A Christian in the Land of the Gods
A Christian in the Land of the Gods

Author: Joanna Reed Shelton

Publisher: Wipf and Stock Publishers

Published: 2016-01-05

Total Pages: 298

ISBN-13: 149822492X

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In November 1877, three months after Emperor Meiji's conscript army of commoners defeated forces led by Japan's famous "last samurai," the Reverend Tom Alexander and his new wife, Emma, arrived in Japan, a country where Christianity had been punishable by death until 1868. A Christian in the Land of the Gods offers an intimate view of hardships and challenges faced by nineteenth-century missionaries working to plant their faith in a country just emerging from two and a half centuries of self-imposed seclusion. The narrative takes place against the backdrop of wrenching change in Japan and Great Power jockeying for territory and influence in Asia, as seen through the eyes of a Presbyterian missionary from East Tennessee. This true story of personal sacrifice, devotion to duty, and unwavering faith sheds new light on Protestant missionaries' work with Japan's leading democracy activists and the missionaries' role in helping transform Japan from a nation ruled by shoguns, hereditary lords, and samurai to a leading industrial powerhouse. It addresses universal themes of love, loss, and the enduring power of faith. The narrative also proves that one seemingly ordinary person can change lives more than he or she ever realizes.

The Present Professor
The Present Professor

Author: Elizabeth A. Norell

Publisher: University of Oklahoma Press

Published: 2024-12-03

Total Pages: 262

ISBN-13: 0806195177

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It’s hard to learn when you’re under stress, and a lot harder when your teacher is struggling with stress, too. In a world where stress is unavoidable—where political turmoil, pandemic fallout, and personal challenges touch everyone—this timely book offers much-needed guidance for cutting through the emotional static that can hold teachers back. A specialist in pedagogical strategies with extensive classroom experience, Elizabeth A. Norell explains how an educator’s presence, or authenticity, can be critical to creating transformational spaces for students. And presence, she argues, means uncovering and understanding one’s own internal struggles and buried insecurities—stresses often left unconfronted in an academic culture that values knowing over feeling. Presenting the research on how and why such inner work unlocks transformational learning, The Present Professor equips educators with the tools for crafting a more authentic presence in their teaching work. At a time of crisis in higher education, as teachers struggle to find new ways to relate to, think about, and instruct students, this book holds a key. Implementing more inclusive pedagogies, Norell suggests, requires sorting out our own identities. In short, if we want to create spaces where students have the confidence, comfort, and psychological safety to learn and grow, we have to create spaces where we do, too. The Present Professor is dedicated to that proposition, and to helping educators build that transformational space.

Pivot
Pivot

Author: Joanne Soliday

Publisher:

Published: 2019-01-23

Total Pages: 0

ISBN-13: 9781642250565

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The news sure looks bad: rapidly shifting student demographics, the ever-increasing speed of technological innovation, and extreme legislative and public pressure are squeezing colleges and universities into a lose-lose race toward irrelevancy. Detailed in countless articles and books, the challenges faced by institutions of higher learning in the U.S. are varied and weighty. But higher education is far from doomed. It is at this inflection point in which independent colleges and universities have the opportunity to revolutionize higher education. It is time to pivot towards a new university, one that radically refocuses structure and pedagogy on students and their learning; reimagines the foundational institutional structures of leadership, tenure, and the higher education business model; and produces national examples for access and inclusion. In an industry notoriously slow to adapt and evolve, leaders of colleges and universities must act quickly and decisively, committing to a monumental shift to educate students for a world that we cannot yet see: a leap-frog into relevancy that higher education has never experienced. Authors Joanne Soliday and Dr. Mark Lombardi, with their combined decades in higher education leadership and consulting, explicate a picture of possibility for the future of independent colleges and universities, one rooted in the essential value of a liberal arts education that brings students to their highest potential. It is the critical reimagining of how that education is shaped that guides a vision for the new university.

Yesterday Today
Yesterday Today

Author: Catherine S. Barker

Publisher: University of Arkansas Press

Published: 2020-03-06

Total Pages: 268

ISBN-13: 1610756835

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The emergence into pop culture of quaint and simple Ozarks Mountaineers—through the writings of Vance Randolph, Wayman Hogue, Charles Morrow Wilson, and others—was a comfort and fascination to many Americans in the early twentieth century. Disillusioned with the modernity they felt had contributed to the Great Depression, middle-class Americans admired the Ozarkers’ apparently simple way of life, which they saw as an alternative to an increasingly urban and industrial America. Catherine S. Barker's 1941 book Yesterday Today: Life in the Ozarks sought to illuminate another side of these “remnants of eighteenth-century life and culture”: poverty and despair. Drawing on her encounters and experiences as a federal social worker in the backwoods of the Ozarks in the 1930s, Barker described the mountaineers as “lovable and pathetic and needy and self-satisfied and valiant,” declaring that the virtuous and independent people of the hills deserved a better way and a more abundant life. Barker was also convinced that there were just as many contemptible facets of life in the Ozarks that needed to be replaced as there were virtues that needed to be preserved. This reprinting of Yesterday Today—edited and introduced by historian J. Blake Perkins—situates this account among the Great Depression-era chronicles of the Ozarks.