A Summer Reading List for Teachers

We can't believe that Summer College for Teachers came and went so quickly! During our time collaborating with high school educators in June, we often talked about non-fiction texts that teachers can use to revise their prompts, in order to bridge the gap between high school and college writing. Here is a list of recommendations, complied by Brendon Votipka. Check out the selections below and use them to revised your prompts before the new school year begins!

Nonfiction Reading List

Compiled by Brendon Votipka, Rutgers Writing Program

Family

Arlie Russell Hochschild, The Commercialization of Intimate Life: Notes from Home and Work
Andrew Solomon, Far From the Tree: Parents, Children and the Search for Identity

Fear

Susan Faludi, The Terror Dream: Myth and Misogyny in an Insecure America

Chuck Klosterman, I Wear the Black Hat: Grappling with Villains (Real and Imagined)
Maggie Nelson, The Art of Cruelty: A Reckoning
Kurt Spellmeyer, Buddha at the Apocalypse: Awakening from a Culture of Destruction

Health
Atul Gawande, Being Mortal: Medicine and What Matters in the End
Rebecca Skloot, The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks

Identity

Ta-Nehisi Coates, Between the World and Me

Michael Kimmel, Guyland: The Perilous World Where Boys Become Men

Claudia Rankine, Citizen: An American Lyric

Kenji Yoshino, Covering: The Hidden Assault on Our Civil Rights

Psychology

Daniel Gilbert, Stumbling on Happiness

Alison Gopnik, The Philosophical Baby: What Children’s Minds Tell Us about Truth, Love and the Meaning of Life

Andrew Solomon, The Noonday Demon: An Atlas of Depression
Martha Stout, The Sociopath Next Door

Social Interaction

Susan Blackmore, The Meme Machine

Janet A. Flammang, The Taste for Civilization: Food, Politics, and Civil Society

Malcolm Gladwell, The Tipping Point: How Little Things Can Make a Big Difference

Sebastian Junger, Tribe: On Homecoming and Belonging

Technology & the Mind

Nicholas Carr, The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains
Cathy N. Davidson, Now You See It: How Technology and Brain Science Will Transform Schools and Business for the 21st Century

Sherry Turkle, Alone Together: Why We Expect More from Technology and Less from Each Other

Sherry Turkle, Simulation and Its Discontents

Writing, Thinking, and Communication

Gerald Graff and Cathy Birkenstein, “They Say / I Say”: The Moves That Matter in Academic Writing

bell hooks, Teaching to Transgress: Education as the Practice of Freedom

Daniel Kahneman, Thinking, Fast and Slow

David Rosenwasser and Jill Stephen, Writing Analytically

Deborah Tannen, The Argument Culture
Kate L. Turabian, A Manual for Writers of Research Papers, Theses, and Dissertations

College-Level Nonfiction Anthologies

Barclay Barios, Emerging: Contemporary Readings for Writers
Michelle J. Brazier, Points of Departure: A Collection of Contemporary Essays

Kurt Spellmeyer and Richard E. Miller, The New Humanities Reader