Balancing Acts

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.

"In her gently evocative monograph, Mary Huber 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….this is a bloody good read, and I strongly recommend it to faculty who are deeply committed to teaching that enhances the learning of all students."The Review of Higher Education

• 1 Introduction: The Scholarship of Teaching and Learning in Academic Careers Case: Daniel Berstein 2 Teaching as Inquiry into Learning 3 Recognizing Teaching as Serious Intellectual Work Case: Brian Coppola 4 Thinking Like a Chemist 5 Pedagogical Positions Case: Sheri Sheppard 6 Redesigning Engineering Education 7 The Question of Quality Case: Randy Bass 8 New Media Pedagogy 9 Making Teaching Visible 10 Conclusion: Work in Progress