Resources

Edna Chun and Alvin Evans’ work on the department chair and diversity fills a gap in the literature on academic leadership. They argue that the academic chair is the pivot for diversity in higher education, particularly as increasing numbers of minoritized students enter the academy. Student diversity contrasts with the overwhelming white maleness of academic administrators, including 90 percent of chairs. Nevertheless, chairs are poised to enhance both the student experience of diversity and diverse faculty diversity development. The authors used an online survey and interviewed chairs across the nation to assess the current level of progress in diversity, to address barriers to diversity, to understand environmental factors that can promote or impede diversity, and to articulate strategies for developing diversity. They were particularly interested in talking with minoritized chairs and in the impact of diversity on student learning. By diversity, they mean race and ethnicity as well as gender and sexual orientation. Chun and Evans recognize that department chairs face many limitations in doing diversity work. Changing upper administrations, maintaining harmony in departments, and other issues take up much chair attention. The work begins with an overview of inequality in America, arguing that the role of higher education is to address this social landscape. They examine the challenges in higher education itself, from the impact of MOOCs to globalization and how department and institutional politics can block chairs’ diversity efforts. Serving students is key: Since minoritized students are at-risk for non-completion, campus climate, including diverse faculty and curriculum, can make a difference in those students’ lives. They also argue, in chapter 6, that interactional diversity is an essential dimension among high-impact college experiences for all student growth. Chairs, who occupy a double role as administrator and faculty, span boundaries and are potential bridge-builders. As both buffers and connections between faculty and administration, skilled chairs have the capacity to reflect on and transform these boundaries to mobilize the various stakeholders towards action. Chairs report to deans (analyzed in chapter 4), and trust in that that relationship is crucial for developing diversity, though the “revolving door” of administration in some institutions poses problems. The discussion of issues that minoritized chairs face and the voices of these persons is an important contribution of this book. These chairs are always proving their competence and may be taken less seriously than their white counterparts. A minority chair may be the only departmental voice for diversity. In terms of sexual orientation, some chairs are limited by institutions’ unwillingness to appoint or policies against appointment of LGBTQI chairs. Like minority faculty, minority chairs face lower student evaluations (see chapter 5), may be isolated and vulnerable, and are under great stress. Another key contribution is strategies, offered by chairs and the authors. Each chapter ends with strategies a chair may implement to address diversity. The final chapters offer suggestions for developing diversity plans, including helpful examples, and additional strategies for overcoming limitations. The description of higher education today, the voices of the chairs, and the multiple strategies offered create a rich study, insightful and practical, for aiding chairs to become leaders for a diverse academy in a global context.

Patricia Pérez and Miguel Ceja published Higher Education Access and Choice for Latino Students as part of the Routledge Research in Higher Education series. Grounded in sociological studies of Latino students and their educational choices, the book’s essays highlight the multitude of challenges that confront Latino students in trying to successfully complete higher education. The essays are split into three sections. The first is “Home, Elementary, and Secondary Context”, part two is “Political Context and Postsecondary Choice,” and part three is “Model College Access and Transition Programs.” This structure allows the reader to see how a variety of issues contribute to how and why Latinos make specific choices in higher education. The first section focuses on essays that examine cultural and familial context. In “Sixth-Grade Teacher’s Perceptions of the College-Bound Student” the essay’s authors point to how teachers’ perceptions of what constitutes a “college-bound” student and an emphasis on “good behavior” heavily shapes whether a Latino student is deemed to be worthy of being on the college prep track or not. In the essay “Constructing College Choice” the authors examine how Latino Catholic high school students are coached to understand their “worth” in terms of potential scholarship money, and the pitfalls as well as benefits of this approach. In the second section, the essays focus on political issues affecting Latino college choice such as gender norms and expectations in “Latino/a Students’ College Destinations” and the issues that block access for undocumented students in “Rising Voices.” In the third and final section, the focus is on college access and programs that promote it, such as summer bridge programs for Latino students as described in “Supporting the College Transition Process and Early Academic Success” and in “Community Cultural Wealth and The Latino/a College Choice.” There are fourteen essays in the book; only a few are mentioned here to highlight some of the main themes. The essays cover a wide range of issues regarding Latino student college access, and each section builds upon the previous section, starting with home life and ending with bridge programs at college itself. Overall, the essays are fairly technical, based in sociological research, and this may make it hard for some readers outside the discipline to get though them all. Yet they provide a wide-angle lens on a huge variety of issues that face Latino students in trying to even consider going to college, let alone applying to one. This book is clearly geared towards those who work in the academic field of sociology and who are exploring issues around Latino college choice, and as it is expensive, is recommended for library collections. It is an informative book for educators as it gives them a varied and broad view on all the obstacles that Latino students in higher education face and offers ideas as how to overcome those obstacles in order help more Latino students achieve success.

If teaching is an art its effectiveness rests in the work of many dedicated hands – a conviction that contributors of Coteaching and Other Collaborative Practices in the EFL/ESL Classroom unanimously share. There are many helpful books on teaching but this one is unique in its aim and concrete ways it offers “teachers to collaborate effectively” (xviii). Andrea Honigsfeld and Marla G. Dove achieve their goal of providing “an accessible resource long awaited by educators whose individual instructional practice and/or institutional paradigm shifted to a more collaborative approach to language education” (xviii). Ingeniously compiled, the twenty-six essays, divided into four parts, examine the: rationale for teacher collaboration to support ESL/EFL instruction, presenting current, classroom-based, practitioner-oriented research studies and documentary accounts related to coteaching, coplanning, coassessing, curriculum alignment, teacher professional development, and additional collaborative practices, and offering authentic teacher reflections and recommendations on collaboration and coteaching. (xviii) The authors’ objective is not only to help inquiring instructors teach English as second or foreign language, but also to become effective leaders, learners, and coteachers – a global task. The collaboration encouraged for teachers to exercise transcends teaching English to include other disciplines such as mathematics and biology. Each contributor uniquely provides evidence of how a theory about teaching might be translated into concrete and tangible outcomes. As is evident from the book’s title, collaborations extend beyond just teaching English to fruitful interdisciplinary teaching. The teamwork called for is neither utopian nor essentialist. Rather the authors highlight insights gained from their own experiences of exercising collaborative learning, teaching, and mentorship, highlighting strengths and potential weaknesses.The latter are often symptoms of a lack of deep commitment to collaborative learning and teaching. The art of becoming effective teachers rests on the participants’ willingness to develop a teachable spirit. Put differently, a good teacher is also a student in many ways – one who benefits from the wisdom and knowledge of collaborating with teachers, especially twenty-first century educators who face an overwhelming technological age with a slew of information making it very difficult for a teacher to be fully up-to-date in her or his own field of expertise, much less another field. From a linguistic perspective, to learn English as a second language is also to learn one’s native language – two languages at once. In other words, to grasp English as a foreign or second language, students actually learn more about the syntax of their native languages. As an immigrant myself, who learned to speak and write in English as a foreign language, and now teach and use ancient biblical languages in my writing projects, I treasure the insights and cogent arguments each author made in this priceless volume. In a nutshell, the contributors strongly advocate collaborative or coteaching as a practical and intellectual approach to sharpening one’s teaching pedagogy. To that end, this book enshrines the wisdom of effective learning and teaching -- an invaluable resource that will revolutionize the art of learning to teach for years to come if taken seriously.

This book contains fourteen essays written by deans of teacher education programs in Canada who are leading change initiatives in the midst of turbulent times in North-American post-secondary education. The book examines reforms in programs designed to prepare effective teachers of the future and address the challenges that deans face in leading these initiatives. A number of the essays emphasize the need for attention to diversity in teacher preparation programs. Although one essay describes diversity in language acquisition programs (25-30), more frequently authors emphasize the need to add Indigenous perspectives to curricula. One chapter examines a program designed to increase the numbers of Indigenous teachers and the awareness of Indigenous culture among non-Native students in teacher training programs, but also raises more fundamental questions about the ways that hegemonic discourses about ethnicity and gender are reproduced in education systems at large (7-12). Another chapter discusses the way that teacher education reforms need to come to grips with white privilege and racism: “Beyond ‘content’ we ask students to ask ‘what is knowledge, how is it privileged, and who does it benefit and why?’” (75). On a different front, one dean grapples with the need to add instructional technology amidst financial constraints (43-48), though another chapter promotes advances in technology use: “relational technology” for building effective bonds between teachers and learners; “cultural technology” which help students overcome the “ethnocentric monoculturalism” of education in the West; and “assessment technologies” that measure student engagement, learning attitudes, and learning strategies (55-60). Other essays focus on the dean’s role in leading effective change. One chapter describes deans as middle managers who walk a tightrope between university executives on the one hand and faculty on the other, in a context where key external constituents doubt that faculty can be trusted to change on their own initiative (61-66). Lack of good decanal leadership negatively affects faculty productivity and damages organization culture, while rapid turnover at this level is associated with increased faculty cynicism about change (31-32). Several authors note the importance of collaborative, democratic decision-making in building a common vision for reform. Some of the strategies described include restructuring departments and committees to maximize faculty participation in decision-making; appointing a faculty steering committee in order to foster widespread engagement; and maximizing faculty choice and autonomy by choosing to change an area that faculty either identify as needing reform or is widely perceived as non-threatening. One author stresses the need to establish a good case for change and the timing of the change (88), while another emphasizes collaborative scanning of the environment (34), a practice identified elsewhere as a crucial factor in building an agile organizational culture. The dean of a faith-based teacher education program advises deans to nurture the quality of their inner life during seasons of change by practicing mindfulness, humility, stillness and attentiveness, and a reorienting gratitude that focuses on abundance versus scarcity (37-42). According to these deans, greater attention to diversity in curricula, relationship-centered pedagogies, and participative, collaborative faculty-led decision-making are the mainstays of successful innovation in teacher education programs. My own experience in leading a large-scale change initiative in a seminary suggests that these same ingredients can be successfully applied in other educational contexts.

Student Motivation and Quality of Life in Higher Education provides readers a constructive overview of the relationship between student motivation and quality of life (QOL) in higher education. In five parts comprising twenty-three chapters, the book presents a wide range of topics and emphases. Part I, “Student perspectives,” offers two student case studies (one undergraduate, one graduate), relating their perspectives and experiences as to influences on personal QOL and learning motivation. These reflections set the stage for Parts II through V. Part II focuses on “Theoretical perspectives” concerned with matters of learning motivation, QOL and higher education, and applied positive psychology in higher education (chapters 3-5, respectively). Part III attends to “Diversity perspectives on motivation to learn and quality of life,” containing ten chapters encompassing wide-ranging variables such as international student well-being, higher education views among various nations and people groups, health-related and disability impact on QOL and motivation to learn, and effects of optimism and positive orientation on student well-being and learning. Part IV centers on “Promotion of motivation to learn and quality of life in higher education,” comprising six chapters examining and reflecting on improving academic QOL via counseling, resilience in students and teaching resilience skills via a computer-assisted learning website, eLearning support for mental health and perceived self-efficacy, a peer support program for student well-being, curriculum implications resulting from QOL and motivation and professionalism studies, and reclamation of light and liberty and learning related to higher education and student stress. Part V, the final chapter (23) “Synthesis of motivation to learn and quality of life,” presents the editors’ conclusion and a proposed integrative QOL and student motivation model. Evident strengths of this book include the important (and apparently original) intentional integration of QOL and student motivation, supported with substantive research, reflection, and proposals. Additional strengths of the book include the breadth of the general subject matter and variety of global perspectives. Chapters vary somewhat in terms of research, reflection, and presentation quality (not atypical of edited volumes). One apparent (and somewhat paradoxical) weakness concerns the book’s striving for – and generally achieving – various and useful diversities while also limiting its general ethos to mainly (though not exclusively) medical and health-related students, curricula, and attention. Broadening the research and application to include a wider base of students, disciplines, and curricula (more liberal arts, for instance) would foster greater connectivity within broader academia (undergraduate and graduate) – enhancing the appeal and merit of this already fine tome. Of particular importance is the dynamic “evolving model of education-related quality of life” (210), summarizing well the overall research findings and important reflective and application possibilities pertaining to student motivation and QOL in higher education. The model avoids reductionistic tendencies owing to its complex, symbiotic, and holistic orientation. I recommend this book as a constructive resource for higher education institutions (public and private): the book represents a strong effort toward advancing its stated goal of combining “the concepts of motivation and quality of life with the view to enriching the educational sector” (212).

All of higher education, with community colleges leading the way, must sense and respond to the need to evolve to serve a new and increasingly diverse student body.  We live in an era where students will increasingly require myriad new approaches to higher education in order for every student to realize their potential (8). That is the central thesis of The Urgency of Now: Equity and Excellence, one volume in a series sponsored by the Association of Community College Trustees. Chapter one sets forth key arguments in favor of the need to transform community colleges in response to changing student demographics. Chapter two is concerned with the shifting role of accreditation in higher education. In chapter three, the authors address the current system’s reliance upon the credit hour as a time-based model for allocating academic course credit and implore administrators to transition to competency-based models. Chapter four offers a comprehensive blueprint for creating an innovative community college-wide outcomes assessment system. Finally, chapter five targets the critical need for administrators to engage faculty in new and meaningful ways in order to successfully implement positive change that will result in improving instructor teaching and student learning. Today there are increasing demands from public and private sector stakeholders for greater accountability and transparency by colleges and universities (19-20). Thus, “to insure equity in the form of economic opportunity for current and future generations” and to “provide demonstrable learning outcomes that position students for success,” there is an urgent need for new models. At the heart of this call for transformation is the notion that higher education must become a student-centered system rather than defaulting to the traditional faculty-centered model. Community colleges must be at the epicenter of determining what the essential ingredients of such a system should be (113). The Urgency of Now argues that higher education must not simply react to changing demographics in America but it must embrace this phenomenon. The priority for the twenty-first century community college must be student needs and student learning (113). This will require that faculty abandon the function of serving primarily as “fountains of knowledge” and instead embrace a new role as “curators of content” and “tour guides of information” (115). Understanding context is critical. America currently finds itself in the midst of the 2016 United States presidential election cycle. College affordability, rising student debt, and declining funding for public colleges and universities are issues now under debate by candidates for the nations' highest political office. The election comes at a time when the gulf that exists between those students and families who lack the economic resources needed to pay college tuition versus those who can readily afford the cost of higher education continues to rise.  The Urgency of Now adds to the political discussion by identifying some of the efforts championed by U.S. president Barack Obama to increase community college enrollment and strengthen public-private partnerships that will improve employment opportunities for those who complete a certificate or degree program (5-6). One must acknowledge that, in the face of opposition from his political adversaries, Barack Obama has advanced the goal of achieving equal access to college for all Americans regardless of race, ethnicity, or socio-economic status. Readers will find that this book offers a timely contribution to public discourse on these topics of concern to many among the American electorate.   An average book informs but an outstanding book sparks self-reflection and may even compel the reader to act in new and bold ways. The Urgency of Now: Equity and Excellence is an outstanding read that is recommended for anyone concerned with the plight of higher education. This book presents reasoned arguments which support the goal of reforming community colleges chiefly as a matter of sound public policy and implicitly to further the Judeo-Christian imperative which calls for social justice.

Martin Nguyen Associate Professor, Faculty Chair for Diversity Fairfield University In a time when it is of paramount importance to assert and witness that black lives matter, how do we go about preparing our Islam courses that all too often afford little to no time at all for the societal.

The authors of 147 Practical Tips for Emerging Scholars describe their work as offering much “to initiate or advance your success as a scholar, and nothing to lose as you invest a short time to read it” (22).  This is a bold claim for a slender volume. However, this clear, honest, unpretentious work lives up to that promise. Authors Kathleen King and Ann Cranston-Gingras identify a key problem with the structure of academia: Those who seek to engage with it too often find themselves without guidance: the professional lives of doctoral faculty, new faculty, and experienced faculty (the three groups the book addresses) are often unsupervised and lack critical guidance for developing and establishing professional reputations, maintaining schedules, pursuing tenure, and avoiding mistakes. Guidance for making good professional decisions is what 147 Practical Tips seeks to provide. The key word which characterizes these tips is “practical”; the tips range from advice about scheduling to reminders to spell-check all correspondence. Some of the tips are about personal development; the authors focus not just on writing, but writing well, learning to vary styles and approaches. Others concern etiquette, with the dos and don’ts of collaborating with peers and contacting publication editors. The final section encourages scholars to apply this knowledge in the service of other emerging scholars, becoming the mentors to students and colleagues we wish we had had. Throughout, there is the acknowledgment that not all of the tips are relevant to all persons at all times; instead, King and Cranston-Gingras intend this to be a re-read resource, to be returned to as often as necessary. Though both authors work in education departments, the tips are meant to be applicable across disciplines – which is one of the book’s unfortunate weaknesses, as most tips are by necessity wholly unspecific. In addition, the section on technology already feels a touch outdated, as though it were targeted to an older audience, one which could use reminders that Dropbox can facilitate collaboration and all-caps text reads like shouting. For a short, cross-discipline guidebook, however, this book provides a significant amount of helpful hints and general guidance. Even in its limited scope, it encourages readers to take the extra steps they need to learn about publications, trends, and significant works inside their own disciplines, and then to apply the information here as necessary. The advice is often simple but rarely simplistic; even the most basic suggestions are good reminders of things too easy to forget in what can be chaotic pursuits. An emerging scholar myself, I would recommend this book to others on the path to establishing academic careers, and I expect to find myself opening it again.

Cláudio Carvalhaes Associate Professor McCormick Theological Seminary In memory of William Klug and Ioan Petru Culianu Pedagogies are concerned with the study and practice of teaching and learning. Pedagogies are ways of organizing society as it has to do with ways of thinking and valuing life, shaping emotions, defining sense,