Beyond the Culture Wars: How Teaching the Conflicts Can Revitalize American Education by Gerald Graff

Beyond the Culture Wars: How Teaching the Conflicts Can Revitalize American Education Reviews

• 
  Scott Lee

  I just realized I never reviewed this, or marked it as read, or gave myself credit for it. It's been some weeks, and I've read Graff's Clueless in Academe since then which, while presenting a different thesis bears strong familial relation to this book in between, so I'm not sure how good a review I can provide.
  
  This is fascinating reading for a teacher that cares about how education works, and the problems with curriculum etc. that plague us. Graff writes fluidly and cogently about some of the major educational problems facing teachers/professors today, and presents a coherent argument for addressing them through a process that he calls "teaching the conflicts." Essentially he argues that if we embed the lessons in our classroom in ongoing professional/public debates on the issues relevant to these texts to on the texts themselves than our teaching will be far more effective.
  
  Already a bit of an oldy, the book still deserves to be read by teacher's who care about what they're doing and how they can improve.
• 
  Jeff

  Graff makes a few decent points in this text, but it follows the structure of many academic diatribes: stated thesis, enormous unrelated leaps, and weak solutions to the problem.
  
  His thesis: that there are enormous cultural disagreements in academia that, instead of hiding, we should teach, incorporating students into intellectual debate amongst their professors rather that maintain autonomy in individual classrooms (I buy it). His solution: Learning communities (I buy it, sort of).
  
  He could have left it at that paragraph. Much of the bridge that connects thesis to solution is academic history, theory/aesthetic debates, and politics in the classroom. These items are marginally related to the topic, but are often presented in tangential and difficult-to-place arguments. What's more, I disagree with a lot of what he says. Perhaps, he would argue, that we then have a basis to form a Learning Community and allow students to watch us go blow-for-blow. Metaphorically.
• 
  Paula

  Graff makes a solid argument for teaching literature through engaging students in the debates, controversies, etc. that make the field of literary studies worth continuing. I particularly value his insight that the way students engage literature can and should mirror the way they interact with the world, at large - i.e., as citizens who face many different viewpoints and deep-seeded beliefs.
• 
  Yifat

  teaching conflict = teaching interest