front cover of Making Plans
Making Plans
How to Engage with Landscape, Design, and the Urban Environment
By Frederick R. Steiner
University of Texas Press, 2018

“Community and regional planning involve thinking ahead and formally envisioning the future for ourselves and others,” according to Frederick R. Steiner. “Improved plans can lead to healthier, safer, and more beautiful places to live for us and other species. We can also plan for places that are more just and more profitable. Plans can help us not only to sustain what we value but also to transcend sustainability by creating truly regenerative communities, that is, places with the capacity to restore, renew, and revitalize their own sources of energy and materials.”

In Making Plans, Steiner offers a primer on the planning process through a lively, firsthand account of developing plans for the city of Austin and the University of Texas campus. As dean of the UT School of Architecture, Steiner served on planning committees that addressed the future growth of the city and the university, growth that inevitably overlapped because of UT’s central location in Austin. As he walks readers through the planning processes, Steiner illustrates how large-scale planning requires setting goals and objectives, reading landscapes, determining best uses, designing options, selecting courses for moving forward, taking actions, and adjusting to changes. He also demonstrates that planning is an inherently political, sometimes messy, act, requiring the intelligence and ownership of the affected communities. Both wise and frank, Making Plans is an important philosophical and practical statement on planning by a leader in the field.

[more]

front cover of The Managerial Unconscious in the History of Composition Studies
The Managerial Unconscious in the History of Composition Studies
Donna Strickland
Southern Illinois University Press, 2011
In this pointed appraisal of composition studies, Donna Strickland contends the rise of writing program administration is crucial to understanding the history of the field. Noting existing histories of composition studies that offer little to no exploration of administration, Strickland argues the field suffers from a “managerial unconscious” that ignores or denies the dependence of the teaching of writing on administrative structures. 

The Managerial Unconscious in the History of Composition Studies is the first book to address the history of composition studies as a profession rather than focusing on its pedagogical theories and systems. Strickland questions why writing and the teaching of writing have been the major areas of scholarly inquiry in the field when specialists often work primarily as writing program administrators, not teachers. 

Strickland traces the emergence of writing programs in the early twentieth century, the founding of two professional organizations by and for writing program administrators, and the managerial overtones of the “social turn” of the field during the 1990s. She illustrates how these managerial imperatives not only have provided much of the impetus for the growth of composition studies over the past three decades but also have contributed to the stratified workplaces and managed writing practices the field’s pedagogical research often decries. 

The Managerial Unconscious in the History of Composition Studies makes the case that administrative work should not be separated from intellectual work, calling attention to the interplay between these two kinds of work in academia at large and to the pronounced hierarchies of contingent faculty and tenure-track administrators endemic to college writing programs. The result is a reasoned plea for an alternative understanding of the very mission of the field itself.
[more]

front cover of Master Class
Master Class
Lessons from Leading Writers
Nancy Bunge
University of Iowa Press, 2005

Master Class: Lessons from Leading Writers gathers more than two decades of wisdom from twenty-nine accomplished authors. It offers previously unpublished interviews along with freshly edited versions of ten interviews from Nancy Bunge's well-received previous collection, Finding the Words. The first section, Theory, incorporates interviews which document the golden age of writing programs in which authors with a strong sense of social and cultural responsibility taught as seriously as they wrote. These conversations delve into the writers' philosophies and teaching methods. The second section, Practice, presents interviews with authors who discuss how they've approached the writing of particular works. Altogether the interviews introduce authors as inspirational models and provide insightful techniques for other writers to try. One piece of advice recurs with striking consistency: to produce fresh, interesting work, aspiring writers must develop a passionate self-trust. This rule has an essential corollary: improving as a writer means constantly stretching oneself with new information and skills. Sure to interest writing and literature teachers as well as writers at every stage of development, Master Class is highly recommended for undergraduate and graduate writing courses.

Interviews with Marvin Bell, Ivan Doig, Sandra Gilbert, Allen Ginsberg, Donald Hall, Jim Harrison, Etheridge Knight, Margot Livesey, Larry McMurtry, James Alan McPherson, Clarence Major, Bobbie Ann Mason, Sue Miller, N. Scott Momaday, Kyoko Mori, Thylias Moss, W. S. Penn, Kit Reed, Alix Kates Shulman, William Stafford, Wallace Stegner, Ruth Stone, Scott Turow, Katherine Vaz, Diane Wakoski, Anne Waldman, Richard Wilbur, Richard Yates, and Helen Yglesias.

[more]

front cover of Mere and Easy
Mere and Easy
Collage as a Critical Practice in Pedagogy
Edited by Jorge Lucero
University of Illinois Press, 2017
Collage making offers everyone from small children to trained artists the ability to express themselves through images. In this new Common Threads collection, Jorge Lucero draws on the archive of the journal Visual Arts Research to present articles focused on the place of collage in fine art and education. Guided by the twinned concepts of mereness --collage's reputation as a trifle--and easiness --the technique's accessibility to all--the authors explore how subversive, debased, and effortless the collage gesture can be. What emerges is in and of itself a collage, one that groups disparate scholarship into a whole that reveals how the technique may serve as a method of scholarship and as a wellspring of vibrant, even radical, pedagogical utility. Contributors: Michael Biggs, Ian Buchanan, Daniela Büchler, Paul Duncum, Charles R. Garoian, Kit Grauer, Anniina Suominen Guyas, Kathleen Keys, Jorge Lucero, Dan Nadaner, Ryan Patton, Janet N. Stevenson, Robert W. Sweeny, and Stuart Thompson.
[more]

front cover of Mobilizing Pedagogy
Mobilizing Pedagogy
Two Social Practice Projects in the Americas by Pablo Helguera with Suzanne Lacy and Pilar Riaño-Alcalá
Edited by Elyse A. Gonzales and Sara Reisman
Amherst College Press, 2018
What is—what should be—the place of art in society? Is it merely decorative? Is it only to affirm a given set of cultural preferences? Or should it examine, challenge, even upend these norms to bring open new perspectives for those who experience what artists create?

Social practice artists offer a clear and unflinching answer to this question, setting before us works intended not merely to ask questions but to propose pathways toward large societal change.

In this volume, the work of two social practice artists of different generations and different social locations—Suzanne Lacy and Pablo Helguera—are brought into creative tension by two visionary curators: Elyse A. Gonzalez of the Art, Design & Architecture Museum of the University of California, Santa Barbara, and Sara Reisman of the Shelley and Donald Rubin Foundation of New York. Working together, Gonzales and Reisman bring the work of these two engaged and activist artists into dialogue, showing how art can be not merely the mirror of society but the means of making it more just, more inclusive, and more humane.
[more]

front cover of Multiliteracies for a Digital Age
Multiliteracies for a Digital Age
Stuart A. Selber
Southern Illinois University Press, 2004

Just as the majority of books about computer literacy deal more with technological issues than with literacy issues, most computer literacy programs overemphasize technical skills and fail to adequately prepare students for the writing and communications tasks in a technology-driven era. Multiliteracies for a Digital Age serves as a guide for composition teachers to develop effective, full-scale computer literacy programs that are also professionally responsible by emphasizing different kinds of literacies and proposing methods for helping students move among them in strategic ways.

Defining computer literacy as a domain of writing and communication, Stuart A. Selber addresses the questions that few other computer literacy texts consider: What should a computer literate student be able to do? What is required of literacy teachers to educate such a student? How can functional computer literacy fit within the values of teaching writing and communication as a profession? Reimagining functional literacy in ways that speak to teachers of writing and communication, he builds a framework for computer literacy instruction that blends functional, critical, and rhetorical concerns in the interest of social action and change.

Multiliteracies for a Digital Age reviews the extensive literature on computer literacy and critiques it from a humanistic perspective. This approach, which will remain useful as new versions of computer hardware and software inevitably replace old versions, helps to usher students into an understanding of the biases, belief systems, and politics inherent in technological contexts. Selber redefines rhetoric at the nexus of technology and literacy and argues that students should be prepared as authors of twenty-first-century texts that defy the established purview of English departments. The result is a rich portrait of the ideal multiliterate student in a digital age and a social approach to computer literacy envisioned with the requirements for systemic change in mind.

[more]


Send via email Share on Facebook Share on Twitter