Book Review: Waiting to Happen: The Sociology of Unexpected Injuries

aspects addressing online learning, coteaching, community-based research, internationalization, flipped classrooms, nontraditional students, and universal design for learning. Part 2, “Classroom Techniques,” focuses on specific pedagogical techniques for improved classroom instruction. These include the oft-maligned but effective lecture, the use of PowerPoint, the relationship of classroom norms and discussion, how to create successful team projects, strategies for teaching difficult topics, the role of faculty in creating diverse and inclusive classrooms, the use of games and simulations in the classroom, and the use of contemplative practices in instruction. Part 3, “Out-of-Class Situations,” primarily covers the dual concerns of reading and engagement with course material. In looking at how students prepare for class outside of course meeting times, the two chapters in this section provide literature reviews and best practices to help students with reading and understanding a variety of course materials. The final section, part 4, “Assessment,” is a straightforward look at strategies for evaluating our practices as professors, from backward course design to grading rubrics, as well as a discussion of how to turn scholarly teaching into research addressing the sociology of teaching and learning. As a collection or as individual chapters, this book is useful for a wide variety of courses. Graduate proseminars across disciplines would benefit from using selections from part 1 (“Curricular Innovations”) and part 2 (“Classroom Techniques”). Any faculty member or working group of faculty focused on highquality teaching could also benefit from this volume. Institutionwide centers focused on teaching and learning might use selections from this book for teacher and teaching-assistant training or for focused discussion. Reading groups, new faculty support groups, and even select undergraduate courses in sociology of education, teacher education, or human development could stimulate rich discussion and generate useful assignments based on this book. Even with a rich collection like this, we have to ask, is it relevant? We have more and more evidence that college-level teaching is rarely a priority at the university level to anyone but a handful of committed teachers. At this moment, where American universities have been making hard choices between offering in-person, online, and other new and creative ways of teaching if not closing down entirely, we have our answer: Yes. This collection is relevant, perhaps in ways unanticipated by the scholar-contributors. It is a reminder that teaching matters. With the current crisis in higher education exacerbated by the ongoing pandemic and the abrupt shift to online teaching, we see that the college classroom is not a set of modules or of content to be delivered; it is a set of relationships. While the U.S. college classroom may never look the way it did before March 2020, the larger idea here, which is that professors are teachers and researchers of their own classrooms as much as their larger stated research agendas, is critical. Teaching matters, perhaps now more than ever. Let’s keep learning from each other.