Education Commons^™

Strengths Hidden In Plain Sight, Edward L. Ayers

History Faculty Publications

I knew from teaching that the lifeblood of education travels through capillaries, small vessels that reach into small classrooms, quiet conversations, silent reading. But when I became dean, I saw that those capillaries flow only because of the arteries and veins of admissions, finance, student affairs, and advancement. People far removed from the classroom make it possible for other people to be teachers and students.

"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 …

The Future Of Scholarship, Edward L. Ayers

History Faculty Publications

Digital scholarship could take many new shapes, many of which we are just now glimpsing. It seems likely to take advantage of new forms of visualization, certainly, and become more supple to the reader’s curiosity. Arguments will be tied more closely to the documents and data on which they are based, allowing readers to test ideas in real time, for themselves.

A More-Radical Online Revolution, Edward L. Ayers

History Faculty Publications

Whatever the discipline, the new online world must find ways to help create new knowledge. Online education cannot run indefinitely, as it does now, on borrowed intellectual capital, disseminating what we already know. Higher education takes its energy, its purpose, from a charged circuit between teaching and research, between sharing knowledge and making knowledge. New forms of teaching must be able to generate new ideas.

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 …

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 …

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 …

The Experience Of Liberal Education, Edward L. Ayers

History Faculty Publications

Every college and university has built new capacity to deliver new experiences for students through study abroad, community service, career development, health and fitness, cultural understanding, or spiritual growth. They come to college to broaden their experience, and colleges and universities are the only places where people of all backgrounds, religions, ethnicities, classes, and politics come together to explore who they are and who they might become. Going to college is a defining time in their lives, and there is much more we can do to make it a liberating and transformative experience.

Where The Humanities Live, Edward L. Ayers

History Faculty Publications

The humanities play an important role at every kind of institution. Approximately 40 percent of all undergraduate humanities degrees come from large research universities, where they account for about 15 percent of all bachelor's degrees. The United States stands in the top third of the percentage of degrees awarded in the humanities and the arts internationally, ranking with Germany and Denmark. English remains the dominant major, producing about a third of all bachelor's degrees in the humanities, followed by general humanities and liberal studies with 26 percent, and history with 18 percent.

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.

New Men On Campus - Three Local Institutions Of Higher Education Have New Leaders. Today The Presidents Present Their Visions And Missions To The Community, Edward L. Ayers

History Faculty Publications

There is no such thing as a perfect university. Despite the rankings and institutional bragging, there is no place that combines everything into a perfect package. Every institution is a work in progress. The University of Richmond is no exception. Like every institution, it inherits both strengths and weaknesses.

'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.

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 …

Aiming High For Virginia Colleges, Edward L. Ayers, Danny Axsom, Thomas M. Sherman, Esther N. Elstun, L. Terry Oggel

History Faculty Publications

Considerable discussion about higher education is likely to take place throughout 1999 from the current legislative session through December, when the report of the Governor's Blue Ribbon Commission on Higher Education is anticipated. Because faculty teach, conduct research and provide service to all Virginians, we have a unique perspective on what will be needed to ensure the continuing excellence of higher education in Virginia. Toward that end, we offer the observations below on funding practices, simplifying bureaucratic procedures, improving research and scholarship, and governance in higher education. We believe positive change can make real differences in the quality of the …

Giving Orders In Rural Southern Rhodesia: Controversies Over Africans’ Authority In Development Programs, 1928-1934, Carol Summers

History Faculty Publications

This article focuses on the period from 1928 to 1935, Depression years, when Harold Jowitt was director of native development. During these years, debates over the Jeanes teacher program, and specifically over the careers of Matthew Magorimbo and Lysias Mukahleyi, exposed both the needs that drew the administration and missions toward community-based development, and the questions of power, authority, and resources that blocked community development, and more specifically the Jeanes teacher program, from achieving its stated aims.

"If You Can Educate The Native Woman...": Debates Over The Schooling And Education Of Girls And Women In Southern Rhodesia, 1900-1934, Carol Summers

History Faculty Publications

As the turn of the century, European settlers, officials, and missionaries in Southern Rhodesia were apathetic about promoting African girls' schooling. By the late 1920s, however, all sectors of the European community-settlers, officials, and missionaries- were debating whether, and for what reasons, girls should attend mission schools.¹ Europeans discussed girls' and women's schooling as a strategy for coping with problems in the social and economic development of the region. Some Native Commissioners hope that disciplined moral education would encourage women to remain in rural areas and take responsibility for their families, supporting the system of migrant labor. Many missionaries …

What I Do All Day: Professor Spends 5 Hours A Week Teaching Class, But Here's How It's A 55-Hour Week, Edward L. Ayers

History Faculty Publications

Professors, like the students around whom we structure our lives, don't follow the same rhythms and schedules of most people. People in the academy, whatever their age, tend to follow unusual hours, work in cycles of desperately hard labor and periods of less desperation, tend to work in places other than a central office, tend to spend considerable amounts of time alone or in intense conversation with a few people, tend not to work in terms reflected in billable hours or tightly scheduled appointments. The fruits of our labor are not always visible to the casual observer. For that reason, …