Resources

Doctors, architects, lawyers and engineers are all trained in schools that emphasize technique but neglect the key element of artistry that distinguishes the true professional. Today's professional is a drudge, mechanically applying privileged knowledge to rote tasks. That is Schon's diagnosis of higher education, and as a remedy he recommends learning by doing. To teach skills of improvisation and problem-framing, he feels our universities should borrow the methods used in art studios, dance conservatories, athletics coaching, craft appenticeships and psychoanalytic training. In all these settings, a dialogue between student and coach in a low-risk atmosphere encourages creativity. Despite its academic prose, this primer by an MIT urban studies professor will enlighten students, teachers and professionals. Schon concludes the book (a sequel to The Reflective Practitioner with a description of his attempt to create a ``studiolike'' curriculum for MIT's city planning courses. (From the Publisher)

This important book includes more than twenty essays by faculty from different disciplines, each articulating the multiple dimensions and components of multicultural teaching. Teachers discuss their own teaching methods and classes in terms of course content, process and discourse, and diversity among faculty and students in the classroom. This volume integrates new scholarship that reflects a more expansive notion of knowledge, and suggests new ways to communicate with diverse populations of students. (From the Publisher)

This book provides a brief history of the most recent wave of assessment in higher education, particularly focused on the faculty role in assessment. It traces major conceptual, methodological, political and policy advances in assessment over the past decade. The authors suggest some ways of thinking about assessment, strategies, and next steps which they view as necessary for more clearly envisioning assessment as a faculty role. (From the Publisher)

Every teacher wants to improve teaching effectiveness, and a good place to begin is by understanding the various ways students perceive and process information. Learning Style Perspectives addresses the learning needs of the students, taking into consideration individual preferences for absorbing and retaining material in an auditory, visual, or tactile manner. Lynne Celli Sarasin gives an overview of major theorists and synthesizes those theories into an approach to teaching which is easily applied in any college or university classroom setting. The characteristics of auditory, visual, and tactile learners are described along with appropriate teaching techniques, student reactions, and evaluation of each style of learning. Includes easily referenced charts of descriptors, teaching strategies, and student behaviors. (From the Publisher)

Using a feminist poststructural focus, Ropers-Huilman (Louisiana State Univ.) investigates feminist teachers' positions and styles in order to examine the practices of a theory of teaching. She explores teachers' reflections on power and gender, how they operate in the classroom, and their experiences as innovators in feminist teaching. No one particular approach or process is emphasized. The application of theory to practice allows the 22 teachers who were interviewed to explore and debate the interaction between students and teachers. The complexity of investigating feminist practices, rather than just the teachers themselves, allows a more flexible look at the issues and the social forces defining their interpretations. Ropers-Huilman explores factors contributing to the many forms of feminist teaching and how power affects and shapes the experience. (From the Publisher)

College and university teachers who struggle to connect instruction with students' real world experiences have found much of value in service learning. This volume of New Directions for Teaching and Learning presents an academic conception of service learning, described as a pedagogical model that intentionally integrates academic learning and relevant community service. Contributors provide a conceptual structure for academic service learning, describe successful programs, and discuss issues that faculty and administrators must consider as they incorporate service into courses and curricula. This is the 73rd issue of the quarterly journal New Directions for Teaching and Learning. For more information on the series, please see the Journals and Periodicals section. (From the Publisher)

Taken ad seriatim, these essays present a wide range of differing theoretical positions and practical strategies for reform. It is our hope that, when read from this point of view, they will evoke the kind of very specific discussions, debates and actions that will be required if real change is to occur. (From the Publisher)

What is the purpose of higher education, and how should we pursue it? Debates over these issues raged in the late nineteenth century as reformers introduced a new kind of university - one dedicated to free inquiry and the advancement of knowledge. In the first major study of moral education in American universities. Julie Reuben examines the consequences of these debates for modern intellectual life. Based on extensive research at eight universities - Harvard, Yale, Columbia, Johns Hopkins, Chicago, Stanford, Michigan, and California at Berkeley - Reuben examines the aims of university reformers in the context of nineteenth-century ideas about truth. She argues that these educators tried to apply new scientific standards to moral education, but that their modernization efforts ultimately failed. By exploring the complex interaction between institutional and intellectual change, Reuben enhances our understanding of the modern university, the secularization of intellectual life, and the association of scientific objectivity with value-neutrality. (From the Publisher)

It is no longer clear what role the University plays in society. The structure of the contemporary University is changing rapidly, and we have yet to understand what precisely these changes will mean. Is a new age dawning for the University, the renaissance of higher education under way? Or is the University in the twilight of its social function, the demise of higher education fast approaching? We can answer such questions only if we look carefully at the different roles the University has played historically and then imagine how it might be possible to live, and to think, amid the ruins of the University. Tracing the roots of the modern American University in German philosophy and in the work of British thinkers such as Newman and Arnold, Bill Readings argues that the integrity of the modern University has been linked to the nation-state, which it has served by promoting and protecting the idea of a national culture. But now the nation-state is in decline, and national culture no longer needs to be either promoted or protected. Increasingly, universities are turning into transnational corporations, and the idea of culture is being replaced by the discourse of "excellence." On the surface, this does not seem particularly pernicious. The author cautions, however, that we should not embrace this techno-bureaucratic approach too quickly. The new University of Excellence is a corporation driven by market forces, and, as such, is more interested in profit margins than in thought. Readings urges us to imagine how to think, without concession to corporate excellence or recourse to romantic nostalgia within an institution in ruins. The result is a passionate appeal for a new community of thinkers. (From the Publisher)

Provides organized materials intended to help groups of individuals on campus toward focused discussions of the role of ethnic diversity in the daily life of colleges and universities. The (welcome) aim is to help such groups find their own common ground, not to tell them what that common ground should be. Produced by the Project on Campus Community and Diversity of the Accrediting Commission for Senior Colleges and Universities of the Western Association of Schools and Colleges. (From the Publisher)