Enhance Your Teaching while Connecting with Colleagues
The CEE offers Faculty Reading Circles throughout the year for all USD faculty members. Reading Circles are small, self-paced groups who meet at least once a semester, virtually or in-person, to discuss a selected book, provided by the CEE. By participating, faculty get the opportunity to:
- Read inspiring, useful, and meaningful pedagogical books
- Build and deepen interdisciplinary collegiate relationships
- Apply new teaching strategies and practices
Fall 2026 Books:
Saundra Y. McGuire
Teach Students How to Learn: Strategies You Can Incorporate Into Any Course to Improve Student Metacognition, Study Skills, and Motivation
Preview: AI is reshaping the way students study, but fundamental strategies, such as the ones McGuire presents in this book, can provide a simple roadmap for improving student metacognition, study skills, and motivation in your course(s). Read more...
Join this circle to:
- Learn what metacognition is and how it helps students become independent learners.
- Identify specific learning activities for your courses/student groups that encourage and support higher levels of student achievement.
- Implement learning strategies you can immediately use in your course(s).
Chavella T. Pittman
Empowered: A Woman Faculty of Color's Guide to Teaching and Thriving
Preview: Experience tells us, and studies confirm, that women faculty of color are among the most overworked, unfairly criticized, and least rewarded individuals serving higher education today. In Empowered, Chavella T. Pittman shows women faculty of color how to be unapologetically authentic in their teaching, speak up in reviews about their classroom excellence, and to offer themselves compassion. And, how to recover a sense of joy in what they do. Read more...
Join this circle to Learn:
- How to be unapologetically authentic in your teaching
- How to speak up in reviews about their classroom excellence
- How to practice self-compassion and recover a sense of joy in what you do
Arturo Escobar, Michal Osterweil, and Kriti Sharma
Relationality: An Emergent Politics of Life Beyond the Human
Preview: Examine the convergence of relationality, decolonization, and community engagement in teaching, learning, research, and beyond. This Reading Circle emerges, in part, from a CEE travel grant that supported Dr. Kevin Guerrieri’s (CAS: Languages, Cultures, and Literatures) participation in the 2025 Annual Conference of the International Association for Research on Service-Learning and Community Engagement (IARSLCE). Read more...
Join this circle to:
- Analyze non-relational frameworks
- Explore the philosophical, scientific, and political foundations of relationality
- Weave relational design into academic and institutional practice
"...this is an excellent book, and the book circle, an excellent program...Please continue to have these book circles...as it follows the mission of USD - in the spirit of learning and collaboration."