A Choice Outstanding Academic Title of the Year
In Minds on Fire, Mark C. Carnes shows how role-immersion games channel students’ competitive (and sometimes mischievous) impulses into transformative learning experiences. His discussion is based on interviews with scores of students and faculty who have used a pedagogy called Reacting to the Past, which features month-long games set during the French Revolution, Galileo’s trial, the partition of India, and dozens of other epochal moments in disciplines ranging from art history to the sciences. These games have spread to over three hundred campuses around the world, where many of their benefits defy expectations.
“[Minds on Fire is] Carnes’s beautifully written apologia for this fascinating and powerful approach to teaching and learning in higher education. If we are willing to open our minds and explore student-centered approaches like Reacting [to the Past], we might just find that the spark of student engagement we have been searching for in higher education’s mythical past can catch fire in the classrooms of the present.”
—James M. Lang, Chronicle of Higher Education
“This book is a highly engaging and inspirational study of a ‘new’ technique that just might change the way educators bring students to learning in the 21st century.”
—D. D. Bouchard, Choice
From wired campuses to smart classrooms to massive open online courses (MOOCs), digital technology is now firmly embedded in higher education. But the dizzying pace of innovation, combined with a dearth of evidence on the effectiveness of new tools and programs, challenges educators to articulate how technology can best fit into the learning experience. Minds Online is a concise, nontechnical guide for academic leaders and instructors who seek to advance learning in this changing environment, through a sound scientific understanding of how the human brain assimilates knowledge.
Drawing on the latest findings from neuroscience and cognitive psychology, Michelle Miller explores how attention, memory, and higher thought processes such as critical thinking and analytical reasoning can be enhanced through technology-aided approaches. The techniques she describes promote retention of course material through frequent low‐stakes testing and practice, and help prevent counterproductive cramming by encouraging better spacing of study. Online activities also help students become more adept with cognitive aids, such as analogies, that allow them to apply learning across situations and disciplines. Miller guides instructors through the process of creating a syllabus for a cognitively optimized, fully online course. She presents innovative ideas for how to use multimedia effectively, how to take advantage of learners’ existing knowledge, and how to motivate students to do their best work and complete the course.
For a generation born into the Internet age, educational technology designed with the brain in mind offers a natural pathway to the pleasures and rewards of deep learning.
Through a blend of personal narrative, cultural and literary analysis, and discussions about teaching, Minor Re/Visions: Asian American Literacy Narratives as a Rhetoric of Citizenship shows how people of color use reading and writing to develop and articulate notions of citizenship. Morris Young begins with a narration of his own literacy experiences to illustrate the complicated relationship among literacy, race, and citizenship and to reveal the tensions that exist between competing beliefs and uses of literacy among those who are part of dominant American culture and those who are positioned as minorities.
Influenced by the literacy narratives of other writers of color, Young theorizes an Asian American rhetoric by examining the rhetorical construction of American citizenship in works such as Richard Rodriguez’s Hunger of Memory, Victor Villanueva’s Bootstraps: From an American Academic of Color, Carlos Bulosan’s America Is in the Heart, and Maxine Hong Kingston’s “Song for a Barbarian Reed Pipe” from Woman Warrior. These narratives, Young shows, tell stories of transformation through education, the acquisition of literacy, and cultural assimilation and resistance. They also offer an important revision to the American story by inserting the minor and creating a tension amid dominant discourses about literacy, race, and citizenship. Through a consideration of the literacy narratives of Hawai`i, Young also provides a context for reading literacy narratives as responses to racism, linguistic discrimination, and attempts at “othering” in a particular region.
As we are faced with dominant discourses that construct race and citizenship in problematic ways and as official institutions become even more powerful and prevalent in silencing minor voices, Minor Re/Visions reveals the critical need for revising minority and dominant discourses. Young’s observations and conclusions have important implications for the ways rhetoricians and compositionists read, teach, and assign literacy narratives.
“What a delight to read David Gooblar’s book on teaching and learning. He wraps important insights into a story of discovery and adventure.”
—Ken Bain, author of What the Best College Teachers Do
College is changing, but the way we train academics is not. Most professors are taught to be researchers first and teachers a distant second, even as scholars are increasingly expected to excel in the classroom. There has been a revolution in teaching and learning over the past generation, and we now have a whole new understanding of how the brain works and how students learn. The Missing Course offers a field guide to the state-of-the-art in teaching and learning and is packed with insights to help students learn in any discipline.
Wary of the folk wisdom of the faculty lounge, David Gooblar builds his lessons on the newest findings and years of experience. From active-learning strategies to ways of designing courses to get students talking, The Missing Course walks you through the fundamentals of the student-centered classroom, one in which the measure of success is not how well you lecture but how much your students actually learn.
“Warm and empirically based, comprehensive but accessible, student-centered and also scientific. We’re so lucky to have Gooblar as a guide.”
—Sarah Rose Cavanagh, author of The Spark of Learning
“Goes beyond critique, offering a series of activities, approaches, and strategies that instructors can implement. His wise and necessary book is a long defense of the idea that a university can be a site of the transformation of self and society.”
—Los Angeles Review of Books
“An invaluable source of insight and wisdom on what it means to work with students. We’ve needed this book for a long time.”
—John Warner, author of Why They Can’t Write
Pointing to the disparities between wealthy and impoverished school districts in areas where revenue depends primarily upon local taxes, reformers repeatedly call for the centralization of school funding. Their proposals meet resistance from citizens, elected officials, and school administrators who fear the loss of local autonomy.
Bryan Shelly finds, however, that local autonomy has already been compromised by federal and state governments, which exercise a tremendous amount of control over public education despite their small contribution to a school system's funding. This disproportionate relationship between funding and control allows state and federal officials to pass education policy yet excuses them from supplying adequate funding for new programs. The resulting unfunded and underfunded mandates and regulations, Shelly insists, are the true cause of the loss of community control over public education.
Shelly outlines the effects of the most infamous of underfunded federal mandates, the No Child Left Behind Act of 2001 (NCLB), and explores why schools implemented it despite its unpopularity and out-of-pocket costs. Shelly's findings hold significant implications for school finance reform, NCLB, and the future of intergovernmental relations.
Formed in 1964, the year of independence, the University of Malawi promised more than the distant University College of Rhodesia and Nyasaland—founded 1952—ever could. A decade and a half later, Hastings Kamuzu Banda, by then Life President of the Republic of Malawi, let it be known to the University that a Department of Classics was to be established—teaching the history and languages of the ancient Mediterranean world at Zomba, on the edge of the African Rift Valley.
A Monument More Lasting than Bronze analyzes President Banda’s motives for this surreal intervention and the political goals it served, and also sketches out the shape the enterprise he called into being has taken—all in the context of worldwide transformations of Classics. A balanced team of authors, some Malawian, some foreign with Malawian connections, brings varied perspectives to this reflection.
Eclectic essays on ethics, education, and much else besides.
Plutarch (Plutarchus), ca. AD 45–120, was born at Chaeronea in Boeotia in central Greece, studied philosophy at Athens, and, after coming to Rome as a teacher in philosophy, was given consular rank by the emperor Trajan and a procuratorship in Greece by Hadrian. He was married and the father of one daughter and four sons. He appears as a man of kindly character and independent thought, studious and learned.
Plutarch wrote on many subjects. Most popular have always been the forty-six Parallel Lives, biographies planned to be ethical examples in pairs (in each pair, one Greek figure and one similar Roman), though the last four lives are single. All are invaluable sources of our knowledge of the lives and characters of Greek and Roman statesmen, soldiers and orators. Plutarch’s many other varied extant works, about sixty in number, are known as Moralia or Moral Essays. They are of high literary value, besides being of great use to people interested in philosophy, ethics, and religion.
The Loeb Classical Library edition of the Moralia is in fifteen volumes, volume XIII having two parts. Volume XVI is a comprehensive Index.
There are few groups more stereotyped and demonized than "welfare mothers," particularly low-income, African American women raising children in the inner city. But what are the day-to-day stories behind the stereotypes? How do African American mothers (both single women and those living with a partner) in poor families handle their roles as parents? What support networks do they rely on to help raise their children? How do their personal histories affect their parenting styles?
Sociologist Katherine Brown Rosier spent three years interviewing and observing Indianapolis mothers as their children made the transition from a Head Start program to kindergarten and through second grade, analyzing the families in their homes, schools, and other social settings. She brings forth the voices of the mothers, children, and their teachers, providing a multifaceted picture of how low-income African American families cope with the daily pressures and responsibilities of child rearing.
Rosier also examines how larger socio-economic factors influence these families' specific circumstances and histories. What child-rearing strategies do these mothers employ, she asks, to promote a smooth transition into school despite complex discontinuities among their homes, schools, and communities? How are these strategies viewed and supported or impeded by teachers, family, friends, and neighbors?
Until now, most research on poor African American families has focused so intently on the problems confronted by this seemingly homogenous group that the routine practices of every day life have been ignored. In this unique project, Rosier allows the families' individual experiences and thoughts to contribute to and complicate current research.
Using a unique data set comparing mothers and daughters who attended Douglass College—the women's college of Rutgers University—twenty-five years apart, Krista Jenkins perceptively observes the changes in how women acquire their attitudes toward gender roles and behaviors in the post-women's movement years.
Mothers, Daughters, and Political Socialization examines the role of intergenerational transmission—the maternal influences on younger women—while also looking at differences among women in attitudes and behaviors relative to gender roles that might be attributed to the nature of the times during their formative years. How do daughters coming of age in an era when the women's movement is far less visible deal with gendered expectations compared to their mothers? Do they accept the contemporary status quo their feminist mothers fought so hard to achieve? Or, do they press forward with new goals?
Jenkins shows how contemporary women are socialized to accept or reject traditional gender roles that serve to undermine their equality.
Moving Beyond Borders examines the life and accomplishments of Julian Samora, the first Mexican American sociologist in the United States and the founding father of the discipline of Latino studies. Detailing his distinguished career at the University of Notre Dame from 1959 to 1984, the book documents the history of the Mexican American Graduate Studies program that Samora established at Notre Dame and traces his influence on the evolution of border studies, Chicano studies, and Mexican American studies.
Samora's groundbreaking ideas opened the way for Latinos to understand and study themselves intellectually and politically, to analyze the complex relationships between Mexicans and Mexican Americans, to study Mexican immigration, and to ready the United States for the reality of Latinos as the fastest growing minority in the nation. In addition to his scholarly and pedagogical impact, his leadership in the struggle for civil rights was a testament to the power of community action and perseverance. Focusing on Samora's teaching, mentoring, research, and institution-building strategies, Moving Beyond Borders explores the legacies, challenges, and future of ethnic studies in United States higher education.
Contributors are Teresita E. Aguilar, Jorge A. Bustamante, Gilberto Cárdenas, Miguel A. Carranza, Frank M. Castillo, Anthony J. Cortese, Lydia Espinosa Crafton, Barbara Driscoll de Alvarado, Herman Gallegos, Phillip Gallegos, José R. Hinojosa, Delfina Landeros, Paul López, Sergio X. Madrigal, Ken Martínez, Vilma Martínez, Alberto Mata, Amelia M. Muñoz, Richard A. Navarro, Jesus "Chuy" Negrete, Alberto López Pulido, Julie Leininger Pycior, Olga Villa Parra, Ricardo Parra, Victor Rios, Marcos Ronquillo, Rene Rosenbaum, Carmen Samora, Rudy Sandoval, Alfredo Rodriguez Santos, and Ciro Sepulveda.
High school turf wars are often a teenage rite of passage, but there are extremes—as when a race riot at a Los Angeles campus in the spring of 2005 resulted in a police lockdown. In her fascinating book,Multicultural Girlhood, Mary Thomas interviewed 26 Latina, Armenian, Filipina, African-American, and Anglo girls at this high school to gauge their responses to the campus violence. They all denounced the outbreak, calling for multicultural understanding and peaceful coexistence.
However, as much as the girls want everyone to just “get along,” they also exhibit strong racist beliefs and validate segregated social spaces on campus and beyond. How can teenagers and “girl power” work together to empower instead of alienate multicultural groups? In her perceptive book, Thomas foregrounds the spaces of teen girlhood and the role that space plays in girls' practices that perpetuate social difference, and she explains the ways we navigate the intellectual terrain between scholarship and school yard.
Contributors are Stephen Blum, Patricia Shehan Campbell, Sabine M. Feisst, Lawrence Gushee, Robert S. Hatten, William Kinderman, Natalie Kononenko, Robert Levin, Charlotte Mattax Moersch, Ingrid Monson, John P. Murphy, Bruno Nettl, A. Jihad Racy, Anne K. Rasmussen, Stephen Slawek, Gabriel Solis, Nicholas Temperley, John Toenjes, and Thomas Turino.
His memoir, My Many Selves, is both an incisive self-examination and a creative approach to retelling his life. Writing his autobiography became a quest to harmonize the diverse, discordant parts of his identity and resolve the conflicts in what he thought and believed. To see himself clearly and whole, he broke his self down, personified the fragments, uncovered their roots in his life, and engaged his multiple identities and experiences in dialogue. Basic to his story and to its lifelong concerns with ethics and rhetoric was his youth in rural Utah. He valued that background, while acknowledging its ambiguous influence on him, and continued to identify himself as Mormon, though he renounced most Latter-day Saint doctrines.
Wayne Booth died in October 2005, soon after completing work on his autobiography.
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