The Emerging Scholars Blog

And if so, with whom did you watch it?

My family and I joined the rest of our Adult Bible Fellowship for our annual Souper Bowl Party. This has become a central tradition among our group of church friends: a Super Bowl watching party combined with a soup & chili cook-off. We have a few families in our group with houses large enough to host everyone comfortably, along with finished basements where the many, many kids can gather. We’re still waiting for Cincinnati’s turn, but our group includes a couple of Purdue grads who were very happy with this year’s outcome. At least it wasn’t the Steelers. :)

The Super Bowl is a powerful cultural liturgy in the United States, part of the “military-entertainment complex” that James K. A. Smith describes in Desiring the Kingdom. Here, he explicates the National Anthem ritual: Read the rest of this entry »

What are you reading, watching, thinking about this week? As usual, here’s a few which have been on our mind. Let us know your thoughts on any/all of them. If you have items you’d like us to consider for the top five, add them in the comments or send them to Tom or Mike.

1. New online journal for student research: The Chronicle reports on Student Pulse, a new online journal for student research. Some good points from the Chronicle’s commenters about copyright and usage issues, but still an interesting and inspiring idea for sharing early academic work.

2.  Abstract Thoughts? The Body Takes Them Literally (Natalie Angier, NY Times, February 1, 2010).  Leaning forward with anticipation regarding what we might learn from the immensely popular field called embodied cognition or reclining (even if only a little bit) and giving it a quizzical look?

3.   Educators Mull How to Motivate Professors to Improve Teaching (David Glenn, Chronicle of Higher Education, January 24, 2010). Any suggestions or encouraging case studies to share?

4.  Teaching Matters: Rethinking the Hybrid Course (Steve Fox, Chronicle of Higher Education, January 31, 2010).  What do you think of Fox’s suggestions regarding Hybrid courses?  Have you taken or taught any Hybrid courses?  What recommendations would you add, in particular with regard to the management of a classroom blog?  Any encouraging case studies to share?

Books

5. “The most important person in the world”: I (Mike) was not familiar with the HeLa cell line until I read Dwight Garner’s NYTimes review of the new book by Rebecca Skloot, The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks. Ms. Lacks, an uneducated, African American Virginia tobacco farmer who died of cervical cancer at the age of 31, contributed the famously immortal cells that have

helped with some of the most important advances in medicine: the polio vaccine, chemotherapy, cloning, gene mapping, in vitro fertilization,” Ms. Skloot writes. HeLa cells were used to learn how nuclear bombs affect humans, and to study herpes, leukemia, Parkinson’s disease and AIDS. They were sent up in the first space missions, to see what becomes of human cells in zero gravity.

The problem? Ms. Lacks never gave permission for her cells to be used for scientific experiments, and researchers continued to draw samples from her descendants without explaining why, one part of the tragic legacy of American medical treatment of African Americans. From Garner’s review:

As one of Mrs. Lacks’s sons says: “She’s the most important person in the world, and her family living in poverty. If our mother so important to science, why can’t we get health insurance?”

This looks like an important – and discussion-provoking – book.

Education for Human Flourishing, Cover

After rattling the reader’s cage by exploring Have you been properly educated?, Paul D. Spears and Steven R. Loomis argue:

Most of the abilities that we associate with knowledge in the educational field turn out to be mostly a capacity to recite. … As humans we are constantly engaged in mental activities.  We constantly access and categorize everything around us.  We experience the world around us and we have beliefs about the world, some of which are true and some of which are false.  We justify our ideas through our rational capacities, by which we set up a system of understanding that arbitrates what can be constituted as knowledge, what is and is not an accurate depiction of reality.

To claim we know something implies we have sufficiently good reasons to say the things we believe are as we say they are.  Knowledge is justified true belief. Each of these categories — justification, truth and belief — plays a necessary but not sufficient role in determining knowledge, and each should be explained in order to see how belief, justification and truth form an integrated concept of knowledge. – Education for Human Flourishing: A Christian Perspective.* InterVarsity Press, 2009. p.103-4) .

Questions …

• Are Paul D. Spears and Steven R. Loomis on track with their definition of knowledge?  Note:  earlier they distinguish three types of knowledge
  • technical knowledge or what is more commonly called know-how
  • propositional knowledge, which is knowledge of facts
  • knowledge of acquaintance, which is knowledge about something in direct awareness (78-80, 103).
• How do you define knowledge and describe it’s acquisition in general, in your discipline?
• What scholars/resources/books have you found most helpful in shaping your understanding of knowledge?

*Find the title appealing? Then check out the Preface & Precis of Book and Chapters.

A while back, I asked for your recommendations for the best books for undergrads, and you came through with a pretty impressive list. Let’s advance a few years.

What books do you recommend to graduate students, on God, on academia, or just about life in general?

There will probably be some overlap, but here are some common graduate school situations that might affect the list:

• Deeper exploration of a specific discipline or profession
• New life experiences (e.g. marriage, children, death of family and friends)
• Coping with failure and success
• The “quarterlife crisis“
• Growth and change in one’s spiritual life

What are your suggestions?

What are you reading, watching, thinking about this week? Anything special with some time off or is there too much going on with the holiday?

As usual, here’s a few which have been on our mind. Let us know your thoughts on any/all of them. If you have items you’d like us to consider for the top five, add them in the comments or send them to Tom or Mike.

1. Expanding Your Reach: Want to spread your ideas beyond the sound of your voice? The higher ed website ProfHacker.com shares some tips and tricks for effective “lecturecasting.” Here’s a sample, on the importance of having a script:

If you are going formal, make sure you have a script.  Even if you aren’t going formal, its always good to have some talking points.  If you are going to record your talking head (as opposed to talking over some slides or video material), put the script at eye level somewhere.  There is nothing worse than having to look down at a sheet of paper to figure out what you need to talk about next.  I put my script up on one of my other monitors (which I’ve got positioned just behind my laptop – the machine on which I do the actual recording).  This way, I can scroll through the script without looking away at all.

2. Keeping Up with Journals: Another practical article from ProfHacker.com, offering a number of ways that you can keep up with the latest journals in your specialty, whether online or in print.

3. Academic Bait and Switch: The pseudonymous “Henry Adams” has been writing in the Chronicle about his experiences as a English PhD candidate at “Elite National University.” His title – Academic Bait and Switch – refers both to his students’ expectations of attending an “elite” institution with world-renowned faculty, only to be taught in reality by graduate students just a few years older than themselves, and also to his own expectations of graduate school running aground with reality. In this installment, Adams describes a recent lecture series given to the grad students by the tenure-track faculty. He learns much more than intended about the “real world” of academia. In the selection below, one of the faculty, “Dr. Ethos,” has just recommended a seemingly impossible rate of work.

When she implied that a human being could grade six essays an hour—and do a good job of it—Dr. Ethos was lying. Even a novice knew that. I also knew that performing as a grad student meant not challenging my superiors, but I gave in to the desire that Edgar Allan Poe labels the imp of the perverse, the urge to do something just because I shouldn’t. I raised my hand and said politely, “It’s good to know that I need to grade six papers per hour, but right now I can handle only four. Could you and the other professors give us tips on how you reach the six-per-hour rate?”

Dr. Ethos stared in my general direction without making eye contact. Silence. I looked around the room. Dr. Dreedle and Dr. Cathcart, the only tenured persons in the room, glared right at me, but the junior professors all stared at the tops of their desks, just like my freshmen did when they couldn’t answer a question.

4.Billy Graham, Evangelist to…TED? I (Mike) had no idea that Billy Graham spoke at TED in 1998. (HT: Don’t Eat the Fruit.) His topic, before this cutting-edge crowd of tech prophets and design gurus: Technology and Faith. As John Dyer summarizes,

His basic message is simple: technology brings amazing benefits to humanity, but it’s failure to alleviate the brokenness of the human heart ultimately point us to our need for a Savior.

5. Article about Wheaton Canceled by Books & Culture: Andrew Chignell’s article, exploring the present condition and possible future for Wheaton College, was almost published by Books & Culture (Inside Higher Ed), but was pulled at the last minute. Instead, it has been published by the SoMA Review. Chignell, an associate professor of philosophy at Cornell and a Wheaton alumnus, provides his side of the back story on his website, WhitherWheaton.org. (Note: the comments on the IHE article say much about the current state of academia; Jerry Pattengale, Douglas Groothius, Louis Gallien, and others of note weigh in.)

Education for Human Flourishing, Cover

Educational standards are the foundation of the modern educational endeavor.  Statements about educational success imply standards.  Measuring whether or not students are being properly educated involves testing them in particular subjects with its prescribed set of grade-appropriate standards that they must meet or exceed (Paul D. Spears and Steven R. Loomis. Education for Human Flourishing: A Christian Perspective.* InterVarsity Press, 2009. p.100).

The battery of standardized tests which Spears and Loomis go onto describe and critique in Chapter 3:  Who Knows?  Education and epistemology are not just applicable my fourth grade twin girls, as I hear a variety of students/educators in higher education discuss standardized tests with some frequency (particularly at PSU-Hershey Medical Center).   Here are the questions Spears and Loomis bring to our attention:

• What do such tests actually tell us about the student’s intelligence, ability, creativity, insightfulness or grasp of reality?
• Do current standards provide an accurate way to assess a genuine education?
• What does it mean to be educated?
• How do educators determine the success or failure of our educational project? (p. 100)

Any responses?  Do the “answers” vary depending on the level, sphere of education

• Fourth graders
• Medical students
• Undergraduate History major prepare to teach Secondary Education versus preparing for Graduate School
• Computer Science PhD student headed to Microsoft versus a Faculty position involving Research/Teaching
• Vo-Tech student

As you’re mulling these things over, here are the three types of knowledge the authors discuss in chapter 2 and remind the reader of in chapter 3:

• technical knowledge or what is more commonly called know-how
• propositional knowledge, which is knowledge of facts
• knowledge of acquaintance, which is knowledge about something in direct awareness (103).

More coming from Chapter 3.

*Find the title appealing?  Then check out the Preface & Precis of Book and Chapters.

American Flag at William Jewell College

On Friday, our week in review linked to Patricia Cohen’s article about political liberalism in the academy, “Professor is a Label That Leans to the Left.” The article was based on the work of sociologists Neil Gross (U. British Colombia) and Ethan Fosse (a PhD candidate at Harvard, where Gross worked until recently), who propose that academic liberalism is due to typecasting, similar to how nursing is considered a “woman’s job” by most Americans.

The academic profession “has acquired such a strong reputation for liberalism and secularism that over the last 35 years few politically or religiously conservative students, but many liberal and secular ones, have formed the aspiration to become professors,” they write in the paper, “Why Are Professors Liberal?” (PDF) That is especially true of their own field, sociology, which has become associated with “the study of race, class and gender inequality — a set of concerns especially important to liberals.”

Photo Credit: bbaltimore via Flickr

Read the rest of this entry »

What are you reading, watching, thinking about this week? As usual, here’s a few which have been on our mind. Let us know your thoughts on any/all of them. If you have items you’d like us to consider for the top five, add them in the comments or send them to Tom or Mike.

1. The research says Professor Is a Label That Leans to the Left (Patricia Cohen, NY Times, January 17, 2010). What do you think? HT: Miller. Note:  The article references Louis Menand’s The Marketplace of Ideas: Reform and Resistance in the American University, mentioned in Week in Review: The Valiant Return Edition and the subject of an upcoming ESN quote series.
2. Annual Poll of Freshmen Shows Effect of Recession (By Kate Zernike, NY Times, January 21, 2010):  “The recession hit this year’s college freshmen hard, affecting how they chose a school as well as their ability to pay for it, according to an annual nationwide survey released Thursday. …”  Related:  The American Freshman: National Norms Fall 2009 (pdf)
3. Can Religion Coexist with…Medicine? Faculty at the (independent) Baylor College of Medicine protest a planned merger with (Baptist-affiliated)

Baylor University (Chronicle, Katherine Mangan). Their petition states, in part,

The religious ideologies that permeate throughout BU’s academic policies may adversely affect both scientific progress and the culture at BCM, particularly in relation to issues such as evolution, embryonic stem cells, and sexual orientation.

This week, the Chronicle also reported that the Baylor College of Medicine faces NIH sanctions over conflicts of interest (Chronicle, Paul Basken).

4. Twitter at the MLA: ProfHacker.com offers a variety of perspectives on the use of Twitter at the recent MLA convention. They range from the scary (a job-seeker whose interview was derailed after a member of the interview committee found a tweet of his to be “spurious”) to the very cool (several twitterers who made important face-to-face connections after “meeting” fellow MLA members on Twitter).
5. The Book of the Decade: Byron Borger of Hearts and Minds Books named Steven Garber’s Fabric of Faithfulness (affiliate link) as its “Book of the Decade”. We’ve had it on our ESN Core Bibliography for several years, so we think Byron has great taste!

Education for Human Flourishing, Cover

In Chapter 2 of Education for Human Flourishing:  A Christian Perspective* (InterVarsity Press, 2009), Paul D. Spears and Steven R. Loomis draw attention to the importance of foundational categories and philosophical thinkers for the development of educational theory.  Furthermore, they argue modern educational theory, influenced by modern philosophy, has led to some of the pitfalls of our prestigious institutions of higher education (p.71).  Spears and Loomis begin Chapter 2 with these comments:

Educators are inundated with myriads of competing educational theories, and these theories dictate the methods and goals that are actualized in the classroom on a daily basis.  These educational theories are a product of a commitment to a certain philosophical paradigm.  Teachers are overwhelmed, understandably, with the amount of work it takes to properly manage the classroom. … This doesn’t leave a teacher much time (if any at all) to reflect on educational theory — let alone the theories’ underlying philosophical commitments.  If teachers are going to be properly equipped for their task of education, they must begin to grapple with the historical development of educational purpose.

Broadly speaking, modern education lacks a unified purpose or goal to direct its curricular and pedagogical commitments.  This lack of unity exists because education has many competing allegiances to different educational methodologies, which are driven by a variety of diverse philosophical commitments.  Education is no longer understood in terms of training that enable us to pursue a true conception of reality.  Formerly, education was conceived as a tool by which we came to properly understand our humanity, ourselves and our right role within society.  Education was about pursuing and understanding objective value, as C.S. Lewis points out:  “the belief that certain attitudes are really true, and that others really false, to the kind of thing the universe is and the kind of things we are.”  Today, education is not so much about truth or morality as it is about tolerance and contributing to the nation’s economic growth. — p.69-70.

Questions to ponder/discuss:

• Do you feel overwhelmed by competing educational theories, whether as a student, researcher, a professor, or an administrator?
• What do you consider the purpose/goal/end of education?
• What training in foundational categories/philosophy is necessary for followers of Christ to work out their faith in the complex market of educational theory/practice?

*Find the title appealing?  Then check out the Preface & Precis of Book and Chapters.

Haiti's Cathedral in Ruins

I’m sure that, like me, your heart has been breaking for the people of Haiti, and you have been looking for ways to help. The motivation to give is powerful. I’m amazed at the new technologies for giving, such as these text message appeals — as of Friday, the American Red Cross reports that more than $8 million has been donated by people who text “HAITI” to #90999.

Photo of Haiti’s cathedral after the earthquake by Mr Stucke via Flickr

Unbelievable as it may seem, though, there are ways to “help” that really don’t help anyone. Before joining InterVarsity staff, I worked for a local affiliate of the BBB Wise Giving Alliance, a nonprofit ethics and accountability watchdog. Disasters always bring out con artists hoping to use emotion for a quick buck (if you don’t believe that there are people out there as heartless as that, let me tell you some stories sometime), but there are also well-intentioned charity efforts that are simply ineffective, inefficient, or unaccountable. For example, no one doubts that respected Haitian-American musician Wyclef Jean cares about Haiti (one of his best friends was killed in the earthquake), but the Smoking Gun has raised important questions about whether donations to his foundation actually help anyone other than concert promoters (charges which Jean denies, by the way). The BBB offers several resources for donating wisely to Haiti relief. Read the rest of this entry »