My name is Jim Brown. I received my Ph.D. in English with a specialization in Digital Literacies and Literatures from the University of Texas. In September 2009, I will join the English Department at Wayne State University as an Assistant Professor. I write for multiple blogs, and you can see all of my blog writings via this RSS feed. Clinamen focuses mostly on my research interests, and its title is explained in this post from January 2008. SearchRecent comments
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First-Year [Forum] TextsThanks to Lee for forwarding me this interesting story about Temple's new freshman texts shows that UT isn't the only one interested in creating a freshperson/first-year discourse community. The text sounds really interesting ("West of Kabul, East of New York," Tamim Ansary's memoir of life in Afghanistan and the United States), but I'm more interested in what might be a "trend" toward uniting a community of first-year students under a "text." It's also interesting that those texts are tending to be contemporary - and (possibly) perceived to be more relevant to students' lives. I'll be expanding on my paper on the UT first-year forum text in a class called "Writing the History of English" studies, and stories like this show me that there may in fact be a trend at work. More to come on this...
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similar program at unc
unc's summer reading program (http://newstudents.unc.edu/content/view/32/61/) does something similar, and i'm sure that a quick search of the chronicle of higher ed would turn up other stories re: these kinds of programs being adopted at other small/large colleges and universities. it might be interesting to look at the arguments being made at the reading selection committee level once these programs have been enacted and also the arguments being made at the institutional level in favor/against the implementation of such programs. good luck!
Austin Reads
Also interesting as trend for cities--Austin, for ex., is in fourth year of city-wide project that asks, "What if all of Austin reads the same book?" This year, the book is a group of Austin-resident authored stories called Writing Austin's Lives. In the past, it's been Cormac McCarthy's All the Pretty Horses , Louis Sachar's Holes and Rudolfo Anaya's Bless Me, Ultima. Chicago also had much-publicized program... It would be cool to consider some community leaders' answers to that--what if everybody reads the same book--question. How are their answers--and starting goals--different from academic communities?