This essay is an attempt to add to the argument that beauty matters in education through offering a reciprocal but interconnected point: if the dynamic harmony and deep connectedness of beauty need to be taken seriously, so must their aesthetic converse–the disharmony and estrangement of failure. While the discourse of philosophical aesthetics has long included categories such as the beautiful, the good, and the virtuous, the seeds for achievement of these ideals are planted in the soil of disharmony, uncertainty, and failure. Using a Deweyan account of art as experience, this essay argues that disharmony and failure are as much aesthetic categories as harmony and beauty and must be taken as seriously in teaching and learning. It further argues that failure, rather than beauty, is often more suited to providing the foundation for unlocking the unique potential of students and helping them cultivate their capacity for creative thought and action.
In the last fifteen years, critical theories of mentorship have become a small, but growing, thread in the mentoring literature. Despite this recent advancement, critical mentoring frameworks have yet to meaningfully impact the discourse of undergraduate peer mentoring. This essay is an attempt to address a twin concern that undergraduate peer mentoring programs need a more adequate theoretical basis for practice and that, in particular, the limited discourse on mentoring theory must be expanded to include a variety of critical theories. This paper identifies the core conceptual differences between traditional and critical theories of undergraduate peer mentorship and advances a grounded, critical framework for undergraduate peer mentoring.
Most first-year seminars exist to ensure that incoming students achieve what is commonly described as “academic success.” While definitions of this term vary widely, it most often means socializing students into an academic culture so that they will remain at the institution, achieve a strong GPA, and graduate on time. Most first-year seminars focus on skills that either help students prepare for performing academic tasks or help students engage in academic tasks. This article introduces an alternative framework that moves beyond academic task training and advances the idea that a first-year seminar should provide a foundation for the cultivation of critical intellectual agency. This article calls this framework critical inquiry. It defines critical inquiry as the interrogation of the disciplinary cultures and practices where knowledge is produced and the pedagogical and curricular architectures where it is reproduced. As a conceptual core for first-year seminars, critical inquiry unpacks the learning environment for students, making its hidden expectations, cultures, and structures of power and privilege visible to students. In doing so, it prepares them to critically engage with and harness the educational environment in the development of their own identities as intellectual agents.
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