Resources

What is it like for women of color to teach in predominantly white college classrooms? This anthology is about the pedagogical implications of diversifying the faculty of higher education. It compiles narratives by women professors of color who interrogate their classroom experiences in predominantly white U.S. campuses to examine the impact of their social positions upon their classroom practices and their teaching-learning selves. The authors reflect upon their unique classroom challenges and talk about the teaching-learning strategies they use to find rewards in their interactions with students. This anthology explores the larger question of how social distinctions shape classroom social life and will be a resource for those concerned with enabling the diversification of the faculty of institutions of higher learning. (From the Publisher)

More Asian women are entering higher education in the UK than ever before, and the number looks likely to rise. Their engagement with higher education reflects widespread changes in the attitudes and cultural expectations of their various communities, as awareness grows of the greater long-term value associated with continuing in education. Today they face different challenges and share different ambitions from those of their mothers and grandmothers. This book examines the experiences of young Asian women in higher education and the difficulties they face because they have no shared background of engagement with the British university system. It considers what motivates them to succeed and describes their strategies for building support networks that help them succeed with the university setting and actively shape their lives. Taking a theoretical and empirical perspective Kalwant Bhopal examines the diversity of Asian women's experiences in higher education and provides original and valuable insights into their experience. She explores the friendship and support networks that women turn to whilst at university as well as familial support. Especially striking are her findings about the effect of higher education traditional practices such as arranged marriages and dowries, and about the empowerment generated by changing the economic status of women within British Asian society. Asian Women in Higher Education: shared communities offers a new and original perspective on the educational experiences of Asian women at university. It will be invaluable to teachers, postgraduate and undergraduate students and academics interested in the study of gender, ethnicity, identity and higher education. (From the Publisher)

This book provides a provocative look at the issues and controversies surrounding grade inflation, and, more generally, grading practices in American higher education. The contributors confront the issues from a number of different disciplines and varying points of view. Topics explored include empirical evidence for and against the claim that there is a general upward trend in grading, whether grade inflation (if it exists) is a problem, which ethical considerations are relevant to grading, and whether heavy reliance on anonymous student evaluations of teaching excellence has a distorting effect on grading practices. Finally, the contributors offer contrasting perspectives on the prospects for reform. "As state and federal agencies begin to talk about accountability for universities, the topic of grade inflation could become even more politicized. This timely book addresses a topic of significant public interest and does it well. The fact that the contributors disagree, take different approaches, and address different aspects of grade inflation is a virtue." - Kenneth A. Strike, author of Ethical Leadership in Schools: Creating Community in an Environment of Accountability "This book encourages academic communities to engage in constructive debate over their professional responsibilities as evaluators of student academic work. Its greatest strength is that it presents disparate perspectives on the complex topics of grading and grade inflation. The contributors are in a real sense engaged in a discussion on the subject, which makes the book refreshing and intellectually stimulating." - Matthew Hartley, University of Pennsylvania Contributors include CliffordAdelman, David T. Beito, Mary Biggs, Harry Brighouse, Lester H. Hunt, Richard Kamber, Alfie Kohn, Charles W. Nuckolls, Francis K. Schrag, and John D. Wiley. (From the Publisher)

Your graduate work was on bacterial evolution, but now you're lecturing to 200 freshmen on primate social life. You've taught Kant for twenty years, but now you're team-teaching a new course on “Ethics and the Internet.” The personality theorist retired and wasn't replaced, so now you, the neuroscientist, have to teach the "Sexual Identity" course. Everyone in academia knows it and no one likes to admit it: faculty often have to teach courses in areas they don't know very well. The challenges are even greater when students don't share your cultural background, lifestyle, or assumptions about how to behave in a classroom. In this practical and funny book, an experienced teaching consultant offers many creative strategies for dealing with typical problems. How can you prepare most efficiently for a new course in a new area? How do you look credible? And what do you do when you don't have a clue how to answer a question? Encouraging faculty to think of themselves as learners rather than as experts, Therese Huston points out that authority in the classroom doesn't come only, or even mostly, from perfect knowledge. She offers tips for introducing new topics in a lively style, for gauging students' understanding, for reaching unresponsive students, for maintaining discussions when they seem to stop dead, and -yes- for dealing with those impossible questions. Original, useful, and hopeful, this book reminds you that teaching what you don't know, to students whom you may not understand, is not just a job. It's an adventure. (From the Publisher)

The impact of changing demographics in higher education, and the importance of family-friendly policies, is well documented. There is an urgent need to keep PhDs in the higher education sector, to recruit talented scholars into academia, and retain them over the course of their academic careers. The key is instituting policies to enable all constituencies to balance work and personal responsibilities. This book covers the range of issues faced by all generations in academe, from PhD students, to the "sandwich generation" (those caring for children and aging parents simultaneously) through to older faculty and administrators. It addresses the causes for women faculty with children leaving the academy at a disproportionately higher rate than men, the conflicts women face between academic work and motherhood, and the difficulties they encounter in reentering the academy after having left the professoriate. In examining the need for family-friendly policies, this book documents the "best practices" currently in use at institutions across the United States. Each chapter highlights practices and programs from a variety of institutions and institutional types that address the needs of a more inclusive family-friendly campus and offers suggestions to others who are implementing similar change on their campuses. These examples provide context so that readers no longer have to develop practices in isolation, and without evidence of their effectiveness. The editors suggest that the most successful campuses are those that utilize a work-life systems framework to meet the needs of its employees. They also point to future growth trends, including expanding the focusfrom faculty and staff to incorporate all in the campus community. This book offers guidance to department chairs, deans, faculty, administrators, and graduate students on setting a family-friendly agenda, and models for implementation. Contributors include Emily Arms, Kathleen Beauchesne, Jill Bickett, Sharon A. Dannels, Mariko Dawson Zare, Karie Frasch, Marc Goulden, Jeni Hart, Caryn Jung, Jaime Lester, Sharon A. McDade, Jean McLaughlin, Mary Ann Mason, Sharon Page-Medrich, Kate Quinn, Margaret Sallee, Randi Shapiro, Angelica Stacy, Dave Swihart, Gloria D. Thomas, Darci Thompson. (From the Publisher)

Written for educators, administrators, policy makers, and anyone else concerned with the future of higher education, Rethinking Faculty Work shows how changes in higher education are transforming the careers of faculty and provides a model that makes it possible for all faculty to be in a position to do their best. This important resource offers a vision of academic workplaces that will attract superb faculty committed to fulfilling the missions of the universities and colleges where they work. (From the Publisher)

Higher education is becoming destabilized in the face of extraordinarily rapid change. The composition of the academy's most valuable asset—the faculty—and the essential nature of faculty work are being transformed. Jack H. Schuster and Martin J. Finkelstein describe the transformation of the American faculty in the most extensive and ambitious analysis of the American academic profession undertaken in a generation. A century ago the American research university emerged as a new organizational form animated by the professionalized, discipline-based scholar. The research university model persisted through two world wars and greatly varying economic conditions. In recent years, however, a new order has surfaced, organized around a globalized, knowledge-based economy, powerful privatization and market forces, and stunning new information technologies. These developments have transformed the higher education enterprise in ways barely imaginable in generations past. At the heart of that transformation, but largely invisible, has been a restructuring of academic appointments, academic work, and academic careers—a reconfiguring widely decried but heretofore inadequately described. This volume depicts the scope and depth of the transformation, combing empirical data drawn from three decades of national higher education surveys. The authors' portrait, at once startling and disturbing, provides the context for interpreting these developments as part of a larger structural evolution of the national higher education system. They outline the stakes for the nation and the challenging work to be done. (From the Publisher)