Archive for the ‘In the classroom’ Category

Foreign professors wanted

Monday, November 13th, 2006

After reading my story on Virginia Tech's new policy about sponsoring foreign faculty and staff for Green Cards, I received an email from Steven Toth of Roanoke which read, in part:

"It was an eye-opener to read that VT found it necessary to establish a policy for a "growing number of foreign scholars" at VT. Why does VT find it necessary to hire foreign scholars to teach science and engineering at VT? Is there some sort of a prestige status or label attached to that practice? Aren't there enough U.S. scholars interested and capable of teaching at VT?"

This article in today's Inside Higher Ed suggests that people in higher education think that looking beyond national borders, at least for students, is a good idea. And after a post 9-11 decline in foreign students in American schools, the numbers are finally on the way up again.

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School’s out for summer, but you might still have to read a book

Friday, August 4th, 2006
persepolis.jpg

Cover of the book Roanoke College freshmen are reading this summer

I recently wrote about reading programs for incoming college freshmen and came across some great resources while I was reporting.

One of the best was the National Resource Center for the First-Year Experience and Students in Transition at the University of South Carolina. On the site you can find an extensive list of books used by colleges for incoming students and a list of colleges that have the programs. One note of caution: The latter is incomplete, as it depends on other colleges writing in and telling USC about their programs, but it's a good start.

I also had a chance to sit in on a discussion by faculty and staff members at Roanoke College about the book the college is using this year. The school's reading committee chose a different sort of offering this year: "Persepolis" by Marjane Satrapi.

As I noted in my story, the book is a graphic novel about a girl growing up in Iran during the revolution in the 1970s. A large part of the discussion was about the format of the book itself. Some of the people in the room had never read a graphic novel before, but others mentioned the powerful impact of the wonderful and beautiful Maus by Art Spielgelman.

In the discussion, an English professor said he might be interested in forming a course entirely about graphic novels or other media that try to tell stories through comics (such as the film "American Splendor"). It sounded like a great idea to me -- and one that would likely get a lot of interest from students. I wonder if faculty members at other institutions have done something like that before.

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