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ABOUT CAMPUS / JANUARY–FEBRUARY 2013
By Jennifer L. Bloom and Marc Lowenstein
During its irst decade, About Campus published the “What They’re Reading”
department highlighting publications related to the support of student learning.
While that department oficially signed off several years ago, Jennifer L. Bloom
and Marc Lowenstein offer two lists of publications valuable to their work helping
college students learn and succeed.
Embracing Lifelong Learning
for Ourselves
Published online in Wiley Online Library (wileyonlinelibrary.com).
© 2013 by American College Personnel Association and Wiley Periodicals, Inc.
DOI: 10.1002/abc.21099
A central commitment of educators in colleges
and universities is to help students practice becom-
ing lifelong learners by developing the ability to draw
on and synthesize multiple sources, ways of knowing,
and frames of reference. We ask, “Are educators who
work with these students serving as role models for
this kind of learning?” In our personal and profes-
sional lives, are we remaining current on trends in
our disciplines, in higher education in general, and on
breakthroughs in technology, design, business, leader-
ship, psychology, neuroscience, and other ields? Are
we reading relevant books and articles and speaking
with experts, inside and outside our own disciplines?
If any of the answers are “no,” we are falling short.
We are also risking being without the tools neces-
sary to create innovative and efective solutions for
the pressing issues education now faces.
The thesis of this article is “You are what you
read.” We irst make a case for staying current on ideas
and innovations from a wide range of disciplines and
then share recommendations for reading in higher edu-
cation and beyond. We believe that no one, including
the authors of this article, is in a position to offer a
professional canon to our fellow educators. So what we
ofer here is a list of print resources that have impacted
us professionally over the many decades of our com-
bined experience working to enrich student lives and
enhance student learning.
A COMMITMENT TO OUR OWN LEARNING
A thoughtfully and intentionally designed reading
program has the potential to make us better role mod-
els as lifelong learners who are open to the transforma-
tional power of new ideas. It also has the potential to
make us more efective collaborators in problem solv-
ing with others who have disciplinary backgrounds and
perspectives diferent from our own. Reading widely
also increases the value of our ideas in discussions about
important educational and student issues. When edu-
cators strive to become scholar-practitioners through
reading and writing, our deans, provosts, and presidents
have increased incentive to listen to our views.
Scholar-practitioners read what their well-
informed colleagues, provosts, and presidents read.
They read what their regional accrediting bodies read.
They read, and think, not only about the latest tech-
niques in their own ields, but also about issues that cut