Summary

Geeky Pedagogy is a funny, evidence-based, multidisciplinary, pragmatic, highly readable guide to the process of learning and relearning how to be an effective college teacher. It is the first college teaching guide that encourages faculty to embrace their inner nerd, inviting readers to view themselves and their teaching work in light of contemporary discourse that celebrates increasingly diverse geek culture and explores stereotypes about super-smart introverts.

Geeky Pedagogy avoids the excessive jargon, humorlessness, and endless proscriptions that plague much published advice about teaching. Neuhaus is aware of how embodied identity and employment status shape one’s teaching context, and she eschews formulaic depictions of idealized exemplar teaching, instead inviting readers to join her in an engaging, critically reflective conversation about the vicissitudes of teaching and learning in higher education as a geek, introvert, or nerd. Written for the wonks and eggheads who want to translate their vast scholarly expertise into authentic student learning, Geeky Pedagogy is packed with practical advice and encouragement for increasing readers’ pedagogical knowledge.
 

Receive a 30% discount on orders of 10 or more copies of this title with code HIGHEREDBULK30 at checkout.

Contents

Acknowledgements     

Introduction     

1. Awareness  

2. Preparation 

3. Reflection    

4. Support       

5. Practice        

Glossary          

Notes   

Index   

Author

Jessamyn Neuhaus is a professor of US history and popular culture at SUNY Plattsburgh, a scholar of teaching and learning, and a recipient of the SUNY Chancellor’s Award for Excellence in Teaching. She is the author of Manly Meals and Mom’s Home Cooking: Cookbooks and Gender in Modern America and Housework and Housewives in American Advertising: Married to the Mop.

Reviews

“Every college professor should read this book. It is useful, accessible, lively, and humorous. It is not ideological or pedantic, but is instead a practical guide to becoming a better professor for those of us who never desired to read a book about pedagogy.”
David Arnold, Columbia Basin College

Summary

Chalkboards and projectors are familiar tools for most college faculty, but when new technologies become available, instructors aren’t always sure how to integrate them into their teaching in meaningful ways. For faculty interested in supporting student learning, determining what’s possible and what’s useful can be challenging in the changing landscape of technology.

Arguing that teaching and learning goals should drive instructors’ technology use, not the other way around, Intentional Tech explores seven research-based principles for matching technology to pedagogy. Through stories of instructors who creatively and effectively use educational technology, author Derek Bruff approaches technology not by asking “How to?” but by posing a more fundamental question: “Why?”
 

Receive a 30% discount on orders of 10 or more copies of this title with code HIGHEREDBULK30 at checkout.

Contents

Acknowledgements                                                                                                                       

Introduction                                                                                                                                   

1. Times for Telling                                                                                                                     

2. Practice and Feedback                                                                                                              

3. Thin Slices of Learning                                                                                                            

4. Knowledge Organizations                                                                                                         

5. Multimodal Assignments                                                                                                         

6. Learning Communities                                                                                                           

7. Authentic Audiences                                                                                                               

Conclusion                                                                                                                                   

Notes                                                                                                                                               

References                                                                                                                                    

Index                                                                                                                                               

Author

Derek Bruff is the director of the Vanderbilt University Center for Teaching, where he helps faculty and other instructors develop foundational teaching skills and explore new ideas in teaching and learning. He is the author of Teaching with Classroom Response Systems: Creating Active Learning Environments.

Reviews

“Derek Bruff is an engaging—and often charming—guide throughout this concise book. The stories he tells keep things moving at a crisp pace and offer pedagogical inspiration. His principles provide a useful framework and establish a clear foundation for his practical advice.”
Peter Felten, coauthor of The Undergraduate Experience: Focusing Institutions on What Matters Most

Summary

Teaching about race and racism can be a difficult business. Students and instructors alike often struggle with strong emotions, and many people have robust preexisting beliefs about race. At the same time, this is a moment that demands a clear understanding of racism. It is important for students to learn how we got here and how racism is more than just individual acts of meanness. Students also need to understand that colorblindness is not an effective anti-racism strategy.

In this book, Cyndi Kernahan argues that you can be honest and unflinching in your teaching about racism while also providing a compassionate learning environment that allows for mistakes and avoids shaming students. She provides evidence for how learning works with respect to race and racism along with practical teaching strategies rooted in that evidence to help instructors feel more confident. She also differentiates between how white students and students of color are likely to experience the classroom, helping instructors provide a more effective learning experience for all students.
 

Receive a 30% discount on orders of 10 or more copies of this title with code HIGHEREDBULK30 at checkout.

Contents

Acknowledgements

Introduction: Why Is It So Hard?   
                                                                                              
1. Naïve Understandings: How We Differ from Our Students                                                      

2. Struggling Students: How and Why Resistance Happens                                                        
3. Getting Yourself Together: Developing a Secure Teacher Identity                                          
4. Belonging in the Classroom: Creating Moments of Positivity and Connection                      
5. Expectations: From Ground Rules to Growth Mindsets                                                            
6. Course Content: Problems and Solutions                                                                                  
Conclusion and Summary of Ideas                                                                                               
Appendix: Suggested Reading for Historical Understanding                                                        
References                                                                                                                                   
Index   

Author

Cyndi Kernahan is a professor of psychology at the University of Wisconsin–River Falls, where she is also the assistant dean for teaching and learning in the College of Arts and Sciences. Her research and writing are focused primarily on teaching and learning, including the teaching of race, inclusive pedagogy, and student success.

Reviews

“An unflinching look at the realities of teaching about race. This book is destined to sit proudly next to such classics as Even the Rat Was White and Why Are All the Black Kids Sitting Together in the Cafeteria?”
Regan A. R. Gurung, Oregon State University

“Kernahan’s honest, compassionate, and evidence-based discussions are a bracing antidote to the often stilted, evasive, and anxiety-ridden discourses around race’s intersections with teaching and learning. Those of us who teach about race and racism need this book on our shelves.”
Kevin Gannon (@TheTattooedProf), Grand View University

"This insightful and accessible resource is recommended for educators in any discipline, at any level, who want to speak more effectively about race and racism."
Library Journal (starred review)

Summary

Council for Wisconsin Writers, Norbert Blei/August Derleth Nonfiction Book Award winner

In this often-surprising book of essays, Krista Eastman explores the myths we make about who we are and where we’re from. The Painted Forest uncovers strange and little-known “home places”—not only the picturesque hills and valleys of the author’s childhood in rural Wisconsin, but also tourist towns, the “under-imagined and overly caricatured” Midwest, and a far-flung station in Antarctica where the filmmaker Werner Herzog makes an unexpected appearance.

The Painted Forest upends easy narratives of place, embracing tentativeness and erasing boundaries. But it is Eastman’s willingness to play—to follow her curiosity down every odd path, to exude a skeptical wonder—that gives this book depth and distinction. An unlikely array of people, places, and texts meet for close conversation, and tension is diffused with art, imagination, and a strong sense of there being some other way forward. Eastman offers a smart and contemporary take on how we wander and how we belong.

Author

Krista Eastman's writing has earned recognition from Best American Essays and appeared in The Georgia Review, The Kenyon Review (KROnline), New Letters, and other journals. She lives in Madison, Wisconsin. Learn more at https://kristaeastman.com/.

Reviews

“Thoughtful and elegant. . . . Eastman's deep fascination with and love of her home state, in all its complexity and eccentricity, permeate this moving book and will live on in the reader’s mind.”
Publishers Weekly

“Gorgeously written and meticulously researched, it would be perfect for lovers of creative nonfiction—especially those with an affinity for nature writing and ecocriticism. . . . A continuing tour led by a bright, fascinating guide who reminds us that adventure is born from the possibility of self-discovery.”
Rain Taxi

“The Painted Forest is a singular and visionary portrait of the Midwest, one that defies familiar caricatures of the region. Eastman puts rural towns and hamlets too often dismissed as 'nowhere' definitively on the map, and reveals that they are far more uncanny, complex, and bizarre than our wildest imaginings.”
Meghan O'Gieblyn, author of Interior States

“The Painted Forest is a surprising and tender book in which a reader might be reminded of the considered natural observations of Annie Dillard, the unrelenting gaze of Lia Purpura, or the masterful storytelling of Jo Ann Beard. Eastman is interested in interrogating the history and ethos of several specific places, including her own home state of Wisconsin, as well as elegantly demonstrating the ways in which landscapes shift and morph through generations and recall.”
Caryl Pagel, author of Twice Told

“In this shimmering collection, Krista Eastman blends imagined scene with researched fact to bring us fresh visions of places we thought we knew. From examinations of home to 'laughter from nowhere,' from the Wisconsin Dells to Antarctica’s McMurdo Station, from an itinerant painter’s elliptical masterwork to gestation’s feral undertow, Eastman casts a spell that renders us 'still captive to the mystery in distance, still loyal to the pledge found in story.'”
Joni Tevis, author of The World Is On Fire: Scrap, Treasure, and Songs of Apocalypse

Summary

American Grief in Four Stages is a collection of stories that imagines trauma as a space in which language fails us and narrative escapes us. These stories play with form and explore the impossibility of elegy and the inability of our culture to communicate grief, or sympathy, outside of cliché.

One narrator, for example, tries to understand her brother’s suicide by excavating his use of idioms. Other stories construe grief and trauma in much subtler ways—the passing of an era or of a daughter’s childhood, the seduction of a neighbor, the inability to have children. From a dinner party with Aztecs to an elderly shut-in’s recollection of her role in the Salem witch trials, these are stories that defy expectations and enrich the imagination. As a whole, this collection asks the reader to envisage the ways in which we suffer as both unbearably painful and unbearably American.

Contents

Cavalier Presentations of Heartbreaking News

Fucking Aztecs                                                                                                                              
In July Flags Are Everywhere                                                                                                       
Father/Writer                                                                                                                                  
Warning Signs                                                                                                                              
American Family Portrait, Clockwise from Upper Right                                                            
The Crossword                                                                                                                             
Frog Prince                                                                                                                                     
Six and Mittens                                                                                                                               
American Grief in Four Stages                                                                                                    
Origins                                                                                                                                          
Extra Patriotic                                                                                                                              
Prelingual                                                                                                                                    
Dementia, 1692                                                                                                                           
Time Just Isn’t That Simple                                                                                                     
Acknowledgements

Author

Sadie Hoagland is an assistant professor of English at the University of Louisiana at Lafayette and the former editor of Quarterly West. Her work has appeared in Alice Blue Review, The Black Herald, Mikrokosmos Journal, South Dakota Review, Sakura Review, Grist, Oyez Review, Passages North, Five Points, The Fabulist, and elsewhere. Learn more at sadiehoagland.com.

Reviews

"A captivating debut collection probes the trauma of being human. . . . assured, haunting, and deeply empathetic."
Kirkus (starred review)

"This terrifying, brave collection takes the sting out of what happens when the worst has already occurred. Even in their loss, its broken characters find ways to try and explain the unexplainable to themselves."
Foreword Reviews

“Sadie Hoagland’s stories are hard and bright as the twenty-first century, but with reflections that radiate into subtle chiaroscuro. She’s a startlingly fresh new writer; American Grief in Four Stages is a debut that will be remembered.”
Madison Smartt Bell, author of All Souls’ Rising

“Terrifyingly true and dangerously perceptive, Sadie Hoagland’s provocative fictions deliver us to moments of maximum chaos.”
Melanie Rae Thon, author of Silence and Song

“As riveting as short fiction gets.”
Jacob M. Appel, author of The Amazing Mr. Morality

Summary

This story begins with a phone call out of the blue: a lawyer tells a writer that his ninety-six-year-old father, with whom he has had no contact since the age of three and whom he has twice tried to find without success, has just died, leaving him nothing. Half-reluctant, half-fascinated, both angry and curious, Keith Maillard begins to research his father’s life. The result is a suspenseful work of historical reconstruction—a social history often reading like a detective story—as well as a psychologically acute portrait of the impact of a father’s absence. Walking a tightrope between the known and the unknown, and following a trail that takes him from Vancouver to Montreal to his native Wheeling, West Virginia, Keith Maillard has pulled off a book that only a novelist of his stature could write.

Contents

Coming soon.

Author

Keith Maillard is the author of fourteen novels, most recently Twin Studies, the winner of the Alberta Book of the Year Award in Fiction. Born and raised in West Virginia, he has lived in Vancouver for most of his adult life. He has been a musician, photographer, and journalist, and has taught creative writing at the University of British Columbia since 1989.

Reviews

“This memoir is an astonishing act of generosity and tenacity, exploring the profound flaws of one family’s dynamics and the resiliency of the human spirit.”
Eden Robinson, author of Son of a Trickster

“Fatherless is Keith Maillard’s haunting response to that most ancient curse: Why, father, did you desert me? How, father, should I love you?”
Clark Blaise, author of I Had a Father

“Marvelous and brutally honest.”
Marc Harshman, author of Woman in Red Anorak and poet laureate of West Virginia

Summary

Mountains Piled upon Mountains features nearly fifty writers from across Appalachia sharing their place-based fiction, literary nonfiction, and poetry. Moving beyond the tradition of transcendental nature writing, much of the work collected here engages current issues facing the region and the planet (such as hydraulic fracturing, water contamination, mountaintop removal, and deforestation), and provides readers with insights on the human-nature relationship in an era of rapid environmental change.

This book includes a mix of new and recent creative work by established and emerging authors. The contributors write about experiences from northern Georgia to upstate New York, invite parallels between a watershed in West Virginia and one in North Carolina, and often emphasize connections between Appalachia and more distant locations. In the pages of Mountains Piled upon Mountains are celebration, mourning, confusion, loneliness, admiration, and other emotions and experiences rooted in place but transcending Appalachia’s boundaries.

Add bundle to cart

Contents

Chris Bolgiano
Taylor Brown
Ben Burgholzer 
Kathryn Stripling Byer
Wayne Caldwell 
Sarah Beth Childers
Jessica Cory
Chauna Craig
Thomas Rain Crowe
Stephen Cushman
doris diosa davenport
Ed Davis
Susan Deer Cloud
Lisa Ezzard
Katie Fallon
Carol Grametbauer 
Jesse Graves
Jane Harrington
Lisa Hayes-Minney
Laura Henry-Stone
Scott Honeycutt
George Hovis
Gene Hyde
Libby Falk Jones
Madison Jones 
Julia Spicher Kasdorf
Bill King
John Lane
Jeanne Larsen
Laura Long
Brent Martin
Michael McFee
Jim Minick
Felicia Mitchell
Ann Pancake
Ellen J. Perry
Mark Powell
Heather Ransom
Jeremy Michael Reed
John Robinson
Rosemary Royston
M. W. Smith
Larry D. Thacker
Gail Tyson
Rick Van Noy
G. C. Waldrep
Meredith Sue Willis
Amber M. Wright
David R. Young

Editor

Jessica Cory teaches in the English department at Western Carolina University. She grew up in southeastern Ohio, and her work has been published in ellipsis…, A Poetry Congeries, and other journals.

Reviews

“Mountains Piled upon Mountains is a collection of writings that does more than record the observations of Appalachian authors on their environment. It is also a timely call to action: to preserve what might be lost and, most hopefully, what might yet be resurrected. Jessica Cory has given us an important addition to our region’s literature.”
Ron Rash, author of Above the Waterfall

“From the introduction onward, this collection, filled with bright surprises and sharp challenges, engaged my emotions, mind, and senses. Taking in its life-giving poems, heart-piercing stories, and ethically profound essays, night after night I pondered this collection, drank in Appalachia and nature, and felt my sense of wonder and connection renewed.”
Chris Green, director of the Loyal Jones Appalachian Center, Berea College