Scholarship Reconsidered: A Challenge to Use Teaching Portfolios to Document the Scholarship of Teaching

This article examines the use of teaching portfolios in documenting the scholarship of teaching in the U.S. Portfolios are generally three-ring binders that create teaching records including most often three types of materials: products of good teaching; material from oneself; materials from others. The major contribution most advocates of portfolios mention is the perceived improvement of teaching. Portfolios increase reflection and action about teaching by: giving focus on teaching as part of a professor\u27s expected activities; encouraging faculty to seek ways to improve their teaching by attending conference meetings on teaching, reading about teaching techniques, and creating discussions about teaching within the department and university; and stimulating formal and informal research on teaching

Defining the Field: Revisiting the ACA 1995 Definition of Communication Studies

This article deals with the problem of defining communication studies in higher education. In 1995, the Association for Communication Administration (ACA) convened a summer conference that produced a two-sentence definition of the field of communication. More than 100 conferees voted their unanimous approval of the definition, which was then disseminated nationally and used by communication scholar/teachers for a multiplicity of purposes. Given the potential utility of that definition and the expansion of communication studies since 1995, the present study surveyed ACA\u27s current members to determine whether they are aware the definition exists, how they have used it, and the extent to which they perceive it as representative of communication studies today. The results of that survey are reported in this article, which begins with a description of why and how this definition was originally developed. In a field as diverse and eclectic as communication, a need exists for some commonality of understanding about what constitutes the discipline\u27s subject matter. Such understanding, in the form of a definition, can serve two functions: it can provide a descriptor of the diversity, breadth, and depth of the field itself; and, it can be used to represent the discipline to an external audience, both inside and outside of academe, many of whom may still hold onto the notion that the field is committed only to the practice and study of speech making

Zacpeten Structure 719: Activities at a Contact Period \u3ci\u3ePopol Nah\u3c/i\u3e Before Rapid Abandonment

This paper addresses activities carried out in a late-sixteenth or seventeenth century Maya council house (popol nah) just before its abandonment. Structure 719 at the site of Zacpeten in the central Peten lakes district is considered a noble residence remodeled into a council house with an adjacent temple. Excavations revealed quantities of de facto refuse inside the structure\u27s two rooms and around the exterior; recent studies focused on ceramics, lithics, faunal remains, and net sinkers. The back room held abundant lithics and diverse fauna, with evidence of grinding red pigment and snapping obsidian prismatic blades into segments for fashioning arrow points. Pottery and faunal remains indicate feasting, as well as possible use of animal parts in ritual and in making ceremonial objects. The Group 719 complex served as a center of production of various goods and community ritual until its abrupt abandonment, likely in the first decade or so of the eighteenth century