Curriculum and Social Inquiry Commons^™

Committee As Text, Mimi Killinger

National Collegiate Honors Council Monographs: Chapters

I mistakenly joined the Place as Text (PAT) Committee in 2017. Perusing a list of prospective standing committees to join on the NCHC website, I had clicked on “Semesters Committee” (now “Place as Text”), having seen NCHC flyers advertising their adventurous institutes, which sounded fascinating though I had never attended one myself. Shortly thereafter I received an invitation to the committee’s June working meeting in Brooklyn that likewise sounded promising. Had I been well versed in the City as Text™ (CAT) pedagogy that undergirds PAT, I might have then done some reading, finding out more about the group and perhaps …

The Merits Of Applied Learning, Michael Rossi

National Collegiate Honors Council Monographs: Chapters

In the fall semester of my senior year in 1998, twenty-two years before the time of this writing, I participated in the National Collegiate Honors Council’s Honors Semester in Thessaloniki, Greece. I still remember this experience as vividly as if it were yesterday: a four-month long study at Aristotle University in which half our time was spent walking through Thessaloniki’s medieval streets and modern boulevards; interacting with the people on a daily basis in the limited (but workable) Greek we knew; and making a number of weekend excursions—beginning on Wednesday evenings for us—to surrounding areas: Athens, Pelion, the beaches of …

Acts Of Interpretation: Pedagogies Of Inquiry, Bernice Braid

National Collegiate Honors Council Monographs: Chapters

[T]he world is not given, it is not simply ‘there.’ We constitute it by acts of interpretation. —Jonathan Z. Smith, 1988

In Nadine Gordimer’s 1970 novel A Guest of Honour, the central white figure, diplomat James Bray, is asked by a newly installed Black president to shift from the diplomatic sphere to organize educational structures for a newly minted Black national constituency. Intelligent, sensitive, and empathetic, Bray considers his own sophisticated background in the context of this semi-literate Southern African country and thinks: “What was needed was perhaps someone with a knowledge of the basic techniques of learning. Someone …

Transforming Community-Based Learning Through City As Text™, Jean-Paul Benowitz

National Collegiate Honors Council Monographs: Chapters

Honors students at Elizabethtown College have used City as Text™ (CAT) strategies to address the racism they experienced in new student orientation programming, to transform volunteerism opportunities into sustained civic engagement experiences, to prepare for study abroad and study away, and to strengthen their applications for prestigious scholarships and fellowships. Their research projects have enabled them to publish scholarship informing federal, state, and local historic preservation public works projects; to improve town and gown relationships; and to partner with local stakeholders in community economic development initiatives. Drawing on City as Text pedagogy, they have introduced new courses and academic programs …

Doubling Back On The City As Text™ Walkabout, Gabrielle Watling

National Collegiate Honors Council Monographs: Chapters

I had been hearing about City as Text™ (CAT) for some time from my honors dean, Sara E. Quay, and from faculty members who had participated in CAT programs around the nation and internationally. So when Sara asked if I would like to participate in the Rotterdam City as Text Faculty Institute, I was prepared—in a broadly conceptual sense. Needless to say, Rotterdam was fabulous, the Institute was eye-opening, and I was converted.

Bringing that energy and set of ideas back to my own honors foundations class was a way of preparing the students to look with new eyes, not …

Brain Activity And Experiential Learning, Paul Witkovsky

National Collegiate Honors Council Monographs: Chapters

The chapters in this book deal primarily with students’ learning experiences as documented through self-awareness, knowledge acquisition, and behavior. Language makes it possible to communicate these changes to others. This essay, in contrast, will examine learning from the perspective of brain function. The current framework of thinking among neuroscientists, psychologists, and philosophers is that the brain is fully responsible for our minds, and thus studying how the brain functions in molecular, cellular, and systems terms sheds light on all mental processes, including those that are the substrate of learning. A scientific understanding of brain function thus helps to explain the …

Integrating Dynamic Systems Theory And City As Text™ Framework: In-Depth Reflections On ‘Lens’, Ron Weerheijm, Patricia Vuijk, Bernice Braid

National Collegiate Honors Council Monographs: Chapters

City as Text™ provides a semi-structured learning environment in which small groups of people are challenged to examine parts of a city through “mapping, observing, interpreting, analyzing, reflecting.” In 2014, I (Ron Weerheijm) attended a City as Text (CAT) Faculty Institute in Lyon. During an early session on the hills overlooking the eastern part of Lyon, our group observed a Basilique, the Notre Dame de Fourvière (1872–1884; interior finished 1964). Having a degree in architecture, I looked at this church from architectural and historical viewpoints. I was puzzled. In a quick scan, many different styles competed for my attention, hurting …

Racism In Education Remix, Kevin M. Donton

English Department: Research for Change - Wicked Problems in Our World

Racism in Education has been a huge problem in the United States today, and it still is. The presence of racism in the education system is quite controversial and many people have strong opinions on it. Its roots date all the way back to slavery in the United States to the Brown vs. the Board of Education case to the Reagan Revolution to present day in the wake of the Black Lives Matter movement. This topic has been a problem for a long time now and should be brought up more. Along with this information and as a reinterpretation, or …

“It Was Time For Us To Take A Stand”: An Ethnic Studies Classroom And The Power Of Student Voice, Jorge F. Rodriguez, Carah Reed, Karen Garcia

Education Faculty Books and Book Chapters

"In this chapter, we invite you to join us—a high school graduate, an Ethnic Studies teacher, and a university ally—as we reflect on a story of student mobilization for change. Some of us will share firsthand narratives while others, such as the university ally, will contribute an interpretive analysis. We all grew up in the region where our story takes place. This affords us a personal understanding of the cultural and political dynamics described in our story. To protect identities, we use pseudonyms for students and teachers."

The Inventive Work Of The Christian Mind, Jeff Ringer

The Journal of the Assembly for Expanded Perspectives on Learning

Responding to Bizzell’s 2008 JAEPL article, this article argues that the intellectual work of religious minds involves inventing arguments grounded in the religious community’s ethos that advocate for new perspectives within that community. Using Katharine Hayhoe’s evangelical Christian environmentalist rhetoric as an example, this article prompts rhetorical educators to rethink approaches to teaching ethos.

("What if there is intellectual work to be done that can only be done by what [Shannon] Carter calls the “Christian mind”—or Jewish, Muslim, or Buddhist mind?" —Patricia Bizzell, Faith-Based World Views as a Challenge to the Believing Game)

Back Matter-Jaepl Volume 25, Wendy Ryden

The Journal of the Assembly for Expanded Perspectives on Learning

Back Matter

Front Matter- Jaepl Volume 25, Wendy Ryden

The Journal of the Assembly for Expanded Perspectives on Learning

Front Matter

The Good Enough Teacher, Natalie Davey

The Journal of the Assembly for Expanded Perspectives on Learning

This paper puts forward a pedagogical model of care for K-12 educators that is specifically focused on alternative classroom educators. In conversation with educational theorists and psychologists, a model of care that is translatable to both teachers and students in non-traditional classrooms is presented. Looking first at Arlie Hochschild’s “emotion work” in the context of alternative classroom teaching, a link is made to Nel Noddings’s “ethics of care” as a pedagogical starting point. The author then riffs on psychoanalyst D.W. Winnicott’s notion of the “good enough mother,” the one who “manages a difficult task: initiating the infant into a world …

Invictus: Race And Emotional Labor Of Faculty Of Color At The Urban Community College, Kerri-Ann M. Smith, Kathleen T. Alves, Irvin Weathersby Jr., John D. Yi

The Journal of the Assembly for Expanded Perspectives on Learning

This article shares the counter-stories of four junior faculty members of color, whose lived experiences provide concrete examples of what emotional labor sometimes entails in higher education. Grounded in Critical Race Theory and antiracist methodologies, these academics identify specific ways in which they experience emotional labor: guilt, silence, anger, navigating double-consciousness and liminality, and self-regulating physical and mental health. They seek to buttress their experiences with counternarratives and, consequently, recommendations for how community college leaders may help to alleviate the emotional labor associated with junior faculty members of color through promotion, leadership, mentoring, and recognition of diverse perspectives and contributions …

Seeing Writing Whole: The Revolution We Really Need, Keith Rhodes

The Journal of the Assembly for Expanded Perspectives on Learning

Composition classes have difficulty achieving the aims of the CCCC position statement entitled Students’ Right to Their Own Language, for reasons related to why we have difficulty integrating calls for building rhetorical listening more fully into our curricula. A fundamental assumption that writers alone are responsible for the success of written communication leads to results that sustain privileged discourse and upset any sense that readers, too, have an obligation in any written transaction. A field of Writing, properly constituted, needs to challenge that assumption of readerly privilege overtly so that we can shift toward teaching students better ways to manage …

Stemm-Humanities Co-Teaching And The Humusities Turn, Hella B. Cohen

The Journal of the Assembly for Expanded Perspectives on Learning

Donna Haraway calls for a new Humanities that attends to the role of this traditionally anthropocentric field on a damaged planet. The Humusities, she offers, empower us to teach at the intersections of observation, speculation, and affective reasoning. This article considers co-teaching and interdisciplinary teaching structures as part of the Humusities model. Drawing from interviews and pedagogical materials of professors who have co-taught STEMM-Humanities classes, student feedback from these sections, and current research on interdisciplinary education, I theorize the possibilities and limitations of the interdisciplinary Humusities at the undergraduate level. The article explores how we translate the tenets of Haraway …

Contemplative Wac: Testing A Mindfulness-Based Reflective Writing Assignment, Jared Featherstone

The Journal of the Assembly for Expanded Perspectives on Learning

This qualitative study examines the effects of the Mindfulness Journal Assignment (MJA), a semester-long integration implemented in five different university courses, to understand its potential for teaching and learning. Of particular interest were the patterns found in the reflective writing of students engaging in the MJA and the connection of those patterns to both classroom and Writing Across the Curriculum learning objectives. The most frequent themes occurring in the 111,906-word dataset were metacognitive awareness and self-regulation, both of which are significant for learning transfer and WAC. The findings of this study are promising in that the inclusion of a contemplative …

Connecting: On “Showing Up” In Teaching, Tutoring, And Writing: A Search For Humanity, Christy Wenger, Nicole J. Wilson, Angela Montez, Sara Y. Chung, Christina M. Lavecchia, Cristina D. Ramirez, Patricia D. Pytleski

The Journal of the Assembly for Expanded Perspectives on Learning

The pieces collected in this section of Connecting all exhibit ways of “showing up” in writing. They do so by modeling how we might claim very specific, very material conditions of learning and thinking and speak from the authority of personal experience. They are full of voice. They show up by revealing the presence of their writers and by making intentional space for readers to show up in response, as a writer’s presence begets the readers’. The writing contained within this section also offers practices that might help us think through the dynamics of a pedagogical praxis of “showing up.”

Volume 25 Of The Journal Of The Assembly For Expanded Perspectives On Learning, Wendy Ryden, Peter H. Khost

The Journal of the Assembly for Expanded Perspectives on Learning

The Assembly for Expanded Perspectives on Learning (AEPL), an official assembly of the National Council of Teachers of English, is open to all those interested in extending the frontiers of teaching and learning beyond the traditional disciplines and methodologies. JAEPL is especially interested in helping those teachers who experiment with new strategies for learning to share their practices and confirm their validity through publication in professional journals.

Book Reviews, Irene Papoulis, Nate Mickelson, Paul Pucccio, Erin L. Frymire, Tracy Lassiter

The Journal of the Assembly for Expanded Perspectives on Learning

All of this year’s books circle around issues of healing, a richly faceted subject always dear to members of the Assembly for Expanded Perspectives on Learning. Nate Mickelson reviews Burt Bradley’s After Following, in which the poet takes solace in writing his own meditations on the work of other poets; Paul Puccio responds to Peter Khost’s Rhetor Response: A Theory and Practice of Literary Affordance, which explores the potential connections to life that literature could provide readers in our classrooms and beyond; Erin Frymire addresses Jessica Restaino’s Surrender: Feminist Rhetoric and Ethics in Love and Illness, which combines rhetorical analysis …

Complaint As ‘Sticky Data’ For The Woman Wpa: The Intellectual Work Of A Wpa’S Emotional And Embodied Labor, Anna Sicari

The Journal of the Assembly for Expanded Perspectives on Learning

There is rich scholarship on emotions in writing program administration, and the labor this work requires from WPAs (Holt; Micciche; McKinney et. al; Ratcliffe and Rickley; Vidali) and on the feminized nature of writing programs and the way gender informs this type of emotional work (Enos; Flynn; Miller; Schell). Many WPA scholars advocate that our administrative work is intellectual work, yet little attention has been given to the emotional and embodied labor of WPA work as intellectual and as defining components of WPA work. Drawing from Sara Ahmed’s recent work on complaint and data I collected from thirty interviews with …

Fyc Students’ Emotional Labor In The Feedback Cycle, Kelly Blewett

The Journal of the Assembly for Expanded Perspectives on Learning

This essay explores the emotions first-year composition students experience when receiving feedback on their writing. Culling data from 32 hours of interviews with students, as well as two different data streams students provided regarding their emotional reactions to feedback, I argue that students undergo what Arlie Hochschild calls transmutation as they process feedback on their writing. Two implications are suggested: first, that future studies should utilize non-alphabetic tools for capturing emotion; second, that teachers wishing to assist student reception of feedback should be attentive to building rapport in the classroom. Finally, the essay calls for additional study of the impact …

The Toil Of Feeling: Education As Emotional Labor - Teaching At The End Of Empire, Wendy Ryden

The Journal of the Assembly for Expanded Perspectives on Learning

The editor's introduction to the Special Section, The Toil of Feeling: Education as Emotional Labor.

“So, That’S Sort Of Wonderful”: The Ideology Of Commitment And The Labor Of Contingency, Sarah V. Seeley

The Journal of the Assembly for Expanded Perspectives on Learning

This article explores the emotional outcomes related to language commodification within an organizational context: the first-year writing program at Binghamton University, which is a public research university in upstate New York. In this setting, the meanings of effective writing instruction are discursively constructed in terms of a multi-faceted commitment to ‘the process.’ This entails an ideological commitment to both recursive process writing and the process of collaboratively evaluating the product that derives from it. I first offer an overview of the Binghamton context, including the details of collaborative portfolio assessment. I then analyze a specific sociolinguistic strategy: pep talking. I …

Rhetoric And Emotion Save Science: Lessons From Student Eco-Activists, Jesse Priest

The Journal of the Assembly for Expanded Perspectives on Learning

This essay is a qualitative study of the experience of undergraduate students learning how to teach issues of sustainability to their campus communities through an innovative outreach program at a large northeastern research university, while at the same time learning to navigate complex emotional labor required by their outreach and activist work. While most previous work on science writing and rhetoric focuses on disciplinary, publishing, or genre practices, I examine the holistic student experience by placing outreach, writing, and the classroom in conversation with each other, illuminating how discourses can cross institutional and contextual borders. Additionally, while most previous work …

“You’Re Almost In This Place That Doesn’T Exist”: The Impact Of College In Prison As Understood By Formerly Incarcerated Students From The Northeastern United States, Hilary Binda, Jill D. Weinberg, Nora Maetzener, Carolyn Rubin

Journal of Prison Education and Reentry (2014-2023)

This qualitative study examines the immediate and lasting impact of liberal arts higher education in prison from the perspective of former college-in-prison students from the Northeastern United States. Findings obtained through semi-structured interviews with formerly incarcerated people are presented in the following three areas: self-confidence and agency, interpersonal relationships, and capacity for civic leadership. This study further examines former students’ reflections on the relationship between education and human transformation and begins to benchmark college programming with attention to the potential for such transformation. The authors identify four characteristics critical to a program’s success: academic rigor, the professor's respect for students, …

Introduction To "The State Of The Syllabus" Special Edition Of Syllabus Journal, Katherine Harris, Rebecca Frost Davis, Matthew Gold

Faculty Research, Scholarly, and Creative Activity

Positioning the syllabus as a key artifact in the modern academy, one that encapsulates many elements of intellectual, scholarly, social, cultural, political, and institutional contexts in which it is enmeshed, we offer in this special issue of Syllabus a set of provocations on the syllabus and its many roles. Including perspectives from full-time and part-time faculty, graduate students, and librarians, the issue offers a multifaceted take on how the syllabus is presently used and might be reimagined.

Instructional Scaffolding Of The Acrl Framework For Information Literacy For Developmental Learners., Fabio Montella

Georgia International Conference on Information Literacy

Information literacy has become a necessary set of abilities for community college students to possess in this age of digital distribution. The plethora of information that is generated at an almost instantaneous rate has brought about the need for an information-literate student body with the ability to both decipher and utilize viable and valid information. However, the attainment of such abilities requires the comprehension of information literacy core concepts. These concepts, while instrumental, may be difficult to grasp without a foundation of practical familiarity, especially for students in developmental education courses.

In this presentation, Fabio Montella, Assistant Professor of Library …

Democracy For Homework: A Review Of Civic Engagement In Urban Public Schools, Amanda B. Rosenblum

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Civic engagement education prepares students to actively engage in social and political processes and influence community change. Many educators believe that civic engagement ought to be a central mission of schools because: 1. Adolescent civic engagement predicts adult civic engagement; 2. Schools may be able to reduce the inequity in political participation between individuals of different ethnic and socioeconomic backgrounds, and 3: Civic engagement orientation and competencies can be developed through any and all content courses and extracurricular opportunities. This literature review on civic engagement education in urban public middle and high schools over the past 15 years explores: 1. …

Rhetoric And Race - Background And Assignment - Shu Mlk Symposium 2020, Jon Radwan

CHDCM Publications

Provides an overview of Rhetoric and describes the historical development of Race as a rhetorical construct. Offers two associated assignment options: a digital audio interview plus video debrief on contemporary racism, and/or an essay on 21st century abolitionist rhetoric. - Jon Radwan and Angela Kariotis