While I enjoy having time during the summer for all the fiction reading that I miss during the school year, this summer I also have a stack of non-fiction reading that I plan to dig into.
Back when I was finishing my master’s program I read a lot on adult development and theories of adult learning, but it’s been a wee bit of time since then, so I thought it would be good to pick out some unfamiliar works by familiar authors. No promises that I get to all these right away, but I’ve started with Teaching Matters: A Guide for Graduate Students by Aeron Haynie and Stephanie Spong.
My focus with this particular summer reading stack is thinking about how adult development and theories of adult learning can inform working with faculty in their development as instructors. I think most faculty, understandably, don’t want to participate in activities that don’t feel authentic and useful. I think most of us are excited to engage in professional development when we see the potential for immediate application to making our students’ learning better and our own work easier to manage and more joyful. No one wants to tick boxes for the sake of ticking boxes. So while I have a general goal of thinking about applications of adult learning, I really don’t have any other specific reason for why these texts - and I am looking forward to just reading and mulling over them rather than reading to develop a proposal or lit review.
If you want some other book recommendations, I have a list at Bookshop.org. Purchasing via Bookshop supports independently-owned bookstores across the county, and I’ve found their prices to track pretty similarly to other online booksites, including Amazon.
If a book isn’t your cup of tea at the moment, last summer I shared some Substack newsletters I read regularly and podcasts I subscribe to, and I still have some Audible titles I’m working my way through.
Lest you think it’s all work here, this is my fiction stack - still finishing Children of Time, but the rest were thoroughly enjoyable summer reading.