The Emerging Scholars Blog

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. In the last Week in Review we kicked off with highlighting Seth Godin’s take on the coming melt-down in higher education. Since then, the Chronicle of Higher Education thought Godin’s piece was worth posting. That action, along with the material from the article, has created conversation worth consideration, visit here. I [Tom] think it is helpful to note that the meltdown is “as seen by a marketer” and the “facts” are told the way a marketer tells the “facts.” Bigger questions: What is the End of Education? How are followers of Christ salt and light in higher education, even advocating, developing, and maintaining structures (not just in the Council for Christian Colleges & Universities) which truly educate to the glory of God, making the small list of redemptive outliers instead of the mass of marketers selling their wares?

2. A School Pushing Back Against Facebook (Mark Bauerlein, Chronicle of Higher Education, 5/2010) brings to mind the question of How should educators interact with Social Media and teach students to handle Social Media? I [Tom] think that phenomena such as Soical Media, e.g., Facebook and Twitter, are too much of a larger cultural issue for educators to address alone. Educators should be finding ways to dialogue with children, parents, community leaders, and Social Media advocates/leaders to wisely discern it’s proper place, use, parameters. Those in the nonprofit and ministry sector have much to offer. Note: Jon Boyd has an excellent handout on Mistakes You Can Avoid on Facebook and Twitter for people in the nonprofit and ministry sector. Read the rest of this entry »

Education for Human Flourishing, Cover

Find yourself in blizzard conditions as you reflect upon the larger structure of education, but can’t quite figure out why or the proper direction for next steps?  In Chapter 4:  The Information Economy of Education, Paul D. Spears and Steven R. Loomis move from tracing

several important knowledge traditions vital to Christian thought and indispensable to a complete education … [to] an exercise in the ontology of education as a social institution. — Education for Human Flourishing: A Christian Perspective.* InterVarsity Press, 2009. p.125) .

Put on your snow (I mean thinking) cap, review the topics given below, and let me know some of your responses to these concerns.  In particular, what is unique about what the mind/Way of Christ, which influences the follower of Christ as he/she is salt and light, has to say regarding these concerns in the fragile institution of education?  What are the hidden persuaders which are in tension between the manner in which the world versus the people of God understand, view, practice education? Read the rest of this entry »

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.

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.

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.

Two recent articles on the profession of education worth consideration:

1. In Search of Education Leaders, by Bob Herbert, NY Times Op-Ed, December 4, 2009
2. The Ph.D. Problem: On the professionalization of faculty life, doctoral training, and the academy’s self-renewal, by Louis Menand, Harvard Magazine, November-December 2009.  HT: Miller.

Anyone willing to take a stab at why the educational system is so leaky and how we find/develop educational leaders which serve their department, discipline, campus, education in the United States/beyond?

Questions which come to mind with the Harvard degree program, topic of In Search of Education Leaders, “Will this program include the philosophy, purpose, and joy of education? Or are these unable to be expressed in the pragmatic, secular context of trying to keep up because we need to?”  With regard to ‘residency’ models, these already exist in education, e.g., the undergraduate student teacher model. Stronger cross-grade & inter-generational mentoring with the potential for long term relationships would profit the whole educational system.

HT:  Nick who responded to my Facebook musings by referring to Diane Rehm’s discussion of Women in Science with

1. Dr. Elizabeth Blackburn, Morris Hertzein Professor of Biology and Physiology at the University of California, San Francisco. Dr. Blackburn was awarded the 2009 Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine, along with Carol Greider and Jack W. Szostak.
2. Dr. Carol Greider, Daniel Nathans Professor of Molecular Biology & Genetics at The Johns Hopkins University. Dr. Greider was awarded the 2009 Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine, along with Elizabeth Blackburn and Jack W. Szostak.
3. Melody Barnes, director of the White House Domestic Policy Council, and special assistant to President Obama

Yes, higher education is leaky pipeline for women in the sciences.  Any responses by those part of the system?

According to Louis Menand in The Ph.D. Problem: On the professionalization of faculty life, doctoral training, and the academy’s self-renewal, the educational system is leaky in quite another way for the Humanities, but with a particular internal end in mind. Can/should higher education in the Humanities add practical skills and develop a specific graduation time line?  What about those who went through the system? Will they allow such changes (Note: Reminds me of the reduction of hours in medical training)?  Will the motivation for students in the Humanities become the pursuit and exploration of knowledge for the rich or those seeking direction later in life?  Even though the article seems focused upon the Humanities, especially English, does the article apply to all (or let’s say most) of higher education?

Here’s the top five articles, books, websites, etc., that we’ve been reading or thinking about the past week. Let us know your thoughts on any/all of them.  In addition, 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.  Week in Review: Big Questions Edition touched on if Universities have lost sight of their purpose and the potential value of increased career services.  The Chronicle of Higher Education opened this week with Are Too Many Students Going to College? (November 8, 2009) and What Do Parents Think? (November 9, 2009).  Both articles wrestle with whether the whole population can afford or should pursue this American dream.  In the survey of 1000 parents of pre-college students:

Nine of 10 parents told us that, despite the toughest economic climate in decades, they still view sending their kids to college as an essential part of the American dream … Almost eight in 10 Americans agreed that it’s very important to obtain a degree, while only a little more than half said their parents had felt it was very important for them to attend college (William F. Glavin Jr. What Do Parents Think? Chronicle of Higher Education. November 8, 2009).

2.  In Why College Professors Don’t Envy the Young (Chronicle of Higher Education.  November 08, 2009), Gina Barreca, professor of English/Feminist Theroy at UConn, delivers a unique perspective on midlife crisis as an older member of the academic community observing the younger members (and reflecting upon her own past).

While friends in other professions are waking up to their midlives (or what we choose to call midlife but how many people do you know who live past 100 — not counting Lévi-Strauss?) and frantically wishing they could return to their twenties or thirties, those of us who have been dealing with undergraduate and graduate students don’t want to time-travel back to those years. … To be adorable and energetic would be great, but to feel that perpetual trepidation that I’ll never find a job, a partner, a place in the world, or an apartment that I don’t have to share with six other people? No deal. To feel as if the whole world is open to me would be lovely, but to live with the anxiety that I’ll end up on the outskirts or end up an outcast? No thanks.  To wonder whether I’ll ever do work meaningful to me, let alone anyone else? Not a chance. …

3.  Reduce the Technology, Rescue Your Job (Chronicle of Higher Education. November 09, 2009) by Michael J. Bugeja, director of the Greenlee School of Journalism and Communication at Iowa State University and author of Interpersonal Divide: The Search for Community in a Technological Age (Oxford University Press, 2004) provides a number of practical recommendations.

4. Getting Started with Zotero – Zotero is a free citation and research manager that you can add on to Firefox. Amy Cavender at ProfHacker.com started a series this week to introduce new users to Zotero, which I (Mike) have never really used but have heard great things about.

5. Someone’s Trying to Find You – In a good way. IVP Editor Dan Reid, writing on IVP’s Addenda & Errata blog, expresses his frustration, and bafflement, at how hard it is to find faculty information on some universities’ websites. Dan uses the information to look for potential new authors, but the benefit of easy-to-find, easy-to-read faculty pages goes beyond that:

This is important not just for the sake of publishers and others finding your faculty. Good academic websites also contribute to a faculty member’s platform. And it is a good thing for academic institutions to have faculty with a platform that extends beyond the classroom. This doesn’t really need to be argued, does it?

Some of the Sesame Street cast members

In How We Got to Sesame Street; Art on Screen (The Chronicle of Higher Education. January 16, 2009), Evan R. Goldstein treats us to some of the history of Sesame Street, which celebrated 40 years on November 10.

In 1966 a group of friends gathered for a dinner party in Manhattan. As the evening was winding down, one of the guests, Lloyd N. Morrisett, a vice president at the Carnegie Corporation, turned to his host, a television executive named Joan Ganz Cooney, and asked a seemingly innocuous question: Can television educate young children? …

Almost four years after the Cooney dinner party, on November 10, 1969, Sesame Street showed up on public television across the country. The series was greeted with a torrent of gushing reviews. “The show moves, seduces, diverts, dazzles, amuses, and infects,” raved a writer at Variety. “Learning seems almost a byproduct of fun,” noted another critic. Children’s television would never be the same.”

It’s hard not to concede that education begins in the context of where one grows up and TV viewing is almost universal among the kids in our culture.  As such, would you credit Sesame Street or similar TV shows for your early childhood education (or at least some of it)?  Does Sesame Street Turns 40, But It Doesn’t Look a Day Over 25 resonate with you?

In the last 40 years, Sesame Street taught us to celebrate our differences, to bask in our own individuality and has continuously redefined “normal” to fit us all. Sesame Street taught us to read, to write, and yes, to count. It opened our eyes to cultures beyond our cul-de-sac and taught us global thinking. Sesame Street made us believe that we could be anything and that anything was possible. Sesame Street taught us to love music and laughter and learning.

A couple more questions to ponder/discuss:

Street Gang: The Complete History of Sesame Street

1. How much emphasis should parents or the educational system as a whole place on educational TV for kids, youth, young adults, adults?
2. What has the educational experiment shown us about what kids can/do learn from TV?  Do they learn/absorb more than the basics, e.g., values, perspective on the real world?
3. Would you agree with the Robert Smith’s 40 Years Of Lessons On ‘Sesame Street’, which ran on NPR yesterday (11/10/2009)?  E.g., Children Are Adaptable. Keep It Simple.  The Children are always right (Note: Bonus on audio).
4. As one involved in higher education, do you have any recommendations for the next decade of Sesame Street as it seeks to educate kids across the spectrum or for parents as they seek to evaluate it’s role in the overall educational toolkit?  Note:  Sesame Street provides a peek of it’s future direction at It’s all new and better than ever as Sesame Street turns 40!

P.S.  Street Gang:  The Complete History of Sesame Street (Michael Davis. Viking. 2008) looks like a good read.  I found an excerpt posted here.

Here’s the top five articles, books, websites, etc., that we’ve been reading or thinking about the past week. Let us know your thoughts on any/all of them.  In addition, 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.

Claude Levi-Strauss

1.  The Big Questions: Have our colleges and universities lost sight of their purpose? (Jerry Pattengale, Books & Culture, November/December 2009) critiques Education’s End: Why Our Colleges and Universities Have Given Up on the Meaning of Life (Anthony Kronman, Yale University Press, 2008) and recommends The American University in a Postsecular Age (Co-edited by Douglas & Rhonda Jacobsen, Oxford University Press, 2008).

2. Can a biologist trust an evangelical Christian? – InterVarsity Graduate & Faculty Ministry at Indiana University will be hosting this event next Thursday, Nov. 12.

This panel discussion features three evangelical scholars on the topic of Christianity, science and evolution. Our primary audience for this event will be scholars who are skeptical or even hostile about the idea of integrating religion and science. We have chosen the topic as part of the Indiana University “themester” on “Evolution, Diversity, and Change.” Our goals, at this point, are to provide a model of what it might look like to integrate belief in God with scientific inquiry; to put names and faces behind what can often be the demonized other (evangelical Christians); to foster a discussion about the integration of religion and science; to work at eroding the destructive binary that is assumed to exist between science and religion; and to work at building trust between the scientific community and evangelical Christianity.

For more information, check out their website, www.iugfm.blogspot.com.

3. Claude Lévi-Strauss Dies at 100 – One of the most important intellectual figures of the 20th Century died last Friday. From the NY Times’ obituary:

A powerful thinker, Mr. Lévi-Strauss was an avatar of “structuralism,” a school of thought in which universal “structures” were believed to underlie all human activity, giving shape to seemingly disparate cultures and creations. His work was a profound influence even on his critics, of whom there were many. There has been no comparable successor to him in France. And his writing — a mixture of the pedantic and the poetic, full of daring juxtapositions, intricate argument and elaborate metaphors — resembles little that had come before in anthropology.

Other reflections on his life and work: WSJ’s obituary and an elegy, NPR’s story about his 100th birthday, Eric Banks’ post at the Chronicle of Higher Ed about Lévi-Strauss’ importance.

Photo: Claude Levi-Strauss in 1992, from sagabardon via Flickr

4.  In a NY Times Op-Ed entitled Teach Your Teachers Well, Susan Engel (a senior lecturer in psychology and the director of the teaching program at Williams College) builds upon Secretary of Education Arne Duncan’s Urging for ‘Revolutionary Change’ in Nation’s Teacher-Training Programs.  How about this angle on the problem?

Our best universities have, paradoxically, typically looked down their noses at education, as if it were intellectually inferior. The result is that the strongest students are often in colleges that have no interest in education, while the most inspiring professors aren’t working with students who want to teach. This means that comparatively weaker students in less intellectually rigorous programs are the ones preparing to become teachers.

So the first step is to get the best colleges to throw themselves into the fray. If education was a good enough topic for Plato, John Dewey and William James, it should be good enough for 21st-century college professors. — Susan Engel, Teach Your Teachers Well, NY Times, 11/02/2009

5. Online Education, Growing Fast, Eyes the Truly ‘Big Time’ (Marc Perry, Chronicle of Higher Education, October 30, 2009) as The $50K Club: 58 Private Colleges Pass a Pricing Milestone (Reported by Scott Carlson, Kathryn Masterson, and Jeffrey Brainard, and written by Mr. Carlson. Chronicle of Higher Education. November 1, 2009).  Looking for some thoughts on how liberal arts colleges and their ideals will survive the current economic crisis?

Traditional reasoning about the enrichment of the “student as future citizen” can only go so far when parents who pay the tuition or students taking the courses can’t see a bottom line in the form of a lucrative job after graduation. — Katharine S. Brooks, Close the Gap Between the Liberal Arts and Career Services, Chronicle of Higher Education, November 1, 2009

In Close the Gap Between the Liberal Arts and Career Services, Katharine S. Brooks, director of liberal-arts career services, University of Texas at Austin, offers some good ideas regarding career services.  For parents, students, and educators she has a new book,  You Majored in What? Mapping Your Path From Chaos to Career (Viking, 2009), which might be worth exploring.  If you’ve read it, let us know what you think.

"Called Out of Darkness" Cover

As I mentioned in Week in Review: Connections Edition, Anne Rice’s Called Out of Darkness: A Spiritual Confession (Alfred A. Knopf, 2008) offers a number of comments on education.  The tension which Rice wrestled with in her call as a writer speaks to a reality encountered by many in the higher education, i.e., a confusing mixture of encouragement/discouragement offered by human beings in the role of shaping/teaching youth transitioning to their respective vocational roles in the larger culture.

“I took to the freedom of college, and navigating amid interesting classes and lecturers; and I responded strongly to complete lectures which enabled me to learn without the necessity of cumbersome and difficult books.   The classes in sociology and in journalism and in music appreciation were particularly illuminating.  The classes in English were discouraging.  I made less-than-perfect grades because I wasn’t considered an effective writer.  And the atmosphere of the English classes was disciplinary and confining.

‘We may assume,’ said the teacher, ‘that there are no Hemingways or Faulkners in this classroom.  Therefore we expect you to write in decent sentences.’  I loathed the very idea of assuming mediocrity.  I barely got by.

The one story I submitted to the college literary magazine was rejected.  I was told it wasn’t a story” (p.76).

So how did Anne Rice emerge as a creative writer without the support of her professors?  Peer encouragement, with memories extending back to 5th grade, and I would add the grace of God fused with the determined, educational vision nurtured by her parents.  Have you faced similar challenges to your sense of vocation/call?  If so, how have you overcome?  For those who are currently in the role of educators, what recommendations do you have regarding how to encourage creative students?

Note:  I find it of interest that Rice later

wrote novels about people who are shut out of life for various reasons.  In fact, this became a great theme of my novels — how one suffers as an outcast, how one is shut out of various levels of meaning and, ultimately out of human life itself (p.78).

In Friday’s Week in Review, we’ll have some links to articles highlighting the role/value of monsters.  At present, Rice’s books on Jesus are on my too read shelf. Can anyone comment as to how/whether these books highlight the theme of being an outcast?

Note:  Updated 10/28/2009, 8:45 am.