reviews.indd


572 College & Research Libraries 

assist NextGen librarians in keeping their 
skills current and marketable. 

The remaining chapters in this book 
offer advice to NextGen librarians on 
what to expect in the workplace, but also 
how to handle different scenarios that 
may arise. Each chapter provides possible 
ideas and strategies a NextGen librarian 
may use in situations in which older col-
leagues and administrators have differing 
viewpoints. Appendix B lists useful Web 
sites and a list of recommended read-
ings that address the constant changes 
in librarianship. Gordon has done an 
excellent job outlining what it takes for 
NextGen librarians to survive in the work-
place and in articulating the profession’s 
expectations that they will be able to move 
libraries into the future.—Katie Nash, Elon 
University 

Newman, Michael. Teaching Defi ance: Sto-
ries and Strategies for Activist Educators. 
A Book Written in Wartime. Foreword 
by Stephen Brookfield, San Francisco: 
Jossey-Bass, 2006. 320p. $35 (ISBN 
0787985562). LC 2006-4175. 

It takes only a few pages of reading this 
book to be moved from curious (about its 
title) to motivated (How can I become an 
activist educator?) to inspired. 

Michael Newman believes that critical 
thinking, a frequent aim of higher educa-
tion, has been tamed. Rather than helping 
people recognize ideology, it has become 
another workplace skill and has lost its 
connection to social justice. Adult educa-
tion itself has become “… simply too nice, 
too self-centered, or too concerned with 
maintaining the status quo.” Instead of 
following the prevailing learner-centered 
focus, adult education should help people 
uncover their anger, examine it, and thus 
look outward to define the enemy, “… 
who is trying to lay our futures for us, 
who is telling us what we should and 
should not do, … who is preventing us 
from acting effectively in our own and in 
others’ interest.” The mission of activist 
adult educators, according to Newman, 
is “to help people become truly conscious 

November 2006 

… to teach choice. … to help ourselves 
and others break free from our pasts, 
plan for the futures we want and resist 
the futures we do not want. Our job is to 
teach defiance.” 

Newman, now retired after twelve 
years as a senior lecturer in adult educa-
tion at the University of Technology in 
Sydney, Australia (UTS), has an extensive 
background of working, teaching, and 
writing in adult education and training. 
Prior to joining UTS, he did community 
education work in London and was a 
national trainer for the Australian Trade 
Union Training Authority. Although 
Teaching Defiance is his first book to be 
released by an American publisher, two 
of his books have won the American 
Association for Adult and Continuing 
Education’s Cyril Houle Award for Out-
standing Literature in Adult Education. 

After articulating his mission, New-
man provides ample material—through 
a combination of concepts, philosophy, 
critical theory, stories, and practical teach-
ing models—to guide those who wish 
to become activist adult educators. One 
example, appearing early in the book, is 
his model for teaching problem solving. 
He illustrates this model with an exercise 
he developed as a trade union trainer. He 
divides his class into groups of three and 
gives each group a sheet of paper contain-
ing a succinctly worded work problem: A 
union representative finds that the factory 
manager has moved the time clocks from 
outside the gate to inside the factory. At 
the top of the sheet is the question, “What 
would you do?” The groups must remain 
completely silent while reading the prob-
lem. Then, they talk for ten minutes. In 
debriefing the exercise, Newman finds 
that groups invariably leap to solutions. 
He shows them the benefits of adhering 
to a simple, three-step discussion process: 
(1) What’s wrong? (2) What can we do? 
(3) What will we do? He follows up by 
helping the class refine each step into 
discrete stages. 

Besides problem solving, Newman 
explores why and how to teach rebel-



liousness, collective decision making, 
dialogue, negotiation, insight, action, 
and the relationship of morality to defi-
ance. The teaching methods he presents 
are quite varied. Along with group work 
and discussion, they include role play, 
forum theater, discussions of literary 
works, having participants construct and 
analyze a metaphor that portrays them in 
their professional practice, and exercises 
using Paulo Freire’s concept of naming 
and renaming. 

Newman grounds his concepts and 
methods in philosophy and critical 
theory, employing Camus, Sartre, Paulo 
Freire, Jürgen Habermas, Alfred Jules 
Ayer, the South African philosopher Rick 
Turner, and many others. For readers not 
intimately familiar with philosophy and 
critical theory, Newman’s explications of 
key concepts perform a welcome service. 
An example is his discussion, in Chapter 
11, “Disruptive Negotiation,” of how 
this type of negotiation can transform 
the issues and the conflict, as well as 
the people, involved in the negotiation. 
His model is an incident in Queensland, 
Australia, in 1996. Negotiations were 
held among cattle grazers, aboriginals, 
and environmentalists about land use on 
the Cape York peninsula. To show that 
the manner in which these negotiations 
were conducted changed the perceptions 
the stakeholders had of each other, he 
employs both Sartre’s phenomenological 
writing about the Other, the gaze, and 
shame and Zygmunt Bauman’s concept 
of the stranger. 

Stories are woven throughout the 
book, and they are effective on several 
levels. Newman uses stories to illustrate 
philosophical or theoretical concepts, to 
motivate, and to provide practical ex-
amples of how he teaches the various ele-
ments of defiance. They provide a context 
that enables the reader (and, ultimately, 
the student) to remember the material 
and transfer it to new contexts. The ef-
fectiveness of these stories is amplifi ed as 
readers quickly find themselves writing 
their own stories—thinking of their own 

Book Reviews 573 

contexts, past or future, in which these 
would be useful techniques. 

Librarians will find numerous ways 
to employ this book’s insights and 
techniques. In the classroom, some of 
the techniques are best suited to credit 
courses; but others can be used as pre-
sented, or adapted, for one-shot instruc-
tion sessions. Instruction librarians can 
illustrate information literacy skills using 
topics (for instance, global warming) that 
embody the need for activism and change. 
They can ensure that the session also 
shows students that gathering thorough 
information from a variety of viewpoints 
equips citizens to make informed choices. 
Other techniques can be used in library 
workplace settings, whether to structure a 
discussion in a meeting or to help nudge 
a bureaucracy toward change. Librarians 
can also use this book in their campus or 
community service work. 

For those of us dismayed (as Newman 
is) by the Iraq War and a host of other 
conditions that cloud our future, this 
book provides a language for thinking 
about and discussing our feelings and 
our choices. It also gives us the tools to 
move on to productive action.—Glenn 
Ellen Starr Stilling, Appalachian State 
University 

Pálsdótt ir, Ágústa. Health and Lifestyle: 
Icelanders’ Everyday Life Information 
Behaviour. 237 + 45p. Åbo, Finland:
Åbo Akademi University Press, 2005. 
(ISBN 9517652720 print; 9517652739 
digital) 

We’re ordinarily labeled as ‘information 
professionals,’ but that’s not an entirely 
sufficient term for who we are and what 
we, as librarians, do. That is, what we 
do is certainly centered on information, 
and we produce and creatively use much 
metadata about information. And we do 
all this with the goal of providing the 
information we preserve to those users 
who will turn it into knowledge. But, in 
important ways, our whole profession 
is built upon anecdotal presumptions 
about the relationships among needs,