Posted in SHP Summer 2010, Student work, Uncovering & Evaluating Sources on August 3, 2010| Leave a Comment »
This week’s Reading Response assignment asked students to find 1-3 primary sources (government reports, news articles, website blurbs, etc.) and 1-2 related peer-reviewed secondary sources, and compare-and-contrast these sources. I designed this assignment to help students prepare for writing their essay.
This post complements student research highlighted in this post.
More details below the fold!
Posted in SHP Summer 2010, Student work, Uncovering & Evaluating Sources on July 29, 2010| 1 Comment »
We had a recent assignment this quarter that echoed an assignment from the spring quarter (here) in which students uncovered two peer-reviewed sources to help them formulate interview questions and/or to provide materials for their essay assignment.
Highlights of this work below the fold.
Posted in Oral History, SHP Summer 2010, Student work on July 14, 2010| Leave a Comment »
Once again, student responses to our readings this quarter have provided many fruitful avenues for thought and discussion, and I wanted to bring some of these topics to the attention of the broader community.
This post complements last quarter’s discussion of student responses to the same readings, Discussion of oral history methods & philosophy.
Posted in SHP Summer 2010, Student work, Uncovering & Evaluating Sources on July 14, 2010| 8 Comments »
This post will serve as the medium through which students in the Summer 2010 quarter can provide updates on the group work and research that they’re doing to prepare for their interview and/or to write their essay. Updates can include:
This comment thread will, ideally, also provide students the opportunity to process some of their research findings in writing. I’ve consistently found it beneficial to jot down thoughts spurred by new information I’ve uncovered. Expressing in writing comparisons, contrasts, and other relevant points often helps me work-through my ideas on the topic which, in turn, helps me compose more appropriate interview questions and more coherent essays.
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Posted in Critiques of Sustainability, SHP Summer 2010, Student work, Uncovering & Evaluating Sources, What is Sustainability? on July 5, 2010| 4 Comments »
This post supplements On Sustainability, Summer 2010 (pt. 2 of 2) and provides reflections from two of my students this quarter on one particular article in this special issue of the journal Academic Questions. Ashley Thorne’s comment to the post Critiquing Sustainability alerted us to the publication of this special journal issue. I plan to post on other articles in this issue of the journal, but the present post will focus on Daniel Bonevac’s “Is Sustainability Sustainable?”[1]
Posted in SHP Summer 2010, Student work, What is Sustainability? on July 5, 2010| 3 Comments »
Below are more student reflections on the second reading response assignment of the summer term. See the post On Sustainability, Spring 2010 (pt. 2 of 2) for the details of this assignment and the citation to Gibson’s article; at the end of this post are citations for the articles that students chose as their second reading. Also, see the post In response to Bonevac, “Is Sustainability Sustainable?” for reflections specifically on Daniel Bonevac’s article in Academic Questions 23:1 (March 2010), 84-101.
(Part 1 of this term’s reading responses on sustainability here.)
Posted in Critiques of Sustainability, SHP Summer 2010, Uncovering & Evaluating Sources, What is Sustainability? on July 5, 2010| Leave a Comment »
In comments to a previous SHP post (Critiquing Sustainability), Ashley Thorne brought our attention to a special issue of the journal Academic Questions devoted to “sustainability” (vol. 23, no. 1 (March 2010)). This journal is produced by the National Association of Scholars (NAS).
The NAS is “an independent membership association of academics working to foster intellectual freedom and to sustain the tradition of reasoned scholarship and civil debate in America’s colleges and universities.” The NAS was founded in 1987, “soon after Allan Bloom’s surprise best-seller, The Closing of the American Mind, alerted Americans to the ravages wrought by illiberal ideologies on campus. The founders of NAS summoned faculty members from across the political spectrum to help defend the core values of liberal education.”[1] The NAS considers itself to be “higher education’s most vigilant watchdog” on issues pertaining to “intellectual integrity in the curriculum, in the classroom, and across the campus.” The NAS “oppose racial, gender, and other group preferences” while upholding “the principle of individual merit.” Further, they consider “the Western intellectual heritage” to be “the indispensable foundation of American higher education.”
In poking around the Internet, I happened upon another source affiliated with the NAS: A weekly digest of sustainability-related news pertaining to institutions of higher education fittingly called Sustainability News. This digest is composed of “10-20 links to sustainability news stories” that will enable those interested to “keep a finger on the pulse of this movement in its manifestations in higher education.”
Ashley Thorne, as NAS Director of Communications, oversees production of Sustainability News. She also produces the NAS’ online Encyclopedia of Sustainability.
(Soon I will be publishing a post with student responses to one of the articles in the Academic Questions issue cited above.)
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[1] Allan Bloom, the controversy surrounding his book The Closing of the American Mind, and subsequent discussions of this book, are too complex to discuss in this post; see links for places to begin further research on this matter.
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Posted in Economics, Environment, Equity, Media, SHP Summer 2010, What is Sustainability? on July 2, 2010| 3 Comments »
This post is in response to the same student comments and questions spurred by the assignment outlined in On Sustainability, Summer 2010 (pt. 1 of 2). I found myself writing more and more in reply to this particular issue, so I opted to make a stand-alone post.
I’ve seen a pattern, both in these courses I teach and in our broader culture, that suggests to me that a great many (most?) people seem first to think of environmental issues when they hear the word “sustainability.” Members of the Brundtland Commission perceived this pattern as early as 1982, when they began their work on Our Common Future, so my relatively limited sample size seems more than anecdotal.[1]
One student’s reading response this quarter flipped on the light bulb for me. This student found that her/his definition of sustainability focused on environmental concerns, and, when comparing this definition to the Brundtland Commission’s definition, suggested that this was “mainly because that’s what everyone hears in the media or news.”
Aha!
Posted in SHP Summer 2010, Student work, What is Sustainability? on July 2, 2010| 3 Comments »
Our first assignment for the Summer 2010 quarter had us reading and responding to the same articles as the students in the Spring 2010 term; you can find the assignment details and journal entry citations in the post “On Sustainability, Spring 2010.” As I did in Spring 2010, I have extracted a selection of student comments and questions, below.
Sustainability History Project 