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Mentor in a Manual: Climbing the Academic Ladder to Tenure

For assistant professors envisioning tenure, this completely revised publication is about as close to being a mentor as a book can be! Using a representative institution and a prototype assistant professor, Mentor in a Manual provides invaluable counsel for those on the tenure track. Twelve chapters take the new hire through each step with advice on making it through the mazes. (From the Publisher)

Becoming Multicultural: Personal and Social Construction through Critical Teaching

This book argues that becoming multicultural is a process of recursive cycles that must involve confrontational dialogue for change. Multicultural education texts often describe multiculturalism as a process where a person develops competencies of perceiving, evaluating, believing, and doing in multiple ways. However, the dynamic, fluid and changing qualities central to the process of interpersonal interaction often results in mastery of a product, focusing on lists of static features of generalized groups rather than on the individuals who make up those groups. Rather than listing and describing objectified features of cultural groups from a theoretical view, this book details the interactions of 21 ethnically diverse individuals through one classroom experience. First, the personal histories and meanings constructed from lived experience are detailed and analyzed to reveal the ways in which personal identity constructions influence learning events in a singular classroom context. Second, from this analysis, the author develops a conceptual model for the process of becoming multicultural. Then the author applies the model to herself and describes specific ways in which interaction with these individuals has influenced her present teaching strategies for expecting and facilitating confrontational dialogue toward developing education that is multicultural. Specifically the book addresses the questions: 1) What does it mean to become multicultural? 2) What does it mean to be culturally sensitive? 3) How can the process of multiculturalism be facilitated in a classroom setting? 4) What is the teacher's role in the multicultural classroom? 5) What are some expected/predictable outcomes of a multicultural classroom? Includes bibliography and index. (From the Publisher)

Coming of Age in Academe: Rekindling Women’s Hopes and Reforming the Academy

At what price entry? Philosopher of education Jane Roland Martin contends that feminist scholars have traded in their idealism for a place in the academy. In Coming of Age in Academe, she looks at the ways that academic feminists have become estranged from women. Determining that this is the "membership fee" the academy exacts on all its members, she calls for the academy's transformation. Part one explores the chilly research climate for feminist scholars, the academic traps of essentialism and aerial distance, and the education gap in the feminist text. In part two, Martin likens the behavior of present-day feminist scholars to nineteenth-century immigrants to the United States and examines their assimilation into the world of work, politics and the professions. She finds that when you look at higher education, you see what a brutal filter of women it is. Part three highlights the academy's "brain drain" and its containment of women and then proposes actions both great and small that aim at fundamental change. In this rousing call to action, Martin concludes that the dissociation from women that the academy demands--its "entrance fee"--can only be stopped by radically reforming the gendered system on which the academy is based. (From the Publisher)

The Time Bind: When Work Becomes Home and Home Becomes Work

In her remarkable new book, The Time Bind, Arlie Hochschild brings us startling news of the ways in which home is being invaded by the time pressures and efficiencies of work, while the workplace is, for many parents, being transformed into a strange kind of surrogate home. For three years at a Fortune 500 company, she interviewed everyone from top executives to factory hands, sat in on business meetings, followed sales teams onto golf courses, and trailed working parents and their children through their days. In a series of vivid portraits, Hochschild paints a surprising picture of couples as time thieves, children as emotional bill-collectors, spouses as efficiency experts, parents who feel like helpful mothers and fathers mainly to their workmates, and women who - like generations of men before them - flee the pressures of home for the relief of work. Hochschild's groundbreaking study exposes our crunch-time world and reveals how, after the first shift at work and the second at home, comes the third, and hardest, shift of repairing the damage created by the first two. (From the Publisher)

Leadership Without Easy Answers

The economy uncertain, education in decline, cities under siege, crime and poverty spiraling upward, international relations roiling: we look to leaders for solutions, and when they don't deliver, we simply add their failure to our list of woes. In doing do, we do them and ourselves a grave disservice. We are indeed facing an unprecedented crisis of leadership, Ronald Heifetz avows, but it stems as much from our demands and expectations as from any leader's inability to meet them. His book gets at both of these problems, offering a practical approach to leadership for those who lead as well as those who look to them for answers. Fitting the theory and practice of leadership to our extraordinary times, the book promotes a new social contract, a revitalization of our civic life just when we most need it. Drawing on a dozen years of research among managers, officers, and politicians in the public realm and the private sector, among the nonprofits, and in teaching, Heifetz presents clear, concrete prescriptions for anyone who needs to take the lead in almost any situation, under almost any organizational conditions, no matter who is in charge, His strategy applies not only to people at the top but also to those who must lead without authority--activists as well as presidents, managers as well as workers on the front line. (From the Publisher)

The Reflective Practitioner: How Professionals Think in Action

A leading MIT social scientist and consultant examines five professions—engineering, architecture, management, psychotherapy, and town planning—to show how professionals really go about solving problems. (From the Publisher)

The Teaching Professor, Volume 15, Number 6
The Teaching Professor, Volume 15, Number 5

Designed as a resource for persons interested in improving the quality of teaching and student learning, this book covers aspects of the teaching-learning process that can be altered with relative ease. Practical suggestions are given in chapters focusing on concepts known to have a strong influence on student learning. The chapters include: (1) new ideas on teaching and learning in higher education; (2) exceptionally effective college teachers (identifying and interviewing them, feedback, etc.); (3) learning and evaluation (traditional and alternative uses, critical elements, subject area differences, etc.); (4) mastery learning; (5) motivation and early success (predicting college success, importance of first semester and first test, etc.); (6) time use and student involvement (John Carroll's model, Benjamin Bloom's ideas on learning rate, allocated versus engaged time, etc.); (7) student support services (faculty contact, tutorial services, computer-assisted instruction, etc.); and (8) staff development (collegial sharing, program characteristics, etc.).

Grant Coaching

The Wabash Center understands our grants program as a part of our overall teaching and learning mission. We are interested in not only awarding grants to excellent proposals, but also in enabling faculty members to develop and hone their skills as grant writers. Therefore we offer grant coaching for all faculty interested in submitting a Wabash Center Project Grant proposal.

Sarah Farmer, Ph.D.
Associate Director, Wabash Center
farmers@wabash.edu