Photography can seem to capture reality and the eye like no other medium, commanding belief and wielding the power of proof. In some cases, a photograph itself is attributed the force of the real. How can a piece of chemically discolored paper have such potency? How does the meaning of a photograph become fixed? In The Disciplinary Frame, John Tagg claims that, to answer these questions, we must look at the ways in which all that frames photography—the discourse that surrounds it and the institutions that circulate it— determines what counts as truth.

The meaning and power of photographs, Tagg asserts, are discursive effects of the regimens that produce them as official record, documentary image, historical evidence, or art. Teasing out the historical processes involved, he examines a series of revealing case studies from nineteenth-century European and American photographs to Depression-era works by Walker Evans, Dorothea Lange, and Margaret Bourke-White to the conceptualist photography of John Baldessari.

Central to this transformative work are questions of cultural strategy, the growth of the state, and broad issues of power and representation: how the discipline of the frame holds both photographic image and viewer in place, without erasing the possibility for evading, and even resisting, capture. Photographs, Tagg ultimately finds, are at once too big and too small for the frames in which they are enclosed—always saying more than is wanted and less than is desired.

Higher education is broken, and we haven’t been able to fix it. Even in the face of great and growing dysfunction, it seems resistant to fundamental change. At this point, can anything be done to save it?
 
The Instruction Myth argues that yes, higher education can be reformed and reinvigorated, but it will not be an easy process. In fact, it will require universities to abandon their central operating principle, the belief that education revolves around instruction, easily measurable in course syllabi, credits, and enrollments. Acclaimed education scholar John Tagg presents a powerful case that instruction alone is worthless and that universities should instead be centered upon student learning, which is far harder to quantify and standardize. Yet, as he shows, decades of research have indicated how to best promote student learning, but few universities have systematically implemented these suggestions.
 
This book demonstrates why higher education must undergo radical change if it hopes to survive. More importantly, it offers specific policy suggestions for how universities can break their harmful dependence on the instruction myth. In this extensively researched book, Tagg offers a compelling diagnosis of what’s ailing American higher education and a prescription for how it might still heal itself.