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.
Category: Author Conversations
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.
History as Exploration: Guiding Students Beyond the Familiar
I realized that these students are interested in the world in all its multiplicity; they don’t know where to start. The history of exploration provides a path for them to engage with the world through a familiar lens without entirely leaving their comfort zone. So now I try to complicate and expand rather than to dismiss.
“Write What’s Not Fair”: On Obsession, Paradox, and Permission in the Classroom
Passionate student writers rarely lack ideas, but instructors can help them narrow those ideas down by choosing to write what makes them feel the most. Authors Matthew Clark Davison and Alice LaPlante instruct students to write what’s “not fair.” Unresolved emotions, from hatred to love, offer great fuel to new writers seeking direction.
Curriculum Reform and The Musician in Society
In our own School of Music at Louisiana State University, a large-scale reform of the undergraduate curriculum led us to ponder what, exactly, we hoped first-year music majors would learn from an introductory course taught by musicology faculty.
Engaging Biology Students with RNA Storytelling
Thomas R. Cech, PhD, is Distinguished Professor of Biochemistry at the University of Colorado Boulder and received the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 1989. His book The Catalyst (2024) is available now in paperback. You can request an exam copy for your courses at the end of the article. I’ve taught several thousand college students …
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Making the Case for Sociology: A Practical Guide for Students
Lisa Wade is a professor at Tulane University with appointments in Sociology, the Gender and Sexuality Studies Program, and the Newcomb Institute. She’s the author of Terrible Magnificent Sociology and American Hookup: The New Culture of Sex on Campus. https://lisa-wade.com/
What I Wish My High School Teachers Knew When I Was in High School
Award-winning children’s author Rex Ogle suggests assumptions that kids are either “good” or “bad” leave little room for nuance. Despite gaining a reputation as a “bad kid,” Ogle highlights the teachers who saw past this label and recognized his potential.