Teaching and learning STEM: A practical guide

By Richard M. Felder and Rebecca Brent; foreword by Barbara Oakley.
Call number: Q181 .F45 2016
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Part of our Faculty Development Collection. The authors each have taught STEM for decades and supervised junior faculty development. Their strategies “don’t require revolutionary time-intensive changes in your teaching, but rather a gradual integration of traditional and new methods.” This book is realistic, and its insights resonate with the lived experience of teaching, particularly when discussing the different cognitive styles, learning needs, and educational backgrounds that college teachers must meet. Especially valuable are their suggestions for using technology in hybrid courses and flipped classrooms, and for assignments that develop crucial work-place skills in students: self-directed learning & problem solving, critical and creative thinking, high-performance teamwork, and communication skills.

Energy: A Human History

By Richard Rhodes.
Call number: TJ163.2 .R56 2018
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Relevant to our Agriculture, Engineering Technology, and Homeland Security/Public Safety programs, this book is also of broader interest. It is written for a general audience but is extensively footnoted and has a 50-page bibliography; it also contains many useful diagrams and primary sources. Richard Rhodes – winner of the Pulitzer Prize and many other awards for his science writing – “highlights the successes and failures that led to each breakthrough in energy production: from animal and waterpower to the steam engine, from internal combustion to electricity and the harnessing of wind and sunlight … Each invention, each discovery, each adaptation brought further challenges in its wake … this half-forgotten knowledge can inform our way tomorrow” (publisher).

Firestorm: How wildfire will shape our future

By Edward Struzik.
Call number: SD421.34.N67 S77 2017
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Relevant to our Agriculture and Homeland Security/Public Safety programs, and for argumentative writing on social issues. “Journalist Edward Struzik visits scorched earth from Alaska to Maine, and introduces the scientists, firefighters, and resource managers making the case for a radically different approach to managing wildfire in the 21st century. Wildfires can no longer be treated as avoidable events because the risk and dangers are becoming too great and costly. Struzik weaves a heart-pumping narrative of science, economics, politics, and human determination and points to the ways that we, and the wilder inhabitants of the forests around our cities and towns, might yet flourish in an age of growing megafires.” (publisher)