Bringing Our Brains to the Humanities

Abstract

When I was asked to contribute this essay, the economic crisis was just beginning to cast its shadow over U.S. higher education. Since then, my thinking about the current status of pedagogy in our discipline has not altered substantially, but I believe there is now an even greater need for faculty to address changing realities in our profession and in the situations of our students. Even in the best of times, teaching is often less valued than research. As a partial result, despite increased numbers of pedagogical workshops and other improvements in our teaching landscape, we still largely resist fundamental changes in how we approach pedagogical training and delivery. Through the burgeoning fields of cognitive science and educational psychology, there is a wealth of new information available about how people learn and how best to encourage the kind of education we ostensibly support. Nevertheless, relatively few graduate programs in the humanities have made congruent shifts in the training of future faculty and only limited numbers of teachers have adjusted their instructional methodologies in order to take advantage of this new research. As scholars, we purport to value research and innovation, but English professors as a group inadequately demonstrate that commitment in our classroom practices or in our efforts to prepare our successors. 1 As a consequence, we are losing an invaluable opportunity to answer the always present but now growing number of critics who question the relevance of a liberal arts education -particularly during a period of diminished Pedagogy

Educação de língua inglesa e novos letramentos: espaços de mudanças por meio dos ensinos técnicos e tecnológicos

“…Diminuindo o escopo e trazendo esses argumentos para a educação, MacPherson (2006) argumenta que, apesar das mudanças aceleradas pelas quais estamos passando, as "instituições e discursos escolares do ensino formal mostram pouco ou nenhum questionamento dos hábitos coloniais e das práticas do passado" (MACPHERSON, 2006, p. 74). No que diz respeito ao ensino de inglês, mais especificamente, concordo com Cavanagh (2009) quando este afirma que os departamentos de inglês seguem as mesmas premissas das humanidades tradicionais e da educação convencional. Sugere o autor que devemos redesenhar as maneiras pelas quais apresentamos e justificamos nossos trabalhos publicamente e atender melhor os objetivos práticos e intelectuais de nossos alunos, suas famílias e a sociedade em geral (CANAVAGH, 2009, p. 140).…”