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

A posthumous book by the bestselling author of Lies My Teacher Told Me, sharing the strategies and secrets of an award-winning, fifty-year career as a college professor

＂Not a few professors teach solely because they have to, to hold a position that lets them do what they really want to do, which is ’their work’--their research, their writing. . . . Those professors miss the joys of teaching.＂ --from the introduction to How to Teach College

Widely known as the bestselling author of Lies My Teacher Told Me: Everything Your American History Textbook Got Wrong, James W. Loewen, who passed away in 2021, was 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.

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 from the epic (how to convey a love of one’s topic and motivate students to become lifelong learners) to the technical (how to design a syllabus, manage the classroom, testing and grading)--all drawing on firsthand anecdotes from his own courses on sociology and race relations.

Edited by Loewen’s son, Nicholas Loewen, a longtime high school teacher, and sociology professor Michael Dawson, How to Teach College is sure to inspire 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.

Nick Loewen teaches high school English in Washington, DC.

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.