Resources
Since 1986, when K. Patricia Cross first began to write and speak about Classroom Research, faculty across the country have been inspired by her vision of a learner-centered, teaching-directed approach aimed at understanding and improving student learning. In the intervening five years, hundreds of college teachers at dozens of institutions have taken up her challenge to become "Classroom Researchers," engaging in the systematic and ongoing study of teaching and learning. This volume of New Directions for Teaching and Learning is a collection of examples illustrating a range of ways Classroom Research can be used in a variety of disciplines and settings. It is a gathering of teachers' stories that are also teaching stories, narratives that distill hundreds of hours of experience into a few pages. Whether they are faculty, faculty developers, or academic administrators, readers can profit by learning from the hard-won experience and insights distilled in these early lessons from success. This is the 46th issue of the quarterly journal New Directions for Teaching and Learning. (From the Publisher)
Order and Partialities explores the complex and problematic relations among postcolonial literatures and theories, the people who teach them at the university level, and the institutions in which they are taught. Each essay traces a path through these relations; yet each also comments on the fundamental paradox and contradiction within which these relations operate: that they must engage with the powerful, labyrinthine apparatus of Western cultural hegemony--a set of systematic, interpretative procedures corresponding to, and in service of, a regime of ideological expectations and its institutional representatives--in order to disengage themselves from its operations. There is no way to teach these relations without entering, oneself, into the entanglements of postcolonial power. (From the Publisher)
Four primary factors are relevant to social and cultural diversity in the college classroom: students, teachers, course content, and teaching methods. Faculty can use understanding of these factors and their interrelationships to facilitate learning in an increasingly multicultural environment.
This book offers a close-up look at theological education in the United States today. The authors' goal is to understand the ways in which institutional culture affects the outcome of the educational process. To that end they undertake ethnographic studies of two seminaries - one evangelical and one mainline Protestant. These studies, written in a lively journalistic style, make up the first part of the book and offer fascinating portraits of two very different intellectual, religious, and social worlds. The authors then go on to examine these disparate environments and suggest how, in each case, school culture acts as an agent of educational change. This unique and practical study should be of great interest to both students and scholars of American religion, to theological educators, and to educators generally. (From the Publisher)
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The majority of undergraduate instructors hold contingent appointments, a term used here to include not only the non-tenure-track part-time faculty but also many instructional staff who lack faculty status, an increasing proportion of full-time non-tenure track faculty, and a substantial number of graduate student teaching assistants. This volume seeks to foster a dialogue, long overdue, between those who believe that the academy has failed to give adequate respect and support to undergraduate instruction and those who believe that the academy has failed to give adequate support and respect to the selection and terms and conditions of employment of undergraduate instructors. It may be that the increasing dependence on contingent appointments imperils undergraduate learning no less than it imperils the future of the academic profession. (From the Publisher)
Wabash Center Staff Contact
Sarah Farmer, Ph.D.
Associate Director
Wabash Center
farmers@wabash.edu