Topic: Graduate Students
Pedagogy announces a special issue devoted to graduate students. English professors teach graduate students in a myriad of settings: in seminars, teacher training programs (usually to prepare them to teach writing courses), and through advisement of masters’ and doctoral theses. Yet we rarely discuss how we teach them, or how we should.
Undergraduate teaching has become a topic for rich inquiry by humanists in recent years, but graduate teaching needs attention too—and it needs that attention now. The dismal job market has raised important questions not only about how to teach graduate students, but also of what we should now teach them if we accept the reality that most of them are not going to follow their professors into academia. Teaching graduate students today entails conceiving of their work in global terms: not only in relation to the larger path to the Ph.D. (or M.A.), but also in terms of what comes after that--because graduate school is professional school. At the same time, advancing technology—the “digital humanities”—offers new teaching opportunities and possibilities. Recent MLA President Sidonie Smith has suggested, for example, that we rethink the traditional dissertation to fit the requirements and potentials of this new world of work.
Pedagogy invites contributions on the subject of graduate education in English, broadly conceived.
Essays may be written from the perspective of the professor or the graduate student (for all professors were graduate students once). They may focus on one or two stages of the graduate student life cycle (say, how to teach an effective graduate seminar), or on graduate education, writ large. Possible topics include (but are certainly not limited to):
- · seminars
- · comprehensive exams,
- · teacher training of graduate students,
· technology in graduate teaching, - · thesis and dissertation advising,
- · the job market (both academic and nonacademic), and
- · the "postdoc space."
- · teacher training of graduate students,
This special issue will be divided between scholarly essays (which should be suitably theorized and appropriately sourced) and opinion pieces.
Please send inquiries and/or 500-word proposals by September 15th, 2011 to:
Leonard Cassuto, Guest Editor
Department of English
Fordham University
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