BiblioVault - Books about Study and teaching (Higher)

On the Battlefield of Merit

Harvard Law School, the First Century

Daniel R. Coquillette and Bruce A. Kimball

Harvard University Press, 2015

Harvard Law School is the oldest and, arguably, the most influential law school in the nation. U.S. presidents, Supreme Court justices, and foreign heads of state, along with senators, congressional representatives, social critics, civil rights activists, university presidents, state and federal judges, military generals, novelists, spies, Olympians, film and TV producers, CEOs, and one First Lady have graduated from the school since its founding in 1817.

During its first century, Harvard Law School pioneered revolutionary educational ideas, including professional legal education within a university, Socratic questioning and case analysis, and the admission and training of students based on academic merit. But the school struggled to navigate its way through the many political, social, economic, and legal crises of the century, and it earned both scars and plaudits as a result. On the Battlefield of Merit offers a candid, critical, definitive account of a unique legal institution during its first century of influence.

Daniel R. Coquillette and Bruce A. Kimball examine the school’s ties with institutional slavery, its buffeting between Federalists and Republicans, its deep involvement in the Civil War, its reluctance to admit minorities and women, its anti-Catholicism, and its financial missteps at the turn of the twentieth century. On the Battlefield of Merit brings the story of Harvard Law School up to 1909—a time when hard-earned accomplishment led to self-satisfaction and vulnerabilities that would ultimately challenge its position as the leading law school in the nation. A second volume will continue this history through the twentieth century.

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The One-Shot Library Instruction Survival Guide

Heidi E. Buchanan

American Library Association, 2021

When done well, one-shot library instruction allows you to build solid relationships with faculty while also making positive first impressions with students. Good pedagogy, collaboration with faculty, assessment, and reflection are all imminently possible in the one-shot. So is incorporating the big ideas of the ACRL Framework. This new edition of a trusted resource will guide you in active, student-centered one-shots that connect to courses’ learning outcomes. Demonstrated using vignettes that share teaching experiences drawn from librarians and instructors in the field, you’ll get succinct, hands-on advice on such topics as

why threshold concepts are well suited to one-shot instruction;
online instruction-specific engagement strategies and talking points;
a one-shot version of curriculum mapping to help you prioritize;
quick and easy activities to work into sessions;
how to mix and match the three types of instruction best suited to one-shots;
losing the list, ditching the script, and other strategies for student-centered teaching;
common classroom management mishaps and what to do about them;
talking points for the instruction interview;
how and when to say no; and
5 ways to use assessment to improve your instructional style.

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The One-Shot Library Instruction Survival Guide

Heidi E. Buchanan

American Library Association, 2017

Organic Writing Assessment

Dynamic Criteria Mapping in Action

Bob Broad, Linda Adler-Kassner, Barry Alford, Jane Detweiler, Heidi Estrem, Susanmarie Harrington, Maureen McBride, Eric Stalions, and Scott Weeden

Utah State University Press, 2009

Educators strive to create “assessment cultures” in which they integrate evaluation into teaching and learning and match assessment methods with best instructional practice. But how do teachers and administrators discover and negotiate the values that underlie their evaluations? Bob Broad’s 2003 volume, What We Really Value, introduced dynamic criteria mapping (DCM) as a method for eliciting locally-informed, context-sensitive criteria for writing assessments. The impact of DCM on assessment practice is beginning to emerge as more and more writing departments and programs adopt, adapt, or experiment with DCM approaches.

For the authors of Organic Writing Assessment, the DCM experience provided not only an authentic assessment of their own programs, but a nuanced language through which they can converse in the always vexing, potentially divisive realm of assessment theory and practice. Of equal interest are the adaptations these writers invented for Broad’s original process, to make DCM even more responsive to local needs and exigencies.

Organic Writing Assessment represents an important step in the evolution of writing assessment in higher education. This volume documents the second generation of an assessment model that is regarded as scrupulously consistent with current theory; it shows DCM’s flexibility, and presents an informed discussion of its limits and its potentials.

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The Origins of Composition Studies in the American College, 1875–1925

A Documentary History

John C. Brereton

University of Pittsburgh Press, 1996

This volume describes the formative years of English composition courses in college through a study of the most prominent documents of the time: magazine articles, scholarly reports, early textbooks, teachers' testimonies-and some of the actual student papers that provoked discussion. Includes writings by leading scholars of the era such as Adams Sherman Hill, Gertrude Buck, William Edward Mead, Lane Cooper, William Lyon Phelps, and Fred Newton Scott.

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Out in the Center

Public Controversies and Private Struggles

Harry C. Denny

Utah State University Press, 2018

Out in the Center explores the personal struggles of tutors, faculty, and administrators in writing center communities as they negotiate the interplay between public controversies and features of their own intersectional identities. These essays address how race, ethnicity, gender, sexuality, class, faith, multilingualism, and learning differences, along with their intersections, challenge those who inhabit writing centers and engage in their conversations.

A diverse group of contributors interweaves personal experience with writing center theory and critical race theory, as well as theories on the politics and performance of identity. In doing so, Out in the Center extends upon the writing center corpus to disrupt and reimagine conventional approaches to writing center theory and practice. Out in the Center proposes that practitioners benefit from engaging in dialogue about identity to better navigate writing center work—work that informs the local and carries forth a social and cultural impact that stretches well beyond academic institutions.

Contributors:
Allia Abdullah-Matta, Nancy Alvarez, Hadi Banat, Tammy S. Conard-Salvo, Michele Eodice, Rochell Isaac, Sami Korgan, Ella Leviyeva, Alexandria Lockett, Talisha Haltiwanger Morrison, Anna Rita Napoleone, Beth A. Towle, Elizabeth Weaver, Tim Zmudka

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Out of One, Many Africas

Reconstructing the Study and Meaning of Africa

Edited by William G. Martin and Michael O. West

University of Illinois Press, 1999

Even as symbols of Africa permeate Western culture in the 1990s, centers for the academic study of Africa suffer from a steady erosion of institutional support and intellectual legitimacy. Out of One, Many Africas assesses the rising tide of discontent that has destabilized the conceptions, institutions, and communities dedicated to African studies. In vibrant detail, contributors from Africa, Europe, and North America lay out the multiple, contending histories and perspectives that inform African studies. They assess the reaction against the white-dominated consensus that has marked African studies since its inception in the 1950s and note the emergence of alternative approaches, energized in part by feminist and cultural studies. They examine African scholars' struggle against paradigms that have justified and covered up colonialism, militarism, and underdevelopment. They also consider such issues as how to bring black scholars on the continent and in the diaspora closer together on questions of intellectual freedom, accountability, and the democratization of information and knowledge production.
By surveying the present predicament and the current grassroots impulse toward reconsidering the meaning of the continent, Out of One, Many Africas gives shape and momentum to a crucial dialogue aimed at transforming the study of Africa

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Outcomes Book

Debate and Consensus after the WPA Outcomes Statement

edited by Susanmarie Harrington, Keith Rhodes, Ruth Fischer, & Rita Malenczyk

Utah State University Press, 2005

The WPA Outcomes Statement is important because it represents a working consensus among composition scholars about what college students should learn and do in a composition program. But as a single-page document, the statement cannot convey the kind of reflective process that a writing program must undertake to address the learning outcomes described.

The Outcomes Book relates the fuller process by exploring the matrix of concerns that surrounded the developing Statement itself, and by presenting the experience of many who have since employed it in their own settings.

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Over the Range

A History of the Promontory Summit Route of the Pacific Railroad

Richard V. Francaviglia

Utah State University Press, 2008

Francaviglia looks anew at the geographical-historical context of the driving of the golden spike in May 1869. He gazes outward from the site of the transcontinental railroad's completion—the summit of a remote mountain range that extends south into the Great Salt Lake. The transportation corridor that for the first time linked America's coasts gave this distinctive region significance, but it anchored two centuries of human activity linked to the area's landscape.

Francaviglia brings to that larger story a geographer's perspective on place and society, a railroad enthusiast's knowledge of trains, a cartographic historian's understanding of the knowledge and experience embedded in maps, and a desert lover's appreciation of the striking basin-and-range landscape that borders the Great Salt Lake.

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