional education and offer better alternatives. She makes a case for how multicultural learning and teaching benefits both students and teachers, giving everyone the full experience of interacting, applying, and understanding their newfound knowledge in relation to society as a whole.
Defining Student Success: The Role of School and Culture
By studying three public high schools in America, Nunn shows how different measures of student success shape their students’ specific definition and attitude towards personal academic outcomes. These microcosms of American values provide valuable insight into the nuances of community cultural beliefs about success, hard work, and intelligence, and the role those each play in upward mobility.
Information Literacy and Soci@l Medi@: Empowered Student Engagement with the ACRL Framework
Social media has become an inescapable part of digital information, and students need a unique flexibility to navigate it when looking for useable data. This book shows information literacy teachers how to incorporate these new techniques into their lessons on how to research on the web.
Teaching Web Search Skills: Techniques and Strategies of Top Trainers
An academic reference librarian gives tips for how to showcase the best ways to find information on the internet. Notess has been teaching web search skills since 1991 and his latest book emphasizes the importance of going beyond the first page and evaluating sources before putting them to use.
Rethinking Education and Poverty
Scholars from around the world contribute their research on how education and poverty are linked. Many of their findings are surprising, and all reveal a much more complex, intertwined relationship that does not always reflect conventional thinking.
Education, Justice, and Democracy
The contributors to this anthology explore how education can help advance a democratic society by creating chances for equality and advancing justice through social mobility and cultivating individual talents. They also discuss how these goals can be achieved through the current system and possible changes that would make it better.
African American Education: A Reference Handbook
: This reference book collects data about the Black educational experience. From statistical analysis to personal anecdotes, the author demonstrates discusses how Black Americans have to navigate cultural and racial bias in the educational system and how that can be changed for the better of all students.
The Public Purpose of Education and Schooling
These essays explore how important a public school system is to a civil society. Various authors shine lights on different aspects of formal education and why privatizing fixes to public problems just makes them worse. They argue for focusing on public schooling to build community equality and meaningful education to build informed citizens.
School, the Story of American Public Education
As a companion to the PBS series of the same name, this book takes us through the history of how the American public education system was formed. A number of education historians guide us across the early twentieth century to show how immigration, child labor laws, and industrial growth brought a surge of school attendance and new attention to a cohesive formalized schooling in the U.S. Then we follow the documentary through the fight for equal education from the 1950s and touch on current hot-button topics still being debated about our classrooms. This is a great guide to the PBS show or an excellent stand-alone historical read.
A History of American Higher Education
Thelin’s book walks you through the entire history of college and universities in America. He covers the cultural and political issues that arose during each era, from class issues that sprung up from their very beginnings in the late 18th century to modern issues like adjunct labor and compensation for student athletes. The evolution of higher education reflects and influences American culture as a whole, shown here through a thorough exploration of both.
Upcoming Event
Speaker at the Center Series: Author L. Glen Inabinet
August 6, 2026, 3:00 PM
Please join us for our next Speaker at the Center talk with Author L. Glen Inabinet, who will share from his book "Mekong Memoirs: A GI in Tan Tru, Long An Province, 1969-1970".