Gerald Graff argues that our schools and colleges make the intellectual life seem more opaque, narrowly specialized, and beyond normal learning capacities than it is or needs to be. Left clueless in the academic world, many students view the life of the mind as a secret society for which only an elite few qualify. In a refreshing departure from standard diatribes against academia, Graff shows how academic unintelligibility is unwittingly reinforced not only by academic jargon and obscure writing, but by the disconnection of the curriculum and the failure to exploit the many connections between academia and popular culture. Finally, Graff offers a wealth of practical suggestions for making the culture of ideas and arguments more accessible to students, showing how students can enter the public debates that permeate their lives.
"In a refreshing departure from standard diatribes against academia, Graff shows how academic unintelligibility is unwittingly reinforced not only by jargon and obscure writing, but by the disconnection of the curriculum and the failure to exploit the many connections between academia and popular culture. Finally, Graff offers a wealth of practical suggestions for making the culture of ideas and arguments more accessible, showing how students and the wider public can enter the debates that permeate their lives."--BOOK JACKET.
In the heated academic warfare over multiculturalism and the curriculum, Gerald Graff takes a daring stand. He suggests that the anger and hostility over political correctness should be channelled into productive debate and that teachers, administrators and students alike could actually make good use of the crisis to tackle the real problems of academic incoherence and student apathy.
THIS TITLE HAS BEEN UPDATED TO REFLECT THE 2016 MLA UPDATE. The New York Times best-selling book on academic writing--in use at more than 1,500 schools.
Haven't got your hands on the newest installment of this 90's teen phenomenon? As if! Your favorite girls from Beverly Hills are back in an all-new adventure! It’s senior year and Cher, Dionne, and Tai find themselves in a bit of a crisis of self… Where are they meant to go, and what are they meant to DO after high school? Luckily they have all year—and each other’s help—to figure it out!
While a common goal of higher education is to improve student learning to prepare young adults for the professional, civic and personal challenges of their lives, few institutions have a model to facilitate these outcomes. Learning Partnerships offers a grounded theory and practical examples of how these objectives can be achieved at the college course, program, and institutional levels.The book takes as its foundation Marcia Baxter Magolda’s "Learning Partnerships Model" based on her seventeen-year longitudinal study of young adults’ learning and development from their undergraduate years through their thirties. Based on nearly a thousand participant narratives, the model offers an empirically grounded yet flexible approach to promote "self-authorship." Marcia Baxter Magolda describes the nature of self-authorship--its centrality to the learning goals of cognitive maturity, an integrated identity, mature relationships, and effective citizenship--and the Model.The book then documents examples of actual practice and the learning outcomes they have yielded. The settings include community college and undergraduate courses, exchange and internship programs, residential life, a Masters’ program, faculty development and student affairs organization.Learning Partnerships offers models for all educators--faculty and student affairs staff alike--who work to balance guidance and learner responsibility to prepare students for the complexity of the twenty-first century.
Although coeducation has been the norm within private and public schools since the 1970s, single-sex education has staged a comeback in recent years as a means of addressing the academic and social problems faced by some students. Single-sex education raises controversy on ideological grounds, and in 1996 the Supreme Court struck down the all-male admissions policy at the Virginia Military Institute in a decision that has cast a legal cloud over public initiatives. In this timely book, Rosemary Salomone offers a reasoned educational and legal argument supporting single-sex education as an alternative to coeducation, particularly in the case of disadvantaged minority students. Salomone examines the history of women’s education and exclusion, philosophical and psychological theories of sameness and difference, findings on educational achievement and performance, the research evidence on single-sex schooling, and the legal questions that have arisen. Correcting many of the current misconceptions about single-sex education, she argues that it is a viable option and that the road to gender equality should be paved with diverse educational opportunities for all students—regardless of race, class, or gender.
Communicate more effectively about science—by taking a page from Hollywood and improving your storytelling skills. Ask a scientist about Hollywood, and you’ll probably get eye rolls. But ask someone in Hollywood about science, and they’ll see dollar signs: Moviemakers know that science can be the source of great stories, with all the drama and action that blockbusters require. That’s a huge mistake, says Randy Olson: Hollywood has a lot to teach scientists about how to tell a story—and, ultimately, how to do science better. With Houston, We Have a Narrative, he lays out a stunningly simple method for turning the dull into the dramatic. Drawing on his unique background, which saw him leave his job as a working scientist to launch a career as a filmmaker, Olson first diagnoses the problem: When scientists tell us about their work, they pile one moment and one detail atop another moment and another detail—a stultifying procession of “and, and, and.” What we need instead is an understanding of the basic elements of story, the narrative structures that our brains are all but hardwired to look for—which Olson boils down, brilliantly, to “And, But, Therefore,” or ABT. At a stroke, the ABT approach introduces momentum (“And”), conflict (“But”), and resolution (“Therefore”)—the fundamental building blocks of story. As Olson has shown by leading countless workshops worldwide, when scientists’ eyes are opened to ABT, the effect is staggering: suddenly, they’re not just talking about their work—they’re telling stories about it. And audiences are captivated. Written with an uncommon verve and enthusiasm, and built on principles that are applicable to fields far beyond science, Houston, We Have a Narrative has the power to transform the way science is understood and appreciated, and ultimately how it’s done.
