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Some Takeaways from a History of College Teaching

Antique illustration of Amherst college classroom. Credit: iStock.com/ilbusca
Credit: iStock.com/ilbusca

I’m a historian, and I do a fair amount of pedagogical research. But one thing I’m not is a historian of college-level teaching, which makes Jonathan Zimmerman’s recent work, The Amateur Hour: A History of College Teaching in America, such a delight. What follows here isn’t a formal review of the book; rather, it’s a collection of observations that struck me as particularly important or interesting and that may spur readers of The Teaching Professor to explore Zimmerman on their own.


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