Helps students navigate their college experience and increase their opportunities for success
Creating The Future You: Envision, Pursue, Persist is an engaging, appealing, and encouraging introduction to higher education, providing a unique recipe for students to succeed and thrive in college and beyond. An innovative mixture of reading, video, and interactive learning activities, this concise and student-friendly textbook guides students of various backgrounds, perspectives, and academic abilities through the challenges and opportunities of their first year at college.
Recognizing that every student embarking on their journey through college has their own unique set of hopes and dreams for the future, Creating The Future You employs a student-centric approach that helps students identify and nurture their passions, define their goals, foster lasting relationships, develop the mindset for success in school and life, and more.
Authors Brad Garner and Catherine Sanderson provide a highly personalized format for students to gain information on each topic, measure their levels of performance, and engage in meaningful conversation with each other, with their professors, with other members of their campus community, and with other important figures in their lives.
Perfect for first-year college experience courses, Creating The Future You contains a wealth of interactive pedagogical tools and activities that offer students abundant opportunities for self-assessment, personal reflection, discussion, and action-taking in both their education and their entry into the job market
BRAD GARNER serves as Director of Faculty Enrichment in the Center for Learning and Innovation at Indiana Wesleyan University (IWU). Brad has been actively involved for several years in directing and teaching the first-year seminar on his campus. Currently, he leads faculty enrichment efforts across the entire university. Prior to moving into higher education, his career was focused on program and faculty development in K-12 public school settings, where he worked as a classroom teacher, school psychologist, and administrator. His first book, Getting Employed, Staying Employed was recognized as "Book of the Year" by the President's Council on the Employment of People with Disabilities.
Garner is a frequent presenter at conferences and workshops and has authored several publications including Teaching in the First-Year Seminar. He is on the staff of the National Resource Center for the First-Year Experience and Students in Transition at the University of South Carolina and is the Founding Editor of The Toolbox, an electronic newsletter. This newsletter focuses on teaching and learning strategies for faculty who engage with first-year students. His most recent research activity has focused on the use of digital technology to promote learning, reflected in his recent books Creating Engaged Learners and Digital Citizens (2017) and Helping Students to Become Digital Content Curators (2019). Brad is the co-host of "The Digital to Learn Podcast" (Apple Podcasts) and does a weekly talk show called "Facebook Fridays."
CATHERINE SANDERSON received a bachelor's degree in psychology with a specialization in Health and Development from Stanford University, and received both master's and doctoral degrees in psychology from Princeton University. Her research has received grant funding from the National Science Foundation and the National Institute of Health. Professor Sanderson has published over 25 journal articles and book chapters in addition to four college textbooks, middle school and high school health textbooks, and trade books on parenting, as well as how mindset influences happiness, health, and even how long we live (The Positive Shift). In 2012, she was named one of the country's top 300 professors by the Princeton Review.
Professor Sanderson speaks regularly for public and corporate audiences on topics such as the science of happiness, the power of emotional intelligence, the art of aging well, and the psychology of courage and inaction. These talks have been featured in numerous mainstream media outlets, including The Washington Post, The Boston Globe, USA Today, The Atlantic, CNN, and CBS Sunday Morning with Jane Pauley. She also writes a weekly blog for Psychology Today - Norms Matter - that examines the power of social influence on virtually all aspects of our lives. Her latest trade book, published in North America as Why We Act: Turning Bystanders into Moral Rebels (Harvard University Press) and internationally as The Bystander Effect: The Psychology of Courage and Inaction (HarperCollins), examines why good people so often stay silent or do nothing in the face of wrongdoing.
