How to Teach College: Secrets from a Master of the Craft

Widely known as a bestselling author and an award-winning college professor for over fifty years, James W. Loewen passed away in 2021, but his words and wisdom live on in How to Teach College. Full of strategies and secrets to inspire and invigorate students, this is a must-read for educational leaders at every level looking to deepen the impact of their teaching and inspire students to stay curious, vigilant, and engaged.

How to Teach College is an invaluable resource for professors teaching in increasingly fraught American classrooms. With a special emphasis on teaching students from diverse backgrounds and potentially controversial subjects, this posthumously published book comes to us in Loewen’s vibrant, original, and inimitable voice. In it, he offers advice on:

• How to make content come alive with vibrancy, leading to knowledge retention, comprehension, and student engagement
• How to convey a love of one’s topic and motivate students to become lifelong learners—both in the classroom and outside of it
• How to efficiently design a syllabus, manage the classroom, and optimize testing and grading
• The importance of ethics and open-mindedness when it comes to shaping young minds, and how to incorporate freedom of thought into each and every lesson

As a leading sociologist of race relations and a prizewinning college educator with a teaching career spanning over half a century at Tougaloo College, Harvard University, University of Vermont, and Catholic University, Loewen taught the way he wrote: with creativity, humor, and a high expectation that students can handle the truth. Edited by Loewen’s son, himself a fellow educator and longtime high school teacher, as well as sociology professor Michael Dawson, How to Teach College comes as a pivotal moment in history and is sure to inspire and motivate generations of teachers to come.

James W. Loewen (1942–2021) was the bestselling and award-winning author of Lies My Teacher Told Me, Lies Across America, Lies My Teacher Told Me About Christopher Columbus, Sundown Towns, and Lies My Teacher Told Me: Young Readers’ Edition (all from The New Press). He also wrote Teaching What Really Happened and The Mississippi Chinese: Between Black and White and edited The Confederate and Neo-Confederate Reader. He won the American Book Award, the Oliver Cromwell Cox Award for Distinguished Anti-Racist Scholarship, the Spirit of America Award from the National Council for the Social Studies, and the Gustavus Myers Outstanding Book Award.

Nicholas Loewen teaches high school English in Washington, DC. He is the co-editor (with Michael Dawson) of James W. Loewen’s How to Teach College.

Michael Dawson is an independent sociologist who has taught a wide variety of courses at Portland Community College, Lewis & Clark College, Portland State University, and the University of Oregon. He is the author of The Consumer Trap: Big Business Marketing in American Life and the co-editor (with Nick Loewen) of James W. Loewen’s How to Teach College. He lives in Portland, OR.