At the start of the 2023-2024 academic year, 15 college presidents from a diverse array of institutions came together to launch College Presidents for Civic Preparedness. They committed to advancing critical inquiry, free expression, and civil discourse on campuses across the country. By the end of the spring semester, their numbers had grown to…

This chapter recounts the story of how I came to design a Research Apprenticeship Course at UCLA--what we call the RAC. I lay out the origin story of the RAC dating back to early collaborations with Arturo Madrid of the Tomas Rivera Policy Research Center and the Ford Foundation Family of Fellows in the mid to late 1980s. These collaborations…

Universities are indispensable for a free and prosperous society. Their mission depends on a campus culture of free expression and intellectual diversity. The American Council of Trustees and Alumni (ACTA) seeks to hold American colleges and universities accountable to their missions. ACTA now provides a blueprint to help higher education regain…

College bound students are faced with not only navigating a new environment but also faced with finding their "place" in a new community. Educators have a role to support students' academic growth, self-efficacy (Schunk & DiBenedetto, 2020; Bandura, 1977), and sense of belonging (Brady et al., 2020; Hurtado & Carter, 1997) on…

The authors of this essay discuss the impact of corpus collection and analysis on the writing program at The City College of New York, CUNY, the digital literacies encouraged by the corpus collection process, and how corpus studies can be used to support genre awareness and build communities of practice in basic writing classrooms and among…

Research suggests that America today is more politically polarized and less capable of conducting civil public discourse than at least the last several decades. These greater cultural factors unsurprisingly seem to have trickled into American schools, as teachers report increased divisiveness and conflict, particularly directed toward…

By sharing an honest, thoughtful dialogue about how their different identities affect their experience of feminism and feminist spaces, Z Nicolazzo and Crystal Harris model duoethnographic dialogue--a type of dialogue across difference that has the potential to be a catalyst for transformative student learning.

Course: This assignment is a unit activity designed for use in a skills-focused undergraduate public relations, organizational communication, or crisis communication course. Objective: The goal of this activity is to increase students' understanding of and ability to apply discourse of renewal in a crisis scenario. Students will work…

We consider the emergence of "notables" within the disciplines of the modern university, the foremost among whom may be selected to appear on postage stamps. Noting that disciplinary culture is as important as content in university education, we suggest that some knowledge of the identity of these notables, passed on by encultured tutors, should…

This article describes how one elementary school's professional development model helped both new and veteran teachers grow in their knowledge and practice of balanced literacy. Created in partnership between university faculty, school administration, and elementary teachers, this multifaceted whole-school PD effort enabled teachers to learn…

The objective of the exercise described here is for students to be able to recognize Habermas's public sphere theory and analyze public deliberation occurring within the online public sphere. After completing this unit activity, students will also be able to distinguish between civil and uncivil comments that people use in online forums.…

Existing tensions within and between the discourses permeating doctoral candidature are being exacerbated by those of interdisciplinarity and industry collaboration. Drawing on the author's experience as a doctoral candidate within a cooperative research centre, this article interrogates the conflicting and challenging pressures placed on…

Leaders often display the all-too-human characteristic of talking only or mostly to people with whom they agree. Yet, to be effective as a leader in many circumstances requires reaching out and engaging in dialogue with those who one may fundamentally disagree and may even view as an enemy. To do so requires a particular conception of leadership,…

Conversational competence is a process, not a state. Ithaca does not exist, only the voyage to Ithaca. Vibrant campuses are a series of productive conversations. At its core, communicative competence in academic settings mirrors a collective search for meaning regarding the purpose and direction of a campus community. Communicative competence…

English 106: Introductory Composition is a mandatory four credit hour course offered at Purdue University. English 106 is offered by the English department through the Introductory Composition at Purdue program (ICaP), supervised by the Writing Program Administrator (WPA) of first-year composition (FYC). Students enrolled in English 106 gain…