Resources

In Learning from Our Lives: Women, Research, and Autobiography in Education, eleven women who are eminent educational researchers speak out intimately, and from these autobiographical accounts, readers experience how research that emerges from diverse women's lives shapes (and reshapes) educational knowledge and discourse. The book offers thoughtful insights into how the field of education might change as women assume positions of intellectual leadership. The distinguished list of contributors includes Kathryn H. Au, Concha Delgado-Gaitan, Maxine Greene, Patricia J. Gumport, Gloria Ladson-Billings, Ellen Condliffe Lagemann, Martha Montero-Sieburth, Anna Neumann, Nel Noddings, Penelope L. PEterson, and Linda f. Winfield. The book will be an important resource for graduate courses in foundations, teacher education, philosophy of education, women and education, research methods, sociology of education, and politics and education; general readers will find it fascinating reading as well. (From the Publisher)

This book is the written record of seven feminists' commitment to practice what they preach-to make incarnate both the fierce and the whimsical character of that which is born in every shared effort to teach and learn with minds set on justice. (From the Publisher)

A Professor's Work attempts to clear up questions about the role of the college professor in society by providing a field study of what a professor actually does. The author organizes a year of his work and his colleagues into an overview of a years teaching, research, and service. The first section describes the service work, including a depiction of the search for a new faculty member, and a committee that investigated the appearance of extremely large general educational classes. Then the teaching section focuses on the teaching and evaluation of a single course, and the dealing with problems encountered by the wide variety of students who attend an urban university. Finally, the research section exposes the relationship of writing and publishing to the conflicts and interactions of scholars and with the impact the study had on the university community. The author also includes a representation of community activities, the relationship of a professor's work to his family life, and an evaluation of professors studied against two theoretical models of professional behavior and activity. (From the Publisher)

This book seeks to be responsible both to biblical scholarship and to pedagogical inquiry. It focuses on wisdom texts in the Bible (Proverbs, Job, Ecclesiastes, Ecclesiasticus, Wisdom of Solomon, and the Synoptic Gospels) and on inferences about teaching and learning that can be drawn from these texts. Acknowledging that we cannot reconstruct the practices of the wise teachers of the biblical tradition with historical methods, Meltbert nevertheless argues that the wisdom texts presumably embody not only what these teachers wanted readers to learn but also how it was to be learned. What do the literary forms and content of these texts presuppose, entail, or imply about reader-learners and about learning and teaching processes? Are some teaching-learning approaches more suitable than others for these texts or more likely to foster engagement with particular themes? Using a variation of reader-response criticism (the "readerly approach"), Melchert engages the wisdom texts (whose authorship is anonymous and whose particular historical-cultural context cannot be reconstructed with any confidence) in an effort to determine why the sages said and taught as they did and what contemporary teachers and learners might pick up from them about teaching, learning, and being wisely religious in a postmodern world. (From the Publisher)

Here is a book for the millions of Christians who want to make a vital connection between their faith and their lives. This practical book provides a way for all of us to experience greater meaning in life and a more tangible sense of God's creative presence. (From the Publisher)

In this candid and delightful memoir, Alvin Kernan recalls his life as a student, professor, provost, and dean during turbulent decades of change in the hallowed halls of Columbia, Williams, Oxford, Yale, and Princeton. His vividly remembered account is a unique personal story and more--it is also a history of what has been won, and lost, in the culture wars of the second half of the twentieth century. (From the Publisher)

With a mixture of autobiographical facts and literary insights, the author (English, Kalamazoo Coll.) supports her belief that the ``motherheart must be at the center of all teaching.'' Teachers should ``create an environment where human beings can grow in and toward the fullness of themselves.'' This type of teaching is exemplified by the women teachers in higher education of the mid-1800s who, as the author found following her ``calling'' to Kalamazoo College, were the leaders in a profession that often brings teacher and student together in crisis situations, situations that the author believes are better confronted from a feminist perspective. This is a well-written, often humorous account of one woman's entry into the feminist side of academe. (From the Publisher)

In an era in which the teaching enterprise is freighted with tactics, techniques, and methods, M. Robert Gardner guides us back to the spirit of teaching. He writes especially about the dilemmas and challenges of teaching, about how it feels to be trying to teach. A clinical teacher of psychiatry and psychoanalysis for over four decades, Gardner is both enlightening and entertaining in relating his own teacherly struggles, including his efforts to harness the teacher's ever-present furor to teach" and thence to discern and engage his students' "hidden questions." Written in simple but evocative prose, On Trying to Teach is a wonderful companion volume to Self Inquiry (1983). In the earlier work, Gardner explored the play between patient and analyst; now, in the same gracefully self-reflective voice, he turns to the play between student and teacher. Gardner's provocative, often iconoclastic musings will goad teachers of all subjects to reflect anew on their calling, on what exactly it means to teach. Analysts and other clinical readers will take special pleasure in the humane psychoanalytic sensibility that not only infuses Gardner's own teaching, but shapes his approach to the most basic questions about teaching and learning in general. (From the Publisher)

This book is as much, perhaps more, an exhortation to action than a piece of social science research. In an age when the idols of the tribe or the centrality of self are aggrandized, is it possible to restore a sense of human purpose that extends beyond place or person? To answer this question a core of 100 people, determined as "capable of sustaining commitment to the common good in the face of global complexity," were interviewed, not so much to "prove hypotheses" but to develop "fertile insights" for further research and action in order to "kindle a common fire and forge a new synthesis of practical wisdom." This requires people who can regard space as hospitable, inhabited by mentors and others capable of demonstrating that one can and ought to make a difference in the world; people who can develop habits of mind to engage others and a symbolic world, including the world of story and faith, capable of sustaining a committed consciousness. Two "interludes" describe those who exhibit that concern for the commons, and an epilogue suggests an individual and collective strategy to nourish the sense of the collective. (From the Publisher)

One of the most significant changes in theological education during the past two decades has been a dramatic rise in the enrollment of women in the seminaries. In this ground-breaking book, Rebecca Chopp explores the impact these new voices are having on theological education. She looks at how women and men are actually forming a new Christian praxis through their engagement with feminist practices and thought that often exist outside the sphere of official recognition. This important book will be a starting point for dialogue about the role theological education will play as this new Christian praxis emerges. (From the Publisher)