Education Commons^™

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, …

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 …

Playing In A New Key, In A New World: Virtual Worlds, Millennial Writers, And 3d Composition, Joe Essid

English Faculty Publications

In the author’s courses, students have been augmentationist, not immersionist, in their approaches to using technology. In a virtual world, however, they are born with new skins into strange settings, doing things that might be impossible in the world of matter. Their frequent discomfort at this rebirth corroborates findings in two studies (Mosier, 2009; Howe & Strauss, 2000) that American "Millennials" distrust activities that seem to have no direct bearing on their educational outcomes, established social circles, or professional desires. The chapter describes assignments for such students, in the context of Rouzie s (2005) "serio-ludic "pedagogy. Several touchstones for educators …

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 …

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, …

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 …

Feminists Face The Job Market: Q & A (Questions & Anecdotes), Elisabeth Rose Gruner

English Faculty Publications

When I began work on this paper I designed a questionnaire to be filled out by women who had recently been on the job market. It asked for fairly detailed information: titles of accepted articles, writing samples, and dissertation, number of MLA interviews, other interviews, campus visits, kinds of questions asked, etc. I had hoped, I think, to develop a magic formula—twelve writing sample requests divided by three interviews multiplied by two publications equals an 87% chance of getting a job, for example. But I had trouble developing the formula; no common patterns emerged. The first thing I did learn …