How to Become Irreplaceable


Reading Cathy Davidson’s The New Education had a nearly therapeutic effect on me. Her warm writing style is at once optimistic and edifying as she breaks down several of the major issues facing higher education in the United States today. Rather than adopting a doom and gloom outlook, as many critics (and, I might note, defenders) of […]

We Education


What are we going to do as students in the high prestige departments of Masters and Doctorate education in NYU to systematically change a high powered global institution from within, and how then will we share this with other universities in the United States, and ones imitating the US higher education system globally? For my […]

Da possibilidade do fracasso


Em The New Education, Cathy Davidson foca sua atenção nos graves problemas ideológicos e estruturais do ensino superior estado-unidense.  Julgo que a minha condição de um estrangeiro que agora se vê dentro desse sistema, por vezes tão distinto do brasileiro, me permite tanto um maior distanciamento de alguns dos questionamentos levantados pela autora, como também […]

In-institutional


I remember reading William Deresiewicz’s Excellent Sheep a few years back and thinking: This is about me? It’s not that he’s completely wrong in his analysis of the student-as-customer model of higher education; I think in many respects Deresiewicz is correct, but wide-sweeping claims about an entire generation hardly seem productive, even beyond what Eve Sedgwick has labeled which extend […]

For Any Seat at Any Table for Every Student!


has me thinking about the spatial-material axis of learning. How is learning affected by proximity, and what shape does this proximity take? I couldn’t agree more with Davidson’s claim that “the lecture is broken, and so we must think of better ways to incorporate active learning into the classroom” (Davidson, 248). The hierarchy of the […]

Education as a public good


As an international student “The New Education” it makes me confront myself under many ethical questions and consideration. What led me to pursue a degree at a U.S University? I would not hesitate to state that the prestige and reputation in their programs and faculty that seemed me attractive. But how much of that expectative […]

The new education and the decolonial debate


Cathy Davidson’s The New Education provides interesting insights on how to better the current university machinery in the era of homo economicus and neoliberal rationality. Her proposal relies on an ethical assemblage of all the gears involved, achieved by interdisciplinary approaches and alliances with state-of-the-art educational technology. Her book showcases examples of engaging professors who […]

mundanças para o novo mundo


Traçando um paralelo como o manifesto para uma “Nova Educação” criado por Charles Eliot em 1869, traça um panorama histórico sobre a formação e consolidação do sistema Universitário nos Estados Unidos e avalia as perspectivas e desafios deste modelo frente às transformações operadas na sociedade no nosso tempo. Para a construção de sua proposta de […]