On Monday, March 19, Gerald Graff and Cathy Birkenstein will be on campus to talk about “Demystifying the Academic Game.” Their talk will take place at 10 a.m. in the College Union Ballroom.
Gerald Graff is Professor of English and Education at the University of Illinois at Chicago. A former president of the Modern Language Association of America (2008), he is one of his generation’s most influential commentators on education. His widely cited 1987 book, Professing Literature: An Institutional History, was recently reprinted in a Twentieth Anniversary Edition by the University of Chicago Press. In addition, Prof. Graff is the author of Beyond the Culture Wars: How Teaching the Conflicts Can Revitalize American Education (1992), the book that introduced the phrase “teach the conflicts” to describe a pedagogical approach that treats internecine critical dispute as an opportunity show students how theoretical disagreements help to constitute academic disciplines; Clueless in Academe: How Schooling Obscures the Life of the Mind (2003), which called on academic professionals to demystify academic culture; and, with Cathy Birkenstein, “They Say/I Say”: The Moves That Matter in Academic Writing (2006), a handbook for teaching writing as a species of “conversation” that has set records for sales in colleges and high schools.
Cathy Birkenstein is Lecturer in English at the University of Illinois at Chicago and co-director of the Writing in the Disciplines program. In addition to co-authoring “They Say/I Say,” she has published essays on writing in College English, The Chronicle of Higher Education, Academe, and College Composition and Communication.
The talk is open to the general public.