Resources

Drawing on both her roots in Kentucky and her adventures with Manhattan Coop boards, Where We Stand is a successful black woman's reflection - personal, straight forward, and rigorously honest - on how our dilemmas of class and race are intertwined, and how we can find ways to think beyond them. (From the Publisher)

This book is a first-person, pedagogical reflection on what the author - an applied philosopher with an appointment in a professional school - has learned about being a teacher and a student, over a thirty-five-year career in a "public ivy" university. This narrative recounts a series of life-changing, intellectual, and emotional insights gleaned over three decades from students, colleagues, scholars, and mentors. The author's personal story traces the struggle to create a passionate spirituality of teaching, one that reframes traditional notions of religion and spirituality, as well as one that attempts to correct conventional misunderstandings of postmodernism. Nash's story is every educator's story - lived in unique ways at every level of teaching. (From the Publisher)

Interest in church-related higher education has increased greatly in recent years. Teaching as an Act of Faith is a practical guidebook on strategies to incarnate mission and epitomize theological and theoretical reflection in the classroom. In original essays, distinguished practitioners from fourteen liberal arts disciplines and Roman Catholic, Wesleyan, Anabaptist, Lutheran, and Reformed traditions demonstrate how they have been able link religious values more directly to their teaching. (From the Publisher)

Here is one teacher's story about his personal journey toward a safe classroom for his students. He explains how new technologies, rising education costs - but most important personal, inward changes - forced a reexamination of his teaching methods and goals. (From the Publisher)

"All of us teach," begins Mark Schwehn's anthology of readings on teaching and learning. Teaching is woven into the fabric of our everyday lives. It includes training children, forming habits and characters, witnessing to a way of life, nurturing reflection and imagination, and imparting goals as well as facts and skills. Teachers are parents, grandparents, spouses, friends, neighbors, pastors, siblings, and co-workers, as well as professional educators. Most people know good teaching when they encounter it, Schwehn argues, and few would identify it with a list of techniques. Although good teaching often seems closer to an art than a skill, teaching is not an occult practice, but a public activity that can be improved by practice and questioning and demonstrated by good examples. Through Schwehn's choice of examples and deft introductions, Everyone a Teacher is an argument for a rich account of good teaching. It invites reflection yet avoids the abstractions of psychology and educational theory. From Socrates teaching a Greek slave boy geometry to Mark Twain's river-boat pilot on the Mississippi, from a real classroom of kindergarten children in Chicago to the parents who tenderly raise their child in Agee's A Death in the Family, the readings remind us of the historical and human importance of teaching and of the qualities of good teaching. These readings are intended to help us all think about the meaning of teaching and learning, for the sake of improving our teaching in everyday life. (From the Publisher)

Teaching is more, much more, than getting up in front of a class full of students and presenting information to them. It is, affirms distinguished educator, writer and lecturer Gloria Durka, a true vocation, "a calling that makes claims on our souls". Her book, which is written for teachers of all grade levels, is a journey into the soul of education and the heart of the teacher. In seven chapters, she covers such ideas as teaching from the heart; teaching courageously, creatively, wisely and morally; and, the greatest challenge of all, facing one's own vulnerabilities. Each chapter ends with prayers and reflections that help readers enrich their spirituality. (From the Publisher)

Exiles From Eden sounds a call to the American academic community to begin seeking a solution to the many problems facing higher education today by rediscovering a proper sense of its vocation. Schwehn argues that the modern university has forgotten its spiritual foundations and that it needs to reappropriate those foundations before it can creatively and responsibly reform itself. The first part of the book offers a critical examination of the ethos of the modern academy, especially its understanding of knowledge, teaching, and learning. Schwehn then formulates a description of the "new cultural context" within which the world of higher learning is presently situated. Finally, he develops a view of knowledge and inquiry that is linked essentially to character, friendship, and community. In the process, he demonstrates that the practice of certain spiritual virtues is and always has been essential to the process of genuine learning - even within the secular academy. Schwehn critiques philosophies of higher education he sees as misguided, from Weber and Henry Adams to Derek Bok, Allan Bloom, and William G. Perry, Jr., drawing out valid insights, while always showing the theological underpinnings of the so-called secular thinkers. He emphasizes the importance of community, drawing on both the secular communitarian theory of Richard Rorty and that of the Christian theorist Parker Palmer. Finally, he outlines his own prescription for a classroom-centered spiritual community of scholars. Exiles From Eden examines the relationship between religion and higher learning in a way that is at once historical and philosophical and that is both critical and constructive. It calls for nothing less than a reunion of the intellectual, the moral, and the spiritual virtues within the world of higher education in America. It will engage all those concerned with higher education in America today: faculty, students, parents, alumni, administrators, trustees, and foundation officers. (From the Publisher)

This report on the process of graduate and professional student socialization provides information that can be of use to graduate program faculty and administrators, professional associations, state legislatures, and professional licensing bodies charged with assuring clients that well qualified professional practitioners are being prepared in the nation's universities. It addresses implications of issues raised in current literature for designing more effective graduate programs. Socialization in graduate school refers to the processes through which individuals gain the knowledge, skills, and values necessary for successful entry into a professional career requiring an advanced level of specialized knowledge and skills. The first two sections, "The Professional and Socialization" and "Conceptualizing Socialization in Graduate and Professional Programs," describe the various elements of this socialization process, drawing from research on adult socialization, role acquisition, and career development. The third section, "A Framework for the Socialization of Graduate and Professional Students," presents a conceptual model of graduate and professional student socialization that assumes socialization occurs through an interactive set of stages. The fourth section, "Institutional Culture: Recurrent Themes," illustrates several changing patterns in graduate education that are exerting pressure for reform. The fifth section, "Institutional Culture and Socialization: Differences among Academic Programs," contrasts socialization processes across academic program goals, faculty expectations, and student peer culture. The final section, "Easing the Perilous Passage," discusses modifying the graduate degree program and faculty and administrator roles, increasing diversity, and offering support to students. (From the Publisher)