Does AI deserve the same rights as human beings? Author Jeff Sebo discusses how our future relationship with AI can be understood through a deeper look into ethical and moral theory, human exceptionalism, and our relationship with animals. Learn how his students handle these topics with remarkable generosity and open-mindedness.
Category: Author Conversations
Engaging Music Theory Students with Interactive Resources
Dr. Jennifer Beavers is a music theorist at the University of Texas at San Antonio specializing in early twentieth-century analysis and music theory pedagogy. Dr. Melissa Hoag is the Doris and Paul Travis Professor of Music Theory and music department chair at Oakland University in Rochester, Michigan, where she has coordinated the music theory curriculum since 2007.
WHAT’S REAL ABOUT RACE? Shifting the Paradigm with Rina Bliss
With advances in genetics and high-profile conversations about race in the headlines, it can be difficult for students to know: What’s real about race? We sat down with author Dr. Rina Bliss to discuss her new Norton Short, which offers a different way of understanding how race is socially constructed—even in the age of genomics. What first inspired you to study the …
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Fewer Rules, Better Students: High-Discretion Teaching
The move from high- to low-discretion not only standardizes education, but also standardizes achievement in education in a truly unfortunate way. Instructors in high-discretion fields should embrace that feature, exercising high discretion with respect to assignments, curriculum, and grading standards.
Behind the Scenes of INSECTOPOLIS: A Q&A with Author Peter Kuper
The Norton Learning Blog team recently sat down with award-winning cartoonist Peter Kuper to discuss how he channeled his love of insects into his newest graphic novel, Insectopolis. Kuper shares how COVID-19 inspired his work, why humans should care about insects now more than ever, and how this title might just inspire a future generation of scientists and artists.
Going Fishing with Author Michal Brody: A Q&A on Selecting Model Readings for Students
A reading should also be relevant to a critical mass of our student readers. And that's an interesting part because “student readers” doesn’t mean “college age”—that doesn't mean anything anymore. There's this image of your classic “four-year liberal arts student,” but that’s a small proportion of who our intended audience is.
Teaching READING THE WORLD in Prison
Author of Reading the World, Michael Austin discusses how instructors can use Reading the World and Norton’s textbooks to help them should they need to lesson plan on the fly. Read how using dramatic excerpts from Reading the World kept his students engaged, excited, and encouraged to read more.
An Interdisciplinary Way of Teaching Oceanography: An Interview with Gillian Stewart
Author Gillian Stewart is passionate about drawing connections across these ocean disciplines, to the students’ lives, and to climate change. In this interview with the Norton Geology team, she explores how this new textbook came to be and how she knows it’s one that students will actually read.
From TikTok to Total Surplus: Using Pop Culture to Build Real-World Economic Thinking
Professor of Instruction and the Director of the Minor in Philosophy, Politics and Economics, Dirk Mateer, shares the three ways he makes economics fun, current, and meaningful for students by using pop-culture examples and interactive digital tools.
Rolling Forward: How THE NORTON ANTHOLOGY OF AFRICAN AMERICAN LITERATURE Continues to Shape the Classroom
Looking back at the First Edition of The Norton Anthology of African American Literature reminds me that each generation of scholars of African American literature before ours had to reinvent the wheel every time they tried to do research or sat down to plan a class. English literature has been well documented for decades. A student did not want for bibliographies of British scholarship or dictionaries of Shakespearean language, or collections of Elizabethan poetry and edited editions of medieval lyrics. By contrast, there were few comparable volumes for African American literature, and certainly no single book brought together its most important and representative works so that instructors could teach with one authoritative text.