Our Summer Reading Picks | Academic Newsletter | Seneca Polytechnic

in the June 2021 issue

Summer’s here! Time to relax, recharge, and renew. And what better way to spend the long, hot days than with a good book or two.

The Teaching & Learning Centre has rounded up a list of 10 books that we’ll be reading over the summer. From pirates to pedagogy, there’s something to inspire every teacher. So grab a cold beverage, put on your sunglasses, find a shady spot, and enjoy these titles.

A More Beautiful Question: The Power of Inquiry to Spark Breakthrough Ideas
By Warren Berger
By showing how to approach questioning with an open, curious mind and a willingness to work through a series of “Why,” “What if,” and “How” queries, Berger offers an inspiring framework of how we can all arrive at better solutions, fresh possibilities, and greater success.

Decolonizing and Indigenizing Education in Canada
Edited by Sheila Cote-Meek and Taima Moeke-Pickering
Written by academics from across Canada, the text reflects the critical importance of the discourse on truth and reconciliation in educational contexts and how these discourses are viewed in institutions across the country.

Happy Teachers Change the World: A Guide for Cultivating Mindfulness in Education
By Thich Nhat Hanh
Spanning the whole range of schools and grade levels, from preschool through higher education, these mindfulness techniques are grounded in the everyday world of schools, colleges, and universities, with ample in-class interpretations, activities, tips, and instructions.

Make It Stick: The Science of Successful Learning
By Peter C. Brown, Henry L. Roediger III, and Mark A. McDaniel
New insights into how memory is encoded, consolidated, and later retrieved have led to a better understanding of how we learn. Drawing on recent discoveries in cognitive psychology and other disciplines, the authors offer concrete techniques for becoming more productive learners.

Tech Like a PIRATE: Using Classroom Technology to Create an Experience and Make Learning Memorable
By Matt Miller
Tech Like a PIRATE helps provide the tools, ideas, and inspiration for educators to use technology as a treasure map to amazing learning.

Small Teaching Online: Applying Learning Science in Online Classes
By Flower Darby
This book offers small teaching strategies around educational technologies, building community, and collaboration, and minor changes you can make in your online teaching practice – small but impactful adjustments that result in significant learning gains.

The Anti-Racist Writing Workshop: How to Decolonize the Creative Classroom
By Felicia Rose Chavez
A captivating mix of memoir and progressive teaching strategies, this book demonstrates how to be culturally attuned, twenty-first century educators. The Anti-Racist Writing Workshop is a call to create healthy, sustainable, and empowering classroom communities and asks what specific actions we can take to achieve authentically inclusive communities.

The New Education: How to Revolutionize the University to Prepare Students for a World in Flux
By Cathy N. Davidson
From the Ivy League to community colleges, Davidson introduces us to innovators who are remaking college for our own time by emphasizing student-centered learning that values creativity in the face of change above all.

The Online Teaching Survival Guide: Simple and Practical Pedagogical Tips, 3rd edition
By Judith V. Boettcher and Rita Marie Conrad
A practical, theory-based resource for educators learning to navigate the online teaching sector. It presents a framework of simple, yet practical instructional strategies mapped across a four-phase timeline that works for any online or blended course.

The Privileged Poor: How Elite Colleges Are Failing Disadvantaged Students
By Anthony Abraham Jack
Jack reveals that the struggles of less privileged students continue long after they’ve arrived on campus. This bracing and necessary book documents how university policies and cultures can exacerbate preexisting inequalities and reveals why these policies hit some students harder than others.

We want to know what you're reading! Share your summer reading items with us in this Wakelet collection.

View the June 2021 issue of the Academic Newsletter.