AU Faculty - Teaching & Learning: Teaching, Engaging, and Thriving in Higher Ed. Series

"Drawing on extensive research, Pittman provides active measures for withstanding intersectional race and gender tensions, exercises to inoculate against toxic dynamics, and tools to resist being silenced and support being heard. Through these empowering strategies and exercises, women faculty of color can become the most powerful versions of themselves in their classrooms, and go on to make the most of their careers, contributions, and lives" In Empowered, Chavella T. Pittman distills decades of practice to show women faculty of color how to be unapologetically authentic in their teaching, speak up in reviews about their classroom excellence, and to offer themselves compassion. And, to recover a sense of joy in what they do.

The critical lessons that Michele Eodice, Anne Ellen Geller, and Neal Lerner took from their survey research, as well as from their own classrooms and workshops, are these: Students want their writing to be consequential, to build on connections with their lives, their world, and their futures, and to foster an inclusive learning experience. The authors delved further into these findings by asking what role identities—whether racial, ethnic, or cultural—played in students’ approach to writing and by exploring what students found meaningful in writing during experiences such as disruption, dislocation, and loss; personal, economic, and health challenges; and political, racial, and societal conflict. The resulting guide pairs a wealth of new data with pedagogical strategies and reflective exercises to help instructors of all kinds connect more effectively with their students—and to help students connect their lives and their writing in meaningful and productive ways.

The Opposite of Cheating presents a positive, forward-looking, research-backed vision for what classroom integrity can look like in the GenAI era, both in cyberspace and on campus. Accordingly, the book outlines workable measures teachers can use to better understand why students cheat and to prevent cheating while aiming to enhance learning and integrity. Bertram Gallant and Rettinger provide practical suggestions to help faculty revise the conversation around integrity, refocus classes and students on learning, reconsider the structure and goals of assessment, and generally reframe our response to cheating. At the core of this strategy is a call for teachers, academic staff, institutional leaders, and administrators to rethink how we "show up" for students, and to reinforce and fully support quality teaching, learning, and assessment.

Academia is not, by and large, a kind place. Individualism and competition are what count. But without kindness at its core, Catherine Denial suggests, higher education fails students and instructors--and its mission--in critical ways. Part manifesto, part teaching memoir, part how-to guide, A Pedagogy of Kindness urges higher education to get aggressive about instituting kindness, which Denial distinguishes from niceness. Having suffered beneath the weight of just "getting along," instructors need to shift every part of what they do to prioritizing care and compassion--for students as well as for themselves. A Pedagogy of Kindness articulates a fresh vision for teaching, one that focuses on ensuring justice, believing people, and believing in people. Offering evidence-based insights and drawing from her own rich experiences as a professor, Denial offers practical tips for reshaping syllabi, assessing student performance, and creating trust and belonging in the classroom. Her suggestions for concrete, scalable actions  outline nothing less than a transformational discipline--one in which, together, we create bright new spaces, rooted in compassion, in which all engaged in teaching and learning might thrive.

A specialist in pedagogical strategies with extensive classroom experience, Elizabeth A. Norell explains how an educator's presence, or authenticity, can be critical to creating transformational spaces for students. And presence, she argues, means uncovering and understanding one's own internal struggles and buried insecurities--stresses often left unconfronted in an academic culture that values knowing over feeling. Presenting the research on how and why such inner work unlocks transformational learning, The Present Professor equips educators with the tools for crafting a more authentic presence in their teaching work. At a time of crisis in higher education, as teachers struggle to find new ways to relate to, think about, and instruct students, this book holds a key. Implementing more inclusive pedagogies, Norell suggests, requires sorting out our own identities. In short, if we want to create spaces where students have the confidence, comfort, and psychological safety to learn and grow, we have to create spaces where we do, too. The Present Professor is dedicated to that proposition and to helping educators build that transformational space.

In this empowering, smart, and refreshingly frank book, Jessamyn Neuhaus offers college educators a roadmap for anticipating and navigating these inevitable snafus-and keeping the course of teaching and learning on track. Clear-eyed about the rarely acknowledged foul-ups that teachers invariably confront, Snafu Edu provides evidence-based insights into why these things happen and practical, workable strategies for recognizing, responding to, repairing, and reducing them.Snafu Edu identifies five major reasons for systemic and individual snafus in the field-inequity, disconnection, distrust, failure, and fear-and shows how understanding underlying causes can help educators perceive the problem and take appropriate measures.

"If teachers want an inclusive, engaging classroom, they must learn their students' names. Sound advice, certainly, but rarely does it come with practical guidance-which is precisely what this book offers. Eschewing the random tips and mnemonic tricks that invariably fall short, Michelle D. Miller offers teachers a clear explanation of what is really going on when we learn a name, and a science-based approach for using this knowledge to pedagogical advantage. Drawing on a deep background in the psychology of language and memory, Miller gives a lively overview of the surprising science of learning proper names, along with an account of why the practice is at once so difficult and yet so critical to effective teaching. She then sets out practical techniques for learning names, with examples of activities and practices tailored to a variety of different teaching styles and classroom configurations. In her discussion of certain factors that can make learning names especially challenging, Miller pays particular attention to neurodivergence and the effects of aging on this special form of memory.