Hoping to increase student engagement, the author decided to re-envision his course on contemporary global issues in a "flipped" format. The results proved encouraging--to a degree. Over the course of five semesters, applying lessons gleaned from the literature, students learned how to read challenging texts outside of class and…

Postsecondary education has undergone dramatic changes in the past 30 years or so. When I began teaching at the college level in the mid-1980s I went to class clutching my scribbled notes and a piece of chalk. If I scheduled it well in advance, a few times each semester I could have someone wheel in an overhead or film projector. Students typed…

Faculty at Bethany College, Kansas found that when engaging with controversial topics like social justice, students needed lower-stakes spaces to think--and history and writing, together, provided these needed spaces. When taught in combination, these two subject areas prompted engagement and self-reflection, and the interdisciplinary synergy…

A reading-writing initiative began in 2011-12 at the University of Toronto as a partnership between an East Asian Studies (EAS) department and an English Language Learning (ELL) Program. In this institution, students are expected to enter into scholarly discussions in their first year essays, yet many (both native English speakers and non-native…

Professors have long assigned to their students works of which they were the author. The practice ranges from assigning commercially published textbooks they have written to having students buy a volume they have written and published or course packs made up of their own materials they have photocopied. Not only individual professors, but also…

A program is described that set out to improve/enlarge the reading background of entering students by asking them to read 5-10 specific books before coming to college, featuring one book each year as the "common text," and providing a number of special seminars and activities based on that text. (MLW)

One of the author's first assessment experiences at California State University, Sacramento, began when she was assigned to teach a graduate-level program evaluation research course in the Division of Criminal Justice. The chair of the assessment committee and the division chair approached her with the idea of conducting an assessment of the…