Engaging Ideas. John C. Bean

Engaging Ideas - John C. Bean


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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.

      From Dan

      From Both of Us

      Finally, we would like to thank Riley Harding, our editor at Jossey‐Bass/Wiley, for the skillful way she encouraged John to seek a coauthor for the third edition and for her talent at managing the logistics. We would also like to thank Christine O'Connor and her team at Wiley for the smooth production process from manuscript to published book. For their insightful reviews of the second edition with advice for the third edition, we thank Todd P. Primm, Carroll F. Nardone, and faculty workshop participants at Sam Houston State University; Pamela Flash, University of Minnesota; Brian Hendrickson, Roger Williams University; Jessie L. Moore, Elon University; and J. Michael Rifenburg, University of North Georgia.

      John C. Bean

      Vashon Island, WashingtonOctober 2020

      Dan Melzer

      Sacramento, CaliforniaOctober 2020

      John C. Bean is an emeritus professor of English at Seattle University, where he held the title of Consulting Professor of Writing and Assessment. He has an undergraduate degree in English from Stanford University (1965) and a PhD in Renaissance literature from the University of Washington (1972). He has been active in the Writing Across the Curriculum movement since 1976—first at the College of Great Falls (Montana), then at Montana State University (Bozeman), and, since 1986, at Seattle University. Besides Engaging Ideas, the first edition of which has been translated into Dutch and Chinese, he is the coauthor of four composition textbooks with varying focuses on writing, argumentation, critical thinking, and rhetorical reading. He has also published numerous articles on writing, writing across the curriculum, and discipline‐specific pedagogies to promote students' growth from novice to expert. He has done extensive consulting across the United States and Canada on writing, critical thinking, and university outcomes assessment. In 2001, he presented a keynote address at the first annual conference of the European Association of Teachers of Academic Writing (EATAW) at the University of Groningen in The Netherlands. More recently, he and his wife Kit (who is also now a retired college teacher of writing) have facilitated workshops on writing and critical thinking for BRAC University in Bangladesh, Ashesi University in Ghana, and Charles Lwanga College of Education in Zambia. In 2010, his article “Messy Problems and Lay Audiences: Teaching Critical Thinking within the Finance Curriculum” (coauthored with colleagues from finance and economics) won the 2008 McGraw‐Hill–Magna Publications Award for the year's best scholarly work on teaching and learning.

      In his now classic study of pedagogical strategies that make a difference, Richard Light (2001) examined the connection between writing and student engagement. “The results are stunning,” he claims:

      The relationship between the amount of writing for a course and students' level of engagement—whether engagement is measured by time spent on the course, or the intellectual challenge it presents, or students' level of interest in it—is stronger than the relationship between students' engagement and any other course characteristic. (55)


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