Cathy N. Davidson

Our current system of higher education dates to the period from 1865 to 1925, when the nation's new universities created grades and departments, majors and minors in an attempt to prepare young people for a world transformed by the telegraph and the Model T. As Cathy Davidson argues in The New Education, this approach to education is wholly unsuited to the era of the gig economy. From the Ivy League to community colleges, she introduces us to innovators who are remaking college for our own time, by emphasizing student-centered learning that values creativity in the face of change above all. The New Education ultimately shows how we can teach students not only to survive but to thrive amid the challenges to come.

How to Revolutionize the University to Prepare Students for a World In Flux

The New Education

David Theo Goldberg

In this report, Cathy Davidson and David Theo Goldberg focus on the potential for shared and interactive learning made possible by the Internet. They argue that the single most important characteristic of the Internet is its capacity for world-wide community and the limitless exchange of ideas. The Internet brings about a way of learning that is not new or revolutionary but is now the norm for today's graduating high school and college classes. It is for this reason that Davidson and Goldberg call on us to examine potential new models of digital learning and rethink our virtually enabled and enhanced learning institutions.This report is available in a free digital edition on the MIT Press website at http://mitpress.mit.edu/9780262513593.John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation Reports on Digital Media and Learning

The Future of Learning Institutions in a Digital Age

A digital innovator shows how we can thrive in the new technological age. When Cathy Davidson and Duke University gave free iPods to the freshman class in 2003, critics said they were wasting their money. Yet when students in practically every discipline invented academic uses for their music players, suddenly the idea could be seen in a new light-as an innovative way to turn learning on its head. This radical experiment is at the heart of Davidson's inspiring new book. Using cutting-edge research on the brain, she shows how "attention blindness" has produced one of our society's greatest challenges: while we've all acknowledged the great changes of the digital age, most of us still toil in schools and workplaces designed for the last century. Davidson introduces us to visionaries whose groundbreaking ideas-from schools with curriculums built around video games to companies that train workers using virtual environments-will open the doors to new ways of working and learning. A lively hybrid of Thomas Friedman and Norman Doidge, Now You See It is a refreshingly optimistic argument for a bold embrace of our connected, collaborative future.

How Technology and Brain Science Will Transform Schools and Business for the 21s t Century

Now You See It

By turns candid, witty, and poignant, 36 Views of Mount Fuji is an American professor's much-praised memoir about her experiences of Japan and the Japanese.

On Finding Myself in Japan

36 Views of Mount Fuji

Christina Katopodis

The New College Classroom

Now greatly expanded, this classic study has been updated to include the major controversies & developments in literary & cultural theory over the past two decades. It traces the co-emergence of the United States as a nation & the literary genre of the novel.

The Rise of the Novel in America

Revolution and the Word

A selection of more than one hundred love letters features passionate prose by writers ranging from Sappho to Anne Sexton, from Marcus Aurelius to Nelson Algren

Writers and Their Love Letters

The Book of Love

How traditional learning institutions can become as innovative, flexible, robust, and collaborative as the best social networking sites. Over the past two decades, the way we learn has changed dramatically. We have new sources of information and new ways to exchange and to interact with information. But our schools and the way we teach have remained largely the same for years, even centuries. What happens to traditional educational institutions when learning also takes place on a vast range of Internet sites, from Pokemon Web pages to Wikipedia? This report investigates how traditional learning institutions can become as innovative, flexible, robust, and collaborative as the best social networking sites. The authors propose an alternative definition of “institution” as a “mobilizing network”—emphasizing its flexibility, the permeability of its boundaries, its interactive productivity, and its potential as a catalyst for change—and explore the implications for higher education. The Future of Thinking reports on innovative, virtual institutions. It also uses the idea of a virtual institution both as part of its subject matter and as part of its process: the first draft of the book was hosted on a Web site for collaborative feedback and writing. The authors use this experiment in participatory writing as a test case for virtual institutions, learning institutions, and a new form of collaborative authorship. The finished version is still posted and open for comment. This book is the full-length report of the project, which was summarized in an earlier MacArthur volume, The Future of Learning Institutions in a Digital Age.

Learning Institutions in a Digital Age

The Future of Thinking

Linda Wagner-Martin

Expertly annotated short stories, poems, essays, plays, speeches, experimental writing, erotica, diaries, and correspondence by almost one hundred women of every age and ethnic background from the past four centuries offer a panorama of women's lives and concerns. UP.

The Oxford Book of Women's Writing in the United States

Jessamyn Hatcher

Inderpal Grewal

Caren Kaplan

DIVArgues against the use of male/female gender categories to characterize public and domestic life./div

A Next Wave American Studies Reader

No More Separate Spheres!

No More Separate Spheres! challenges the limitations of thinking about American literature and culture within the narrow rubric of “male public” and “female private” spheres from the founders to the present. With provocative essays by an array of cutting-edge critics with diverse viewpoints, this collection examines the ways that the separate spheres binary has malingered unexamined in feminist criticism, American literary studies, and debates on the public sphere. It exemplifies new ways of analyzing gender, breaks through old paradigms, and offers a primer on feminist thinking for the twenty-first century. Using American literary studies as a way to talk about changing categories of analysis, these essays discuss the work of such major authors as Catharine Sedgwick, Herman Melville, Pauline E. Hopkins, Frederick Douglass, Catharine Beecher, Ralph Waldo Emerson, W. E. B. Du Bois, Sarah Orne Jewett, Nathaniel Hawthorne, María Ampara Ruiz de Burton, Ann Petry, Gwendolyn Brooks, Cynthia Kadohata, Chang Rae-Lee, and Samuel Delany. No More Separate Spheres! shows scholars and students different ways that gender can be approached and incorporated into literary interpretations. Feisty and provocative, it provides a forceful analysis of the limititations of any theory of gender that applies only to women, and urges suspicion of any argument that posits “woman” as a universal or uniform category. By bringing together essays from the influential special issue of American Literature of the same name, a number of classic essays, and several new pieces commissioned for this volume, No More Separate Spheres! will be an ideal teaching tool, providing a key supplementary text in the American literature classroom. Contributors. José F. Aranda, Lauren Berlant, Cathy N. Davidson, Judith Fetterley, Jessamyn Hatcher, Amy Kaplan, Dana D. Nelson, Christopher Newfield, You-me Park, Marjorie Pryse, Elizabeth Renker, Ryan Schneider, Melissa Solomon, Siobhan Somerville, Gayle Wald , Maurice Wallace

Michael Moon

Focusing on intersecting issues of nation, race, and gender, this volume inaugurates new models for American literary and cultural history. Subjects and Citizens reveals the many ways in which a wide range of canonical and non-canonical writing contends with the most crucial social, political, and literary issues of our past and present. Defining the landscape of the New American literary history, these essays are united by three interrelated concerns: ideas of origin (where does "American literature" begin?), ideas of nation (what does "American literature" mean?), and ideas of race and gender (what does "American literature" include and exclude and how?). Work by writers as diverse as Aphra Behn, James Fenimore Cooper, Edgar Allan Poe, Frances Harper, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Herman Melville, William Faulkner, Harriet Jacobs, Frederick Douglass, Abraham Lincoln, Bharati Mukherjee, Booker T. Washington, Mark Twain, Kate Chopin, Américo Paredes, and Toni Morrison are discussed from several theoretical perspectives, using a variety of methodologies. Issues of the "frontier" and the "border" as well as those of coloniality and postcoloniality are explored. In each case, these essays emphasize the ideological nature of national identity and, more specifically, the centrality of race and gender to our concept of nationhood. Collected from recent issues of American Literature, with three new essays added, Subjects and Citizens charts the new directions being taken in American literary studies. Contributors. Daniel Cooper Alarcón, Lori Askeland, Stephanie Athey, Nancy Bentley, Lauren Berlant, Michele A. Birnbaum, Kristin Carter-Sanborn, Russ Castronovo, Joan Dayan, Julie Ellison, Sander L. Gilman, Karla F. C. Holloway, Annette Kolodny, Barbara Ladd, Lora Romero, Ramón Saldívar, Maggie Sale, Siobhan Senier, Timothy Sweet, Maurice Wallace, Elizabeth Young

Nation, Race, and Gender from Oroonoko to Anita Hill

Subjects and Citizens

William L. Bamberger

Bill Bamberger

The story of the White Furniture Company--a century-old family-owned business that was bought out by a huge corporation and later closed--puts a human face on the economic realities of the 1990s. 92 photos, 31 in color. National TV & radio features.

The Life and Death of an American Factory

Closing

Scott Donaldson

John W. Aldridge

Martin Linda Wagner

Michael Shane Reynolds

Wendy Martin

Arnold E. Davidson

The Sun Also Rises (1926) was Hemingway's first novel and is now widely considered to be the most important of his longer works of fiction. Written in an accessible style by prominent scholars, this collection of essays provides helpful and valuable insight for new readers and Hemingway specialists alike. Each essay is devoted to a major aspect of the novel: Hemingway's use of humor, the literary and historical context of the book, the atypically modern character of Brett Ashley, and recent approaches to issues of sexuality in the novel.

Cathy N. Davidson

Books

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