Available now! Published in the West Virginia University Press in the Teaching and Learning Higher Education series
What is this book about? Picture a Professor: Interrupting Biases about Faculty and Increasing Student Learning is a collection of evidence-based insights and intersectional teaching strategies crafted by and for college instructors who inspire transformative student learning while challenging stereotypes about what a professor “looks like.” Published in the West Virginia University Press series, “Teaching and Learning in Higher Education” and representing a variety of scholarly disciplines, the authors offer practical, energizing, and encouraging advice about effectively navigating student preconceptions about embodied identity and academic expertise. Each author recognizes the pervasiveness of racialized, gendered, and other biases about professors and recommends specific, concrete ways to productively respond to and interrupt such preconceptions.
These authors believe in the potential of the college classroom to facilitate authentic life-changing learning for students. Educators at every stage of their career will find affirming acknowledgement of the ways systemic inequities impact college teaching conditions and evidence-based, actionable advice about interrupting those biases and facilitating student learning with innovative course design, classroom activities, assessment techniques, and more.
Jargon-free and engagingly written, each chapter offers multidisciplinary, immediately applicable teaching takeaways, rooted in the scholarship of teaching and learning and the authors’ lived wisdom-of-practice. Picture a Professor is a highly practical and groundbreaking collection of empowering pedagogical practices that re-envision what we think of when we picture a professor.
What can this book do? Picture a Professor will empower and inspire its readers in their teaching. First, it compellingly demonstrates one of the most transformative truths offered by the best SoTL: the message that “you are not alone.” Readers will recognize themselves in these pages and in the authors’ experiences navigating student biases. Secondly, these essays go on to demonstrate specific, actionable, pedagogical strategies for interrupting those biases and facilitating student learning. It will build readers’ teaching self-efficacy by fully acknowledging the ways systemic racism, sexism, ableism, and other inequities impact college teaching but at the same time giving readers effective ways to challenge those inequities in the classroom and create authentic learning experiences.
How does this book break new ground? This collection of teaching strategies takes as its starting point that embodied identity matters to effective teaching and learning. It acknowledges very directly that sociocultural assumptions, expectations, and stereotypes about identity always come with us into the classroom. Picture a Professor breaks new ground in the SoTL and teaching advice field by first foregrounding this proven fact and then offering clear, actionable, and effective strategies for instructors navigating those stereotypes, i.e., everyone who doesn’t “look like” a professor. Previous books that explore systemic inequities in higher education fall short of giving readers things they can do right now, when designing their next course or teaching their next class, to improve student learning. Similarly, most college teaching guides fail to adequately address the reality of embodied identity in shaping every individual teaching context. This book does both.
Who is this book for? Picture a Professor aims to directly empower and speak to readers whose lived experiences encountering and responding to racialized, gendered, and other embodied stereotypes about “what a professor looks like” have not been consistently addressed in previous published advice and guidance about teaching. Picture a Professor attends to filling this gap by directly discussing the college teaching contexts of faculty from historically marginalized and delegitimized groups in higher education, such as women faculty of color, faculty with disabilities, and nonbinary faculty. We hope these readers in particular will be energized as educators seeking to increase their teaching efficacy by knowing that others have had some similar experiences and are now sharing some actionable insights into effective teaching and learning.
However, this collection is also intended for anyone teaching college today. The pedagogical strategies elucidated here and the Teaching Takeaways listed at the end of each chapter offer concrete, research-based, thought-provoking points for pedagogical reflection and class planning, no matter what your individual institutional context and embodied identity. Though never presuming a universally applicable approach to effective teaching, each chapter provides extensive food for thought for all educators committed to their own pedagogical learning. Each chapter encourages and works to empower readers to think about what will help them facilitate authentic student learning in their own teaching context.