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Ongoing structural reform and evolution in the higher education sector continue to pose complex challenges for educators, including those who teach introductory psychology courses. One such challenge is helping students to overcome the first-year hurdle and develop the core attributes required for success at tertiary level. Psychology educators are uniquely situated to help students develop these life-long learning skills by setting the development of “psychological literacy” as a principal aim of first-year courses. Psychological literacy can achieve this by developing critical thinking skills, problem solving skills, respect for diversity, and self-awareness. In fact, these core skills can provide the foundation for all students—not just psychology students—to achieve success. Because of this, there is potential for introductory psychology courses to become compulsory across all disciplines as a foundation block for commencing students. This would help students transition more seamlessly and have an excellent foundation for academic success, assisting universities to improve retention rates and achieve higher education participation targets set by government. In addition to this, compulsory psychological literacy development moves toward the university goal of creating “global citizens” and even beyond this to becoming a strategy for national agendas such as social inclusion. Pedagogical issues surrounding the appropriate content and methods of delivery required to develop psychological literacy warrant further collaborative discussion. In order to achieve quality learning and teaching within higher education, educators cannot ignore the potential of psychological literacy and psychology educators arguably have a responsibility to advocate its potential within their institution.

Culturally mainstream American teens are, by the end of the first year out, more cognitively sharper and more skilled in adapting to new organizations, than they were before but are largely immune to intellectual curiosity and creative engagement. Educationally, then, the glass is neither empty nor full. It is half-empty for those who want the first year out to be about intellectual curiosity and creative engagement, and it is half-full for those who want the first year out to be about becoming smarter and successfully adapting to new formal organizations. This chapter describes the educational preparation of high school seniors, the educational experiences of first-year students, and the cultural mismatch between educator hopes, student experiences, and public perceptions.

Expectations about the role that MOOCs might play in higher education remain intertwined with conventional understandings of how learning happens and might be measured. Another approach to online pedagogy might begin with the premise that changing the technologies with which faculty and students work will alter their capacities for teaching and learning. This approach might be termed “posthuman” for the way it shifts the focus from individual humans to their media environments. Taking up the classical, rhetorical concepts of kairos and metanoia (opportunity and regret), this chapter investigates MOOCs not as a mechanism for solving existing educational challenges but rather as creating an environment in which pedagogy must be reinvented. The chapter looks specifically at two MOOCs designed to teach first-year composition and then turns to practices in video games to develop a practice of prospecting, of searching for and constructing new learning practices.

Chapter 6 turns to Josephine Miles’s notes from five decades of teaching at the University of California, Berkeley. Miles was an early practitioner of quantitative approaches to literary study, beginning with her 1938 doctoral thesis, for which she “counted” Wordsworth’s “feelings.” By the 1950s, Miles was collaborating with the electrical engineering lab at Berkeley to make the first computational concordance in the humanities. Alongside this lost history of distant reading, the chapter considers Miles’s notes for teaching English 1A, Berkeley’s freshman composition course. Miles taught this class as a workshop. The chapter describes how Miles’s focus on the sentence as foundational to composition shaped her research—research in which she pursued a method for quantifying the sentence structures of five-hundred years of poetry. In turn, Miles’s quantitative scholarship gave her a unique account of the value of freshman composition to society. Whereas the New Critics set literary and poetic form in opposition to scientific modes of writing and knowing, Miles believed that poems, English 1A papers, and handmade data sets all required decisions about representativeness and selection, qualification and connection. In her workshops, Miles taught students to write meaningfully about the world and its data from their own distinct perspectives.

This chapter provides an introduction to Laura’s classroom and her students. A transcription of a class meeting in which the students describe their out of school lives and the neighborhood in which they live provides a view of the students’ lives outside of school at the time they entered the class. The physical setup of the classroom is described and each of the students is introduced with a brief description as viewed during the first week of school.