Kate McDowell on Storytelling

Teaching What You Don't Know by Therese Huston Among the things I haven't had time to do lately, I haven't had time to go to the annual U of I Faculty Retreat, the big one that brings people across campus together.  But I have been paging through this book by one of the keynote speakers. Huston argues that there are real structural aspects of how teaching is organized that lead to people teaching subjects they "don't know."  But the bar for "know" is ridiculously high for most academics, which is again an artifact of the extreme narrowness of dissertations and Ph.D. specialization in general.  In fact, most people teach things they are qualified to teach about (specialists in genetics can and should teach, for instance, biology), and her examples make this clear though the language around them is sometimes more dire, most likely reflecting the anxieties of her interviewees. And the world changes.  We can't graduate knowing it all.  When I too...

In honor of Terry Pratchett's Blue Ribbons Win for the last of the Tiffany Aching books (which I look forward to reading straight through): "Some humans would do anything to see if it was possible to do it.  If you put a large switch in some cave somewhere, with a sign on it saying "End-of-the-World Switch.  PLEASE DO NOT TOUCH," the paint wouldn't even have time to dry." --Terry Pratchett quoted in the March 2011 Funny Times

Two storytelling titles for various purposes.... Storytelling for Grantseekers by Cheryl A. Clarke More than anything, this is an accurate and accessible book-length metaphor for what a grant can be:  a gripping story of a need and a solution with a promise of another chapter to come.  The chapter titles alone give a sense of how this metaphor works.  A few examples are:  "The Proposal Narrative:  Introducing the Characters and the Place," "The Need or Problem:  Building Tension and Conflict into Your Story," and "The Budget:  Translating Your Story from Words to Numbers."  This last chapter, chapter 8, is now in my email in .pdf form (thanks Alaine!) for future use in 506.  The whole book might work, but I notice that the most frequent student mistake is to botch or, in rare cases, leave off the budget for their "facilitating change" projects.  A whole reading on the how-to of the topic can't hurt. On the Origin of Stories:  ...

 Lots of reading, but very little blogging, so this is a catch-up posting.  I suppose the guest lecture and keynote speech and the two classes I'm teaching and the writing do tend to get in the way.  Today I gave a keynote speech for a little regional conference of teachers interested in history.  It was my first time giving an hour plus talk with questions, and interestingly I found it really is about the amount that fits into any one of my 40-page-double-spaced history papers.  I did talk for about an hour about "Creating a History of Children as Readers," but then left time for 30 min or so of questions, and I think it went well, though the evaluations that they'll send me will be useful.  It was a pleasure to talk to such a great audience of intelligent history teachers with good questions.  In the meantime, I have been reading: Rose Daughter by Robin McKinley This retelling of Beauty and the Beast came to my attention years ago, when Bets...

First, a little context:  I've been asked to guest lecture in a class on sex in the media, and at the same time I've been asked to write an article on how LIS should envision young adults.  So I've chosen to focus on controversies and censorship of factual sexual health books for young adults, hopefully to bring the two together.  I may even be able to write about talking to this class of freshman in the article.  Some background on the central book I'll be looking at is here . Though nonfiction is the focus, I also opted to delve into a little YA fiction on the topic, thanks to the help of the always wonderful CCB GAs, A. and L.  Thanks you two!  This is the first of that pile that I'm reading.  Since the presentation and article are going to focus on books that support comprehensive sex education for young people, this may also be the last of the pile.  We'll see.  The Making of Dr. Truelove by Derrick Barnes I've read a lot of YA fi...

What a great title for an article in this year's Book History about the extreme differences between British and U.S. versions of Charlotte Yonge's works in the late 19th century.  The whole title is: "Re-Authorship:  Authoring, Editing, and Coauthoring the Transatlantic Publications of Charlotte M. Yonge's Aunt Charlotte's Stories of Bible History " by Leslee Thorne-Murphy, Book History 13 (2010) The whole argument that Thorne-Murphy (T-M) makes is fascinating, showing that Yonge was produced as an author, to some degree constructed and re-written as a character in her own books. Two particular aspects of this very well-written article fascinate me. First, T-M examines the British/U.S. publishing divide at a cultural level by examining the differences in how the author is figured in these very variant editions of the same work.  That's interesting in and of itself, but it's especially useful to me as one of the comments on my book chapter on ev...

I can blog about Jake because it's no longer up for award consideration for the Gryphon Award , though a fair smattering of my reading at the moment is geared toward the needs and ideas of that committee.  Like reading for reviewing, reading for awards committees is an art in and of itself.  I have to balance my critic with my reader.  This means leaving room for the contradictions of both keeping an eagle eye out for flaws at narrative, cultural representation, or other levels while also trying to just drop into the absorption of a good narrative.  It's like reading for class used to be, back before I finished all the degrees I'm doing.     Jake by Audrey Couloumbis Jake is ten and it's almost Christmas when his mother slips on the ice in the grocery store parking lot.  After that, a lot of things change quickly.  His mom is unconscious and has a twisted leg fracture, so Jake has to stay with their neighbor.  Even stranger, his grandf...