Education Commons^™

[Introduction To] Writing Centers At The Center Of Change, Joe Essid, Brian Mctague

Bookshelf

Writing Centers at the Center of Change looks at how eleven centers, internationally, adapted to change at their institutions, during a decade when their very success has become a valued commodity in a larger struggle for resources on many campuses.

Bringing together both US and international perspectives, this volume offers solutions for adapting to change in the world of writing centers, ranging from the logistical to the pedagogical, and even to the existential. Each author discusses the origins, appropriate responses, and partners to seek when change comes from within a school or outside it. Chapters document new programs being formed …

Generalized Self-Efficacy Of Youth In The New Territories: A Community Survey Conducted By A Hong Kong Ngo, Robert W. Spires, Eric Howington, Jay Rojewski

School of Professional and Continuing Studies Faculty Publications

Youth are both key participants in debate and a central theme in the discourse on social issues in Hong Kong. Youth are often problematized in the contemporary media and political discussion as lacking in the work ethic, confidence and social skills necessary to be successful. Hong Kong youth are framed as pathologically shy, anti-social, lazy and entitled and these characteristics are used to present an image of Hong Kong youth as having individual characteristics that lead to their challenges in the job market and their characteristics as political rogues. This study approaches the characterization of Hong Kong youth with an …

[Introduction To] Constructing The Adolescent Reader In Contemporary Young Adult Fiction, Elisabeth Rose Gruner

Bookshelf

This book examines the way young adult readers are constructed in a variety of contemporary young adult fictions, arguing that contemporary young adult novels depict readers as agents. Reading, these novels suggest, is neither an unalloyed good nor a dangerous ploy, but rather an essential, occasionally fraught, by turns escapist and instrumental, deeply pleasurable, and highly contentious activity that has value far beyond the classroom skills or the specific content it conveys. After an introductory chapter that examines the state of reading and young adult fiction today, the book examines novels that depict reading in school, gendered and racialized reading, …

[Introduction To] Teaching Britain: Elementary Teachers And The State Of The Everyday, 1846-1906, Christopher Bischof

Bookshelf

Teaching Britain examines teachers as key agents in the production of social knowledge. Teachers claimed intimate knowledge of everyday life among the poor and working class at home and non-white subjects abroad. They mobilized their knowledge in a wide range of mediums, from accounts of local happenings in their schools’ official log books to travel narratives based on summer trips around Britain and the wider world. Teachers also obsessively narrated and reflected on their own careers. Through these stories and the work they did every day, teachers imagined and helped to enact new models of professionalism, attitudes towards poverty and …

[Introduction To] Yesternight: A Story For Those Whose Days Cannot Contain All Their Dreams, Linda B. Hobgood

Bookshelf

Recent release Yesternight from Covenant Books author Linda Hobgood is a fascinating story designed to celebrate the potential of imagination, to treasure childhood dreams and remember them for a lifetime.

With this compelling book, the author seeks to persuade readers of all ages that even morning cannot quell our dreams so long as we keep recalling with joy each “yesternight.”

[Introduction To] Pedagogical Matters: New Materialisms And Curriculum Studies, Nathan Snaza, Debbie Sonu, Sarah E. Truman, Zofia Zaliwska

Bookshelf

This edited collection takes up the wild and sudden surge of new materialisms in the field of curriculum studies. New materialisms shift away from the strong focus on discourse associated with the linguistic or cultural turn in theory and toward recent work in the physical and biological sciences; in doing so, they posit ontologies of becoming that re-configure our sense of what a human person is and how that person relates to the more-than-human ecologies in which it is nested. Ignited by an urgency to disrupt the dangers of anthropocentrism and systems of domination in the work of curriculum and …

"A Home For Poets": The Emergence Of A Liberal Curriculum For Elementary Teachers In Victorian Britain, Christopher Bischof

History Faculty Publications

In this article I explore student culture beyond the classroom to argue that there existed an informal liberal curriculum which embraced a general spirit of intellectualism and the pursuit of a wide range of knowledge dealing with the human condition and the state of society. I also offer a new reading of the formal curriculum at training colleges by examining the formal curriculum alongside student accounts of their experiences of it, student responses to assignments, commonly used textbooks, and educationalists’ discourses about teachers’ training. While acknowledging that the formal curriculum emphasized rote memorization and was narrow, I argue that there …

Extending An Alternative: Writing Centers And Curricular Change, Joe Essid

English Faculty Publications

When our Writing Center staked its reputation and perhaps its survival on a proposal to change our first-year curriculum, we entered territory that would have been unthinkable to those in our field a few decades ago. Writing center directors and peer tutors may not like it, but the climate now is very different from the salad days of the 1980s, when scholars such as Tilly and John Warnock argued “it is probably a mistake for centers to seek integration into the established institution” (22). In both the United States and EU nations, we face curricular change driven by emerging technologies, …

Speak Out Loud: Deconstructing Shame And Fear Through Theater In A Community-Based Service-Learning Project, Karina Elizabeth Vázquez

Latin American, Latino and Iberian Studies Faculty Publications

The combination of theater and community-based service-learning can be a powerful tool to allow university students to meet their educational goals while connecting them with the world. The performance of children's theater in elementary schools with English for Speakers of Other Languages (ESOL) programs, for example, has important pedagogical and social effects. For both groups of students, this becomes an opportunity to be better prepared for a level of social engagement involving bilingualism that was not necessarily available to their parents and/or members of their community. The author describes and analyzes the results of teh adaptation and performance of Alfonsina …

Where Would Hip Hop Be Without Colleges And Universities?, Erik Nielson

School of Professional and Continuing Studies Faculty Publications

Institutions of higher education have played a critical role in ensuring that hip hop music remains fluid and vibrant.

Racial Justice, Hegemony, And Bias Incidents In U.S. Higher Education, Glyn Hughes

Sociology and Anthropology Faculty Publications

Formal administrative protocols for responding to bias incidents are now the norm in higher education. This article considers these developments by posing critical questions about racial justice work on campus, identifying key features of an under-acknowledged institutional racism, and contributing to discussions about ways that diversity and social justice efforts often reproduce rather than challenge systemic inequities.

Education And Literacy, Carol Summers

History Faculty Publications

Loram's definition of education as planned by the powerful for the social construction of useful and 'good' Africans, along with his implicit concerns about bad or disruptive literate individuals, represented the views of many educationists during the colonial era. Such views, moreover, survived the end of colonial rule, re-emerging at the centre of shifting debates over how educational institutions and pedagogies should either persist or be challenged. Social utility defined education, not its specific content in reading, arithmetic, religious faith, business, or gardening. Struggles over educational planning were less over whether it was a form of social control than over …

Breaking The Waves: Deconstructing Class/Gender And Sociocultural Stereotypes Through A Spanish Readings Course On Human Rights With Service Learning Component, Karina Elizabeth Vázquez

Latin American, Latino and Iberian Studies Faculty Publications

As the film directors Bertrand Tavernier and Laurent Cantet demonstrate in their respective films It All Starts Today (1999) and Entre Les Murs (2008), schools still reproduce social inequality and cultural stereotypes. One of the most important challenges teachers and professors confront as members of civil society, particularly in moments of social crisis or instability, is to promote students' critical thinking in relation to individual and collective rights. A deep understanding of the concepts and history of human rights infuses the foreign language classroom with a sense of cooperation and dignity that will promote the deconstructing of social and cultural …

Reading On The Edge Of Oblivion: Virgil And Virule In Coetzee's Age Of Iron, Gary Shapiro

Philosophy Faculty Publications

Not long ago I taught a yearlong course on reading and writing for the last time. Last, because I have just retired from the university that sponsored the course and also because faculty, in their usual condition of mixed motives, aspirations, and agendas, have decided to discontinue it. I write then elegiacally, in memory of about twenty years of teaching a varying assemblage of so-called great books of literature, philosophy, religion, and even (occasionally) science, sprinkled with more-contemporary works (Toni Morrison, Orhan Pahmuk, Adrienne Rich, and others), drawn from all continents (we may have missed Australia) and written any time …

Schooling Passions: Nation, History, And Language In Contemporary Western India (Book Review), Christopher Bischof

History Faculty Publications

Schooling Passions is an anthropological work that explores the everyday production of local, regional, and national senses of belonging in the elementary schools in the locality of Kolhapur near the southern boundary of the state of Maharashtra, India. Kolhapur was an independent kingdom until 1949 and traces its origin to Shivaji Bhosale, a seventeenth-century hero-warrior who founded the Marathi nation. Equipped with a knowledge of Marathi and significant expertise in nationalism, citizenship, education, and gender, Véronique Benei conducted fieldwork at five schools in the late 1990s and early 2000s with the expectation that education would be less nationalistic there than …

Education, Elisabeth Rose Gruner

English Faculty Publications

In both Keywords (Williams 1983a) and New Keywords (Bennett, Grossberg, and Morris 2005), "education" (Keywords has "educate") is primarily an institutional practice, which, after the late eighteenth century, is increasingly formalized and universalized in Western countries. Bearing the twin senses of "to lead forth" (from the Latin educare) and "to bring up" (from the Latin educare), "education" appears chiefly as an action practiced by adults on children. The Oxford English Dictionary thus defines the terms as "the systematic instruction, schooling, or training given to the young in preparation for the work of life."

Building A Collaborative Online Literary Experience, Joe Essid, Fran Wilde

English Faculty Publications

Key Takeaways

-Educators and students collaborated in constructing an immersive literary experience at the University of Richmond and then reenacted the narrative as a team.

-Considerable planning goes into such simulations to make them effective collaboration spaces.

-In creating a simulation of Edgar Allan Poe's The Fall of the House of Usher, a team of distributed groups negotiated different approaches to believably embody Poe's characters and period.

-Despite limitations in the software and the planning process during and after a beta test, students experienced Poe's story in a new and rewarding way.

Effective virtual simulations can embed participants in imaginary …

Educating Women: Schooling And Identity In England And France, 1800-1867 (Book Review), Christopher Bischof

History Faculty Publications

Christina de Bellaigue’s Educating Women: Schooling and Identity in England and France, 1800-1867 explores stereotypes about women’s boarding schools on both sides of the English-French Channel. In the process de Bellaigue identifies the basis in reality which many of the most widespread stereotypes had, including: the socially grasping schoolmistress; the schoolmistress as a gentlewoman fallen on hard times; the short-lived nature of many schools; the stress laid on the teaching of “accomplishments”; and the idea that preparing women for their domestic role was the ultimate goal of an education. However, she also simultaneously undermines these stereotypes by supplying nuance and …

Teach The Children: Education And Knowledge In Recent Children's Fantasy, Elisabeth Rose Gruner

English Faculty Publications

This essay is an investigation into how learning is portrayed in children's books. It starts from two premises: first, that at least one origin of children's literature is in didacticism, and that learning and pedagogy continue to be important in much of the literature we provide for children today. Thus, for example, David Rudd claims that most histories of children's literature on "the tension between instruction and entertainment," and that the genre as we know it develops within, among other things, "an educational system promoting literacy" (29, 34). Seth Lerer's recent Children's Literature: A Reader's History similarly traces the origins …

Teaching Economics, Jonathan B. Wight

Economics Faculty Publications

Ethical considerations intersect with economics education on a number of planes. Nonetheless, in terms of curricula, only a handful of economics departments offer courses specifically focused on ethics. This chapter addresses the ways in which instructors can incorporate ethical components into teaching principles and field courses in order to broaden economic understanding and to enhance critical thinking. It examines three pedagogical issues: the artificial dichotomy between positive and normative analysis; the limiting scope of efficiency in outcomes analyses; and the incorporation of alternative ethical frameworks into public policy debates.

On The Humanities, Edward L. Ayers

History Faculty Publications

Although humanists have tended to dwell on simple dichotomies as the source of our problems - the humanities versus virtually any other field of inquiry, scholarship versus teaching, specialization versus public reach, and innovation versus tradition - the real challenge to the humanities lies elsewhere.

[Introduction To] Museum Careers: A Practical Guide For Students And Novices, N. Elizabeth Schlatter

Bookshelf

This concise volume is the place to start for anyone considering a career in museums. Museum professional and author N. Elizabeth Schlatter outlines the nature of the profession as a whole, the rewards and challenges of museum work, types of museums, and jobs within museums, including salary ranges. She discusses options for education and training, and suggestions on how to secure a job and how to move up the career ladder. Interviews with museum professionals from a variety of disciplines and backgrounds demonstrate different career paths and offer unique and helpful advice . For novices in the field, students in …

These - Are - The "Breaks": A Roundtable Discussion On Teaching The Post-Soul Aesthetic, Bertram D. Ashe, Crystal Anderson, Mark Anthony Neal, Evie Shockley, Alexander Weheliye

English Faculty Publications

We met at Duke University - mid-summer, in the mid Atlantic, at mid-campus - to talk about teaching courses that focused on the post-soul aesthetic. We met outside the John Hope Franklin Center, and soon enough we five youngish black professors were walking a hallway towards a conference room near the African and African American Studies program. Not at all surprisingly, the walls of the hallway were lined with framed photographs of the esteemed John Hope Franklin at various stages throughout his long and storied career. For me, given the topic I was about to raise among these professional colleagues, …

[Introduction To] Teaching The Ethical Foundations Of Economics, Jonathan B. Wight, John S. Morton

Bookshelf

Teaching the Ethical Foundations of Economics contains 10 lessons that reintroduce an ethical dimension to economics in the tradition of Adam Smith, who believed ethical considerations were central to life. Utilizing these innovative instructional materials your students will learn about the important role ethics and character play in a market economy and how, in turn, markets influence ethical behavior.

The lessons do more than illustrate how ethical conduct improves an economy. They actively involve the students through simulations, group decision making, problem solving, classroom demonstrations and role playing. The lessons encourage students to think critically about ethical dilemmas.

Teaching The Ethical Foundations Of Economics: The Principles Course, Jonathan B. Wight

Economics Faculty Publications

When we analyze the source of humor, one ingredient is surely incongruity, the juxtaposition of opposites. So when Tom Lehrer, the consummate Harvard mathematician, openly calls for plagiarism, this is funny because it is exactly the opposite of what we expect - it is absurd. And yet, from the viewpoint of modern economics, is plagiarism really so absurd? We teach our students to maximize short-term profits (in a moral vacuum). We drill them that producers minimize private costs of production (without reference to ethical codes of conduct). We expect economic agents to operate with atomistic selfishness, assuring them that this …

Fiera, Guambra, Y Karichina!: Transgressing The Borders Of Community And Academy, Patricia Herrera

Theatre and Dance Faculty Publications

As Latinas with diverse biographies in and out of the university,¹ we share a commitment to actively engage with all of our communities. As students and teachers, we are expected to leave our personal lives out of our "intellectual" workspaces, causing feelings of isolation and fragmentation (hooks, 1994). We are concerned with the ways we can maintain a sense of connection and wholeness for our well-being and that of our communities. Our collaboration with the National Latina Health Organization's (NLH0)² Intergenerational Latina Health Leadership Project has enabled us to work toward this goal. This project provides a revolutionary …

'Subterranean Evil' And 'Tumultuous Riot' In Buganda: Authority And Alienation At King's College, Budo, 1942, Carol Summers

History Faculty Publications

Staff petitions, sexual and disciplinary scandal and open riot pushed Buganda's leaders to close Budo College on the eve of Kabaka (King) Muteesa II's coronation. The upheaval at the school included a teachers' council that pro-claimed ownership of the school, student leaders who manipulated the headmaster through scandal and school clubs and associations that celebrated affiliation over discipline. Instead of enacting and celebrating imperial partnership and order in complex, well-choreographed coronation rituals, the school's disruption delineated the fractures and struggles over rightful authority, order and patronage within colonial Buganda, marking out a future of tumultuous political transition.

Working For The Clampdown? Being Crafty At Managed Universities, Joe Essid

English Faculty Publications

Last fall I found myself not only our school’s Writing Center Director but also its Writing Program Administrator. At the same time, a reminder of my wastrel youth appeared: the twenty-fifth anniversary edition of the Clash’s London Calling.

The two events are connected. On the one hand, it is delightful to hear people again discuss the anthems of the punk-rock era. More than at any time since the 1970s, we need a little more defiance against authority, including the transformation of everything into a saleable commodity. On the other hand, the very way in which London Calling appeared, slickly packaged …

History In The Air, Edward L. Ayers

History Faculty Publications

The history in the air never seems to settle to the ground. Polls and tests reveal that plenty of young people do not know about their nation's history -- not to mention the history of other nations. Some connection is not being made.

Doing Scholarship On The Web: 10 Years Of Triumphs And A Disappointment, Edward L. Ayers

History Faculty Publications

In the fall of 1991, someone appointed me, a historian, to a committee that oversaw computing at my university. I had long been underfoot in the computer labs, consuming valuable time in front of UNIX workstations, making computerized maps, and running statistical tests for a history of the New South. Now it was time for payback.

Yet despite my years of working with computers, I had little idea at that time of the revolutionary promise that computing held for scholarship in disciplines like my own. More than a decade of living on the Web later, I recognize the potential of …