Radical Grace: Essays and Conversations on Teaching

by Candice Price, Dr. Miloš Savić

In teaching, when do we have instances of grace, or as the dictionary defines it, courteous goodwill? Are those instances going against what we’ve been trained to do when teaching, or against what the norms are of academia? Throughout this book, Drs. Candice Price and Miloš Savić have conversations and essays about how they've learned to believe in radical grace for their students. Going through their own personal stories, they provide reasons for their teaching philosophy.

Genres: Education

168 pages, Paperback

Published July 2, 2022

Reviews

[Hudson Payne · Rating 5 out of 5]

I had Dr. Savić for a course in grad school and he practices everything he preaches in this book. There have been semesters where I have had less grace with my students and semesters where I have endeavored to be radically graceful with my students, and the differences in how they learn and work in those environments are as clear as night and day.

I have found that this is especially true for non-math majors, and students in freshman and sophomore level courses who have a fear or hatred of math, or as the authors refer to it in the book “mathematical trauma”. Being sure that we don’t compound that trauma is essential in building an environment where students feel the safety to learn and make mistakes.

The ideas in this book are certainly something worth striving towards, and as the authors say, hopefully they reform how we think about teaching in general.

[Jean Marie · Rating 4 out of 5]

I loved the introductory chapter, and first few chapters. I was struggling more (is it me?) toward the end. This book definitely was spiritual food I needed in managing some conflicts with other faculty and to think about how I want to be dealing with my students (I'm a department chair, but I also have teaching responsibilities). Managing both aspects of my job together has been difficult this first term. I needed at lot of grace, and I hope I gave some to others.

I bought this book for a colleague/friend, and I anticipate recommending it to other faculty in my department. I will definitely tell my husband and fellow math professor to read it!

[Reader · Rating 5 out of 5]

Radical Grace is a beautiful book that bravely reimagines a world where we treat ourselves and our students with grace and compassion. I have always loved teaching. I have been teaching mathematics at the university level for 17 years. I am also an academic who conduct research about the teaching and learning of mathematics. I honestly purchased the book because I wanted to support my friends/colleagues, the authors of this book, in the way that people often do when their academic friends wrote a book. Sadly, the book is usually left unopened on the shelf.

I ended up opening the book because I thought, why not? I kept reading because the stories brought me into the fun and silly friendship between the two authors (see the famous philosophers they cited in the early chapters). I ended the book with a profound reminder of who I am as a person and a teacher, and the power of influence I have in and out of the classroom. I closed the book with a temporary sense of peace as if I had shared space with two other like-minded individuals who care so deeply about students, mathematics, and their own joy and well-being. Just this morning after class, I asked myself, how gracious is an open-note take-home exam when on average my students took 6 hours to complete it?