While Active Learning Classrooms, or ALCs, offer rich new environments for learning, they present many new challenges to faculty because, among other things, they eliminate the room’s central focal point and disrupt its conventional seating plan to which faculty and students have become accustomed. The importance of learning how to use these classrooms well and to capitalize on their special features is paramount. The potential they represent can be realized only when they facilitate improved learning outcomes and engage students in the learning process in a manner different from traditional classrooms and lecture halls. This book provides an introduction to ALCs, briefly covering their history and then synthesizing the research on these spaces to provide faculty with empirically based, practical guidance on how to use these unfamiliar spaces effectively. Among the questions this book addresses are: How can instructors mitigate the apparent lack of a central focal point in the space? What types of learning activities work well in the ALCs and take advantage of the affordances of the room? How can teachers address familiar classroom-management challenges in these unfamiliar spaces? If assessment and rapid feedback are critical in active learning, how do they work in a room filled with circular tables and no central focus point? How do instructors balance group learning with the needs of the larger class? How can students be held accountable when many will necessarily have their backs facing the instructor? How can instructors evaluate the effectiveness of their teaching in these spaces? This book is intended for faculty preparing to teach in or already working in this new classroom environment; for administrators planning to create ALCs or experimenting with provisionally designed rooms; and for faculty developers helping teachers transition to using these new spaces.

While Active Learning Classrooms, or ALCs, offer rich new environments for learning, they present many new challenges to faculty because, among other things, they eliminate the room's central focal point and disrupt its conventional seating plan to which faculty and students have become accustomed. The importance of learning how to use these classrooms well and to capitalize on their special features is paramount. The potential they represent can be realized only when they facilitate improved learning outcomes and engage students in the learning process in a manner different from traditional classrooms and lecture halls. This book provides an introduction to ALCs, briefly covering their history and then synthesizing the research on these spaces to provide faculty with empirically based, practical guidance on how to use these unfamiliar spaces effectively. Among the questions this book addresses are: How can instructors mitigate the apparent lack of a central focal point in the space? What types of learning activities work well in the ALCs and take advantage of the affordances of the room? How can teachers address familiar classroom-management challenges in these unfamiliar spaces? If assessment and rapid feedback are critical in active learning, how do they work in a room filled with circular tables and no central focus point? How do instructors balance group learning with the needs of the larger class? How can students be held accountable when many will necessarily have their backs facing the instructor? How can instructors evaluate the effectiveness of their teaching in these spaces? This book is intended for faculty preparing to teach in or already working in this new classroom environment; for administrators planning to create ALCs or experimenting with provisionally designed rooms; and for faculty developers helping teachers transition to using these new spaces.

Some of the most popular stories in nineteenth-century America were sensational tales of whites captured and enslaved in North Africa. "White Slaves, African Masters" for the first time gathers together a selection of these Barbary captivity narratives, which significantly influenced early American attitudes toward race, slavery, and nationalism.
Though Barbary privateers began to seize North American colonists as early as 1625, Barbary captivity narratives did not begin to flourish until after the American Revolution. During these years, stories of Barbary captivity forced the U.S. government to pay humiliating tributes to African rulers, stimulated the drive to create the U.S. Navy, and brought on America's first post-revolutionary war. These tales also were used both to justify and to vilify slavery.
The accounts collected here range from the 1798 tale of John Foss, who was ransomed by Thomas Jefferson's administration for tribute totaling a sixth of the annual federal budget, to the story of Ion Perdicaris, whose (probably staged) abduction in Tangier in 1904 prompted Theodore Roosevelt to send warships to Morocco and inspired the 1975 film "The Wind and the Lion." Also included is the unusual story of Robert Adams, a light-skinned African American who was abducted by Arabs and used by them to hunt negro slaves; captured by black villagers who presumed he was white; then was sold back to a group of Arabs, from whom he was ransomed by a British diplomat.
Long out of print and never before anthologized, these fascinating tales open an entirely new chapter of early American literary history, and shed new light on the more familiar genres of Indian captivity narrative and American slave narrative.
"Baepler has done American literary and cultural historians a service by collecting these long-out-of-print Barbary captivity narratives . . . . Baepler's excellent introduction and full bibliography of primary and secondary sources greatly enhance our knowledge of this fascinating genre."--"Library Journal"