A posthumous book by the bestselling author of Lies My Teacher Told Me, sharing the strategies and secrets of an award-winning, fifty-year career as a college professor
“Not a few professors teach solely because they have to, to hold a position that lets them do what they really want to do, which is ‘their work’—their research, their writing. . . . Those professors miss the joys of teaching.” —from the introduction to How to Teach College
James Loewen (1942–2021) was a leading historian and sociologist of race relations and the U.S. South, most widely known as the best-selling author of Lies My Teacher Told Me: Everything Your History Textbook Got Wrong (winner of the American Book Award). In addition to being a prolific historian and writer, he was also a prize-winning college educator. With a career spanning over half a century at institutions including Tougaloo College, Harvard, University of Vermont, and Catholic University, Loewen taught the way he wrote: with creativity, humor, and a high expectation that students can handle the truth.
How to Teach College is an invaluable resource for professors teaching in increasingly fraught American classrooms. With a special emphasis on teaching students from diverse backgrounds and potentially controversial subjects, the posthumously published book comes to us in Loewen’s vibrant, original, and inimitable voice. In it, Loewen also offers advice from the epic—how to convey a love of one’s topic and motivate students to become lifelong learners, to the technical—how to design a syllabus, manage the classroom, testing and grading—all drawing on firsthand anecdotes from his own courses on sociology and race relations.
Edited by Loewen’s son, Nicholas Loewen, a longtime high school teacher, and sociology professor Michael Dawson, How to Teach College is sure to inspire generations of teachers to come.
