UW News

July 20, 2006

Banks book wins stellar reviews

Education Professor James Banks spent the past school year as a Spencer Fellow at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences at Stanford University, where he also finished a new book that was published to excellent reviews.

Banks, Kerry and Linda Killinger Professor of Diversity Studies and director of the UW’s Center for Multicultural Education, spent the 2005-2006 school year at the center, which also is called The Think Tank. He was one of 37 fellows representing 27 universities internationally, chosen from among nearly 5,000 candidates of diverse backgrounds, according to the center’s Web site. The site states that Center fellows are welcomed to “nine months of reading, researching, thinking, discussing, and writing” as well as discussion and collaboration across disciplines.

In April, Banks’ latest book, Race, Culture, and Education: The Selected Works of James A. Banks, was published by Routledge in London. The book includes 18 of Banks’ most significant articles, book chapters and papers, showing his scholarship over four decades as well as the evolving field of multicultural education. Topics include black studies and the teaching of history, multiethnic education and school reform and diversity and citizenship education. The volume also includes a selected bibliography of publications by Banks, who is known as one of the most important voices in multicultural education.

The book, part of Routledge’s World Library of Educationalists series, received a stellar review in the Education Supplement to the Times of London, on June 23. Referring to Banks as a “founding father” of multicultural education, writer Tim Brighouse went on to add, ” Banks is more than a founding father; he’s a rigorous, pioneering thinker and the pre-eminent black academic of my lifetime.”

Banks is already at work on another book, which he says is tentatively titled Educating Students for Cosmopolitan Citizenship in a Diverse and Changing World. He recently embarked on a lecture tour of the United Kingdom and Paris, where he will speak on the subject of his new manuscript. He will give keynote addresses at the University of Oxford and the University of Leeds.

UWTV has a recording of Banks giving the Faculty Lecture, Democracy, Diversity and Social Justice: Education in a Global Age.  To hear it, go to 
http://www.uwtv.org/programs/displayevent.asp?rid=2499