Resources

Teaching and learning become rich and exciting when any classroom makes room for and taps into the resources of diverse backgrounds, contexts, and identities. Also, it’s the right thing to do. When I began teaching online, I knew classroom diversities might increase due to broadening access, but I suspected student diversities could also be less visible due to the individuating and sometimes alienating aspects of technology. Yet in online contexts, foregrounding and integrating room for diversities into teaching and learning is surprisingly easier than you might imagine. Online students have more ways to participate in conversation, experience greater equity from the outset, and often exhibit deeper transparency. How can an online educator make more of diversities in a virtual classroom and tap into their teaching and learning potential? Increased access to classroom diversities was an important draw for me into online education because I teach at a theological school in the far eastern corner of Tennessee. During a 2014 sabbatical, I traveled throughout the United States, Europe, Africa, and Mexico. In many places, vital and thriving ministry was happening without good access to theological education. Many of the people I encountered would not be able to relocate to my school. I began imagining a classroom where a male, Kenyan micro-lender in the Mathare slum district of Nairobi and a Chicago-based, African American woman in urban church planting could have access to theological education and both be in the same room learning together and from one another. The kind of diversities I imagined while traveling now exist in my online contexts, and I aim to embrace them as an asset in theological education. How can online teaching and learning make room for greater diversities? Begin by welcoming student engagement that makes connections to students’ own contexts and backgrounds. Then, incentivize, encourage, and reward these connections across your course design: in opening introductions; discussion posting; student selection of readings, assignments, and projects; and integrative exercises like papers or exams. In all learning tasks and rubrics, objectives should include making resourceful connections to one’s own history, identity, or current contexts. Keep students engaged and invested while simultaneously making learning moments more tangible by emphasizing the contribution of student diversities to learning. Doing so makes diversities a more visible and constructive part of teaching and learning. Students are invited to witness connections happening in the work of their peers and are drawn to do the same. They begin to hear, learn, and feel challenged by their own and others’ diverse perspectives and orientations. Yet, I’ve learned along the way that the contours of online classroom diversities are unpredictable and can unfold in unexpected ways. For example, a white, male American student in an online course entered imagining he had no resources from his own context for theological learning. He named his rural and poor upbringing, and his ministry experience in both conservative and progressive West Virginia congregations as limitations. In response, other students helped him recognize the displacements and pressures that were indeed shaping his theological convictions. Identity in online contexts includes complex and shifting aspects of race, sexuality, trauma, geography, economics, citizenship, displacements, and more. Often, students’ own self-awareness around this multi-layered complexity is shifting in the midst of a course and in response to readings, peer-to-peer engagement, and/or assignments. Hosting spaces where students are invited to name what they are learning from their own contexts and backgrounds and from those of their peers becomes vital. Online learning tends to feel more “democratic” because it allows all learners to enter discussions under similar parameters. But online educators must be aware of persisting inequities. Safety can be heightened by using netiquette guidelines and checking in personally with students when they shift into overly aggressive or suddenly silent postures. Yet, if “democratic” means majority opinions rule, minoritized students will be susceptible to overt and subtle forms of silencing by their peers, while being more exposed and vulnerable in the process. In my experience, subtle forms of deflecting peer voices happens when students champion what they already (think they) know, rather than sharing what they are actively learning. I prioritize and reward only the latter. Surfacing diversities that already exist, and making room for more diversities, enhances learning in the online classroom. It’s risky and needs adaptive and adapting postures, a self-aware and engaged teacher, and rethinking of all elements of course design. I remind students regularly that part of our learning together is about how theological engagement and conversation becomes welcoming and constructive. In that engagement and conversation, every person is a vital and valued contributor in the process of teaching and learning. Making more of diversities enhances every potential for learning, empathy, and relevance.

The pursuit of higher education has become increasingly popular among students of many different backgrounds and cultures. As these students embark on higher learning, it is imperative for educators and universities to be culturally sensitive to their differing individualities. Student Culture and Identity in Higher Education is an essential reference publication including the latest scholarly research on the impact that gender, nationality, and language have on educational systems. Featuring extensive coverage on a broad range of topics and perspectives such as internationalization, intercultural competency, and gender equity, this book is ideally designed for students, researchers, and educators seeking current research on the cultural issues students encounter while seeking higher education. (From the Publisher)

Games have become popular tools to enhance learning in both educational and business environments. Analyzing the link between games and their results on students can help provide advances for learning initiatives in the future. Enhancing Education and Training Initiatives Through Serious Games is an essential reference source that examines the impact that games and simulations have within different learning environments. Featuring in-depth discussions on relevant topics including self-reporting surveys, project management techniques, academic training, and game design, this publication is an ideal resource for academicians, students, business owners, and professionals that are interested in discovering the advances of serious gaming techniques. (From the Publisher)

Gaming technologies have become effective learning tools within education. Gamification has the potential to increase engagement using real-time feedback on learning activities, which allows students to reflect on their completion and retention of a learned activity. Gaming Innovations in Higher Education: Emerging Research and Opportunities is an essential reference work featuring the latest scholarly knowledge on the application of different gaming techniques within education to make learning activities more enjoyable and successful. Including research on a number of topics such as virtual laboratories, interaction media, and intrinsic and extrinsic motivation, this publication is ideally designed for academicians, researchers, and students interested in the benefits of providing an entertaining and intellectually-stimulating learning environment. (From the Publisher)

As educational standards continue to transform, it has become essential for educators to receive the support and training necessary to effectively instruct their students and meet societal expectations. To do this, fostering education programs that include innovative practices and initiatives is imperative. Preparing the Next Generation of Teachers for 21st Century Education provides emerging research on innovative practices in learning and teaching within the modern era. While highlighting topics such as blended learning, course development, and transformation practices, readers will learn about progressive methods and applications of 21st-century education. This book is an important resource for educators, academicians, professionals, graduate-level students, and researchers seeking current research on contemporary learning and teaching practices. (From the Publisher)

In Teaching for Purpose, Heather Malin explores the idea of purpose as the purpose of education and shows how educators can prepare youth to live intentional, fulfilling lives. The book highlights the important role that purpose—defined as “a future-directed goal that is personally meaningful and aimed at contributing to something larger than the self”—plays in optimal youth development and in motivating students to promote the cognitive and noncognitive skills that teachers want to instill. Based on a decade of research conducted at the Stanford University Center on Adolescence, the book explores how educators and schools can promote purpose through attention to school culture, curriculum, project learning, service learning, and other opportunities. Malin argues for expansive thinking on the direction schools should take, especially in terms of educating students to be creative, innovative, and self-directed critical thinkers. The book includes profiles of six organizations working in schools across the US that have made purpose development a priority. Infused with the engaging voices of purposeful youth, Teaching for Purpose offers a fresh, inspirational guide for educators who are looking for new ways to support students to succeed not only in school, but in life. (From the Publisher)

Click Here for Book Review What are the foundational moments of meaningful scholarship of teaching and learning (SoTL) projects? How do teacher-scholars collect, develop, and share useful insights about student learning? How do they work through the pinch points that frustrate, confuse, or elude many SoTL practitioners? By unpacking SoTL processes through rich narratives that illustrate what they look like, this collection offers inspiration to anyone at any stage of engagement with SoTL. This book takes discussions of SoTL to a new level. Its subtitle reflects the microscopic lenses SoTL processes can apply to student learning experiences to understand how they happen, what they look like, what they mean, and what we can do about them. Going beyond definitions, how-to, theory, and debates about methods and standards, the contributors offer a SoTL primer documenting how practitioners have intentionally thought through key moments in their work. These procedural vignettes present powerful examples of what doing SoTL looks like when done well. The authors represent a range of disciplines (the humanities, social sciences, natural sciences, and professions) and a mixture of familiar and unfamiliar names. Nancy Chick has selected contributions that compellingly illuminate why their authors focused on a particular critical moment, the questions they asked as they refined their approaches, and the theoretical and observational tools they employed to conduct their research. Each introduces a specific critical moment in doing SoTL, taking the reader through the author’s reflections, concerns, and choices in doing meaningful SoTL work. The aim is to support potential practitioners, inform educational developers who teach new SoTL practitioners, and inspire experienced SoTL scholars to reflect on their own practice. This is a compelling collection for anyone interested in practitioner reflection, intentional design, and advancing the field of SoTL and the quality of teaching and learning. (From the Publisher)

Click Here for Book Review Even on good days, teaching is a challenging profession. One way to make the job of college instructors easier, however, is to know more about the ways students learn. How Humans Learn aims to do just that by peering behind the curtain and surveying research in fields as diverse as developmental psychology, anthropology, and cognitive neuroscience for insight into the science behind learning. The result is a story that ranges from investigations of the evolutionary record to studies of infants discovering the world for the first time, and from a look into how our brains respond to fear to a reckoning with the importance of gestures and language. Joshua R. Eyler identifies five broad themes running through recent scientific inquiry—curiosity, sociality, emotion, authenticity, and failure—devoting a chapter to each and providing practical takeaways for busy teachers. He also interviews and observes college instructors across the country, placing theoretical insight in dialogue with classroom experience. (From the Publisher)

Advocates for the rights of people with disabilities have worked hard to make universal design in the built environment “just part of what we do.” We no longer see curb cuts, for instance, as accommodations for people with disabilities, but perceive their usefulness every time we ride our bikes or push our strollers through crosswalks. This is also a perfect model for Universal Design for Learning (UDL), a framework grounded in the neuroscience of why, what, and how people learn. Tobin and Behling show that, although it is often associated with students with disabilities, UDL can be profitably broadened toward a larger ease-of-use and general diversity framework. Captioned instructional videos, for example, benefit learners with hearing impairments but also the student who worries about waking her young children at night or those studying on a noisy team bus. Reach Everyone, Teach Everyone is aimed at faculty members, faculty-service staff, disability support providers, student-service staff, campus leaders, and graduate students who want to strengthen the engagement, interaction, and performance of all college students. It includes resources for readers who want to become UDL experts and advocates: real-world case studies, active-learning techniques, UDL coaching skills, micro- and macro-level UDL-adoption guidance, and use-them-now resources. (From the Publisher)

Click Here for Book Review Teaching Readers in Post-Truth America shows how postsecondary teachers can engage with the phenomenon of “post-truth.” Drawing on research from the fields of educational and cognitive psychology, human development, philosophy, and education, Ellen C. Carillo demonstrates that teaching critical reading is a strategic and targeted response to the current climate. Readers in this post-truth culture are under unprecedented pressure to interpret an overwhelming quantity of texts in many forms, including speeches, news articles, position papers, and social media posts. In response, Carillo describes pedagogical interventions designed to help students become more metacognitive about their own reading and, in turn, better equipped to respond to texts in a post-truth culture. Teaching Readers in Post-Truth America is an invaluable source of support for writing instructors striving to prepare their students to resist post-truth rhetoric and participate in an information-rich, divisive democratic society. (From the Publisher)