Resources

Transformative Dimensions of Adult Learning describes the dynamics of how adults learn--and how their perceptions are transformed by learning--as a framework for formulating educational theory and practice. It presents an in-depth analysis of the ways in which adults learn, how they make meaning of the learning experience, and how their lives can be transformed by it. (From the Publisher)

The second edition of Learning in Adulthood integrates the most important contributions to adult learning in the last decade. The result is an updated, comprehensive synthesis of what we now know about adult learning--including the context in which it takes place, who the participants are, what they learn and why, the nature of the learning process itself, major theoretical developments, and much more. Sharan Merriam and Rosemary Caffarella reveal how sociocultural influences can create specific developmental needs and interests, and how such social factors as race, class, and gender can shape learning. From this background, they construct a more inclusive perspective on adult learning, guiding readers toward new ways of thinking about teaching, learning, and the broader social implications of adult education. (From the Publisher)

Each year, hundreds of academics begin new faculty appointments. Some are just launching new careers, while others are advancing to new campuses. As faculty members and their institutions struggle to ease the passage to a new environment, they are faced with critical questions. What are the challenges of the transition process? And how does that process differ for first-time faculty and seasoned faculty? Drawing on a study conducted by researchers at the National Center on Postsecondary Teaching, Learning, and Assessment, Faculty in New Jobs shows how faculty and institutions can work together to ease the transition to a new job and facilitate the process of mastering academic work. Robert Menges and his associates offer practical, real-world advice covering all phases of the faculty career--from the difficult early process of settling in, to becoming socially and academically established, to ultimately building the institutional supports necessary for a successful career. The authors provide newcomers with valuable strategies for adapting to campus culture, building professional relationships, establishing a teaching style, and successfully juggling the diverse responsibilities of the faculty role. They also explain what institutions can do to select, support, and evaluate faculty more effectively. They describe the institutional climate that supports effective faculty transitions into and out of academia. They discuss what administrators can do to help faculty better understand and participate in the institutional culture, while also challenging and changing it in positive ways. (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)

The monographs collected in this volume are based on research into the role of chief academic officers in North American theological schools. (From the Publisher)

Presents the results of a research study which surveyed the state of the deans of 75 percent of North American theological schools. The study profiles, who the deans are the types of work that they due, and their role in the administration and governance of schools. Reasons for high turnover are explored and recommendations are made to help schools encourage and develop leadership qualities in academic deans. (From the Publisher)

Critical Pedagogy and Predatory Culture is a major contribution to the radical literature on culture, identity and the politics of schooling, especially as it addresses the challenge and the promise of school and social reform through what the author calls a "critical multiculturalism." The author's approach to what he calls "predatory culture" and his exploration of recent debates over the role of public institutions and the state within such culture offers the discerning reader a unique combination of neo-marxist and post-structuralist theory--referred to by the author as "resistance of postmodernist critique." (From the Publisher)

There was a time not long ago when the only complaints students levied against professors were that they assigned too much work or that their lectures were delivered in a soporific monotone. Today, radical changes in the composition of the university, the ongoing revision of canons and curricula, and the politicization of knowledge have profoundly altered the landscape, introducing an identity-based definition of credibility as an entirely new precondition of authority. As a result, questions that previous generations of educators never considered have taken on a central importance: Can whites teach African American literature effectively and legitimately? What is at issue when a man teaches a women's studies course? How effectively can a straight woman educate students about gay and lesbian history? What are the political implications of the study of the colonizers by the colonized? More generally, how does the identity of an educator affect his or her credibility with students and with other educators? In incident after well-publicized incident, these abstract questions have turned up in America's classrooms and in national media, often trivialized as the latest example of PC excess. Going beyond simplistic headlines, Teaching What You're Not broaches these and many other difficult questions. With contributions from scholars in a variety of disciplines, the book examines the ways in which historical, cultural, and personal identities impact on pedagogy and scholarship. Teaching What You're Not gets at the heart of the ongoing debates about identity politics in the academy, and society at large. (From the Publisher)

A searching exploration of a century and a half of higher education in American culture. This book will enliven, and inform, the wide-ranging discussion now taking place. Bringing together eleven new essays--most published here for the first time--on the secularization of American, British, and Canadian higher education, this text maps some of the major contours of a largely unexplored topic. It focuses on the histories of leading universities since the late nineteenth century, analyzing the transition from an era when organized Christianity and its ideals had a major role in leading institutions of higher education to an era when they have almost none. This book is an important resource for students of religion and the history of education. (From the Publisher)