About the book:
No matter how skilled, thoughtful, and well prepared professors are—or how motivated and engaged their students might be—things sometimes go wrong. In this empowering, smart, and refreshingly frank book, Jessamyn Neuhaus offers college educators a roadmap for anticipating and navigating these inevitable snafus—and keeping the course of teaching and learning on track. Clear-eyed about the rarely acknowledged foul-ups that teachers invariably confront, Snafu Edu provides evidence-based insights into why these things happen and practical, workable strategies for recognizing, responding to, repairing, and reducing them.
Snafu Edu identifies five major reasons for systemic and individual snafus in the field—inequity, disconnection, distrust, failure, and fear—and shows how understanding underlying causes can help educators perceive the problem and take appropriate measures. These measures are part of a problem-solving approach that Neuhaus calls STIR: stop, think, identify, and repair. She details course design principles and pedagogical practices to reduce major teaching and learning snafus by increasing equity, building connections, fostering trust, enabling success, and increasing agency for both educators and students.
Looking beyond “classroom management” and “conflict resolution,” Snafu Edu carefully and clearly grounds its lessons in the real context of education, where institutional structures, systemic injustices, individual and collective history, and the complexity of human interactions mean there will always be snafus. Like a preparedness kit for natural disasters, the book gives teachers an educational “go-bag” of insights, strategies, and practices to have at the ready when things go sideways.
About the reading experience:
Join us for a 4-week virtual, author-facilitated, communal reading experience on Jessamyn Neuhaus’s book, Snafu Edu: Teaching and Learning When Things Go Wrong in the College Classroom.
Dates: February 17th through March 16th
Cost: $15 for 8-week access to the ebook in Perusall
Location: Perusall platform -- participate on your own schedule!
About the author:
Jessamyn Neuhaus is the Director of the Center for Teaching and Learning Excellence (CTLE) and Professor in the School of Education at Syracuse University. A scholar of teaching and learning, Jessamyn is the author of Geeky Pedagogy: A Guide for Intellectuals, Introverts, and Nerds Who Want to be Effective Teachers and editor of Picture a Professor: Interrupting Biases about Faculty and Increasing Student Learning, both published in the West Virginia University Press series, Teaching and Learning in Higher Education. Her latest book, Snafu Edu: Teaching and Learning When Things Go Wrong in the College Classroom was published in the Oklahoma University Press series, Teaching, Engaging, and Thriving in Higher Education. Jessamyn holds a Ph.D. in history and in addition to two historical monographs, has published pedagogical, historical, and cultural studies research in numerous anthologies and journals, and is editor of Teaching History: A Journal of Methods. As a professor of history at SUNY Plattsburgh, she earned the SUNY Chancellor’s Award for Excellence in Teaching and has over twenty years of classroom experience at a range of higher ed institutions, teaching courses on U.S. history, gender studies, history of sexuality, popular culture history, and most recently, the history and discourse of traditional grading systems.
Please note: the course will be available for participants to continue the conversation for 4 weeks after the conclusion of the event. You may unenroll at any time.
