Navigating Academia is a bit different from the other volumes in the series because it focuses on the supporting genres that facilitate the more public genres that form the building blocks of an academic and/or research career. Included are statements of purpose for graduate school applications, letters of recommendation, and responses to journal reviewers.
One feature that these genres have in common is that they are largely hidden from public view; it is difficult to find examples of them in university libraries. Although guidance about these genres can increasingly be found on the Internet, this guidance is often too general to be helpful in an individual particular situation. This is unfortunate because in almost all cases, the individual needs to be seen as both a serious scholar, researcher, or instructor (whether beginning or getting established) and as a collegial but objective person. As a result, many of these academic communications need to be carefully considered, particularly with regard to the likely effect this communication will have on its intended recipients, who, more often than not, are established figures in the field (as with a job application letter). Because of the roles of these genres, this volume also differs somewhat from the others in that it is as much concerned with social academic practice as it is with more formal academic texts.
This volume represents a revision and expansion of the material on academic correspondence that appeared in English in Today's Research World.
In A New Writing Classroom, Patrick Sullivan provides a new generation of teachers a means and a rationale to reconceive their approach to teaching writing, calling into question the discipline's dependence on argument.
Including secondary writing teachers within his purview, Sullivan advocates a more diverse, exploratory, and flexible approach to writing activities in grades six through thirteen. A New Writing Classroom encourages teachers to pay more attention to research in learning theory, transfer of learning, international models for nurturing excellence in the classroom, and recent work in listening to teach students the sort of dialogic stance that leads to higher-order thinking and more sophisticated communication.
The conventional argumentative essay is often a simplistic form of argument, widely believed to be the most appropriate type of writing in English classes, but other kinds of writing may be more valuable to students and offer more important kinds of cognitive challenges. Focusing on listening and dispositions or "habits of mind” as central elements of this new composition pedagogy, A New Writing Classroom draws not just on composition studies but also on cognitive psychology, philosophy, learning theory, literature, and history, making an exciting and significant contribution to the field.
Winifred Bryan Horner argues that an understanding of the changes that occurred in the content of nineteenth-century courses in logic, rhetoric, and belles lettres taught in Scottish universities provides important critical insight into the development of the twentieth-century American composition course, as well as courses in English literature and critical theory.
Because of the inaccessibility of primary materials documenting the changes in courses taught at Scottish universities, the impression remains that the nineteenth century represents a break with the traditional school curriculum rather than a logical transition to a new focus of study. Horner has discovered that the notes of students who attended these classes—meticulously transcribed records of the lectures that professors dictated in lieu of printed texts—provide reliable documentation of the content of courses taught during the period. Using these records, Horner traces the evolution of current traditional composition, developed in the United States in the first part of the twentieth century, from courses taught in nineteenth-century, northern Scottish universities. She locates the beginning of courses in English literature and belletristic composition in the southern schools, particularly Edinburgh.
Horner’s study opens new vistas for the study of the evolution of university curricula, especially the never before acknowledged influence of belletristric rhetoric on the development of the North American composition course.
In Noise from the Writing Center, Boquet develops a theory of "noise" and excess as an important element of difference between the pedagogy of writing centers and the academy in general. Addressing administrative issues, Boquet strains against the bean-counting anxiety that seems to drive so much of writing center administration. Pedagogically, she urges a more courageous practice, developed via metaphors of music and improvisation, and argues for "noise," excess, and performance as uniquely appropriate to the education of writers and tutors in the center.
Personal, even irreverent in style, Boquet is also theoretically sophisticated, and she draws from an eclectic range of work in academic and popular culture-from Foucault to Attali to Jimi Hendrix. She includes, as well, the voices of writing center tutors with whom she conducted research, and she finds some of her most inspiring moments in the words and work of those tutors.
It has long been recognized that affect (that is, the noncognitive aspect of mental activity) plays a large role in writing and in learning to write. According to Susan H. McLeod, however, the model that has been most used for empirical research on the writing process is based on cognitive psychology and does not take into account affective phenomena. Nor does the social constructionist view of the writing process acknowledge the affective realm except in a very general way. To understand the complete picture, McLeod insists, we need to explore how cognitive, affective, and social elements interact as people write.
In this book, McLeod follows a group of students through a semester of writing assignments, tracking the students’ progress and examining the affective elements relevant to their writing. To facilitate future discussion of these phenomena, McLeod also provides suggested definitions for terms in the affective domain.
In a very real sense, this book is the result of a collaboration of three Susans: Susan McLeod, who researched and wrote the book; Sue Hallett, an instructor in Washington State University’s composition program whose classes McLeod observed and who helped provide much of the data; and Susan Parker, a graduate student who observed Hallett’s class and who ran a tutorial connected to that class. To provide a narrative structure, McLeod and her two collaborators have constructed a simulated semester, conflating the year and a half of the study into one semester and creating a class that is a composite drawn from seven classrooms over three semesters.
Although philosophers have had much to say about the affective domain, Notes on the Heart is based for the most part on research from the social sciences. Discussions of pedagogy, while meant to have practical value, are suggestive rather than prescriptive. The goal is to help teachers see their practice in new way.
Teachers will be particularly interested in McLeod’s discussion of teacher affect/effect. This section examines both the issue of the "Pygmalion effect" (students becoming better because the teacher believes they are) and perhaps the more common opposite, the "golem effect" (students becoming less capable because their teachers view them that way).
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