Читать книгу Engaging Ideas - John C. Bean - Страница 25

I have been fortunate over my teaching career to have generous colleagues who encouraged and supported my interest in writing across the curriculum and often shaped my thinking. I wish particularly to thank W. Daniel Goodman in the Department of Chemistry at the College of Great Falls and Dean Drenk, John Ramage, and Jack Folsom for our FIPSE‐grant days at Montana State University. At Seattle University, I thank my SoTL colleagues (many of whom have been coauthors with me on WAC or SoTL publications): economists Dean Peterson, Gareth Green, and Teresa Ling; finance professors David Carrithers and Fiona Robertson; chemists P. J. Alaimo, Joe Langenhan, and Jenny Loertscher; historian Theresa Earenfight; English professors Charles Tung, Nalini Iyer, June Johnson Bube, Sean McDowell, and David Leigh, S.J; and SoTL scholar David Green of Seattle University's Center for Excellence in Teaching and Learning. Thanks also to Larry Nichols, director of the Writing Center at Seattle University, my longtime friend, workshop cofacilitator, and fellow advocate for good writing assignments and engaged learning.

A larger network of WAC friends has also nurtured and inspired my work: Joanne Kurfiss Gainen, former director of the Center for Teaching and Learning at Santa Clara University; Linda Shohet, the Centre for Literacy in Montreal, Canada; Martha (Marty) Townsend at the University of Missouri, who spearheaded the development of her institution’s remarkable pioneering WAC program; John Webster, SoTL scholar and director of writing for the College of Arts and Sciences at the University of Washington; Michael Herzog, my Teagle Grant co‐investigator and longtime SoTL colleague at Gonzaga University; Carol Rutz, director of the writing program at Carleton College; Carol Haviland, former director of the writing center at California State University at San Bernardino; Paul Anderson, now retired from his important WAC work at Miami University and Elon University; and nursing professor Rob van der Peet of the Netherlands, who translated the first edition of Engaging Ideas into Dutch. I also owe a special debt of gratitude and warm thanks to pioneering SoTL scholar Maryellen Weimer, emeritus professor of teaching and learning at Pennsylvania State University, who wrote the foreword to the first and second editions of Engaging Ideas. Her faith in my work, her encouragement, and her extraordinary generosity of time gave me the confidence to produce the first and second editions.

I offer a special thanks to the Seattle University teaching community during the years 1988–1993, when I wrote the precursor to Engaging Ideas as an in‐house book for Seattle University's new core curriculum using examples from more than forty Seattle U faculty. As a Jesuit institution, Seattle University created a new core curriculum that reflected the Jesuit commitment to inquiry and debate along with a passionate belief that rhetoric, as eloquentia perfecta, should serve the common good. These beliefs, combined with the student‐centered ethic of cura personalis (care for the whole person) and mission commitment to social justice, created a teaching environment where faculty could develop and share the pedagogical practices that eventually emerged in Engaging Ideas. That remarkable Seattle U community discovered modern ways to enact the principle of active learning aimed at the growth of persons revealed in St. Ignatius's 1583 Ratio Studiorum, the originating “plan of studies” for Jesuit education. It took a village to write Engaging Ideas.

My deepest thanks and love go to my wife, Kit, who is also a professional writing teacher, and to our children—Matthew, Andrew, Stephen, and Sarah—who have grown to adulthood since I first started writing about Writing Across the Curriculum.