Those of us who teach composition know the difficulty of convincing students to think of audience as they write: Just who are they addressing? What do they expect in response? Why are they saying something? Writing is about convincing, entertaining, conveying, demanding, contacting…. However you describe it, writing is as much a two-way street as talking.…
American colleges and universities have reached a tipping point in their evolution. The old business, financial and program models are insufficient. Consumers now balk at the advertised sticker prices charged. Local government, trapped by a spiral of declining revenues in a long and deep recession, challenges the nonprofit status of these institutions. Endowments – at…
Last week, porn star James Deen spoke to a class at Pasadena City College, but administrators banned a planned public event with Deen. In a press release misleadingly titled, “PCC Instructor Agrees To Cancel Public Event,” the PCC administration claimed, “Pasadena City College administrators met with instructor Hugo Schwyzer today and came to agreement to…
At my monthly department meeting yesterday, the department’s representative to our University Senate gave his report on their last meeting. As part of his report, he told us some of the concerns our university president, Javier Cevallos, expressed about a recent drop in enrollment. Cevallos’s remarks before our University Senate echoed a statement he released…
The greatest irony in the increasing privatization of public education is that the deficiencies that the “reformers” typically claim to be trying to correct are often exacerbated by the very “reforms” that they are advocating. There is now a tremendous amount of statistical evidence that, on average, students in charter schools perform worse–and often much…
Last week, I finished the manuscript of a book (it will be called The Cult of Individualism: A History of an Enduring American Myth, in case anyone is interested, and it should appear in August). It is caught up in history and historicism, culture and commentary–in what other people have written. While writing, I was surrounded…
This guest post is by Kathleen Rand Reed. She is “an African American anthropologist who has not only been in the trenches of higher education as an activist over a number of years, but a trench digger during my “older-woman returns-to-graduate-school” experience at the University of Maryland, College Park.” I have read the Academe article on…
This guest post is a re-post from @The Chalk Face. Author Timothy Slekar is Head of the Division of Education, Human Development and Social Sciences at Penn State Altoona. “Research shows that when expectations are raised, students rise to meet them. Adapting to higher standards and raising expectations may prove challenging, but they are the steps…
Guest Blogger Morna McDermott McNulty is an Associate Professor in the College of Education at Towson University. She blogs at Educationalchemy where this post also appears. I guess I had Tim Slekar’s clarion call to challenge EdWeek in mind when I was looking through my recent issue of Educational Researcher (ER) today. In his blog, Slekar illustrated quite…
In past blogs, I’ve chronicled the development of Writing Commons, the Open Education Home for Writers, with hopes that my experiences developing an Open Education Resource (OER) might be of interest to faculty across the disciplines. I’ve argued that faculty might want to consider contributing to Writing Commons or other OERs that are peer-reviewed, that…