Opening the Academy’s Doors with an Author-Led Online Book Club

Academic researchers routinely safeguard their scholarship. We publish our work in academic journals with limited circulation and readership. We share our findings at academic conferences with participants who are often specialists in our field.

But, as many academics have shown, it doesn’t have to be this way. It’s possible for academic researchers to share their work beyond the academy.

As a researcher and teacher, I have benefited tremendously from the generosity of scholars who have opened doors and shared their work beyond the academy. I want to do for others what these individuals have done for me.

And so, beginning on January 20, 2022, I am launching an innovative author-led online book club about my new academic book, The Roots of Educational Inequality: Philadelphia’s Germantown High School, 1907–2014. The book examines the factors that contributed to the transformation of urban public high schools over the past 100 years.

This book club will meet weekly on Zoom, Thursday evenings from 8–9 pm EST. During our meetings, I will give brief lectures on each chapter, share the primary sources in the book, and answer participant questions about my work. Anyone is welcome.

I hope that this club will give participants an opportunity to learn why wrote this book, to interrogate the sources that I used, and ask me questions about my work. I also hope that it will give us space and time to apply what we learn together in our own schools and communties and to network together as we collectively strive to create and sustain schools and communities where all children can thrive.

I’m especially eager to have educational administrators, advocates, families, teachers, and youth as participants in the book club. After all, you are the individuals who work tirelessly every day to create more just and equitable classrooms, schools, and communities.

I invite you to join me this January so that together we can learn from and with one another. To register for the online book club, please visit my personal website: https://www.erikakitzmiller.com/online-book-club

I hope to see you on the 20th!