Scholarship on Teaching

Click Here for Book Review Teachers’ active online participation and engagement with students are critical factors to the success of online courses. Essentials of Online Teaching is a standards-based, straightforward guide to teaching online in higher education, high school and vocational training, or corporate learning environments. This brief but powerful book encourages immediate application of concepts with the help of real-world examples, technical insights, and professional advice. The guide includes: - a practical approach informed by, but not about, relevant learning theories; - clear models and examples from a wide variety of online courses; - teachers’ reflections about their online practice; - a checklist of standards to help guide teaching decisions; and - an accompanying website (www.essentialsofonlineteaching.com) with additional resources. Essentials of Online Teaching addresses key instructional challenges in online teaching and presents the reader with practical solutions for each phase of a course—preparation, beginning, middle, and end. (From the Publisher)

Click Here for Book Review Whilst much has been written about the doors that technology can open for students, less has been said about its impact on teachers and professors. Although technology undoubtedly brings with it huge opportunities within higher education, there is also the fear that it will have a negative effect both on faculty and on teaching standards. Education Is Not an App offers a bold and provocative analysis of the economic context within which educational technology is being implemented, not least the financial problems currently facing higher education institutions around the world. The book emphasizes the issue of control as being a key factor in whether educational technology is used for good purposes or bad purposes, arguing that technology has great potential if placed in caring hands. Whilst it is a guide to the newest developments in education technology, it is also a book for those faculty, technology professionals, and higher education policy-makers who want to understand the economic and pedagogical impact of technology on professors and students. It advocates a path into the future based on faculty autonomy, shared governance, and concentration on the university’s traditional role of promoting the common good. Offering the first critical, in-depth assessment of the political economy of education technology, this book will serve as an invaluable guide to concerned faculty, as well as to anyone with an interest in the future of higher education.

Click Here for Book Review The Idea of the PhD: The doctorate in the twenty-first-century imagination analyses the PhD as it is articulated in diverse areas of contemporary discourse at a time in which the degree is undergoing growth, change and scrutiny worldwide. It considers not just institutional ideas of the PhD, but those of the broader cultural and social domain as well as asking whether, and to what extent, the idea of the Doctor of Philosophy, the highest achievable university award, is being reimagined in the twenty-first century. In a world where the PhD is undergoing significant radical change, and where inside universities, doctoral enrolments are continually climbing, as the demand for more graduates with high-level research skills increases, this book asks the following questions: How do we understand how the PhD is currently imagined and conceptualised in the wider domain? Where will we find ideas about the PhD, from its purpose, to the nature of research work undertaken and the kinds of pedagogies engaged, to the researchers who undertake it and are shaped by it? International in scope, this is a text that explores the culturally inflected representation of the doctorate and its graduates in the imagination, literature and media. The Idea of the PhD contributes to the research literature in the field of doctoral education and higher education. As such, this will be a fascinating text for researchers, postgraduates and academics interested in the idea of the university. (From the Publisher)

Click Here for Book Review How do socially constructed concepts of race dominate and limit understandings and practices of multicultural education? Since race is socially constructed, how do we deconstruct it? In this important book Mahiri argues that multicultural education needs to move beyond racial categories defined and sustained by the ideological, social, political, and economic forces of white supremacy. Exploring contemporary and historical scholarship on race, the emergence of multiculturalism, and the rise of the digital age, the author investigates micro-cultural practices and provides a compelling framework for understanding the diversity of individuals and groups. Descriptions and analysis from ethnographic interviews reveal how people’s continually evolving, highly distinctive, micro-cultural identities and affinities provide understandings of diversity not captured within assigned racial categories. Synthesizing the scholarship and interview findings, the final chapter connects the play of micro-cultures in people’s lives to a needed shift in how multicultural education uses race to frame and comprehend diversity and identity and provides pedagogical examples of how this shift can look in teaching practices.