Category: Teaching

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How You Know You’re Learning

The Problem

I’m reading Thomas Hoby’s translation of The Book of the Courtier, the first English translation of Baltasare Castiglione’s Italian Renaissance manual. In his prefatory letter to Lord Henry Hastings, Hoby explains why he’s decided to print his translation.

And he said wel that was asked the question, How much the learned differed from the unlearned. ‘So much’ (quoth he) ‘as the wel broken and ready horses, from the unbroken.’ wherfore I wote not how our learned men in this case can avoide the saying of Isocrates, to one that amonge soundrye learned discourses at Table spake never a woorde: ‘Yf thou bee unlearned, thou dooest wiselye: but yf thou bee learned, unwyselye,’ as who should saye, learnyng is yll bestowed where others bee not profited by it.

In this passage, Hoby articulate the distinction between those who are learned and unlearned. What exactly is it? Continue reading “How You Know You’re Learning”

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How Do You Teach Leadership in a Literature Class?

The Problem

I keep coming back to this challenge in Seth Godin’s book Linchpin.

What They Should Teach in School

Only two things:

1. Solve interesting problems

2. Lead

My university’s motto is “Integrating Faith in Learning, Leading, and Serving.” If it’s my responsibility to lead in a Christ-centered way, it’s certainly well within my purview to teach my students to lead in some significant way. Continue reading “How Do You Teach Leadership in a Literature Class?”

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What Are the Digital Humanities?

In his article “What Is Digital Humanities and What’s It Doing in English Departments?” from the Debates in the Digital Humanities volume, Matthew Kirschenbaum turns self-reflexive. He notes that the definitional essay is already a DH sub-genre. You can easily track down the genealogy for the term “Digital Humanities,” and a google search will lead to a satisfactory Wikipedia definition. First and foremost, Digital Humanities is a branch of the humanities with a common methodology, namely the intersection of computing and humanities.

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Continue reading “What Are the Digital Humanities?”

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What is a Digital Humanist?

Over the next couple of weeks, I’m going to be reading through the list of resources found here on the Digital Humanities. For each source, I hope to write a summary and the start building some work around the lessons I’m learning.

The first entry today summarizes Matthew Gold’s introductory essay, “The Digital Humanities Moment” from the book Debates in the Digital Humanities.

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Continue reading “What is a Digital Humanist?”

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Why Scholarship Is An Part of Discipleship

A peer told me his new litmus test for deciding whether or not to pursue a longer work of scholarship: would it be spiritually edifying? Would it help him become a better disciple?

Not simply in content, mind you.

As a process.

Would the process of reading and thinking/writing about his topic help him grow as a disciple of Christ?

In this regard, this quotation from Stephen Greenblatt’s Renaissance Self-Fashioning has always stuck with me.

“[I]t is everywhere evident in this book that the questions I ask of my material and indeed the very nature of this material are shaped by the questions I ask of myself.”

I should not only practice this but teach it. In fact, Greenblatt advocates this kind of full-bodied application of your worldview. Don’t ask of the text something you would not ask of yourself.

I will be incorporating this Greenblatt quotation into my future research paper prompts.

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How Do You Talk About God and Love?

The Problem

This week in my Writing About Literature course, we discussed the following passage from Roger Lundin and Susan Gallagher’s Literature Through the Eyes of Faith.

In place of the long-standing Aristotelian view of metaphor as substitution, as a process in which poetic words ‘stand in’ for literal ones, we could perhaps say that the metaphorical process is one of interaction. When we use a metaphor, we say that one thing is another. We take a word from its conventional context and apply it to a new situation.

Lundin and Gallagher are at pains to make us see that literal or proper words are born rather than made. Metaphors are language’s clothing. They are language’s body, and the clothing of “proper” words only comes later.

How does this apply to God and Love, the two subjects of the 10+ poems my students read this week?

Continue reading “How Do You Talk About God and Love?”