Introduction

What is critical thinking, especially in the context of higher education? How have research and scholarship on the matter developed over recent past decades? What is the current state of the art here? How might the potential of critical thinking be enhanced? What kinds of teaching are necessary in order to realize that potential? And just why is this topic important now? These are the key questions motivating this volume. We hesitate to use terms such as “comprehensive” or “complete” or “definitive,” but we believe that, taken in the round, the chapters in this volume together offer a fair insight into the contemporary understandings of higher education worldwide. We also believe that this volume is much needed, and we shall try to justify that claim in this introduction

A will to write

I am something of an old-fashioned scholar (well, some might think that, I suppose) and have a library of my own, accumulated over the years. As it happens, as I write this, there is literally in front of me a group of books on writing. None of those books is one of the standard texts on academic writing. Rather, they are an eclectic group and include books such as Why I Write by George Orwell, The Writer’s Voice by Al Alvarez, The Pleasure of the Text by Roland Barthes, This is not the end of the book by Umberto Eco and Jean-Claude Carrière and Rethinking Writing by Roy Harris. That I have such a group of books on my shelves, and that they should occupy such a central position, perhaps says two things about me. First, that writing as such is important to me; and secondly, that I see academic writing as a kind of writing as such. That is, that what is important about academic writing is that it is a species of writing

The homeless student – and recovering a sense of belonging

There is much empirical evidence to suggest that many students today feel alone and experience anxiety. These phenomena – loneliness and anxiety - have long existed but there is reason to believe that they are heightened in the twenty-first century; and universities are putting in effort to alleviate levels of student stress. However, largely missing is a sense that a degree of destabilization is necessary for an educational process to be worthy of the name of ‘higher education’. It is part of higher education that a student should be, to some extent, epistemologically unsettled. And that unsettlement has to include students becoming reflective of their taken-for-granted frameworks and recognizing the contingency of those frameworks. The student comes ultimately and continually to unsettle her/himself. Higher education, accordingly, is a site of homelessness, in which students embark on a process of permanent – that is, lifelong – self-unsettlement. Fundamentally, therefore, a genuine higher education is not so much a matter of acquiring knowledge (an epistemological process) or skills (a practical process) but about taking on a nomadic form of being (an ontological process); a being always on the move. The student develops a will to unlearn and comes even to revel in it. It is a responsibility of the university to provide the institutional and the pedagogical wherewithal to elicit this kind of student homefulness even alongside a continuing homelessness

Direction of the Play: Antigone by Sophocles, Translation by Ian Johnston

This project entailed the selection, background research and documentation, scenic and lighting design, costume design and creation, casting, direction, and post-production analysis of St. Helens High School\u27s production of Sophocles\u27 Antigone. Documentation includes research and analysis of the play, and an evaluation of the play as a production vehicle for the drama department of St. Helens High School. The analysis also includes a discussion as to the non-traditional directorial vision of this production

Universidad: 245 definiciones

La Universidad ya no sabe lo que significa ser universida

Revitalizing Public Interest Lawyering in the 1990\u27s: The Story of One Effort to Address the Problem of Homelessness

Despite annual exhortations to graduating law students to accept the responsibilities as well as the benefits of entering the legal profession, the prognosis for public interest law in the 1990\u27s is uncertain. There have been significant decreases in federal and private funding of public interest organizations, sweeping changes in the composition of the federal judiciary, and a decline in the matriculation of public interest lawyers due to the increasing salary gap between the private and public sector. Together these factors raise serious questions about the future effectiveness of the traditional model of the full-time public interest litigator and call for the development of alternative models of public interest lawyering suited to the financial, judicial, and personnel constraints of current practice

Revitalizing Public Interest Lawyering in the 1990\u27s: The Story of One Effort to Address the Problem of Homelessness

Despite annual exhortations to graduating law students to accept the responsibilities as well as the benefits of entering the legal profession, the prognosis for public interest law in the 1990\u27s is uncertain. There have been significant decreases in federal and private funding of public interest organizations, sweeping changes in the composition of the federal judiciary, and a decline in the matriculation of public interest lawyers due to the increasing salary gap between the private and public sector. Together these factors raise serious questions about the future effectiveness of the traditional model of the full-time public interest litigator and call for the development of alternative models of public interest lawyering suited to the financial, judicial, and personnel constraints of current practice

O desenvolvimento da autocompreensão em posturas pedagógicas: explicitando o implícito entre os novos docentes

Em sua prática docente inicial, os professores universitários geralmente vivenciam dificuldades relacionadas a como promover a aprendizagem dos alunos (por exemplo, como planejar uma aula, usar os recursos pedagógicos e avaliar a aprendizagem). A maneira como os novos professores enfrentam e abordam essas dificuldades afeta a evolução de suas carreiras acadêmicas e o modo como eles usam diversos referenciais para refletir sobre suas práticas de ensino. Levando em conta que algumas dessas dificuldades ainda não são suficientemente compreendidas, este trabalho tem por objetivo analisá-las por meio de uma abordagem qualitativa. Para tanto, foram adotadas várias técnicas de coleta de dados e fontes (professores, estudantes e pesquisadora) ao longo de um ano letivo. Os resultados evidenciam as dificuldades explícitas reconhecidas pelos docentes em relação ao seu ensino. Além disso, os dados apontaram também para as dificuldades que permaneceram implícitas, sugerindo que elas podem ser particularmente resistentes à autocompreensão, pois estão relacionadas ao desejo interior dos docentes de ordem e previsibilidade em seu ensino. O artigo conclui sugerindo possíveis formas de melhorar tais pressupostos implícitos.In their early teaching practice, university lecturers usually experience difficulties related to how to promote learning among students (e.g., how to plan a lesson, how to use pedagogical resources, and how to assess learning). The way in which new lecturers confront and address these difficulties impacts the evolution of their academic careers and how they use diverse frameworks to reflect on their teaching practices. Taking into account that some of these difficulties are not sufficiently understood yet, this paper aims to analyze them using a qualitative approach. This study adopted several data collection techniques and sources (teachers, students, and researcher) during a single academic year. The results underscored explicit difficulties recognized by the lecturers in relation to their teaching. However, this study's data pointed also to difficulties that remained implicit, and the results suggested that these implicit difficulties may be particularly resistant to self-understanding because they are related to lecturers' inner desire for order and predictability in their teaching. The paper concludes by suggesting possible ways of ameliorating such implicit presuppositions