Book Reviews

Mark Aaron Polger and Scott Sheidlower. Engaging Diverse Learners: Teaching Strategies for Academic Librarians. Santa Barbara, Calif.: Libraries Unlimited, 2017. 164p. Paper, $60.00 (ISBN 978-1-4408-3850-7).

Academic librarians in teaching roles face a recurring challenge to make connections with students that result in student learning of the desired content. Defining “engagement” in terms of these connections, authors Mark Aaron Polger and Scott Sheidlower seek to provide a practical guide to a number of approaches to engaging students in both semester-long and “one-shot” instructional opportunities. With the recognition that our students come to college from a diversity of backgrounds and with a range of learning styles, the authors hope to inspire the reader to seek out and use different techniques to improve student engagement. Unfortunately, the brevity of both their presentation’s original analysis, or synthesis of the cited research, limits the effectiveness of this book in achieving this goal.

A very short chapter looks at generational differences in learning styles. The narrative does not examine any of the differences between generations other than through easy generalities that most readers will have a level of familiarity with before reading the book. Few readers will gain insights here.

Another short chapter is devoted to “Examining Diverse Learning Groups,” yet the only diverse learning groups discussed are the disabled, veterans, LGBTQIA, students of color, and English language learners. Only half a page was devoted to discussing the English language learners, and the students of color section only covers in depth “hip-hop pedagogy,” an approach that does not take into account that students of color may be Asian, American Indian, Latinx, or any other category. The section on gay, lesbian, bisexual, transgender, questioning, and intersex students is thorough and helpful to the reader in understanding how to better relate to these students. One would hope that other learning groups would receive the same treatment. Arguably, the reader would expect a chapter that paints a picture of diverse learning groups to have more diversely vivid detail and insights, given the title of the book.

A core chapter of the book, chapter 4, presents the results of a questionnaire of academic librarians on engagement and teaching strategies. This questionnaire appears as an appendix in the book. The survey responses come from an impressive number of academic librarians (900), and the authors extended their study by conducting 20 in-depth interviews. The work Polger and Sheidlower have done in this chapter would make an ample research article for a peer-reviewed journal. The authors could provide additional insight and make the interview portion of the chapter more coherent for the reader by synthesizing the in-depth interview discussions, grouping commonly expressed ideas and insights together, rather than presenting each librarian’s interview transcript summary in sequence.

The remaining chapters of the book follow a pattern in providing brief summaries of selected resources that provided useful ideas for the authors in their teaching roles. Findings from these articles are presented but not evaluated or analyzed in more than a cursory fashion. The lack of originality in suggested techniques and approaches in these chapters, as well as the absence of depth in discussion of the many techniques presented, will frustrate readers. Polger and Sheidlower are at their best when describing personal anecdotes from their teaching experiences. Spending more time and space connecting their experiences with diverse learners, their insights upon reflecting on those experiences, and their findings and interpretation of additional ideas and techniques in the teaching research literature would make the book more engaging.—Scott Curtis, University of Missouri-Kansas City