Fall 2008 (Preliminary)

 

LC on Collaborative Circles (6 meetings).  This circle will read and discuss Michael P. Farrell, Collaborative Circles: Friendship Dynamics & Creative Work (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001).  Integrative learning necessitates and creative work frequently involves collaboration.  In this book sociologist Michael B. Farrell “looks at the group dynamics in six collaborative circles . . . : the French Impressionists; Sigmund Freud and his friends; C.S. Lewis, J.R.R. Tolkien, and the Inklings; social reformers Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony; the Fugitive poets; and the writers Joseph Conrad and Ford Maddox Ford” (from the back cover of the book).  In light of the above, he develops a provisional theory of collaborative circles. 
 
To learn more about the book, including a look at the Table of Contents, please see: http://www.press.uchicago.edu/cgi-bin/hfs.cgi/00/14221.ctl.  To read a review in Social Forces (September 2004), please see: http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/social_forces/v083/83.1collins.pdf.
 

LC on Liberal Arts Colleges (6 meetings).  This circle will read and discuss Steven Koblik and Stephen Graubard, Distinctively American: The Residential Liberal Arts Colleges (New Brunswick, NJ: Transactions Publisher, 2000).  The Winter 1999 issue of Daedelus--the Journal of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences--was devoted to the residential liberal arts college.  This book, an augmented version of that issue, examines the American liberal arts college as an institution, from its role in the lives of students, to its value as a form of education (from the back cover of the book).  This circle supports A Conversation Regarding the Liberal Arts, a series that will unfold during the next academic year under the guidance of Gordon Wilson.
 
For more information, including a look at the Table of Contents, please see: http://www.collegenews.org/x492.xml.  If you go to this site, I would like to encourage you to explore it, as it is sponsored by The Annapolis Group, “a nonprofit alliance of the nation’s leading independent liberal arts colleges” (http://www.collegenews.org/aboutthissite.xml).
 

LC on The Living Classroom (6 meetings).  This circle will read and discuss Christopher Bache, The Living Classroom: Teaching and Collective Consciousness (Albany: SUNY Press, 2008).  Chris Bache is a Professor of Religious Studies at Youngstown State University and has maintained a meditative practice for decades.  He sees The Living Classroom as “an invitation to explore the deep interiority of teaching and the dynamics of collective consciousness.  It studies the subtle mind-to-mind and heart-to-heart connections that spring up between teachers and students in the classroom, unbidden but too frequent and too pointed to be accidental" (from the Prologue, quoted with permission). 
 
For more information about the book, including its Table of Contents, please see: http://www.sunypress.edu/details.asp?id=61719.  Dr. Bache will be coming to Asheville November 7-8 to present a public lecture on his work and present a workshop.


LC on Rise of Modern India (5 meetings).  This circle will read and discuss Edward Luce, In Spite of the Gods: The Rise of Modern India (New York: Anchor Books, 2008).  Luce, a former Financial Times South Asia bureau chief, has traveled “throughout India’s many regions, cultures, and religious circles, investigating its fragile balance between tradition and modernity” (from the back of the book).  In doing so he “explores economic development from the ground up while never losing sight of the big picture . . . [in so doing he] punctures the myths surrounding India's IT explosion” (Washington Post as reproduced at Amazon.com).
 
The Table of Contents is given at: http://catdir.loc.gov/catdir/toc/ecip0613/2006014227.html.  To read a New York Times review, please see: http://www.nytimes.com/2007/02/04/books/review/Macintyre.t.html?_r=1&oref=slogin.
 
LC on White Southerners in the Age of Civil Rights (7 meetings).  This circle will read and discuss Jason Sokol, There Goes My Everything: White Southerners in the Age of Civil Rights, 1945-1975 (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2006).  Sokol, a historian a Cornell University, “traces the process of desegregation by drawing on public records and interviews conducted with white Southerners as they faced the tide of change brought by Brown v. Board of Education and the Civil Rights Act of 1964 . . . . His eloquent presentation, with all of its complications, provides an invaluable and much-needed addition to our understanding of how the Civil Rights movement was actually lived” (Publishers Weekly as reproduced at Amazon.com).
 
To read a Washington Post review, please go to: http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/08/17/AR2006081700962_pf.html.
 

LC on Wikinomics (6 meetings).  This circle will read and discuss Don Tapscott and Anthony D. Williams, Wikinomics: How Mass Collaboration Changes Everything, Expanded ed. (New York: Portfolio, 2008).  Collaboration can take forms both small and large, with Wikipedia being perhaps the most well-known example of large scale collaboration.  Wikinomics surveys “the quickly changing world of Internet togetherness, also known as mass or global collaboration, and what those changes mean . . . This clear and meticulously researched primer gives business leaders big leg up on mass collaboration possibilities . . . (Publishers Weekly as reproduced at Amazon.com).  The lessons of mass collaboration may well extend to higher education.
 
The wiki for Wikinomics can be found at: http://www.socialtext.net/wikinomics/index.cgi.  It includes access to the completed draft of The Wikinomics Playbook.  The Table of Contents for Wikinomics can be found at: http://www.amazon.com/gp/reader/1591841933/ref=sib_dp_pop_toc?ie=UTF8&p=S00J#reader-link.