Resources

The number of part-time faculty members is increasing steadily, to the point that most colleges and universities could not function efficiently without them. The evening and weekend availability of adjunct faculty enables us to expand class schedules to serve the educational needs of nontraditional students, and their expertise offers students important real-world perspectives.Yet there is often a lack of preparation or support for their vital role. Best Practices for Supporting Adjunct Faculty is written for a full range of academic leaders, including instructional administrators, department chairs, and directors of teaching and learning centers. It showcases proven initiatives at a variety of institutional types—two- and four year, public and private—that help achieve the needs of adjunct instructors, while increasing their effectiveness within institutions’ existing delivery systems. This book provides research data on the initiatives highlighted, and valuable ideas for institutions expanding their professional development opportunities for part-time instructors—thus enhancing student learning and improving accountability outcomes. Contents include: * Deepening our understanding of adjunct faculty * Ensuring an effective start for adjunct faculty * Supporting adjunct faculty through face-to-face and online programming * Mentoring adjunct instructors in a variety of approaches * Building community and a sense of mission * Analysis of orientation, pre-service training, recognition, and comprehensive professional development programs for adjunct faculty * Portraits of proven programs and strategies for implementing initiatives atyour institution * An adjunct professor’s perspective on the benefits of supporting your part-timers’ teaching (From the Publisher)

Practically focused, easily accessible, this book is directly relevant to the academic environment in which department chairs operate. The authors—internationally known experts in academic administration—conducted interviews with department chairs and heads at 38 academic institutions from across the U.S. and Canada, public and private, two-year and four-year. The extensive interviews resulted in four thematic patterns that covered the overarching issues department chairs face: quality, change, culture, and leadership. Each chapter is packed with practical advice and concludes with questions and resources to help chairs develop constructive responses to the myriad issues facing them. (From the Publisher)

New to this edition is the blending of a neuroscientific understanding of motivation and learning with an instructional approach responsive to linguistically and culturally different adult learners. Based on the most current educational and biological research, Enhancing Adult Motivation to Learn addresses issues that focus on deepening learner motivation and helping adults to want to learn. In the book, Raymond J. Wlodkowski offers a clear framework and sixty practical, research-based strategies that are designed to elicit and encourage learner motivation. In addition, the book is filled with practical examples, guidelines for instructional planning, and cutting-edge ideas for assessment and transfer of learning. (From the Publisher)

The first generation of “digital natives” – children who were born into and raised in the digital world – are coming of age, and soon our world will be reshaped in their image. Our economy, our cultural life, even the shape of our family life will be forever transformed. But who are these digital natives? How are they different from older generations – or “digital immigrants” – and what is the world they’re creating going to look like? In Born Digital, leading internet and technology experts John Palfrey and Urs Gasser offer a sociological portrait of this exotic tribe of young people who can seem, even to those merely a generation older, both extraordinarily sophisticated and strangely narrow. Based on original research, Born Digital explores a broad range of issues, from the highly philosophical to the purely practical: What does identity mean for young people who have dozens of online profiles and avatars? Should we worry about privacy issues – or is privacy even a relevant concern for digital natives? How does the concept of safety translate into an increasingly virtual world? Is “stranger-danger” a real problem, or a red herring? What lies ahead – socially, professionally, and psychologically – for this generation? A smart, practical guide to a brave new world and its complex inhabitants, Born Digital will be essential reading for parents, teachers, and the myriad of confused adults who want to understand the digital present – and shape the digital future. (From the Publisher)

The Guide to Service-Learning Colleges and Universities is a wonderful resource for college-bound students interested in making a difference in their communities and gaining valuable hands-on experience while earning college credit. All institutions chosen for the Guide excel at providing students genuine service-learning experiences and programs. The Guide contains a complete explanation of service-learning using licensed information from the National Service-Learning Clearinghouse, colorful articles from colleges and universities around the country, and exciting examples of how students from New York to Los Angeles and everywhere in between are becoming involved. Also included is a directory of all selected schools, admissions and service-learning contact information, easy-to-read college profiles, college fast facts, and course spotlights highlighting specific academic courses. Everything students need to know about what service-learning is, how they can get involved, and which colleges excel at service-learning is found in this comprehensive student-friendly guidebook. (From the Publisher)

In Safe Hands describes the evolution of voluntary service learning for teachers in the developing world. Hope One World (HOW), a charity of Liverpool Hope University, has provided needs-based service education for teachers in SOS schools in Africa, India and Sri Lanka for 20 years. The book is both uplifting and practical. Written by staff and students who took part in projects, it describes the inception of the charity and how it has developed. Each chapter starts with a pen portrait of a person who played a key role in a project, then discusses common issues such as: the collaborative development with Liverpool Hope staff of courses by the overseas teachers for their own staff; the opportunity for students to live in a safe environment for a month with the children and staff in schools in Africa, India or Sri Lanka and have a structured experience of work placement; accountability to the main funding agency; and HOW's passionate engagement with issues of social justice. Co-published by Trentham with Hope One World, winner of the Queen's Anniversary Award for service learning. (From the Publisher)

Sid Brown brings a Buddhist perspective into the classroom to explore the ethical quandaries, lived experiences and intimacy of teaching. Addressing such topics as attention, community, rage, wonder, consumerism, and kindness, Brown demonstrates how this centuries-old tradition can enrich and inform classroom life. (From the Publisher)

Describes the emergence of powerful fields of consciousness that influence students’ learning and personal transformation. This pioneering work in teaching and transpersonal psychology explores the dynamics of collective consciousness in the classroom. Combining scientific research with personal accounts collected over thirty years, Christopher M. Bache examines the subtle influences that radiate invisibly around teachers as they work—unintended, cognitive resonances that spring up between teachers and students in the classroom. While these kinds of synchronistic connections are often overlooked by traditional academics, Bache demonstrates that they occur too frequently and are too pointed to be dismissed as mere coincidence. Drawing upon Rupert Sheldrake’s theory of morphic fields, Bache proposes that well-taught courses generate “learning fields” around them, forms of collective consciousness that can trigger new insights and startling personal transformations. Moving beyond theory, this book is rich with student stories and offers practical, hands-on strategies for teachers who want to begin working with these learning fields to take their teaching to a more conscious level. (From the Publisher)

* Reveals continuing barriers to success for women students * Offers remedies that will benefit all students What are the realities behind recent press reports suggesting that women students have taken over higher education, both outnumbering males and academically outperforming them? Does women's development during college diverge from the commonly accepted model of cognitive growth? Does pedagogy in higher education take into account their different ways of knowing? Are there still barriers to women's educational achievement? In answering these questions, this book's overarching message is that the application of research on women's college experiences has enriched teaching and learning for all students. It describes the broad benefits of new pedagogical models, and how feminist education aligns with the new call for civic education for all students. The book also examines conditions and disciplines that remain barriers for women's educational success, particularly in quantitative and scientific fields. It explores problems that arise at the intersection of race and gender and offers some transformative approaches. It considers the impact of the campus environment—such as the rise of binge drinking, sexual assault, and homophobic behaviors—on women students' progress, and suggests means for improving the peer culture for all students. It concludes with an auto-narrative analysis of teaching women's studies to undergraduates that offers insights into the practicalities and joys of teaching. At a time when women constitute the majority of students on most campuses, this book offers insights for all teachers, male and female, into how tohelp them to excel; and at the same time how to engage all their students, in all their diversity, through the application of feminist pedagogy. (From the Publisher)

* An inspirational and holistic approach to teaching by a renowned Latina scholar * Defines seven steps to unlocking the potential of teachers and their students * Deeply informed by the author's educational journey as a minority woman from a background of rural poverty Laura Rendon is a scholar of national stature, known for her research on students of color and first-generation college students, and on the factors that promote and impede student success. The motivation for the quest that Laura Rendon shares in this book was the realization that she, along with many educators, had lost sight of the deeper, relationship-centered essence of education, and lost touch with the fine balance between educating for academics and educating for life. Her purpose is to reconnect readers with the original impulse that led them to become educators; and to help them rediscover, with her, their passion for teaching and learning in the service of others and for the well being of our society. She offers a transformative vision of education that emphasizes the harmonic, complementary relationship between the sentir of intuition and the inner life, and the pensar of intellectualism and the pursuit of scholarship; between teaching and learning; formal knowledge and wisdom; and between Western and non-Western ways of knowing. In the process she develops a pedagogy that encompasses wholeness, multiculturalism, and contemplative practice, that helps students transcend limiting views about themselves; fosters high expectations, and helps students to become social change agents. She invites the reader to share her journey in developingsentipensante pedagogy, and to challenge seven entrenched agreements about education that act against wholeness and the appreciation of truth in all forms. She offers examples of her own teaching and of the classroom practices of faculty she encountered along the way; as well as guidance on the challenges, rewards and responsibilities that anyone embarking on creating a new vision of teaching and learning should attend to. Though based on the author's life work in higher education, her insights and approach apply equally to all teaching and learning contexts. (From the Publisher)