I was attracted to this book because I have enjoyed his earlier books, particularly, "Sundown Towns" and "Lies My Teachers Told Me." This amazing book should be required reading for all new and current teachers and professors. If someone is an established teacher or professor - it is easy to get complacent and burned out, so this book will help re-energize them as teachers. This book was lovingly completed by his son after James asked him if he would finish it when he died. It covers all the bases -- from teaching "lecturettes," discussions, testing, grading, teaching diverse students, and the importance of having high expectations for all of your students. I highly recommend this book.

Thank you to Netgalley and The New Press for an ARC and I voluntarily left this review.

Horrid Book on How Not to Teach
James W. Loewen; Nicholas Loewen and Michael Dawson, eds., How to Teach College: Inspiring Diverse Students in Challenging Times (New York: The New Press, April 22, 2025). Hardcover: $24.36. 256pp, 5.5X8.5”. ISBN: 978-1-620979-20-4.
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“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… A resource for professors teaching in increasingly fraught American classrooms. With a special emphasis on teaching students from diverse backgrounds and potentially controversial subjects”, a “posthumously published book… 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… longtime high school teacher, as well as sociology professor Michael Dawson…”
I just accepted a job offer to teach English as an Assistant Professor, so I hope to find some inspiration in these pages. Most of the interviews I had asked about how I would handle conflict, and diversity. Many schools require a diversity statement as part of an application. I am unsure what the correct answers to these questions are. I have mostly taught diverse students across the years when I was teaching. Though the “Contents” page started hinting that the advice here is contrary to my standard preferences because there’s a section “On (Not Lecturing)”. I can’t imagine failing to lecture. The Introduction clarifies that the author is “not against lecturing”, but rather shows how to minimize lecture time, and encourages use of media to fill the time instead. This is not really a good idea, in my experience. Showing video content tends to distract students, instead of focusing them on a subject. And they seem to conceive such insertions as filler-time. This chapter begins in the first-person with digressive commentary on talking being “not good enough”. Then, there’s an example that one professor was only lecturing to a single student until the author intervened by recommending seeing “each student in the dorm” to forcefully “get them all to come to the next class, and start over.” This is a very, very bad idea. The closest I came to this was when I lived on-campus at Shantou University, and asked to hold counseling sessions with students in my apartment, instead of dirty, dusty, over-filled office. The students seemed to be frightened by the setting into silence. It would be absolutely terrifying for them if I had found out where each of them live, and come by to insist they had to come to the next class. And then, “start over”? As in beginning teaching the same stuff I already covered? This is not a helpful book, so far.
Chapter 2 apparently recommends including “trigger warnings” for risky topics. I believe it is best to avoid introducing topics that need a trigger warning… Though I might be thinking about sex and violence, and this author might have less triggering things in mind. Inside the chapter, it is explained that “college should trigger some kinds of anxiety”, including when discussing race, sexual orientation, patriotism, religion. But even if these topics are said to not be off limits. The warnings are explained to be needed so those suffering from PTSD can receive special permission “to avoid a certain reading” etc. This strange recommendation is immediately contradicted with the note that students should not be allowed to skip assignments because of discomfort because they are “adults” (31). As an example, he cites a student coming home in tears after a “unit of the Holocaust” (32-3). A discussion on if this means the Holocaust should never be covered follows. One time, my students started yelling the Holocaust wasn’t real, and when I noted my relatives died in the Holocaust, they started questioning how I could know they died if I wasn’t there. That was pretty triggering. But I don’t think it’s legal to ask teachers to put trigger warnings about the Holocaust, or any of these other topics on a syllabus. Race? Imagine having a paragraph in a syllabus that explains which books in the syllabus mention people of other races? That is absolutely illegal. The question of race resurfaces across this book. In one section there is a note: “the massive traumas of American racial slavery disconnected enslaved African Americans from African cultural ways…” The enslavers are said to possibly be right, in that they left the Africans some “cultural habits” (129).
I’m out on this book. This might be the worst book ever written about teaching. Just to check I skimmed to the end and found questions from “Southern Democrats… about the capacity of African American citizens to vote responsibly” (197). What on earth does some blatant racism have to do with a book about how to enhance teaching strategy. I don’t even think I have to explain what’s wrong with all this. No useful information is given. The text is conversational, and rambling. And the things that are being babbled about are offensive and triggering to most self-conscious students as well as teachers. Don’t read this book. Nonsense is excusable in fiction: that’s pretty much what pop fiction is usually. But it is inexcusable in a title designed for teachers.
Pennsylvania Literary Journal: Spring 2025 issue: https://anaphoraliterary.com/journals/plj/plj-excerpts/book-reviews-spring-2025