This is a year of Sicilian life, its seasons and its sacred festivals, its gorgeous fruits and demanding family life, its casual assassinations and village feasts, its weather and the neighbours. It chronicles a life divided between an apartment in the city of Palermo with the weekends and summer devoted to sustaining life in an old family farm. What makes this journal truly exceptional is that Mary Simeti is both an outsider, (an American who had studied medieval history and worked as a volunteer on a social welfare programme) and an insider. For this journal was written after twenty years of immersion in Sicilian life, as wife to a Sicilian, mother to two Sicilian teenagers, as gardener, cook and carer for a suspicious mother-in- law.

The human aspect plays an important role in the social sciences. The behaviour of people has become a vital area of focus in the social sciences as well. Recent Trends in Social and Behaviour Sciences contains papers that were originally presented at the International Congress on Interdisciplinary Behavior and Social Sciences, held 4-5 November 2013, in Jakarta, Indonesia. The contributions deal with various interdisciplinary research topics, particularly in the fields of social sciences, economics and arts. The papers focus especially on such topics as language, cultural studies, economics, behaviour studies, political sciences, media and communication, psychology and human development. This printed abstracts volume comes with a full paper CD-ROM (634pp).

This book addresses the all-important dimensions of collaboration in the study of learning raised by such questions as: Should teachers engage students directly in discussions and inquiry about learning? To what extent? What is gained by the collaboration? Does it improve learning, and what do shared responsibilities mean for classroom dynamics, and beyond?Practicing what it advocates, a faculty-student team co-edited this book, and faculty-student (or former student) teams co-authored eight of its eleven chapters. The opening section of this book explores such dimensions of student voices in the scholarship of teaching and learning (SoTL) as power and authority in the classroom, collaborative meaning-making, and the role of students as both learners and experts on their own learning. It opens up the process of knowledge-building to a wider group of participants, and expands our conception of who has expertise to contribute for instance recognizing students insider knowledge of themselves as learners. Using various institutional models to illustrate these foundational concepts, part one provides a context for understanding the detailed examples that follow. The case studies in the second half of the volume illustrate how these concepts play out inside and outside the classroom when students shift from serving as research subjects in a SoTL study to working as independent researchers or as partners with faculty in such work as studying curricular design/redesign, readings, requirements, and assessment. This co-inquiry brings the principles and benefits of the broader undergraduate research movement to the topic of teaching and learning. It also increases student researchers sense of themselves as independent learners. While recognizing the impossibility of engaging every student in the scholarship of teaching and learning in every course, the editors and contributors make the case for making such opportunities available as broadly as possible because, as this volume also makes clear, this is transformational work with the potential to produce paradigm shifts, turning points, new insights, and changes in classroom culture for both faculty and students. The contributors demonstrate how they validated student voices in theory, method, and methodology across a wide variety of disciplines and while engaging with different pedagogies. Disciplinary examples include: anthropology, communication, chemistry, criminal science, education, English, geography, history, human services, mathematics, psychology, sociology, theater arts, philosophy, and political science."

Drawing on interviews with Dan Bernstein (psychology, University of Nebraska), Brian Coppola (chemistry, University of Michigan), Sheri Sheppard (mechanical engineering, Stanford University), Randy Bass (American literature, Georgetown University), and colleagues within and outside their institutions and fields, the author looks at the routes these pathfinders have traveled through the scholarship of teaching and learning and at the consequences that this unusual work has had for the advancement of their careers, especially tenure and promotion. In collaboration with the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching

Colleges and universities across the US have created special initiatives to promote faculty development, but to date there has been little research to determine whether such programs have an impact on students' learning. Faculty Development and Student Learning reports the results of a multi-year study undertaken by faculty at Carleton College and Washington State University to assess how students' learning is affected by faculty members' efforts to become better teachers. Extending recent research in the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning (SoTL) to assessment of faculty development and its effectiveness, the authors show that faculty participation in professional development activities positively affects classroom pedagogy, student learning, and the overall culture of teaching and learning in a college or university.