Catalog

Biological psychology is the study of the biological bases of behavior and mental processes. It explores how biological factors like genes, hormones, neurotransmitters, and brain structures influence psychological components like thoughts, emotions, memories, and actions. This free and open textbook provides a wide ranging and up-to-date introduction to the main topics and methods of biological psychology. It starts by covering foundations of biological psychology (brain anatomy, neurons, research methods), continues to higher-level topics that link biology and psychology (how drugs and hormones affect the brain and behavior; brain development; genetics; and emotions) and concludes with neural and behavioral differences associated with brain damage, neurological diseases, and psychological disorders.

Why Do I Have to Take This Course? A Guide to General Education developed out of many years of thinking about general education courses and curriculums. We, as university personnel, do not always succeed in explaining why we have certain requirements. Even though these courses make up a significant percentage of our college careers, there is not often time set aside to talk about general education and explore its purpose and goals. When we do not know the reason why we are doing something, it can sometimes lead to apathy and even resentment. Once we have an idea of the purpose, then we can start to appreciate and learn. It is worthwhile to spend some time thinking about these purposes, both “official” and personal ones, in order to maximize student learning.

This textbook helps students systematically study how general education requirements are developed, their history, post-graduation value, etc. It emphasizes exploration of the significance of individual learning outcomes, especially through the lens of John Lewis’ philosophy of “good, necessary trouble.” For instructors adopting this book, it is designed to assign in its entirety or in parts as instructors can choose to emphasize relevant learning outcomes. It is also designed for use by advisors, especially with advisees who express concerns over taking certain requirements.

Maura Reilly defines curatorial activism as “the practice of organizing art exhibitions with the principle aim of ensuring that certain constituencies of artists are no longer ghettoized or excluded from the master narratives of art.” We can expand that definition to include not only “art” but also “cultural heritage” more broadly. When first-year writing students engage in curatorial activism, they directly address marginalization and related issues, giving them an opportunity to explore not only the heritage of these issues but their own stances, experiences, and beliefs while also delving into curation and exhibit-making. More importantly, this approach emphasizes how writing can address those issues and seek to rectify exclusions from cultural heritage spaces. Students can begin to understand the impact that their writing can have on others and what they can convey when they write both effectively and passionately.

This textbook, Heritages of Change: Curatorial Activism and First-Year Writing, includes principles of writing and information literacy through the lenses of curatorial activism, cultural heritage, and curation/exhibition. Heritage topics that students are introduced to include (but are not limited to): anti-racism, #MeToo, indigenous peoples, women/gender/LGBTQIA+, climate change, etc. They gain a broader understanding of cultural heritage and heritages of change, particularly disability heritage, in general in order to apply the concepts through their writing. This textbook presents these topics, but more specifically how to communicate about and research them.

This textbook provides students with guidelines for understanding writing tasks as intellectual work using Bloom’s Taxonomy and for treating the writing process as a set of variable activities that move along a trajectory from idea or assignment to a finished product. The book also includes chapters on strengthening reading strategies and on finding, evaluating, and using sources effectively.

This book is written for anyone who could benefit from learning more about health, wellness, and fitness. Throughout the text, readers will learn about health and wellness, setting goals, physical activity and exercise, cardiovascular fitness, muscular strength and endurance, body composition, flexibility, nutrition, stress management, as well as self-care and sleep. In addition to providing important information about the above topics, the text also includes self-assessment assignments and self-reflection opportunities. These components allow readers to identify personal strengths and weaknesses, and utilize the information given in the chapter to determine any further course of action they would like to make.

Health, wellness, and fitness are important for everyone. This text, while applicable to all individuals from high level athletes, to non-athletes, was written with the aim to focus primarily on the latter and demonstrate how we can all make improvements, whether those be around physical activity, exercise, fitness, nutrition, self care, or sleep. Small changes over time can lead anyone in the direction of greater wellness. We are all dealt different hands in life, and we all have our history and our own experiences, but one thing we all have in common is that we can start now from wherever we are and make small changes to improve our health, wellness, and fitness.

The authors of this book adapted homework problems to improve accessibility and promote diversity, equity, and inclusion in the introductory statistics course they teach at Fitchburg State University. The purpose of this book is to share these updated problems with other instructors. The problems originated on WeBWorK, an open-source online homework platform in which students answer questions in an interactive manner. We have incorporated the updated problems into our existing problem sets on WeBWorK, which can be used as a companion to the OpenStax textbook Introductory Statistics by Barbara Illowsky and Susan Dean or any other textbook for a semester-long introductory statistics course. For a fuller experience for you and your students, we encourage you to contact us for help accessing the problem sets on WeBWorK. On that platform, students will engage more fully with the questions, and a slightly different version of the same problem will be generated for each student.

Literary Studies for a Sustainable Future: An Introductory Course with Social Justice and Ecocriticism Intersections propels readers into the 21st century by providing intellectual spaces for both learners and educators within the realism of the web of life. Learners have opportunities to become virtuosos in ecocriticism and literary studies.

Inspired by Black feminist and legal theorist Dr. Kimberlé Crenshaw’s work on intersectionality, Indigenous storyteller and novelist Leslie Marmon Silko, and American biologist Rachel Carson, learners navigate traditional and innovative literary studies approaches to critique and understand ancient world mythology and Indigenous literature, folklore since Aesop’s Fables to the Arabian Nights, Sappho’s poetics and the feminist romance, and early modern satirical theater of Ben Johnson and William Shakespeare.

Teaching and learning experiences throughout the book challenge readers to approach the study of nature in texts as literary criticism known as ecocriticism. The aim of ecocriticism is to decenter typical anthropocentric interpretative tendencies. Learners are more informed in literary studies as a multifaceted academic journey into how texts represent human communities within landscapes and lifeforms.

This textbook opens with role models in the literary world to introduce innovative ecocritical interpretative approaches in Black, Chicano, and Indigenous Studies. Its introductory sections provide different literary texts and modalities like short film clips, folk songs, and poetry that are informed by key terms and inquiries on the correlations between the environment and instances of social injustices. These learning opportunities potentially unveil an intersectionality between literary studies and concerns with social justice that are important to every community, like those identified in the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals. Following these initial sections on critical theory, the book is organized in three parts with formative and end of chapter assignments for both in-class and online instruction.

The Whole Child is a textbook that gives an overview of development, beginning in the mother’s womb through the age of eight. It starts with a look at perspectives of early childhood, including how children have been viewed historically as well as cross-culturally. There is a complete overview of the important theorists that have helped to deepen and bring clarity to how children develop. These theories include psychodynamic, behavioral, social cognitive theory, cognitive theory, humanistic, multiple intelligence, growth mindset, and Bloom’s taxonomy. Understanding the implications of each theory is important foundational knowledge for the study of development. Developmental domains at each stage is examined alongside important milestones. The biology of the brain is given important consideration. Some of the many factors that influence a young child’s development are also included in this text.

Designed as a main textbook for social work courses at the bachelor’s and master’s level or for social work practitioners in the field, this work moves beyond a traditional medicalized and segregated approach (i.e., chapters organized around impairments) to the exploration of disability-specific populations, instead taking a more intersectional approach in discussing specific service areas and practice issues while weaving in stories about the lived experiences of disabled people with a range of social identities. These issues include parenting, mass incarceration, ableism, aging, and employment, among many others.

A key goal of this book is to introduce an intersectionality-informed and critically culturally competent approach to anti-oppressive social work practice with disabled people, primarily in the United States. To do this, we present an innovative practice model for social workers to use in their work with disabled people and communities, which is incorporated throughout the book in a variety of practice considerations. The main themes woven throughout our practice model are intersectionality theory, critical cultural competence, and anti-oppressive practice.

Bodies reflect not only individual lifestyle choices but also an individual’s freedom or constraint in navigating health options and healthcare systems.  Reporting on “the obesity crisis” in America often overlooks the socioeconomic forces that allow or limit individual choices in food intake and physical activity, so while the first part of this book focuses on developing students’ scientific thinking and their ability to seek out and evaluate information, the second part of this book encourages skepticism in detecting misinformation in the study of the causes and nature of obesity.