Scholarship of Teaching & Learning

Teaching Through Generational Traumas: Adaptive Practices to Combat Dissociation While Addressing the Impacts of Respectability offers a powerful and timely exploration of what it means to teach, learn, and thrive in higher education while navigating the weight of generational wounds. Written by historian and educator Detrice L. Roberts, this book blends personal reflection, scholarly research, and experience-based classroom practice to uncover how trauma, identity, and resilience shape today’s student experience. At its core, this book challenges the idea that education is only about transmitting knowledge. Instead, Roberts presents the classroom as a space of transformation where students must be equipped not only with intellectual tools but also the social and emotional skills necessary to face the complexities of modern life. Drawing on frameworks including Social and Emotional Learning (SEL), the VARK learning model, and culturally relevant pedagogy, Roberts simultaneously offers instructors and students pathways to recognize identity, manage emotions, and build meaningful and productive connections between past and present. There exists a culture of dissociation among students today, but they are more adaptive to learning that incorporates real world engagement that allows for them to actively participate in the learning process. Being able to differentiate instruction relies on our understanding of the types of learners that we have in our classroom and exploring the factors associated with why students are disconnected academically. These very factors can then be addressed and used to enhance student experiences and ability to learn through learner-defined curriculum development. Teaching Through Generational Traumas moves through layered themes reflecting Roberts’s dual perspective as both teacher and learner. Part I situates the conversation historically, acknowledging how generational traumas rooted in slavery, segregation, and systemic racism, continue to impact Black students in higher education. Part II explores the lived experience of respectability politics, dissociation, and the subtle pressures students face to perform identities that do not always align with their authentic selves. Part III shifts to pedagogical innovation, highlighting Roberts’s seven classroom practices: Socratic questioning, storytelling, critical pedagogy, SEL, opening rituals, culturally relevant teaching, and digital humanities. Each practice is illustrated through vivid classroom narratives, emphasizing how teaching strategies can nurture critical thinking while affirming student identity. In the final section, Roberts invites students, educators, and readers alike to consider methods of perpetual growth that extend beyond the classroom. She frames education not as a temporary pursuit, but as a lifelong journey of reflection, resilience, and meaning-making. The book closes with an Ode to the HBCU, honoring the historic and ongoing role of Historically Black Colleges and Universities as sites of cultural affirmation, intergenerational pride, and transformative education. Teaching Through Generational Traumas is a call to reimagine what education can be when it is rooted in empathy, awareness, and liberation. It speaks directly to faculty, administrators, and students at HBCUs and beyond, while also offering insights for those interested in the intersections of history, identity, and pedagogy. This book will resonate with readers who believe that classrooms should be communities of growth, reflection, and belonging. By weaving together scholarship, lived experience, and practical strategies, Roberts demonstrates how we can confront the challenges of dissociation, respectability, and trauma, and instead cultivate spaces where students and instructors learn, heal, and transform together.Perfect for courses such as: Foundations of Education; Teaching and Learning in Higher Education; Culturally Relevant Pedagogy / Multicultural Education; Trauma-Informed Teaching Practices (or Social and Emotional Learning in Schools); African American Educational History; African American History / African Diaspora Studies; Educational Leadership & Policy Studies; Sociology of Education / Education and Society

More than a century after William James published his provocative critique The PhD Octopus in 1903, his warnings about the corrupting entanglements between institutions and graduate students remain strikingly relevant. Doctoral Studies as Educational Industrial Complex revisits James’ concerns through a contemporary lens, offering a critical examination of doctoral education in the field of education in what feels like perennial crisis. Throughout the volume, contributors grapple with the tensions James identified: the obsession with credentials over genuine intellectual work, the “tyrannical machine” of institutional demands, and the misalignment between doctoral preparation and actual career paths. These tensions are particularly acute in practitioner-oriented EdD programs designed to produce scholar-practitioners who often remain in their local communities rather than entering the academy. Yet research-oriented PhD programs face their own crisis, as they continue to prepare scholars for a tenure-track job market that has dramatically contracted. With only 32% of faculty holding tenured or tenure-track positions in 2023—down from 53% in 1987—the traditional pathway to academic careers has fundamentally eroded. The book speaks to multiple audiences: faculty who supervise doctoral students and seek to understand the challenges they face; doctoral students navigating alternative program formats and uncertain career prospects; administrators responsible for program design and accreditation; and scholars interested in the future of higher education and professional preparation. By centering faculty expertise and critical analysis rather than external market demands, this volume offers a necessary counter-narrative to prevailing trends in doctoral education reform. Ultimately, this book argues for a reconsideration of what doctoral education should accomplish and for whom, grounding these questions in both historical perspective and contemporary realities.

Writing a Philosophy Statement: An Educator’s Workbook, Second Edition provides a step-by-step process for writing a clear and concise philosophy of education statement based on a reader’s beliefs about their approaches to teaching. This unique book provides information about five key philosophical approaches to teaching, using a range of activities for preservice and experienced teachers to examine classroom dilemmas. The workbook explores a variety of philosophical stances, including: Five philosophical approaches to teaching Strategies for identifying your approach to teaching Strategies for applying your approach in a written philosophy of education statement Practical uses for your philosophy statement Example Professional Development Activities include Case Studies; Check Lists; Sample Philosophy Statements; Tips and Tools for Writing a Philosophy Statement; and Using your Statement in Job Interviews and Graduate School Applications. A key feature of this book is the highly researched two-dimensional Philosophy of Education Scale, helpful in identifying an individual’s most and least likely approaches to teaching. The Scale includes a range of teaching practices that can prompt readers’ deep understanding of the sources that impact their approach decisions. This book offers educational leaders a much-needed pathway for collaborative communication about how teachers can impact school climate, change and attainment. Writing a Philosophy Statement is an essential tool for undergraduate and graduate students of education who are preparing for a career in teaching and for the academic rigors that they will encounter.Perfect for courses such as: Introduction to Education; Analysis of Instruction; Curriculum and Instruction; Research on Curriculum and Instruction; School Practice and Change; Philosophy of Education; Leadership and Change; Leadership and Collaboration; Principles of Leadership; Foundations of Education; History of Education; Senior Seminar; Student Teaching; Field Experience; and Methods of Instruction

Food Stories: Navigating the Academy with Cultural Lessons from the Kitchen is the first volume in the series Culinary Canvas: A Series on Integrating the Arts and Food into Higher Education. The purpose of the series is to explore the innovative integration of arts and food into higher education. Each volume aims to inspire a paradigm shift in academia, advocating for a more holistic, creative, and inclusive approach to learning, teaching, researching, serving, and existing in the academy. In the present volume, Food Stories makes the case that food, and the culture surrounding food, is a closely held--and powerful--reality that shapes who we are as individuals, as members of varied communities, and invariably, informs who we are as educators and researchers. This book gives space for the authors to explore not only the impact that food and culture have had, and continue to have, on them as individuals, how that culture and experiences impact them as members of the academy (in teaching, research, and service), but also in providing some guidance to graduate students and junior faculty. In effect, chapters explore navigating academic work (teaching, research, and service) through the lens of food and the transferable lessons that can be gleaned from our grandmothers’, mothers’, fathers’, and our own kitchens. It is often the case that higher education fosters both imposter syndrome and a workaholic disposition that can be detrimental to teaching and research. What this book does, then, is to not only explore the ways in which what may seem as non-academic work such as cooking a meal can have on our work/life balance but, also, how to incorporate the very lessons of food into who we are as educators, how we teach, and how we can approach the work we do more broadly. Through carefully curated chapters, this text presents a wide array of perspectives across food and cultural regions, as well as imparting insights from the academy from authors spanning the spectrum of the career. It is an important book full of valuable lessons for graduate students, faculty and teachers who wish to use its content in their classrooms.Perfect for courses such as: Cultural Studies; Culturally-Responsive Pedagogy

Generative Knowing explores the mystery of learning from the unknown in ways that reveal that learning is a dynamic phenomenon, encompassing both personal and societal contexts. Dewey defines learning in terms of experience, reflection, continuity, and interactivity. When learning happens, it eventually solidifies into reliable truths that become a shortcut for taking action or making decisions—thus a habit of learning is formed and becomes rigid. Generative knowing is an emerging theory of adult learning that seeks the not-yet-foreknown potential that waits to be uncovered in the richness of experience. The book delivers vignettes of different lived experiences of being and becoming, signaling multiple ways in which a person shapes and transcends traditional conceptions of self-other binary activating the power to respond to the ongoing complex evolution of self and society. Generative Knowing seeks to accomplish four goals: to offer a unique exploration of learning, positioned as response-ability that illuminates the relatedness of learning and complex, ambiguous, unsolvable challenges that are recognizable in society as social challenges (i.e. forced migration)to present and distinguish an emerging theory of adult learning, generative knowing. Generative knowing emerged as a distinct learning disposition at the intersections of personal meaning making capacity (developmental psychology) encountering the characteristics of rising ambiguity (complexity sciences) and the lived experience of undergoing experienceto make visible and help others make the connections between generative knowing at a personal level and the complex, ambiguous unsolvable challenges in today’s society, andto provide illustrations of what generative knowing entails, how it shapes personal and societal transformation and how that may support educators, facilitator activists and change activists to make space for generative knowing when complex challenges call for both personal and societal transformations. Adult education as a field of practice is presently grappling with how adults learn in a world being recomposed by a global pandemic. Generative knowing—defined as ways of being and becoming that creatively activate potential—restores many rhythms of learning, helping readers gain fresh perspectives on how learning emerges from the unknown. The vital and personal stories in this book guide readers to walk in the territory of the unknown and to pay attention to the sensations of entanglements of self with multiple societal forces as a new way of learning. Perfect for courses such as:  Adult Learning Theory │ Adult Learning Theory & Praxis │ Adult Development │ Transformative Learning │ Phenomenology │ Narrative Inquiry │ New Materialism │ Creative Research Methodologies

Since the founding of the nation, higher education has helped female faculty and students assert themselves in establishing equality between men and women across the country (Morris, 1984). During the nineteenth century, women had limited access to many sectors of American society because of their inferior status to men. Such differences were visible in both political and academic arenas. This discrimination reflected general societal norms of the time, relegating women to the roles of mothers and homemakers. Women and Gender in Higher Education provides a comprehensive review of the varying concepts that address the development of women in higher education, including how women understand the world around them—making meaning for themselves and their environment—and acknowledging the intersectionality of their identity. It also breaks new ground in the conversation about the roles of women and gender in higher education.