Customer Reviews

Clueless in Academe: How Schooling Obscures the Life of the Mind

5 star:		(4)
4 star:		(2)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

This is the book on learning in the classroom that I've been waiting for. So often, even interested students don't get what their teacher wants. When this happens, they can lose confidence in their native abilities and teachers become frustrated in themselves and their students. With Gerald Graff's guidance, teachers can now demistify their expectations while validating their students' intelligence. While this book is directed to teachers, parents will appreciate it as well and may want to pass it on to their child's teachers. (Indeed, some goal-oriented parents may find the chapter on writing an admission essay worth the price of the book alone.)

Graff is an English professor, formerly of the University of Chicago and now at the University of Illinois, Chicago. He gained some fame in the early 1990s for arguing against his then-U. Chicago colleague Allan Bloom's understanding of Western culture. In this book, Graff looks into the great chasm between students and teachers and finds on one side Arguespeak, the language of teachers, and, on the other side, Studentspeak, the language of everyone else. Arguespeak consists of looking at particular aspects of a subject matter critically, in light of what one knows about the whole field. Studentspeak makes itself heard whenever people talk about everyday things: friends, food, movies, work, video games, t.v. shows, and so on. Problems arise when teachers want to hear Arguespeak from their students but only get Studentspeak. Graff's book offers concrete ways to help teachers teach their language to students.

The main obstacle to understanding Arguespeak is that every critical comment uttered by a teacher is made within a larger conversation about a topic or subject. Teachers make their judgements about, say, the historical significance of the Magna Carta, or Twain's sense of irony, based on their knowledge of what others in their field have to say about these issues. Students rarely know how to formulate such judgements because they are unaware of the conversation their teacher is participating in. They are clueless.

But, their teachers are just as clueless about helping them. Graff draws on the work of several education theorists and compositionists (writing instructors) to offer a commonsense way to align the expectations of students and teachers without sacrificing achievement. First, teachers must not feel compelled to teach everything--better to teach a fewer number of topics in depth rather than treat the whole range of a subject like a giant slalom course. Graff would rather see teachers spend more time teaching their students to think. Second, teachers must show students how to enter the critical conversation of their subject by having them practice with the conversations they participate in all the time. Everyone has an opinion about something; everyone has a topic they can think critically about. Graff recommends using what kids already know, especially with regard to popular culture, in class to develop their critical faculties. Graff offers concrete ways to integrate students' nonacademic interests with their academic responsibilities and get them on the road to expressing their opinions in academically useful ways. Following these measures in combination with the regular study of the humanities, math, and sciences bridges the gap between the students' way of thinking and their teachers' way of thinking. To make things very clear, Graff even offers a template for writing the standard five-paragraph critical essay. While some may find this objectionable, I agree with Graff that this kind of essay is a valuable pedagogical exercise. The student doesn't sacrifice any originality if he's given a structure within which to operate because he still has to come up with his own ideas about the topic itself. I look forward to using it in my own classes this year and expect that this template will free up the students to express their ideas in a more critical and engaging manner.

I can't overemphasize this book's practicality. At all points, Graff has his eye on what actually goes on in the classroom, on what the students are actually thinking about and working on. I am certain that teachers, especially at the high school and college levels, and parents will value his insights.

"Clueless in Academe" is a discussion on how to make the academic intellectual life more accessible and desirable for incoming college students. The underlying premise of the book is that "becoming educated has more to do with thinking and talking about subjects or texts in analytical ways than with the subjects or texts you study." While this premise breaks down rapidly as students progress in their major course of study, it is a useful assumption for teaching beginning college students.

Graff's focus is on how English departments should go about their business, and in doing so recommends making connections with popular culture -- since he assumes the subject of study is secondary to learning how to argue. Graff goes on to criticize how different disciplines send different messages about what kind of composition is expected, mentioning not just the humanities and social sciences, but also the sciences and mathematics. While using popular culture as a means of imparting analytical thinking skills is clearly inappropriate for these subjects, Graff does discuss an alternative means that I found interesting: a particular way of intertwining of natural language explanations along with the technical discourse. His use of templates for writing essays also has analogs in the analysis that goes on in other disciplines.

Other topics touched upon in the book include the value of analytical thinking and a discussion of progressive versus traditional models of education.

Overall, "Clueless in Academe" is useful reading for any teacher trying to get their students to think.

Gerald Graff says the great crime of modern academe is not that we deal with tough subjects in dense prose. Our crime is that we withhold the keys to our subjects and prose from students who so desperately want in on what we offer. Reading this book offers new insights into teaching, and reminds me what my students most need to succeed.

Graff describes what students need to know to flourish in current academia, and contrasts that with the content of typical high school and university classes. We who teach have a specialized academic vocabulary, which we expect students to gain through osmosis. Teachers are so immersed in our subjects that we forget which ideas we take for granted are obscure to our students, so we come across as opaque blowhards.

The problem, Graff says, is that the most significant education themes are those of debate and argument. Yet because we teachers don't state this in student language, students see our questions and criticisms as condemnations. We need to teach them how to argue in respectful, productive terms on issues that are not self-evidently true, if we want students to succeed.

This book is not meant exclusively for teachers. Students will find useful chapters on how to create admission essays, negotiate writing intensive classes, and craft class papers without tears. Graff's explication of rhetoric and controversy covers every major theme you should have gotten in ninth grade English, and does so in clear language.

Though Graff comes from a composition background, he stresses how his ideas apply to all disciplines and can be addressed across fields. He uses multiple sources, and diverse educational traditions, to create a synthesis that proposes new options in teaching and studying. This book offers ideas for teachers, students, administrators, and anyone who cares whether students have the skills they need in school and in life.

Summary statement
This book offers a critique of academic culture--in particular, a critique of the role of argumentation within academic culture. Graff believes that a battle has been raging for the soul of academia between a view that sees academic culture as inherently esoteric and specialized and a view that aspires to "outreach" and greater influence within wider society. He sees university students losing in this battle as opportunities to be introduced into the conversations through which they might learn the life of the mind are increasingly few and far between.

Graff's solution to the crisis he pinpoints is in part the work of university administrators (he has some quarrels with the structure of academic departments and with the ways academics communicate with one another). However, he does offer some practical advice for teachers of composition. His primary argument is that students need to be invited into academic discourse, and that it is incumbent on those that teach composition to invite them in--using language they can understand and offering help with the strange structures that academic arguments can take. Graff's practical advice goes beyond the strategic level--he does offer some tactical ideas (e.g., creating argument templates to help students learn the rhythm of argumentation).

Here's a quote from the book that should give you a sense of Graff's style and convictions: "`Criticism' is just a fancy word for what any of us do when we respond to any text. Therefore, students are already producing a form of criticism as soon as they begin to talk about a text in class or write a paper about it. Now, it just makes no sense to ask students to produce a kind of discourse that they rarely see an example of. It makes no sense to withhold from students the discourse that we expect them to produce--and punish them for not producing well" (p. 175).

In his early books, Literature Against Itself: Literary Ideas in Modern Society (1979) and Professing Literature: An Institutional History, Twentieth Anniversary Edition (1987), Graff took as his main subjects literary theory and the institutional history of departments of English and literature, respectively. LITERATURE AGAINST ITSELF continues to be of interest and value for its discussion and analysis of competing schools of literary theory; and the historical narrative of the history of the post-secondary teaching of English that informs PROFESSING LITERATURE continues to enlighten anyone interested in curriculum design and canon-making. But perhaps these two early books can also be appreciated for their having afforded Graff the opportunity to work out the foundational arguments and historical perspectives that enabled him in his later books -- Beyond the Culture Wars: How Teaching the Conflicts Can Revitalize American Education (1992) and Clueless in Academe: How Schooling Obscures the Life of the Mind (2003) -- to effectively argue and explain why students across the curriculum would benefit from a more critical style of pedagogy.

In LITERATURE AGAINST ITSELF Graff analyzes the premises, conclusions, and implications of various literary theories and contemporary schools of criticism in terms of their validity and effectiveness for pedagogy and criticism. And in PROFESSING LITERATURE Graff shows how the various teaching methods and choices of texts in departments of literature from the nineteenth though the early twentieth century suggest that new methods and new canons of study-worthy texts will continue to appear. In the more recent Beyond the Culture Wars: How Teaching the Conflicts Can Revitalize American Education (1992), Graff foregrounds the conclusions and pedagogical injunctions proffered in his earlier books. In the decade following the publication of Beyond the Culture Wars, Graff himself decided to put the pedagogical injunctions based on his conclusions into practice, coediting, with James Phelan, two "critical controversy" textbooks: The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (Case Studies in Critical Controversy) and The Tempest: A Case Study in Critical Controversy (Case Studies in Critical Controversy). Both of these textbooks are in their second editions. In his most recent book, Clueless in Academe: How Schooling Obscures the Life of the Mind (2003), Graff continues to explore the pedagogical implications of what he discovered in researching and writing his earlier books on theory and the institutional history of literature departments.

Teaching the controversies or conflicts has ironically even been taken up by a group which eschews rational argument -- a sine qua non of Graff's critical pedagogy: religious fundamentalists. I would agree to a certain extent with anyone who thinks it unfortunate that some religious fundamentalists -- in their efforts to get creationist mythology (intelligent design) taught in public school science courses -- have co-opted Graff's phrase "teaching the controversies." But consider what violence religious fundamentalists of all faiths have resorted to when discussion stops. So, however ironic or unintended, part of Graff's legacy is to have afforded educators the pedagogic means to obviate the conditions in which thoughts of intellectual, political, or outright physical violence might flourish. So, by all means, let the fundamentalists, in good faith (interesting word!) teach the controversies -- but in their religious schools not in public classrooms. Let the conflicts continue to be taught and discussed by everyone -- rational free-thinkers and fundamentalists alike.

Let the controversies and the conversations they engender continue.

Thank you for the timely sending of the product. I am satisfied with the description of what I received. I believe they matched up with one another. I would definitely do business with this person again!

Despite all my admiration for the Graff book which I won't detail here, I will entitle my review of this book "Penniless
in Academe" because Graff nowhere talks about the material side of what Randy Martin calls the "managed university". Graff wants to build a better mouse trap to persuade more people to take "life of the mind stuff" more seriously, but nowhere does he say how and at what levels his project should be funded; and I'm coming to realize that it doesn't matter what mouse trap you have on paper or even experiment with on a small scale in your own classrooms--it won't go national (or even get beyond one's own school) unless it's perceived as something of worth; and here actions speak louder than words: it will only be perceived as something of worth if students and teachers know that it's being funded at a level that allows teachers to fully invest themselves in their jobs--because the institution is fully investing in them to do a good job by paying them a liveable wage that makes it unnecessary for them to moonlight and cut corners to free up time for that other "night" job, in my case translation work. It is a significant omission as I see it that Graff has no chapter such as "Penniless in Academe" or "Money Matters" that would address these basic issues, nor any index entry for "professor salaries," "wages," "money," and certainly none for that recent coinage "casualization". This ultimately leaves Graff up there in the high altitude superstructure: a superstar talking to other superstars despite the number of times he stoops to include student voices, "compositionist" voices, and other vernacular-speaking subalterns within the grand design of his "arguespeak". This exposes Graff to the "performative contradiction" (p. 89 in reference to D. Tannen) that is his own favorite "gotcha" technique for outing his opponents (and demonstrating that they are already halfway towards agreeing with him): Graff is himself an example of what he is talking about: "clueless in academe". But at least Graff, like the author of the recently reprinted manifesto on "bs", has gone further than most at diagnosing the problem. Now I am just saying, "Professoriat, heal thyself." I am glad to see that a broad array of plaintiffs are stepping up to sue the Department of Education over the federal mandates in the "No Child Left Behind" legislation that come with no accompanying funding: a sign that not everyone is "clueless" when it comes to the fundamental correlation between matter and spirit, between more money and at least "better" student writing.

My child has this assigned for summer reading, and I can only say I'm glad I don't have to get through it. As a former college English prof. I recognize stuffy, condescending academic writing when I see it: "These attitudes may explain why the opaque nature of academic intellectual culture, though a common target of jokes, is not a more prominent topic in debates over what ails American education." "A common target of jokes"?? Give me a break! Graff is trying to be relevant, but with all the success of a middle-aged parent trying to use the latest Internet speech.

Graff wants to bridge the gap between "intellectualspeak" and "studentspeak." Clumsy language aside, this is an idea no one can really object to, but it misses the point. To speak about a subject, you have to know the language, and knowing the language involves knowing the subject. This is as true of English as it is of computer science. If I start to tell someone about that gizmo on the line that keeps out hackers, I need to learn "firewall." And I won't really be able to use the word "firewall" until I actually know something about what it does. I used to know a scholar whose parents were Hungarian and who spoke it at home. At a scholarly gathering in Budapest, he told me, his colleagues thought he was an idiot. They didn't understand why he could speak fluent, unaccented Hungarian and yet stumbled when he had to discuss their field. There's no shortcut to bridging the gap. To carry on an intelligent discourse, you have to know the subject and the language. This is why freshman comp is so deadly. You can't write well when the only subject is writing.

I don't suppose Graff is really terribly wrongheaded, but he is seriously dull.