Resources

Today's colleges and universities face increasing pressure to develop programs and curricula that will teach students how to handle life's unexpected challenges and events. For educators and policymakers, this urgency will only grow as new global trends emerge and social expectations change. This timely book explores what it means for learners to transform themselves and for educators to foster essential skills for learning, leading, teamwork, and adapting with integrity in college and beyond. The authors begin by defining "learning that lasts" as the successful integration of learning, development, and performance. Drawing on two decades of longitudinal studies of student learning in the highly acclaimed curriculum at Alverno College and on leading educational theories, Marcia Mentkowski and her associates set forth a theory of deep and durable learning that includes practical strategies for enabling a wide range of students to cultivate integrative and expansive capabilities across a lifetime. They present concrete suggestions on the ways that faculty and academic staff can work together to forge effective curricula, design innovative programs, implement key institutional goals, and renegotiate the college culture. They analyze compelling research results, collaborative inquiry by consortia of institutions, and twenty-five years of experience to illuminate what educators and administrators must achieve so that increasingly varied learners can realize their goals and potential. Learning That Lasts intertwines educational theory, practice, and research by demonstrating how learning frameworks can shape curricula, teaching strategy, and assessment. It presents core curriculumprinciples for practice and it also systematically tests assumptions about student learning, development, and performance. This landmark volume provides a detailed blueprint for understanding and promoting purposeful, responsible contribution to work, personal, and civic life. (From the Publisher)

Here, at last, is a volume that explores and analyzes learning as a distinctive experience for women. The authors are all established adult education professionals and recognized authorities on women as adult learners. Together, they examine and compare theimportance of such factors as sense of identity, self-esteem, social world, and power in what and how women learn. Drawing from extensive research and scholarship, as well as from personal stories, they reveal the numerous ways in which women experience the learning process. They explain, for example, how women often become personally connected to the object and process of learning. They also analyze these different experiences to show education and training professionals how to better design and conduct programs for women. Women as Learners offers specific recommendations to improve all types of formal and informal adult educational programs, including literacy education, counseling and support groups, workplace training, and professional development activities. Concise yet comprehensive, this long-awaited book provides the most current principles for practice. (From the Publisher)

A ready reference to learning process in college students, or lack there of, and how instructors can help them transform their own education for the better. This comprehensive resource offers readers a proven approach to strengthening persistence and achievement in post-secondary education. (From the Publisher)

This book seeks to increase our understanding of those informal circumstances in which people learn. Adult educators, Professor Foley argues, ought not to neglect the importance of the incidental learning which can take place when people become involved in voluntary organisations, social struggles and political activity. In developing this argument, he uses case studies from the USA, Australia and Third World countries and embracing very diverse political, environmental, women's, and workers' struggles. He shows how involvement in social action can help people to unlearn dominant, oppressive discourses and learn instead oppositional, liberatory ones. He relates these processes of informal learning in contested contexts to current thinking and practice in adult education and points the way to a more radical agenda. For adult educators, community workers and others working with socially engaged citizens, the insights and lessons of this book ought to be especially useful as they try to develop their own practice in such contexts. (From the Publisher)

This primer on authentic education explores how mind and heart can work together in the learning process. Moving beyond the bankruptcy of our current model of education, Parker Palmer finds the soul of education through a lifelong cultivation of the wisdom each of us possesses and can share to benefit others. (From the Publisher)

Ways of Thinking, Ways of Teaching presents a new model of teacher thinking and action–one that explains teacher decisions about what and how to teach. Combining qualitative and quantitative data drawn from observations and interviews with urban teachers of writing, George Hillocks argues that teacher knowledge is not simply transferred from some source to the teacher. Rather, it is constructed on the basis of assumptions about epistemology, students, and subject matter. The fact of this construction helps to explain why teacher education has had so little effect on changing the classroom behavior of teachers from one generation to the next. Unlike other research on teacher thinking, this book examines what actually happens in composition classrooms, presenting large chunks of representative transcripts for analysis. (From the Publisher)

In this book, the distinguished historian James Axtell offers a compelling defense of higher education. Drawing on national statistics, broad-ranging scholarship, and delightful anecdotes, Axtell reminds us of the dedication of professors and the increasing demands placed on them. He describes the professional work cycle, the evolution of scholarship in the past three decades, the importance of "habitual scholarship," and the best ways to judge a university. He discusses, with imagination and wit, the many pleasures of academic life, including intercollegiate sports, the "benign pathology" of loving and collecting books, teaching and service outside the classroom, life in college towns, and working vacations. Axtell persuasively confronts the major critics of higher education, arguing that they have perpetuated misunderstandings of tenure, research, teaching, curricular change, and professional politics. (From the Publisher)