Balancing Acts

"Draws on the experiences of four scholars at major universities who have successfully engaged in ‘balancing acts’ through which they have been educational innovators in their classrooms, disciplines, and institutions while advancing in their respective fields, notably through securing tenure and promotion….This is a splendid book for one reason: the stories that the author, trained as a cultural anthropologist, tells about her four ‘pathfinders.’ In large measure, these are stories of individuals who were not only committed to research in their fields but to improving teaching and learning. To wit, when discussing how the mechanical engineering professor uses methods― and explores subject matter―outside of her field, the reader becomes acutely aware of the attendant ‘risks’ facing this individual…This work marks a significant contribution to that body of scholarship.”―The Review of Higher Education

Includes interviews with Dan Bernstein (psychology, University of Nebraska), Brian Coppola (chemistry, University of Michigan), Sheri Sheppard (mechanical engineering, Stanford University), Randy Bass (American literature, Georgetown University), and colleagues within and outside their institutions and fields.

Mary Taylor Huber is a senior scholar at The Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching, where she works with the Carnegie Academy for the Scholarship of Teaching and Leaming (CASTL) and Carnegie's Ini­tiatives in Liberal Education. Trained as a cultural anthropologist, Huber directed the research program on Cultures of Teaching in Higher Educa­tion, which gave birth both to Balancing Acts and to her co-edited volume, Disciplinary Styles in the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning (2002). Huber is a co-author of Scholarship Assessed (1997), the Foundation's follow-on report to Scholarship Reconsidered (Boyer, 1990), to which she also con­tributed.