This chapter explains that the core principles and practices of social and emotional learning should be used to support doctoral students and enhance their personal welfare and academic performance in graduate school.

In this chapter we describe the Decoding the Disciplines Faculty Learning Community at Mount Royal University and how Decoding has been used in new and multidisciplinary ways in the various teaching, curriculum, and research projects that are presented in detail in subsequent chapters.

A number of universities in the United Kingdom (UK) have launched institution-wide initiatives recently to embed inquiry and research more firmly into the student experience. Among these, the Centre for Inquiry-based Learning in the Arts and Social Sciences (CILASS) led a five-year development program at The University of Sheffield (TUOS) between…

Inquiry-guided learning (IGL) has widespread appeal in higher education as a suite of teaching strategies that promotes learning through students' increasingly independent investigation of questions, problems, and issues using the methods of inquiry of the disciplines. Framed as especially appropriate for research universities, IGL has been…

In 2006, Miami University (Oxford, Ohio) launched a major initiative, the Top 25 Project, to embed inquiry-guided learning (IGL) into its largest-enrollment courses across the university. These are generally entry-level classes and thus affect many students: 75 percent of incoming students on its main campus in 2010 were in at least one Top 25…

The question of how best to fulfill the academy's role in civic life animates many discussions about the identity and function of higher education in the twenty-first century. Service-learning is emerging as a central component of efforts to connect both disciplinary learning and general education with this historic and increasingly salient…

The term "assessment" sends shivers down academic spines. For faculty, it signals marching orders from external parties who may or may not appreciate the subtle and not always quantifiable value of faculty efforts. For administrators, it means the dual challenge of recalibrating internal measures to meet external mandates but also…

In the last two decades, there has been a proliferation of Web-based course-management systems designed to facilitate postsecondary teaching (for example, WebCT, Blackboard, Desire2Learn, Moodle). In general, these systems provide analogs for delivering lectures, holding class discussions, giving quizzes and examinations (typically multiple…

A review of existing training programs for international teaching assistants indicates that trainers generally use one of four approaches: orientation, precession, concurrent-term, or preterm programs. The key to success to any of these approaches is the staff members who conduct the programs. (MLW)

An introductory statistics course is a common requirement for undergraduate economics, psychology, and sociology majors. An approach to statistics that involves the effort to encourage habits of systematic, critical quantitative thinking through focusing on descriptive statistics is discussed. (MLW)

Hampshire College needed to create opportunities for advanced undergraduates to have extensive laboratory or field experience in experimental sciences. A general biochemistry course, taught almost entirely in the laboratory, is described. The focus of the course is enzymes as catalysts and as proteins. (MLW)

A course at Hampshire College that examines the character and history of literary natural history and surveys many of its significant American authors and works is described. Issues of the relationship between people and nature are raised and discussed in terms of current environmental debates. (MLW)

A course at Hampshire College that joins the literature and analytical approaches of anthropology with certain texts in English, American, and European literature and modern criticism is described. The problems of the relationship of observer to observed, of author to text, and of audience to text are covered. (MLW)

Librarians must help students establish basic research skills, enabling students to find their way in the pertinent indexes, bibliographies, and electronic databases. A course at Hampshire College in bibliographical instruction is described. (MLW)

Inquiry is seen as a tension among three modes of imagination. These modes are labeled creation, self-criticism, and observation. Most people do not want to inquire. They tend to cling to their beliefs about the world. Freud's theories are used in a class designed to dramatize inquiry. (MLW)