The Pleasures of Academe

The Pleasures of Academe PDF Author: James Axtell
Publisher: U of Nebraska Press
ISBN: 9780803259386
Category : Education
Languages : en
Pages : 318

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Book Description
In this timely book, historian James Axtell offers a compelling defense of higher education. Drawing on national statistics, broad-ranging scholarship, and delightful anecdotes, Axtell describes the professorial work cycle, the evolution of scholarship in the past three decades, the importance of ?habitual scholarship,? and the best ways to judge a university. He persuasively confronts the critics of higher education, arguing that they have perpetuated misunderstandings of tenure, research, teaching, curricular change, and professorial politics.

The Pleasures of Academe

The Pleasures of Academe PDF Author: James Axtell
Publisher: U of Nebraska Press
ISBN: 9780803259386
Category : Education
Languages : en
Pages : 318

Get Book

Book Description
In this timely book, historian James Axtell offers a compelling defense of higher education. Drawing on national statistics, broad-ranging scholarship, and delightful anecdotes, Axtell describes the professorial work cycle, the evolution of scholarship in the past three decades, the importance of ?habitual scholarship,? and the best ways to judge a university. He persuasively confronts the critics of higher education, arguing that they have perpetuated misunderstandings of tenure, research, teaching, curricular change, and professorial politics.

Academic Life in the Measured University

Academic Life in the Measured University PDF Author: Tai Peseta
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 0429767455
Category : Education
Languages : en
Pages : 226

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Book Description
While a life in academia is still one bestowed with enormous privilege and opportunity, on the inside, its cracks and fragility have been on display for some time. We see evidence of this in researchers bemoaning time spent applying for grants rather than doing research; teachers frustrated at the ways student feedback data are deployed to feed judgements about them; and doctoral students realising that they have little chance of securing full-time academic work. Yet in the public policy domain, the opposite appears true: academics left to their own devices in their elite ivory towers, rarely ever do enough. This collection addresses the fact that academic life deserves to be rigorously researched. Its emphasis on the measured university traces how academic life had ceded itself to the logics of perverse measures, and raises questions about whether the contemporary university may well have become too measured to adequately counter the political times now upon us. The contributors explore the ways in which measurement inhabits paradoxical positions in these spaces. It sketches the contours and consequences of mismeasurement, including the personal costs to academic staff. It examines our desires and fumbled efforts at institutional transformation, and it puts on display our own ethical conduct. The collection concludes with a call to chart a course for a revitalized moral economy of academic labour. This book was originally published as a special issue of Higher Education Research & Development.

Clueless in Academe

Clueless in Academe PDF Author: Gerald Graff
Publisher: Yale University Press
ISBN: 0300132018
Category : Education
Languages : en
Pages : 319

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Book Description
Gerald Graff argues that our schools and colleges make the intellectual life seem more opaque, narrowly specialized, and beyond normal learning capacities than it is or needs to be. Left clueless in the academic world, many students view the life of the mind as a secret society for which only an elite few qualify. In a refreshing departure from standard diatribes against academia, Graff shows how academic unintelligibility is unwittingly reinforced not only by academic jargon and obscure writing, but by the disconnection of the curriculum and the failure to exploit the many connections between academia and popular culture. Finally, Graff offers a wealth of practical suggestions for making the culture of ideas and arguments more accessible to students, showing how students can enter the public debates that permeate their lives.

Pedagogical Pleasures

Pedagogical Pleasures PDF Author: Erica McWilliam
Publisher: Peter Lang Incorporated, International Academic Publishers
ISBN:
Category : Education
Languages : en
Pages : 222

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Book Description
Pedagogical Pleasures inquires into pleasure (understood as enjoyment, delight, and/or gratification) as a crucial but neglected aspect of teachers' lives and work. Pleasure is examined as an historically contingent and unstable product of language use, rather than as a spontaneous, personal, and psychological«feeling.» This book is a departure from conventional accounts of pedagogy in two ways It is unashamedly about teachers rather than students, and it does not offer any solution to pedagogical problems. Instead, it seeks to extend pedagogical knowledge by inquiring into the sorts of pleasure that are available to teachers at this historical time.

The Pleasures of Reading in an Age of Distraction

The Pleasures of Reading in an Age of Distraction PDF Author: Alan Jacobs
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 9780199831678
Category : Self-Help
Languages : en
Pages : 176

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Book Description
In recent years, cultural commentators have sounded the alarm about the dire state of reading in America. Americans are not reading enough, they say, or reading the right books, in the right way. In this book, Alan Jacobs argues that, contrary to the doomsayers, reading is alive and well in America. There are millions of devoted readers supporting hundreds of enormous bookstores and online booksellers. Oprah's Book Club is hugely influential, and a recent NEA survey reveals an actual uptick in the reading of literary fiction. Jacobs's interactions with his students and the readers of his own books, however, suggest that many readers lack confidence; they wonder whether they are reading well, with proper focus and attentiveness, with due discretion and discernment. Many have absorbed the puritanical message that reading is, first and foremost, good for you--the intellectual equivalent of eating your Brussels sprouts. For such people, indeed for all readers, Jacobs offers some simple, powerful, and much needed advice: read at whim, read what gives you delight, and do so without shame, whether it be Stephen King or the King James Version of the Bible. In contrast to the more methodical approach of Mortimer Adler's classic How to Read a Book (1940), Jacobs offers an insightful, accessible, and playfully irreverent guide for aspiring readers. Each chapter focuses on one aspect of approaching literary fiction, poetry, or nonfiction, and the book explores everything from the invention of silent reading, reading responsively, rereading, and reading on electronic devices. Invitingly written, with equal measures of wit and erudition, The Pleasures of Reading in an Age of Distraction will appeal to all readers, whether they be novices looking for direction or old hands seeking to recapture the pleasures of reading they first experienced as children.

Promoting Reading for Pleasure in the Primary School

Promoting Reading for Pleasure in the Primary School PDF Author: Michael Lockwood
Publisher: SAGE
ISBN: 1446244466
Category : Education
Languages : en
Pages : 168

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Book Description
Winner of the UKLA Author Award 2009:UKLA 'Lockwood has written a useful, supportive book which will help teachers and librarians...He describes the background and summarises the research and then proposes thoroughly practical programmes' - Carousel 'Michael Lockwood has produced an excellent, practical overview and analysis of what works in the primary school to promote reading for pleasure....Lockwood's work is grounded and valuable to those who need it most - teachers in the classroom working hard to engender a love of reading' - English Drama Media 'This book is first class. It puts the matter very clearly and succinctly, and presents a great deal of evidence to support the argument that pleasure is not a frivolous extra, but the very heart and essence of what reading is about. It also gives readers plenty of ideas for carrying the principle into the classroom, and for justifying it...This is an excellent piece of work, which I hope will find a place on every staffroom bookshelf.' - Philip Pullman English primary school children are less likely to read for pleasure than their counterparts in many other countries. This practical and focused book discusses the background to this situation and looks at how government initiatives have tried to address it. Drawing on the author's own research project in order to identify good practice in promoting reading for enjoyment, the book presents specific activities which teachers can use to develop their own whole school and classroom practice, enabling them to put the fun back into reading. Each chapter features case-study material and provides examples of planning from schools that have successfully created thriving reading cultures through schemes such as reading assemblies, book clubs, library loyalty cards, school book evenings and quizzes. There is also an extensive, annotated list of print and internet-based resources. Topics covered include: - Becoming a reading for pleasure school - Promoting a love of reading in the early years - Developing reading enjoyment in the later primary years - Getting boys reading Promoting Reading for Pleasure in the Primary School is written for all those involved in education who would like to see as many children as possible develop a love of reading. It will be particularly relevant for primary teachers, teaching assistants, trainee teachers, advisers and consultants, as well as teacher educators and researchers.

Pleasures Of Men

Pleasures Of Men PDF Author: Kate Williams
Publisher: Harper Collins
ISBN: 1443404225
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 312

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Book Description
Spitalfields, 1840. Catherine Sorgeiul is nineteen and lives with her uncle in a rambling house in London’s East End. Sheltered and nervous, she has few companions and little to occupy the days beyond her own colourful imagination. But then a murderer strikes the city, ripping open the chests of young girls and stuffing hair into their mouths to resemble a beak, leading the press to christen him the Man of Crows. Catherine becomes obsessed with the grim crimes, and as she devours the news, she discovers she can channel the voices of the dead . . . and comes to believe she will eventually channel the Man of Crows himself. The murders continue to incite panic in the city, and Catherine gradually realizes she has put herself in the centre of a deadly trap of sexual obsession, deceit and betrayal. Elegant, mysterious and thrilling, The Pleasures of Men reveals the dark, beating heart of 19th-century London, where corruption and desperate desires lurked under a serene surface.

Slow Professor

Slow Professor PDF Author: Maggie Berg
Publisher: University of Toronto Press
ISBN: 1442645563
Category : Education
Languages : en
Pages : 126

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Book Description
In The Slow Professor, Maggie Berg and Barbara K. Seeber discuss how adopting the principles of the Slow movement in academic life can counter the erosion of humanistic education.

Producing Pleasure in the Contemporary University

Producing Pleasure in the Contemporary University PDF Author: Stewart Riddle
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 9463511792
Category : Education
Languages : en
Pages : 8

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Book Description
Academics working in contemporary universities are experiencing unprecedented and unsustainable pressure in an environment of hyper-performativity, metrics and accountability. From this perspective, the university produces multiple tensions and moments of crises, where it seems that there is limited space left for the intrinsic enjoyment arising from scholarly practices. This book offers a global perspective on how pleasure is central to the endeavours of academics working in the contemporary university, with contributors evaluating the opportunities for the strategic refusal of the quantifying, stultifying and stupefying delimiters of what is possible for academic production. The aim of this book is to open up spaces for conversation, reflection and thought, in order to think, to be and to do differently – pleasurably. Contributors rupture the bounds of what is permissible and possible within their daily lives, habits and practices. As such, this book addresses increasingly significant questions. What are some of the multiple and different ways that we can reclaim pleasure and enhance the durations and intensities of our passions, desires and becomings within the contemporary university? How might these aspirations be realised? What are the spaces for the pleasurable production of research that might be opened up? How might we reconfigure the neoliberal university to be a place of more affect, where desire, laughter and joy join with the work that we seek to undertake and the communities whom we serve?

Avidly Reads Guilty Pleasures

Avidly Reads Guilty Pleasures PDF Author: Arielle Zibrak
Publisher: NYU Press
ISBN: 1479807095
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 169

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Book Description
"Avidly Reads Guilty Pleasures reclaims the femme fictions dismissed as "trash" to celebrate the surprisingly cathartic pleasures of domination, privilege, and the material trappings of patriarchal culture"--