Historically, higher learning was based on the study of the Great Works of thought of the Western canon. These works span a broad range of time, from the Classical period, to early Christianity, and the Enlightenment, all the way to the 20th century. Presently, close study of Great Works is less common at most mainstream colleges and universities.…

This essay analyzes student experiences of studying all-female and non-binary cast Shakespeare productions in the Seattle area, including upstart crow collective's "Richard III" and The Fern Shakespeare Company's "Much Ado About Nothing." I draw on my teaching of the experimental work of these regional companies in an…

The benefits of performance-based classroom approaches to teaching Shakespeare have been well-documented in pedagogical scholarship. This paper is an effort to push beyond the performance-based classroom and begin to incorporate ideas from the field of performance studies into a new pedagogical approach that capitalizes on my institution's…

In this article, Roy Rosenstein shares the events that occurred during his first day of teaching the Dante and Medieval Culture course in the fall semester of 2001 at the American University of Paris (AUP). On, September 11, 2001, immediately following Rosenstein's opening statement of "Welcome to hell," the class was alerted to the…

Read and admired throughout the world, Shakespeare's plays and poetry have been the guiding light of statesmen, of authors, and of artists. His writings are the indispensable foundation for understanding English literature, language, and rhetoric. Yet less than 8% of the nation's top universities require English majors to take even a single course…

This article discusses how mapping techniques were used in university teaching in a humanities subject. The use of concept mapping was expanded as a pedagogical tool, with a focus on reflective learning processes. Data were collected through a longitudinal study of concept mapping in a university-level Classics course. This was used to explore how…

Jefferson's republicanism--a people-first, mostly bottom-up political vision with a moral underpinning--was critically dependent on general education for the citizenry and higher education for those who would govern. This paper contains an analysis of Jefferson's general philosophy of education by enumerating some of its most fundamental…

The author, an English professor, shares his experience in retaking the Graduate Record Examination in English literature, 25 years after he entered graduate school at the University of Virginia. He took the practice test instead of the "real" test, for a number of reasons. He wanted to be able to look over the questions afterward; to…

In a country in which, even after the economic crash, there are plenty of resources to go around, people need to think hard about why inequality persists so much more strongly in Britain than anywhere else in Europe. The cause, the author wants to suggest, is a set of deep-rooted, hidden and unacknowledged beliefs, each unjustified yet passed off…

As technology is being integrated into educational processes, teachers are searching for new ways to enhance student motivation and learning. Through shared experiences and the results of empirical research, educators can ease social networking sites into instructional usage. "The Social Classroom: Integrating Social Network Use in…

This volume includes four sections of the 2020 NORDSCI international conference proceedings: (1) Education and Educational Research; (2) Language and Linguistics; (3) Philosophy; and (4) Sociology and Healthcare. Education and Educational Research includes 15 papers covering the full spectrum of education, including history, sociology and economy…

The debate over the best delivery of general education, whether through a canon of Great Books, a core curriculum of specific courses and course sequences, or a distribution requirement of course types providing for greater student choice, has existed for generations. Today, the debate plays out in practice across the top-rated colleges and…

Laura Bates, an associate professor of English at Indiana State University, teaches college courses at Wabash Valley Correctional Facility, but her Shakespeare workshop is a rarer undertaking, with a startling history. About six years ago, an inmate in one of her college-degree courses was sent from the general population to the "SHU"--the…

The decreasing interest in the study of foreign languages forces us to reconsider and re-evaluate new teaching methods and approaches. Nevertheless, the use of music, in particular modern or pop music, for interdisciplinary studies and students' language skills appears to be still neglected. I claim that the lyrics and music of the popular group…

For more than fifty years, an enduring criticism of American higher education has been that it offers students a smorgasbord of courses and choices without coherence, interconnection, or relevance to the deeper purposes of life. How this fragmentation came about is the topic of this essay. American higher education went through a major…