A conversation with David Sedaris

Conversation.Author biography: David Sedaris first came into the national spotlight in 1992, when Ira Glass asked him to read for Morning Edition on National Public Radio. At the time, Sedaris was living in New York City, working as a house cleaner. He read "Santaland diaries" for NPR, an essay that chronicles in meticulous, hilarious detail his odd experiences working in green tights as a Macy's elf. Since that first reading, Sedaris has written the best-selling books Barrel fever, Holidays on ice, and several collections of essays, including Naked, Me talk pretty one day, and Dress your family in corduroy and denim. His radio pieces air on National Public Radio's This American Life, and his essays appear regularly in The New Yorker and Esquire. He also writes plays with his sister, Amy Sedaris, creator of the Comedy Central series Strangers with Candy. Along with David's partner, Hugh, they collaborate as "the Talent Family" on plays that have been produced at La Mama, Lincoln Center and The Drama Department, in New York City Sedaris recently edited an anthology to raise money for 826NYC, an organization dedicated to tutoring youth in Brooklyn, modeled on the successful 826 Valencia project in San Francisco. He currently divides his time between residences in New York, France and England and is working on his next book. [2007]Author biography: Lania Knight teaches writing and literature at the University of Missouri and is an editorial assistant at the Missouri Review. She is currently at work on her first novel. [2009]Selected audio outtakes from our the print interview which appears in our Spring 2007 issue. Lania Knight talks with David Sedaris, author of the best-selling Barrel fever and Holidays on ice and essay collections such as Naked. Sedaris' work airs on National Public Radio and appears reguarly in The New Yorker and Esquire, and he recently edited an anthology to raise money for 826NYC, an organization devoted to tutoring youth in Brooklyn

IMPACT: The Journal of the Center for Interdisciplinary Teaching and Learning. Volume 5, Issue 2, Summer 2016

Impact: The Journal of the Center for Interdisciplinary Teaching & Learning is a peer-reviewed, biannual online journal that publishes scholarly and creative non-fiction essays about the theory, practice and assessment of interdisciplinary education. Impact is produced by the Center for Interdisciplinary Teaching & Learning at the College of General Studies, Boston University (www.bu.edu/cgs/citl)

The N-Word: Lessons Taught and Lessons Learned

In the fall of 2008, I dared to teach a fifteen-week course that focused on a single word, a word arguably like no other, a word adorned with these emotionally colorful descriptors: “the most explosive of racial epithets,” “our cruelest word,” “the most toxic in the English language,” “the most troubling word in our language,” “almost magical in its negative power,” “six simple letters that convey centuries of pain, evil and contempt,” “an almost universally known word of contempt,” “occupies a place in the soul where logic and reason never go,” and “the filthiest, dirtiest, nastiest word in the English language.” I have since taught the course three more times. Because of the overwhelming success of my multimedia and multi-genre undergraduate course, “The N-word: Lessons Taught and Lessons Learned,” both for my students and for me, and because of the peculiar and alleged post-racial American historical moment in which we now are living with the first African American U.S. President, this reflective pedagogical piece, “The N-Word: Lessons taught and Lessons Learned,” is particularly relevant and timely. Indeed, although the use and history of the “nigger” with its various interracial, intraracial, and intracultural associations have garnered public attention in American classrooms, in the American media, and in American popular culture, deeper implications surrounding this word, the word “nigger” has not had the kind of sustained classroom exploration my semester -long course afforded. Putting this single word under a critical microscope underscored for me and my students the fact that ideas about language and identity, about language and public performance, and about language and American race relations inextricably connect youths and elders, blacks and whites, males and females, children and adults, the international and the domestic, past and present, public and private, and the personal and the political. Specifically, this pedagogical reflection offers a social and political context for the course, an intellectual rationale for the course, specific and detailed course content, students’ responses to the course, students\u27 and teacher\u27s overarching lessons gleaned from the course, and bibliographic suggestions for classroom practitioners and critically curious others navigating the ocean of materials on the word that journalist Farai Chideya has called “the all-American trump card, the nuclear bomb of racial epithets.”

Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni: A Bibliographic Review of Resources for Teachers

As a poet, short story writer, novelist and essayist, Divakaruni has gained a wide national and international audience. Her writing in multiple genres addresses cross-cultural complexities of self-identity, family relationships and community values. Most notable has been her continuing concern with these issues in connection with the experiences of Indian and Indian American women. Reviews of her work emphasize her boldly imaginative style of story-telling, poetic sensibility, creativity in genre crossing, and commitment to breaking down boundaries between serious and popular literature

Writing Assignments with a Metacognitive Component Enhance Learning in a Large Introductory Biology Course

Writing assignments, including note taking and written recall, should enhance retention of knowledge, whereas analytical writing tasks with metacognitive aspects should enhance higher-order thinking. In this study, we assessed how certain writing-intensive “interventions,” such as written exam corrections and peer-reviewed writing assignments using Calibrated Peer Review and including a metacognitive component, improve student learning. We designed and tested the possible benefits of these approaches using control and experimental variables across and between our three-section introductory biology course. Based on assessment, students who corrected exam questions showed significant improvement on postexam assessment compared with their nonparticipating peers. Differences were also observed between students participating in written and discussion-based exercises. Students with low ACT scores benefited equally from written and discussion-based exam corrections, whereas students with midrange to high ACT scores benefited more from written than discussion-based exam corrections. Students scored higher on topics learned via peer-reviewed writing assignments relative to learning in an active classroom discussion or traditional lecture. However, students with low ACT scores (17–23) did not show the same benefit from peer-reviewed written essays as the other students. These changes offer significant student learning benefits with minimal additional effort by the instructors

They (Don't) Care About Education: A Counternarrative on Black Male Students' Responses to Inequitable Schooling

Focus group interviews and systematic content analysis of 304 essays written by black male undergraduates refute the dominant message that black men do not care about education. On the contrary, these students aspire to earn doctoral degrees in education despite acute understanding that the education system is stacked against them. The analysis asks what compels that dedication

Writing about empire: remarks on the logic of a discourse

A new genre of scholarly writing has emerged in recent years in the field of what one can broadly call critical international theory. Its principal defining feature is an intense preoccupation with the phenomenon of the so-called ‘new world order’, which it tries to explain and describe through an analytical lens constructed primarily around two ideas: the idea of ‘empire’ and the idea of ‘imperial law’. In this article I attempt to provide a brief overview of this genre, which for the sake of simplicity I shall call henceforth the ‘new imperial law’ or NIL genre, and to reflect critically on its underlying ideological dynamics