Revitalizing Classrooms: Innovations and Inquiry Pedagogies in Practice

Revitalizing Classrooms brings together six diverse essays with the central purpose of providing a venue for scholar teachers from a number of disciplines to convey their individual journeys in pedagogical innovation. These classroom narratives involve a paradigm shift away from traditional lecture modes to vital, active, engaged teaching and learning. From high school classrooms to undergraduate and graduate classes, these models provide adaptable ways to reinvigorate and energize classroom spaces that center student driven learning.

Table of Contents:
Dedication Foreword—Virginia S. Lee Acknowledgements Introduction: Ways of Inquiry—Pathways and Partnerships for Grassroots Innovation Jeff Galle and Rebecca L. Harrison Chapter 1: Moving Pictures and Words: Multimodal Projects in College Composition Laura Ng and Karen Redding Chapter 2: Reacting to the Past and What it Means Today Linda Hughes Chapter 3: PBL and Collaborative Learning in the Complex Learning of Solar Geometry Bronne Dytoc Chapter 4: Discovering Empirical Patterns in the Social Sciences: Small Assignments with Web-Based Data in Introductory Classes Thomas D. Lancaster Chapter 5: The Ethics of the A-Bomb Pangratios Papacosta Chapter 6: A Tale of Two Beneficiaries: Using Inquiry-Guided Learning to Foster Social Research Skills and Critical Thinking Lyndi Hewitt and Lorena Russell About the Contributors Index

About the Author :
Jeffery Galle is Associate Professor of English, founding Director of the Center for Academic Excellence, and organizer of IPLA at Oxford College of Emory University. Co-author of How to Be a ‘HIP’ Campus: Maximizing Learning in Undergraduate Education (2015) and Interdisciplinary Approaches to Pedagogy and Place-Based Education: From Abstract to Quotidian (forthcoming May 2017), Galle’s scholarship focuses on pedagogies involving active learning, particularly those associated with experiential learning, place, and inquiry. Rebecca L. Harrison, Associate Professor of English and Director of STEAM English at the University of West Georgia, teaches courses in Southern women writers, American literature, pedagogy, and secondary English education. A women’s literature specialist, Harrison has published on writers such as Eudora Welty and Beatrice Witte Ravenel, alongside her work on active pedagogies; her recent book Inhabiting La Patria, a critical collection on Julia Alvarez, was published by SUNY Press in 2013.

Review :
At a time when, despite lip service, teaching is woefully undervalued in much of higher education, Oxford College of Emory University’s Institute for Pedagogy in the Liberal Arts honors committed, innovative, and successful teaching and teachers. These essays reflect some of the best sessions from IPLA over the years and provide the reader with powerful and successful models for improving their teaching, and, more importantly, through that teaching improving student learning. Pedagogical approaches to Inquiry-based learning serve to build a solid foundation for critical thinking skills that are essential to student success in college and careers. The essays contained in this volume will serve as model best practices to assist other educators trying to adopt an inquiry-based approach. In this collection of essays from the IPLA incubator, Galle and Harrison and their authors show that, while inquiry-guided learning projects may be grounded in specific courses, the approach itself transcends these particular contexts, and inquiry is ultimately a habit of mind of the educated person.