In this section of Campus, EuropeNow features a selection of scholarly articles and books on topics pertinent to the teaching of Europe or teaching in Europe that were published within the last 5 years. This dynamic bibliography, with monthly installments, seeks to highlight both pedagogy research as well as critical analyses of debates taking place in higher education in and about Europe.
If you are interested in reviewing any of the books featured in any of our Campus Round-Ups, please contact our Research and Pedagogy Chair, Hélène Ducros, at helene@alumni.unc.edu
1. A Splendid Torch: Learning and Teaching in Today’s Academic Libraries by Reeves Eyre, J. John C. Maclachlan, and Christa Williford, eds. (Report)
Six essays, written collaboratively by current and former CLIR postdoctoral fellows, explore the contributions that today’s academic libraries—as providers of resources, professional support, and space—are making to learning and teaching. Topics include the continuing evolution of the learning commons, information literacy instruction, digital humanities teaching in libraries, spatial literacy, collaboration in digital special collections, and 3-D printing and pedagogy.
Read the full report on The Council on Library and Information Resources
2. Classroom Action: Human Rights, Critical Activism, and Community-Based Education edited by Ajay Heble (University of Toronto Press)
Building on the concept of a “teaching community,” Heble and his contributors explore what it might mean for teachers and students to reach outside the walls of the classroom and attempt to establish meaningful connections between the ideas and theories they have learned and the broader community beyond campus. Utilizing a case study approach, the chapters in this volume are conceptually and practically useful for teachers and students involved in thinking about and implementing community-based forms of teaching and learning.
Classroom Action links teaching and research in genuinely innovative ways, and provides a range of dissemination strategies to inspire broad-based outcomes and impact among a diverse range of knowledge-users. It marks a major advance on the ways in which the relationship among pedagogy, human rights, and community-based learning has hitherto been theorized and practiced. The community-based learning at the centre of Classroom Action prompts a radically new means of thinking about what teachers do in the classroom, and how and why they do it.
Buy the book from University of Toronto Press
3. Threats to internationalised legal education in the twenty-first century UK
What are the prospects for internationalised legal education in the contemporary UK? Our reflections on this question were prompted by three relatively recent publications dealing with a variety of aspects of the internationalisation of legal education, as well as discussions in and outputs from “Brexit and the Law School” events in Liverpool Law School, Keele University, Strathclyde University, and Northumbria University during 2017. We argue that, although law is often assumed to be state based and jurisdiction specific, there are significant reasons to internationalise legal education but that in the current climate of Brexit, marketisation of higher education and the Solicitors Qualifying Examination such internationalisation is under threat.
Read the full article in The Law Teacher
4. University academics’ preferences for hiring and promotion systems
Academic employment systems have recently been subjected to policy-driven changes in many countries, but the university sector is still governed by collegial dynamics in which academics’ views and attitudes are important. The present study, based on data from questionnaire survey responses from 4460 faculty members in public universities in Spain, attempts to account for the preferences of academics for the current system of accreditation for hiring and promotion. Following two previous reforms and more than ten years of operation of the accreditation system, over fifty per cent of academics would prefer a different model for hiring and promotion. We identify four sets of explanatory factors linked to: academics’ self-interest, beliefs and values, personal experience and learning, and socialization and institutional factors. We find that academics’ preferences are neither solely nor primarily explained by their career advancement interests. Our results show that preferences regarding the hiring and promotion systems are strongly associated with a set of beliefs and values, especially the belief in the relative suitability of accreditation to guarantee merit-based selection.
Read the full article in European Journal of Higher Education
5. Hannah Arendt’s political thinking on emotions and education: implications for democratic education
This paper asks: when political emotions are invoked in the classroom, can this be done without the process of democratic education degenerating into a form of emotional and/or political indoctrination? The source of inspiration for addressing this question is Hannah Arendt’s political thought on emotion and education. The aim of the article is to show that despite the tensions and weaknesses that have been identified over the years about Arendt’s views on both emotions and political education, she provides compelling insights against the possibilities of political education degenerating into moral-emotional rhetoric. Arendt highlights the dangers of constructing political emotions in the classroom as the foundation for political action, while acknowledging the constructive role for the emotions in the development of political agency. The paper concludes that Arendt’s insights on emotions and political education can help educators avoid potential pitfalls in efforts that (re)consider the place of political emotions in the classroom.
Read the full article in Discourse: Studies in the Cultural Politics of Education
Published on March 10, 2020.
