VISITING PROFESSOR
As culture wars continue to be waged on campuses across the country, one scholar believes that it is the conflicts themselves that should become a part of the curriculum.
"We get so caught up in the debates over which books and ideas students should study [traditional classics versus minority writing and pop culture] that we forget that, for the vast majority of American students in high schools and colleges, the problem has always been books and ideas as such, regardless of which faction gets to draw up the syllabus," says Gerald Graff, the University's 1999-2000 Harry Jack Gray Distinguished Visiting Professor in the Humanities.
In his book Beyond the Culture Wars: How Teaching the Conflicts Can Revitalize American Education, Graff argues that the best way to deal with such conflicts over the curriculum is to bring them into class and use them to bridge the gap between "intellectualism" and the culture of students -- in other words, to "teach the conflicts."
"How can we teach intellectual and cultural conflicts if students are outsiders to those conflicts and their vocabularies and not necessarily interested in them?" Graff asks.
Graff is the George M. Pullman Professor of English and Education at the University of Chicago, where he is also director and chief designer of a new interdisciplinary master's degree program in the humanities.
As the University of Hartford's Harry Jack Gray Distinguished Visiting Professor, he conducted a summer workshop on "Intellectualism and Its Discontents" at the Gray Conference Center that drew a diverse group of high school teachers from Bulkeley, Hartford Public, Weaver, South Windsor and Watkinson schools as well as UofH faculty representing a variety of disciplines. Graff will return for a public lecture on Nov. 5 at 1:30 p.m. in Wilde Auditorium. He will also reconvene the workshop to discuss how participants have used what they learned to enhance their teaching.
The Visiting Professor in the Humanities program is funded by the National Endowment for the Humanities and the Harry Jack Gray Grant for Teaching in the Humanities. The Nov. 5 lecture is being cosponsored by the Connecticut Consortium for Enhancing Learning and Teaching.
Sherry Buckberrough, associate professor of art history and chair of the department, is this year's Harry Jack Gray Distinguished Teaching Humanist; Candace Clements, associate professor of art history, is director of the NEH/Gray project.
