NSCC Open Textbook Catalogue

A presentation of how and why children grow, develop, and learn. We will look at how we change physically over time from conception through adolescence. We examine cognitive change, or how our ability to think and remember changes over the first 20 years or so of life. And we will look at how our emotions, psychological state, and social relationships change throughout childhood and adolescence.

The Power of Selling focuses on forming and nurturing long term relationships in a sales context. A 7-step model is used.

This new 2023 edition replaces The Power of Selling 2e.

Preschool Methods was put together to enhance students knowledge around developmental domains for children 3-5 years of age while highlighting Capable, Confident, and Curious: Nova Scotia’s Early Learning Curriculum Framework.

We as early childhood educators are children’s guides while they develop, explore and make sense of the world around them. Through play preschoolers develop life skills that will transfer and scaffold their learning in all aspects of development for the rest of their lives.

Welcome to Leadership in Early Care and Education! We hope you find this text helpful, thought provoking, and affirming. We created this text to support learning in a couple of different. This text can be used from start to finish, or as modules that you (the instructor or the student) select based on your learning outcomes.

We created this text with these principles in mind:

• Anyone can be a leader at any time. Leadership is not title specific and the field of Early Care and Education needs leaders from diverse background, experiences, and expertise.
• Leadership has an inherent set of responsibilities and leaders need to understand what those are and how to navigate them.
• Diversity, equity, and inclusion are important topics and leadership should be grounded in them.
• Reflection is a key part of professional practice and should be encouraged and supported at all levels.
• It is important to represent a variety of contexts, individuals and scenarios.
• White space is important. How we interact with learning materials is important. We hope you will find our design effective.

Leaders in Early Childhood Education and K-12 Education exist at levels and take many different paths to leadership. Some receive formal education and while many find themselves in leadership roles because they have the most tenure.  Most become leaders through a combination of education and experience – and all are woefully underprepared for what they experience.

These modules were designed to empower leaders at all levels and in any educational context. We realize that is a lofty goal and we felt it was important to aspire to ensure that all leaders could see themselves in the scenarios and strategies we share.  We have been in leadership roles and know how challenging and complex leadership in education can be.

The purpose of the Financial Empowerment adaptation is to take an accessible, student-focused, personal finance textbook from the United States and make it affordable and relevant for students in Canada. While many mainstream Canadian personal finance texts provide excellent content in terms of the mechanics of personal finance, they are expensive and not always relevant to the values and experiences of students in the classroom. Many mainstream personal finance texts fall short for Indigenous Canadians and non-Indigenous Canadians alike because they do not speak to the varied backgrounds, knowledge systems, and experiences of their readers. This textbook was adapted in order to motivate a broad range of students to learn about personal finance.

The specific goals of this textbook are:

1. to help students build a solid understanding of personal finance in order to achieve financial literacy and financial success by providing them with the skills and knowledge necessary to navigate short and long-term financial change;
2. to tailor the content for a Canadian audience by providing Indigenous and non-Indigenous perspectives on personal finance and financial planning using examples and information from the Canadian financial system and economy;
3. to increase accessibility to financial education resources for students and general public alike regardless of where they live or study;
4. to customize the content for Indigenous students in Canada and address student needs for practical and theoretical knowledge on financial decision-making and financial risk assessment; and
5. to connect financial literacy with Indigenous Knowledge and history by threading Indigenous perspectives and interviews with Elders and other community leaders throughout the textbook.

This book is designed to help students organize their thinking about psychology at a conceptual level. The focus on behaviour and empiricism has produced a text that is better organized, has fewer chapters, and is somewhat shorter than many of the leading books. The beginning of each section includes learning objectives; throughout the body of each section are key terms in bold followed by their definitions in italics; key takeaways, and exercises and critical thinking activities end each section.

To facilitate learning outcomes, three techniques have been used:

1. Chapter openers.The focus on behaviour begins each chapter with an opener showcasing an interesting real-world example of people who are dealing with behavioural questions and who can use psychology to help them answer those questions. The opener is designed to draw the student into the chapter and create an interest in learning about the topic.
2. Psychology in everyday life.Each chapter contains one or two features designed to link the principles from the chapter to real-world applications in business, environment, health, law, learning, and other relevant domains. For instance, the application in Chapter 7 “Growing and Developing” — “What Makes a Good Parent?” — applies the concepts of parenting styles in a mini handbook about parenting, and the application in Chapter 4, “Brains, Bodies, and Behaviour,” is about the difficulties that left-handed people face performing everyday tasks in a right-handed world.
3. Research focus.Empiricism is also emphasized throughout, but without making it a distraction from the main story line. Each chapter presents one or more close-ups on research — well-articulated and specific examples of research within the content area, each including a summary of the hypotheses, methods, results, and interpretations. This feature provides a continuous thread that reminds students of the importance of empirical research. The research foci also emphasize the fact that findings are not always predictable ahead of time (dispelling the myth of hindsight bias) and help students understand how research really works.

In short, the authors  have attempted to bring psychology to life in ways that really matter to students while, at the same time, maintaining content and conceptual rigor, with a strong focus on the fundamental principles of empiricism and the scientific method.

Cover illustration by Olivia Conrad