NYMA:
Mother Always Said
Roxanne and I—not necessarily speaking for the field here—very much value this expanded context of literacy in both the classroom and in the field. Just as we are not content to have students merely writing to us as teachers, we are not content to merely write for our colleagues in the field. We certainly do not mean that our colleagues are not important to our intellectual endeavors, but rather that singular conversation is not the raison d’etre for our work.
The tragic shooting in 2010 at the University of Alabama in Huntsville is, at least for a time, leading to productive conversations about the nature of academic work and the role (I initially wrote “the toll”—well, hello Freud) that tenure plays in that work. A faculty member from the University of Florida penned this statement in a special essay in the St. Petersburg Times:
In my area—and in so many others—there is a disconnect between the academy and the profession. But the path to tenure includes “distinction” in research, and young professors are encouraged to carve out severely esoteric areas for study, so they soon paint themselves into a corner of irrelevance. Yet as long as their work gets published in an academic journal read only by a handful of similarly arcane professors, it is regarded as the scholarly holy grail. (William McKeen, 2010, n.p.)
“These studies suggest that students develop sophisticated uses of language when they read and write to provide information that people need, solve shared problems, and reflect on what they know, and that these activities are most likely to happen when students can both learn and teach other students. They suggest, in other words, that we need to expand the contexts for literacy in the classroom.” (Betsy A. Bowen, 1994, p. 119)
Monday, February 22, 2010
What we do in the classroom
