While President Emerita Johnnetta B. Cole is credited with propelling Spelman College (the oldest historically Black womens' college) to national prominence, little is generally known about the strong academic foundation and legacy she inherited. Contrary to popular belief, the first four presidents of Spelman (including its two co-founders) were White women who led the early development of the College, armed with the belief that former slaves and free Black women should and could receive a college-level education. This book presents the history of Spelman's foundation through the tenure of its fourth president, Florence M. Read, which ended in 1953. This compelling story is brought up to date by the contributions of Spelman's current president, Beverly Daniel Tatum, and by Johnnetta B. Cole.The book chronicles how the vision each of these women presidents, and their response to changing social forces, both profoundly shaped Spelman's curriculum and influenced the lives and minds of thousands of young Black women. The authors trace the evolution of Spelman from its beginning-when the founders, aware of the limited occupations open to its graduates, strove to uplift the Black race by providing an academic education to disenfranchised Black women while also providing training for available careers--to the fifties when the college became an exemplar of liberal arts education in the South.This book fills a void in the history of Black women in higher education. It will appeal to a wide readership interested in women's studies, Black history and the history of higher education in general.

This edited collection examines the means to create, maintain, and enhance welcoming colleges and universities in the United States and abroad with personal accounts, case studies, models, programs, and other frameworks written by practitioners in higher education. The contributors explain how they have created inviting classrooms; established friendly educational experiences both within and beyond the classroom; engaged faculty and enhanced the teaching experience; and developed instruments to assess invitational strategies in higher education from a global perspective.

Voices of Native American Indian Educators: Integrating History, Culture, and Language to Improve Learning Outcomes for Native American Indian Students, edited by Sheila T. Gregory, is a comprehensive resource that provides a vivid portrait of best practices for Native American students, as experienced by Native American educators. This book is based primarily on research studies, both quantitative and qualitative, that offer new, practical strategies for teachers to improve the academic performance of Native American students. All of the contributors in this book are Native American Indian educators who have experienced success in their teaching practices by using a variety of multidisciplinary approaches in their practice of teaching. In this collection, "culture" is considered to be constantly evolving and is described as something that can both be learned and unlearned. Furthermore, people who share the same culture do not always behave in the same ways. The complexity of culture, then, is a tremendous challenge for many researchers who strive to quantitatively define the characteristics of a population, rather than contextualize through culturally relevant pedagogy. Voices of Native American Indian Educators seeks to fill this enormous gap in the literature by providing both a variety of scholarly research on best practices and a generous list of references and other resources available to teachers on Native American Indian students.