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  • Book cover of The Culture Trap

    In The Culture Trap, Derron Wallace argues that the overreliance on culture to explain Black students' achievement and behavior in schools is a trap that undermines the historical factors and institutional processes that shape how Black students experience schooling. This trap is consequential for a host of racial and ethnic minority youth in schools, including Black Caribbean young people in London and New York City. Since the 1920s, Black Caribbeans in New York have been considered a high-achieving Black model minority. Conversely, since the 1950s, Black Caribbeans in London have been regarded as a chronically underachieving minority. In both contexts, however, it is often suggested that Caribbean culture informs their status, whether as a celebrated minority in the US or as a demoted minority in Britain. Drawing on rich ethnographic observations, as well as interview and archival data from two of the largest public schools in London and New York City, Wallace interrogates the fault lines of these claims, and highlights the influence of colonialism, class, and context in shaping Black Caribbeans' educational experiences. As racial and ethnic achievement gaps and discussions about what to do about them persist in the US and Britain, Wallace shows how culture is at times used as an alibi for racism in schools, and points out what educators, parents, and students can do to change it.

  • Book cover of Haunted New Braunfels

    Visitors claim to hear the clinking of tinsmith tools and the ring of an unattended antique cash register at all hours at Kickin' K, which formerly housed Henne's Hardware and tinsmith shop. In Landa Park, passersby have reported hearing phantom footsteps follow behind them in the evening. Strange and spooky stories like these abound in New Braunfels. From the city's rough-and-tumble beginnings to its vibrant present, haunted tales can be found all over town. Author Erin O. Wallace delves into the ghost stories and histories of New Braunfels and tries to find the source of the paranormal phenomena.

  • Book cover of There Is No Need to Talk about This

    The mystery of Art Therapy is demystified in this book as the author offers an illuminating glimpse into her therapy practice. The author is deeply immersed in her own creative process and the respect, delicacy, and understanding that she provides her clients shines through. The poems embrace the painful aspects of her clients’ lives and show how by working skillfully and creatively with trauma, abuse and mental illness, her clients move forward into joy, well-being and wholeness. Her poetic reflections move us to appreciate how art can be used as an instrument of transformation by travelling through landscapes where words cannot go. “Art is unique in its ability to embrace and communicate complex, deep, and subtle aspects of emotional experience. And often the best way to reflect upon and understand these artistic processes is to respond to them with more, in the same medium or a different one. Karen Wallace convincingly does both in There Is No Need to Talk about This: Poetic Inquiry from the Art Therapy Studio. Artistic expressions and images are apt to be a few steps ahead of the analytic mind’s way of sorting things out. As an art therapist, she responds to visual imagery and studio environment by writing poems. Aligned with how perception and sensibility work, this language arguably offers a fuller sense of multifaceted processes of arts therapy than conventional clinical narratives. Poems hold contradictions, pare down excess verbiage, distill seeds, and ‘speak/The thoughts of humanness that mattered.’ This book will help therapists and researchers gain a more complete comprehension of their work and do something creative and life enhancing with the feelings it generates in them – living the process themselves as the most reliable way to bring it to others.” – Shaun McNiff is Lesley University’s first University Professor and author of many books including Imagination in Action: Secrets for Unleashing Creative Expression and Art as Research “Karen Wallace’s There Is No Need to Talk about This: Poetic Inquiry from the Art Therapy Studio is a profoundly moving work, therapeutic, evocative, wise, tender, feeling. It is painfully evocative in its words and imagery. There are lessons here for any reader who has ever had to look deeply into the darkness that lurks beneath the traumas of daily life. Karen Wallace teaches all of how to heal, how to love, how to move forward with dignity, and courage.” – Norman Denzin, Professor Emeritus of Sociology, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, Editor of Qualitative Inquiry and International Review of Qualitative Research “Our son Connor has autism and he saw Karen Wallace for art therapy for several years as a teen. Once he said, ‘Karen is the only one who understands me.’ She worked through many issues with him and helped us as parents decode his obsession with monsters. This book provides a glimpse into the genuine caring that Karen Wallace feels for every client lucky enough to see her.” – Kellie Garrett, ACC, MC, ICD.D, Speaker ~ Coach ~ Strategist

  • Book cover of The Fleet Religious Support Activity, U.S. Atlantic Fleet
  • Book cover of Trauma Informed Teaching through Play Art Narrative (PAN)

    Trauma affects the lives of many children who we teach in school. It effects the students, teachers who teach them, the administration, and the school community as it is part of the school environment and culture. Teachers and administrators have great potential to set up an environment and adopt an attitude that can help heal the trauma in the lives of their students. Schools need to become trauma-informed to be able to provide for the growing number of refugee children who have experienced terrorism, crime, war, and abuse, to better help some Indigenous children who due to systemic racism and discriminatory policies have been traumatised and live daily with trauma, and the growing number of all children who have experienced various kinds of trauma during their life span. Trauma informed schools means that all students can feel safe enough to learn, succeed academically and thrive after having undergone a traumatic event. Trauma Informed Teaching demonstrates how Play Art Narrative (PAN) can be instrumental in creating trauma informed schools. The authors provide play, art, and narrative techniques and activities that educators can use to safely work therapeutically with traumatised children and youth.

  • Book cover of Mysteries of the Magnolia Hotel

    One night in 1874, a murderer crept into a New Braunfels home and killed twelve-year-old Emma Voelcker with an axe. The prime suspect was a family friend named Faust, lodging in the nearby Magnolia Hotel. A future governor prosecuted Faust, and an unknown assailant snuck past thirty-six armed guards to assassinate him. More than a century later, when Erin Wallace and her husband, Jim Ghedi, began restoring the hotel, first opened during the wild days of the Texas republic, they experienced eerie echoes from the past. One presence in particular cut through the chaos of slammed doors and roaming shadows to guide them to the Magnolia's darkest mystery. Wading through trial transcripts, newspaper archives and messages from disturbed ghosts, they discovered a secret history of Emma's death, a possible cover-up and its continuing legacy.

  • Book cover of King's Vibrato

    In King’s Vibrato Maurice O. Wallace explores the sonic character of Martin Luther King Jr.’s voice and its power to move the world. Providing a cultural history and critical theory of the black modernist soundscapes that helped inform King’s vocal timbre, Wallace shows how the qualities of King’s voice depended on a mix of ecclesial architecture and acoustics, musical instrumentation and sound technology, audience and song. He examines the acoustical architectures of the African American churches where King spoke and the centrality of the pipe organ in these churches, offers a black feminist critique of the influence of gospel on King, and outlines how variations in natural environments and sound amplifications made each of King’s three deliveries of the “I Have a Dream” speech unique. By mapping the vocal timbre of one of the most important figures of black hope and protest in American history, Wallace presents King as the embodiment of the sound of modern black thought.

  • Book cover of The Life of Christ

    The life of Christ is a book that explains how Jesus Christ is alive in us today. His word is powerful as it was two thousand years ago and can change your life forever. As you read this book, my prayer is that God will give you understanding of the scriptures, that will enlighten your heart and inspire you to walk in the love of God. Allow the Word of God in Jesus name to change you from the inside out as it did me. Ask God in Jesus name to give you the grace to use the faith embedded inside your soul. God wants to work miracles in your life if you dare to stand upon the Word. Then Jesus put out His hand and touched him, saying, I am willing: be cleansed Immediately his leprosy was cleansed. Matthew 8:3

  • Book cover of Haunted Seguin

    Founded and built by the brave Texas Rangers who fought for the state's independence, Seguin is a picturesque town with a chilling history. The defensive wall around the city is said to also keep souls from leaving. Locals whisper tales of a headless soldier roaming the streets at night, searching for his remains. The town square, now a hub of activity and commerce, once hosted public hangings and beatings. Lake McQueeny is known for its beauty, but a lost spirit wails along the shores to warn would-be drowning victims. Discover these and other stories from the shadows of Seguin's past with author Erin O. Wallace.

  • Book cover of Constructing the Black Masculine

    A major rethinking of the issues around African American masculinity, tracing its relation to images of construction, and applying ideas from Eve Sedgwick’s Epistemology of the Closet.