55 books match the query 'Exploring' and 3 start with b

cover of Better Practices: Exploring the Teaching of Writing in Online and Hybrid Spaces

Better Practices

Exploring the Teaching of Writing in Online and Hybrid Spaces

Amy Cicchino

University Press of Colorado, 2024

Featuring a range of better practices related to online writing instruction (OWI) and assessment, this edited collection offers instructors and writing program administrators theoretically grounded approaches from teacher-scholars of online writing. First, the contributors highlight what instructors have been doing in online and hybrid writing classrooms, pointing to innovative theoretical trends in the scholarship of online writing studies and related position statements. Second, they provide access to instructional materials that can be immediately adapted for local contexts, offering a starting point for enacting better practices in OWI. Third, they offer writing program administrators useful perspectives on professional development and curriculum design. Better Practices expands the conversation about online learning and writing studies, providing an opening for educators to come together to explore what it means to teach writing in ways that involve online real-time, online anytime, and hybrid writing courses.
[more]
cover of Birding English: Exploring the History of a Language Through 50 Birds

Birding English

Exploring the History of a Language Through 50 Birds

Jeremy Withers

University of Iowa Press, 2026

What do words like unkindness, haggard, asparagus, jizz, and the singular they have to do with birds? Quite a lot, actually. From Old English roots and Shakespearean idioms to Victorian slang and modern online lingo, Birding English charts a dynamic course through English’s past, present, and future by admiring the plumage of falcons, the songs of sparrows, and the flight of ducks. With each of his fifty mini essays, Jeremy Withers uses birds as a point of entry into a key moment in the development of English: its origins in the Proto-Indo-European and Proto-Germanic languages, the influence of writers like Geoffrey Chaucer and William Shakespeare, the creation of English’s first dictionaries and grammar books, and the arrival of rhyming slang and portmanteaus. Ideal for word nerds and bird nerds alike, this book will enchant anyone who’s ever been captivated by the song of a bird or the song of a word.
[more]
cover of Boundary Layer: Exploring the Genius Between Worlds

Boundary Layer

Exploring the Genius Between Worlds

Kem Luther

Oregon State University Press, 2016

In atmospheric science, a boundary layer is the band of air nearest the ground. In the Pacific Northwest, the boundary layer teems with lichens, mosses, ferns, fungi, and diminutive plants. It’s an alternate, overlooked universe whose denizens author Kem Luther calls the stegnon, the terrestrial equivalent of oceanic plankton.

In Boundary Layer, Luther takes a voyage of discovery through the stegnon, exploring the life forms that thrive there and introducing readers to the scientists who study them. With a keen ear for conversation and an eye for salient detail, the author brings a host of characters to life, people as unique and intriguing as the species inhabiting the stegnon.

A pair of park employees on a windswept beach shows how the violent clash of sea and land creates a sandy home for some of the world’s most endangered plants, including the almost-extinct pink sand-verbena. An expert on mosses, as ingenuous as the plants he loves, leads the author up a mountain and into a sphagnum bog.  A husband and wife team, exiled by brutal repression in the wake of the Prague Spring, introduce European plant sociology to North America.  A scientist, while revolutionizing the study of lichens, hides himself, hermitlike, inside one of the largest park reserves in the American West.

An exhilarating mix of natural history, botanical exploration, and philosophical speculation, Boundary Layer guides readers, in the end, into the author’s own landscape of metaphor. It will be welcomed by naturalists, botanists, outdoor adventurers, and anyone who savors good storytelling. Luther translates into luminous prose what boundary regions have to say, not only about the in-between places of nature, but also about the conceptual borderlands that lie between species and ecosystems, culture and nature, science and the humanities.
[more]