Faculty Summer Care Package: New Books

From the author of Stylish Academic Writing comes an essential new guide for writers aspiring to become more productive and take greater pleasure in their craft. Helen Sword interviewed 100 academics worldwide about their writing background and practices and shows how they find or create the conditions to get their writing done.

Everyone in academia stresses quality. But what exactly is it, and how do professors identify it? Michèle Lamont observed deliberations for fellowships and research grants, and interviewed panel members at length. In How Professors Think, she reveals what she discovered about this secretive, powerful, peculiar world. Lamont aims to illuminate the confidential process of evaluation and to push the gatekeepers to both better understand and perform their role.

The Lab explains the idea of the "culture lab," Edwards' concept for experimental art and design centers like those he recently founded in Paris and at Harvard. He presents the lab as a new kind of educational art studio based on a contemporary science lab model, and he shows how students learn by translating ideas alongside experienced creators by exhibiting risky experimental processes in gallery settings.

Gregory Light and Marina Micari reject the view that science, technology, engineering, and mathematics are elite disciplines restricted to a small number with innate talent. Rich in concrete advice, Making Scientists offers a new paradigm of how scientific subjects can be taught at the college level to underrepresented groups.

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.

For the Internet generation, educational technology designed with the brain in mind offers a natural pathway to the pleasures and rewards of deep learning. Drawing on neuroscience and cognitive psychology, Michelle Miller shows how attention, memory, critical thinking, and analytical reasoning can be enhanced through technology-aided approaches.

You go into teaching with high hopes: to inspire students, to motivate them to learn, to help them love your subject. Then you find yourself facing a crowd of expectant faces on the first day of the first semester, and you think "Now what do I do?" Practical and lively, On Course is full of experience-tested, research-based advice for graduate students and new teaching faculty. It provides a range of innovative and traditional strategies that work well without requiring extensive preparation or long grading sessions when you're trying to meet your own demanding research and service requirements. What do you put on the syllabus? How do you balance lectures with group assignments or discussions--and how do you get a dialogue going when the students won't participate? What grading system is fairest and most efficient for your class? Should you post lecture notes on a website? How do you prevent cheating, and what do you do if it occurs? How can you help the student with serious personal problems without becoming overly involved? And what do you do about the student who won't turn off his cell phone? Packed with anecdotes and concrete suggestions, this book will keep both inexperienced and veteran teachers on course as they navigate the calms and storms of classroom life.

Undergraduates do not experience college as having a clear beginning and end. Their engagement with higher education is at best episodic. But as Practice for Life shows, the disruptions provide opportunities for reflection and course-correction as students learn to navigate the future uncertainties of adulthood.

This book is a guide to thinking about and planning for tenure, promotion, and academic career-planning. It is a synthesis of research, interviews and consultations, as well as personal experiences about surviving and prospering in academia. David Perlmutter tries to reveal as critically and as candidly as possible the "behind closed doors" and "people-incited" events, issues, processes, and relations that affect victory or failure in academia.