The Present Professor: Authenticity and Transformational Teaching

A political scientist at Davidson College writes about what it takes to actually show up for students, not just to deliver content competently but to teach in a way that changes how people think. This is not a pedagogy textbook. It is a reflection on what the work demands.

Elizabeth Norell's argument is rooted in her own experience as a first-generation college student who encountered professors who treated their work as something more than information transfer. She is candid about how hard that kind of teaching is to sustain, how it requires managing your own reactions under pressure, how it runs up against institutional structures that reward research over teaching, and how it can leave you exhausted if you don't build the right internal resources alongside the pedagogical ones.

The book is grounded in evidence: Norell draws on education research, psychology, and her own classroom practice to build an argument that is practical without being prescriptive. This is a good gift for a colleague beginning their first tenure-track position, or for a department chair who wants to think more carefully about what good teaching actually requires of people. It fits naturally into faculty development reading groups and graduate programs that take pedagogy seriously. University of Oklahoma Press, 2024. Paperback.