Teacher Education

Leading with Grace and Grit: The HBCU Faculty Development Network's Legacy of Cultivating Excellence, Resilience, and Innovation brings together scholars, administrators, and faculty innovators to explore the leadership, institutional practices, and culturally grounded approaches that continue to shape the vitality and success of Historically Black Colleges and Universities. Centered on the complementary qualities of grace and grit, the book examines how HBCUs cultivate excellence while navigating the complex challenges and opportunities facing higher education today. Through perspectives on STEM equity, experiential learning, student development, and institutional innovation, the contributors move from theory to practice, demonstrating how HBCUs create meaningful opportunities for students historically underrepresented in critical fields. The volume explores initiatives ranging from research-based strategies for expanding participation in technology and STEM to hands-on learning experiences that reveal both the transformative potential and practical challenges of innovation. At the heart of the book is an examination of the intellectual, psychological, and emotional lives of HBCU students. Drawing on African-centered psychology and Ubuntu philosophy, the contributors challenge conventional Western models of individual achievement and self-actualization, offering instead a vision of resilience and flourishing rooted in community, cultural identity, and historical consciousness. This commitment to culturally responsive support extends to examinations of faculty coaching, mentorship, and advising, emphasizing the essential role educators play in helping students navigate academic expectations while responding to their diverse needs and experiences. Together, these perspectives illuminate how HBCUs continue to foster resilience, innovation, and excellence—not simply through institutional structures, but through communities of support and shared purpose that transform adversity into opportunity and prepare students, faculty, and institutions to flourish. Historically Black colleges and universities have long served as essential institutions of education, opportunity, and social progress. Yet their significance extends well beyond their historical legacy. This book explores the continuing relevance and distinctive contributions of HBCUs in expanding educational opportunity, promoting economic mobility, and preparing students for meaningful and successful careers. At a time when questions about access, affordability, student success, and equity dominate conversations about higher education, HBCUs offer important lessons about the power of institutions designed to support students who have too often been underserved elsewhere. By examining their success in retaining and graduating first-generation, low-income African American students, this book demonstrates how HBCUs continue to foster academic achievement, economic opportunity, and community advancement. More than historic institutions, HBCUs remain vital engines of social and economic mobility, preparing graduates not only to build financially secure futures but also to contribute their talents, leadership, and expertise to communities and society. Leading with Grace and Grit is essential reading for academics, public policy administrators, and others involved in higher education. It is a useful volume in a variety of courses.

Our society urgently needs education that motivates, challenges, engages, and affirms all students. No matter their previous successes or failures, every student has enormous learning potential and important contributions to make now and in the future. Such meaningful learning experiences don't just happen, they need to be intentionally designed. This book supports those who will undertake this vitally important work. Learning that Matters: A Field Guide to Course Design for Transformative Education is a pragmatic resource for designing courses that engage college students as active citizens. This "work" book provides research-informed approaches for creating learning experiences and developing innovative, intellectually-engaging courses. Whether a novice or a veteran, by engaging with the text, collaborating with colleagues, and reflecting on the important work of a teacher, any motivated educator can become a transformative educator. Every college course has the potential to transform students' lives. Through implementation of critical concepts such as connected and authentic assessments; dilemmas, issues, and questions; portable thinking skills and engaging strategies; and a purposeful focus on inclusivity and equity, readers begin the process of change needed for preparing students who will be able to address the monumental challenges facing our society.Click HERE to watch the book launch.Click HERE to hear the authors discuss their book.Perfect for courses such as: Education Curriculum and Instruction | Design for Transformative Learning | An Introduction to Evidence-based Undergraduate Teaching | New Faculty Orientations | Freshman Seminar Faculty Trainings | Center for Teaching & Learning | Workshops in Course Design

Writing Beyond Recognition: Queer Re-Storying for Social Change documents and analyzes the insidious ways heteronormativity produces homophobia and heterosexism, including how this operates and is experienced by those who identify as gay, lesbian, bisexual, transgendered and queer. Using critical arts research practices read through queer and feminist theories and perspectives, the chapters in the book describe how participants who identified as lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgendered gained critical insights by learning to write and read about their experiences in new ways. Their revised queer stories function to enable a movement beyond merely recognizing to appreciating and understanding those differences. Robson offers a powerful argument about how everyone is narrated by and through discourses of gender and sexuality. Therefore, the content of the book is directed at all readers, not only those who identify as gay, lesbian, bisexual, transgendered or queer. The book will be important as a text in any course or area of study that is focused on inclusive education, cultural studies in education, critical arts research methods, gender and sexuality studies, and critical literacy approaches in education.Perfect for courses such as: Qualitative Research Methods | Social Justice | Ethnography | Critical Qualitative Inquiry | Gender, Sexuality, and Women’s Studies | Participatory Action Research | Arts-Based Research | Writing | Autobiography | Curriculum Studies | Teacher Education | Cultural Studies | Reading and Literacy Education | Community Education | Adult Education