Faculty Book Circle Program

The Office for Teaching Excellence & Faculty Development announces a new opportunity for faculty and staff, the Book Circle Program. In this program you choose a title from the options below and then gather monthly and discuss the book you selected. The goal of the Book Circle Program is to familiarize faculty with innovative teaching practices and openly discuss these practices in a cross-disciplinary and collaborative group discussion. The program strives to discuss teaching practices in a broader context, connect ideas from the book topics, and apply practices to courses.

The Book Circle Program will meet approximately once a month to discuss selected readings from your book. If you are interested in participating in the program, choose one or more books from the following selection and notify the OTEFD office (x4118 or Email) by October 26, 2007 of your preferences. Please provide your name, department, and the book (s) you are interested in reading and discussing. Discussion groups will be formed and announced after book selections have been completed.

The Four Options

1. The Missing Professor – Thomas B. Jones
“Any college that adopts this book to promote inclusive discussion with faculty, staff and administrators should see many widespread positive changes. The Missing Professor packs value-per-page few books can match. First, it’s a fun read! Through a story-telling framework that would make Kieran Egan proud, the author takes us with newly hired professor Nicole for an outrageous romp through the Higher State campus. Second, it’s content-rich. Finally, it has a captivating affective depth. Readers quickly recognize equivalents on any campus to the events and characters portrayed here. How these academic characters interact and treat one another not only creates their institution, but also molds them as people. This is the first book I’ve seen with the courage to look at some common interactions among academics in the eye and extend the invitation: ‘Let’s have a discussion about this.’ Brilliant!”

Ed Nuhfer
Director, Center for Teaching and learning, Idaho State University

2. Never a Dull Moment – Jyl Lynn Felman
“Jyl Lynn Felman rewrites feminist pedagogy as a vibrant, political, and self-critical performative practice. Felman connects theory to experience, knowledge to risk taking, and learning to the specificity of place and context. This is a book that equates pedagogy with courage, teaching with hope, and politics with particular bodies mutually crossing into uncharted territories where meaning, passion, justice, and critique open up new possibilities for critical learning and social change. Never a Dull Moment is a moving, courageous, and insightful book that every teacher, student, administrator, and parent should read.”

Henry Giroux, author of Impure Acts: The Practical Politics of Cultural Studies

“In her exciting book Never a Dull Moment, Felman reveals the deeper value of ‘face-to-face’ teaching, not simply as a means of getting information across, but as a way of exploring some of the most sensitive gender and racial issues we confront in the contemporary classroom.”

Lillian S. Robinson, author of In the Canon’s Mouth: Dispatches from the Culture Wars

3. Thinking: The Foundation of Critical and Creative Learning in the Classroom – Robert Boostrom
What might a school that wholeheartedly values thinking look like? How can we encourage students to be active learners instead of passive recipients of knowledge? In this engaging book, Boostrom invites readers to think about the ways in which the practice of teaching unintentionally promotes non-thinking. By engaging the reader in the experience of thinking rather than trying to define it, this accessible volume:

• Addresses the current emphasis on standardized curriculum and how it discourages teachers from providing content that provokes thought, and discourages students from intellectual engagement.
• Uses engaging, real-life examples from high school and college classrooms
• Offers a fresh perspective on a problem all teachers struggle with – how to get students thinking.
• Reexamines familiar topics to see how they come into play in the problem of non-thinking, including higher-level thinking, multiple intelligences, disciplinary boundaries, narrative, cultural literacy, and plagiarism.

Jonas F. Soltis, Series Editor

4. The Ethics of Teaching – Kenneth Strike & Jonas F. Soltis
This bestselling text has been expanded to include the most important ethical issues in contemporary school.

The Fourth Edition features: * A new section on Professionalism and Teaching with Integrity * New cases that discuss such current issues as zero tolerance policies, curriculum mandates and teacher integrity, high-stakes testing, and curriculum distortion.

Written in a style that speaks directly to today’s teacher, The Ethics of Teaching, Fourth Edition uses realistic case studies of day-to-day ethical dilemmas. The book covers such topics as: punishment and due process * intellectual freedom * equal treatment of students * multiculturalism * religious differences * democracy * teacher burnout * professional conduct * parental rights * child abuse/neglect * sexual harassment.

Please note: choices 3 and 4 are include a secondary education perspective, but the issues are easily translated to the collegiate level.

Sponsored by The Office for Teaching Excellence & Research Development

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