No Undergrad Left Behind (NY Times)
Comments(8) Take a look at what passes for subjects of scholarly and instructional focus on campuses. Should taxpayer dollars really go to underwrite courses in such things as the history of comic book art? Policy makers and tuition payers need to be made aware of what sorts of courses institutions consider appropriate to fulfill core academic requirements, if anything resembling an academic core even exists. And there needs to be a greater emphasis on teaching students what they need to know, rather than what faculty want to talk about. -Eugene Hickok
[Thanks, Ted. I am obviously going to give an emphatic “Yes” to funding courses like history of comic book art. Comic studies are interdisciplinary and its applications are probably as flexible as rhetoric. However, increasing awareness and encouraging disciplines to dialogue with one another is a current goal, evidenced by the Carnegie Initiative on the Doctorate. I also disagree about faculty interests conflicting with students learning necessities. I always try and incorporate my research interests with comics and popular culture into my lessons as examples when teaching essential concepts such as composition or literature. BK]
category: Comics, Pedagogy, Popular Culture, Rhetoric and Poetics