My favorite books for inspiring lifelong learning

This gorgeous book by microbiologist Dr. Beronda L. Montgomery is as beautiful to read as it is to hold—in your hands, in your heart. We can’t stop thinking about Montgomery’s key lesson: if you have a plant that is struggling, you figure out what environmental changes it needs to thrive—more or less water or sunlight, better soil. When people fail to flourish, we’re quick to blame the individual. As an African American woman, Montgomery makes us think about society and how we approach problems (do we compete or do we build a collaborative effort for a holistic solution?). Humans have much to discover from our photosynthesizing world: how plants learn—from their own kin, their friends, and their foes—and Montgomery helps us to understand the nature (literally) of teaching and learning.

This is another poetic, lyrical, inspiring book. Kimmerer’s combined Indigenous and scientific ways of knowing—and how much truth she speaks as a mother and teacher—offers a warm embrace into thinking of the world as a most precious gift. When we receive gifts, we are humbled and feel compelled by joy to give back—what an astonishing, hopeful way to think about slowing down human-driven climate change. Kimmerer speaks from the heart. We can’t stop thinking about the “three sisters” (corn, beans, and pumpkins) and how they find room to grow around each other and help one another thrive in her garden. We use this book in our scholarly research, recommend it to colleagues, and talk about it with neighbors and fellow gardeners.

Although her father died when she was only nine, the great scholar of African American life and literature, Farah Jasmine Griffin has never forgotten his admonition to her: “Read until you understand.” In this beautiful book, Professor Griffin guides us to an understanding of the U.S. Constitution, Malcolm X, Marvin Gaye, and Stevie Wonder, the artist Romare Bearden, and writers as different as the enslaved 18th-century poet Phillis Wheatley and Nobel Prize winner Toni Morrison. As educators, we have read and re-read and read again. Every read reveals a new level of understanding and we are grateful for the journey on which Professor Griffin leads us.

This 1994 classic by the late bell hooks never ceases to inspire us. “To educate is a practice of freedom,” hooks writes. She means that to be truly educated means to be liberated: to understand the forms of oppression, coercion, and limits imposed on learners because of class, gender, racial, sexual bias, and in every other way. hooks points to the barriers that keep us from being our very best selves. She inspires every reader to self-educate, self-reflect, find and build communities of support in order to live a better life. She inspires every educator to make, as their objective, not just the teaching of content but transmission of the tools that allow each student to achieve their own best aspirations for their lives and their community. 

Peña’s book began as a letter written to students and it remains a powerful offering of love as well as a call to rebel and resist oppression. The book’s “Course Requirements” include: an open heart and mind; “The desire to be part of the sum, rather than a single part”; and patience—to make room for humility, to unlearn and relearn, to make mistakes, to become resilient in order to do more than rebel once but to actually light the fire within to be rebellious as a practice. This book inspires us to continue fighting for justice and change, and to sustain our communities to keep the light of hope in a better future burning.