Resources

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)

At the end of his 1994 book, The Soul of the American University, George Marsden advanced a modest proposal for an enhanced role for religious faith in today's scholarship. This "unscientific postscript" helped spark a heated debate that spilled out of the pages of academic journals and The Chronicle of Higher Education into mainstream media such as The New York Times, and marked Marsden as one of the leading participants in the debates concerning religion and public life. Marsden now gives his proposal a fuller treatment in The Outrageous Idea of Christian Scholarship, a thoughtful and thought-provoking book on the relationship of religious faith and intellectual scholarship. More than a response to Marsden's critics, The Outrageous Idea of Christian Scholarship takes the next step towards demonstrating what the ancient relationship of faith and learning might mean for the academy today. Marsden argues forcefully that mainstream American higher education needs to be more open to explicit expressions of faith and to accept what faith means in an intellectual context. Contemporary university culture is hollow at its core, Marsden writes. Not only does it lack a spiritual center, but it is without any real alternative. He argues that a religiously diverse culture will be an intellectually richer one, and it is time for scholars and institutions to take the intellectual dimensions of their faith seriously and become active participants in the highest level of academic discourse. (From the Publisher)

Whether you're new to teaching or an experienced veteran, this is a book you'll want to keep handy. From pre-term activities right through final exams, grading, and evaluation, 147 Practical Tips covers all the important phases of the teaching process. Educators use 147 Practical Tips for a quick idea to spice up a class. Teaching and learning centers keep shelf copies as a reference for faculty and teaching assistants. And Chairs and Deans give the book to their faculty during orientation. Take advantage of the special pricing to the right so your colleagues can share these teaching tips. (From the Publisher)

Alasdair MacIntyre—whom Newsweek has called "one of the foremost moral philosophers in the English-speaking world"—here presents his 1988 Gifford Lectures as an expansion of his earlier work Whose Justice? Which Rationality? He begins by considering the cultural and philosophical distance dividing Lord Gifford's late nineteenth-century world from our own. The outlook of that earlier world, MacIntyre claims, was definitively articulated in the Ninth Edition of the Encyclopaedia Brittanica, which conceived of moral enquiry as both providing insight into and continuing the rational progress of mankind into ever greater enlightenment. MacIntyre compares that conception of moral enquiry to two rival conceptions also formulated in the late nineteenth century: that of Nietzsche's Zur Genealogie der Moral and that expressed in the encyclical letter of Pope Leo XIII Aeterni Patris. The lectures focus on Aquinas's integration of Augustinian and Aristotelian modes of enquiry, the inability of the encyclopaedists' standpoint to withstand Thomistic or genealogical criticism, and the problems confronting the contemporary post-Nietzschean genealogist. MacIntyre concludes by considering the implications for education in universities and colleges. (From the Publisher)