This book is not primarily about teaching. But educators who are interested in teaching, whether they are administrators, faculty developers, or faculty in the classroom, will find much to ponder here. Jerry Gaff, who is vice president of the Association of American Colleges and Universities and a familiar name in higher education studies, and James Ratcliff, director of the Center for the Study of Higher Education at Penn State, are the moving forces; or rather they are the mediating moving forces, as they explain that the idea came from Jossey-Bass. This is meant to be a thorough treatment of the whole constellation of issues revolving around the undergraduate curriculum, a worthy successor to Ernest Boyer's 1978 Handbook on the Undergraduate Curriculum. I think it is a worthy successor in every way to Boyer, whose spirit is detectable in some of these contents. It is a crucial book. It should certainly be part of the collection--at least in the library, preferably on the desks of movers and shakers--at every US institution of higher education.
The introduction says more than once that "this is not a book designed to be read cover to cover," and, fortified by this permission, I have not read every word in its nearly 750 pages. A summary of the contents gives an idea of its scope: there are thirty-four chapters, ranging from theoretical ("What is a Curriculum and What Should It Be?") and historical ("Key Turning Points in the Evolving Curriculum," which takes a long view, beginning in 532 BC to fill in the background of American higher education) through a rewarding discussion of the aims of undergraduate education, chapters dealing with different disciplines, generous discussion of how to administer and assess the curriculum, to strategies for change and implementation. Along the way the authors, who include many of the best thinkers on American higher education, provide plenty of examples and extensive bibliographies.
The atmosphere in which this book has been written is different from the one Boyer breathed in 1978. We have been explicitly challenged to defend (and, where indefensible, to change) the experience of higher education in America. Barbara S. Fuhrmann provides a list of late twentieth-century challenges which is daunting in its length: among the most serious criticisms of American higher education she notes are
We don't have to agree with these charges (though it would take a bold person to deny them all) to realize that many people accept them and that among those people are some of our "stakeholders"--parents, legislators, trustees, opinion-makers.
Among the chapters of this book which most overtly address classroom practice are Austin Doherty, et al, "Developing Intellectual Skills," which devotes some trenchant observations to "Implications for Teaching" and Caryn McTighe Musil's "Diversity and Educational Integrity," which asks how professors can help students to "become more effective boundary crossers and borderland dwellers."
The richest section of the Handbook, for readers of Effective Teaching, will likely be that on "Directions for Reform Across the Disciplines," which includes chapters by Elaine Maimon on Teaching Across the Curriculum, by Julie Thompson Klein and Bill Newell on Interdisciplinary Studies, by Roberta S. Matthews, et. al., on Learning Communities, and by James Farmer on Using Technology. Thereare also treatments of internationalizing the curriculum and diversity. Maimon, whose background is in Writing Across the Curriculum, has some particularly interesting ideas on reimagining the classroom, on teaching across the divide between teachers and students, and on active learning across the curriculum.
In justice to all the authors--and to Jerry Gaff and Jim Ratcliff, the editors and commissioners of this volume--the book seems imbued with a recognition that the curriculum is not just what but also how we teach; that there is, in addition to the explicit curriculum found in catalogs and syllabi, a co-curriulum and even an implicit curriculum that are just as eventful for student development; and that theory without praxis is sterile. I believe this book will be a landmark volume. It deserves to be.
Merritt Moseley
UNC Asheville