Provides a state-of-the-field review of recent SoTL scholarship

How can teachers facilitate meaningful classroom conversations in which students engage in shared inquiry, building on what others have written or said (even to disagree)? Such discussions can have many benefits: students can learn from each other, can bring their out-of-school ways of talking into classroom dialog, can make evidence-based, collaborative arguments, and can begin to communicate like historians, scientists, or other members of disciplinary communities. Yet classroom discussions often fail, teaching students implicitly that they have little to learn from school or each other, that their home-language practices are not welcome, that the loudest voice wins the argument, and that academic discourse is as mystifying and alien as the views of anyone who disagrees with them. Outside the classroom, dialog has never been more important. From climate-change summits or peace talks among neighboring nations, to clashes between rival ethnic groups or political-party mudslinging, to workplace conversations or a traffic stop on a dark street, we must learn to bring our own and others’ words into relationship with integrity or suffer the consequences. This book offers concepts, concrete classroom examples, and activities for teachers and students to transform classroom conversations into successful discussions across disciplines, grade levels, and digital platforms.

The scholarship of teaching and learning (SoTL) began primarily as a discipline-based movement, committed to exploring the signature pedagogical and learning styles of each discipline within higher education, with little exchange across disciplines. As the field has developed, new questions have arisen concerning cross-disciplinary comparison and learning in multidisciplinary settings This volume by a stellar group of experts provides a state-of-the-field review of recent SoTL scholarship within a range of disciplines and offers a stimulating discussion of critical issues related to interdisciplinarity in teaching, learning, and SoTL research.

Cultural anthropologists can be an intellectually adventurous crowd: open—even eager—to building bridges across disciplines in the name of understanding human behavior and the human experience more broadly. In this first-of-its-kind book, Caroline Brettell explores the cross-disciplinary conversations that have engaged cultural anthropologists both past and present. Brettell highlights a handful of conversations between the discipline of anthropology on the one hand and history, geography, literature, biology, psychology and demography on the other. She also pinpoints how these exchanges address three enduring issues of anthropological concern: the temporal and the spatial dimensions of human experience; the scientific and the humanistic dimensions of the anthropological enterprise; and the individual and the group/population as units of analysis in research. Anthropological Conversations offers detailed accounts of particular ethnographic methodologies and findings (and the theoretical trends informing them) as a means of grasping the big-picture issues. Brettell clearly shows that, by engaging with other fields, cultural anthropologists have been able to think more deeply about what they mean by culture; through this book, she invites readers to continue the conversation.

This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press’s mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in 1984.