ERIC ED384893: Resisting Cultural Literacy: Student Re pdf

ERIC ED384893: Resisting Cultural Literacy: Student Re

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Description of the Book:

A study interviewed 28 students enrolled in a great books course at Temple University. While interviews did not follow a strict formal pattern, they all covered 4 areas: (1) student interpretations of overall purpose of the course; (2) the influence the course had on the student; (3) which texts were “enjoyable,””difficult” or “engaging”; and (4) how the student saw him- or herself doing in the course. Each interview lasted about an hour. Three patterns of response emerged. First, while the students readily acknowledged the value of the course in terms consistent with the course rationale, they were much less ready to acknowledge its influence on them personally. Second, students simultaneously stressed the need for objectivity in writing about the course texts and the need for representing the self. For them objectivity concerns not simply being neutral but negotiating among personal knowledge, textual knowledge, and teacher expectations. It also concerns ways of speaking, the analytical, secular discourse of the class and the more “expressive” discourse of the self.

Third, students repeatedly used spatial metaphors that re-presented them as multiple, even contradictory “selves” in relation to specific texts, to the course, and to their own past and future lives. Elaboration on individual case studies illustrates in detail the conflicting social and cultural positions some student found themselves in when asked to read political, psychological, historical or religious texts. (Contains 10 references.) (TB

• Creator/s: ERIC
• Date: 1995-03
• Year: 1995
• Book Topics/Themes: ERIC Archive, Core Curriculum, Cultural Differences, Cultural Literacy, Higher Education, Student Attitudes, Student Surveys, Undergraduate Students, World Literature, Writing (Composition

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