For maximum effect, stories should be deployed strategically. That requires understanding the art of persuasion, the stages of a successful story, scene setting, and how to use the stories of others to illustrate important points. But by far the most powerful of all is knowing and using the stories which only you can tell.

Advanced writing skills can make a piece of content truly excellent. Such tricks of the wordsmith’s trade include specialist structures, ensuring your content is inclusive and appealing to all, elegantly laid out, and efficiently edited.

The best public speakers use a series of tricks to enchant an audience. They are revealed in this chapter and include: incorporating interactions to make a crowd feel part of the performance, signposting to continually refresh interest, the showbusiness of magic moments for truly memorable talks, the use of commanding body language, how to deal with nerves and preparing for the question and answer session.

How to remember your new skills, and what to do with them.

A positive online presence is indispensable in modern life, but establishing one requires thought and strategy. This chapter explores how to use social media to your advantage, with an appealing bio, techniques for posting that attract attention and admiration, which platforms to choose, the power of blogging, the effective use of artificial intelligence, and how to create and incorporate photos and videos to help make an impact online.

There are certain foundations of effective communication, and all are revealed and explored in this chapter. They are: clarity, brevity, simplicity, authenticity, and – sometimes surprisingly – humility, or the power of listening.

Writing which informs, influences and impresses requires a series of key components. They include the start and end of a piece of content, its style (often known as the voice, or character, of the writing), the critical details of who, what, why, where, when and how, and also an appealing title.

This epilogue explores the multifaceted experiences of migration and mobility among college students of immigrant origin, revealing their intricate journeys through higher education systems. The authors note the various ways this volume documents the processes by which students from immigrant backgrounds navigate oppressive and exclusionary spaces, seeking avenues of belonging and success on their campuses. Closing on a note of audacious hope, the epilogue presents the narratives of two focal participants, Cecilia and Manuela, interviewed as part of a larger study of the effects of membership in a student-led mutual support network among aspiring teachers of color in a historically white institution. These student leaders articulated themes of belonging and exclusion, the necessity of building community, the centrality of their personal and professional identities as women of color, and the importance of creating and maintaining sources of emotional support and encouragement. Through their narratives, we see ways their community-building efforts serve as a form of resistance so that they can thrive in places that were never designed for them.

The children of Afghan refugees provide important insight into the way that universities can be crucial sites of racial formation. This chapter explores how second-generation Afghan American college students navigate their racial and ethnic identities and build community on a college campus. The results are drawn from a qualitative study conducted at George Mason University, located in Northern Virginia, which is home to one of the largest Afghan diaspora populations in the country. Findings revealed the disparate impact that the withdrawal of the US military and subsequent arrival of tens of thousands of Afghan refugees into the United States had on students, the role of family and collectivist culture in their decision-making, how ethnic student organizations were a method of ethnic preservation and co-ethnic support, and how attending a university with a large Afghan student population exposed internal conflicts within the community. This chapter provides important insight for universities aiming to create inclusive environments and support the diverse experiences of second-generation immigrants, Muslim, and Afghan American students.

This chapter analyzes the historical legacies of union-founding to establish whether these legacies had enduring consequences for subsequent patterns of teacher mobilization. It examines the development trajectories of teacher organizations, from 1900 to 1979. It analyzes several themes: church–state conflict over mass public schooling in the early twentieth century; contrasts between the political incorporation of industrial workers and teachers; patronage politics in public schools and the education bureaucracy; teacher struggles for labor codes and professional autonomy; and restrictions on political rights under nondemocratic regimes. It is shown that corporatist legacies set unions on different paths, but these legacies do not fully account for contemporary patterns of teacher mobilization.