Creating The Academic Commons

Creating the Academic Commons

Today's library is still at the heart of all university activities, helping students and faculty become better learners, teachers, and researchers. In recent years there has emerged the formalizing of one or more of these activities into an Academic Commons. These centers of information have been labeled variously but they all share a commonality: the empowerment of students and teachers. In Creating the Academic Commons: Guidelines for Learning, Teaching, and Research, Thomas Gould gives a detailed outline of the various roles and activities that take place in commons located within the administrative umbrella of the library. Gould provides a roadmap for libraries seeking to establish their own Academic Commons, complete with suggestions regarding physical structure and software/hardware options. And to ensure new ideas are examined, evaluated, and adopted broadly, Gould shows how the Millennial Librarian can be at the center of this evolutionary library. Including information regarding the latest technological advances, this book will be an invaluable guide for librarians.

Creating the Academic Commons

The Composition Commons

The Composition Commons delivers a timely take on invigorating higher education, illustrating how college composition courses can be dynamic sites for producing a democratic, just, and generally educated public. Jessica Yood traces the century-long origins of a writing-centered idea of the American university and tracks the resurgence of this idea today. Drawing on archival and classroom evidence from public colleges and universities and written in a lively autoethnographic voice, Yood names “genres of the commons”: intimate, informal writing activities that create peer-to-peer knowledge networks. She shows how these unique genres create collectivity—an academic commons—and calls on scholars to invest in composition as a course cultivating reflective, emergent, shared knowledge. Yood departs from movements that divest from the first-year composition classroom and details how an increasingly diverse student population composes complex, evolving cultural literacies that forge social bonds and forward innovation and intellectual and civic engagement. The Composition Commons reclaims the commons as critical idea and writing classroom activities as essential practices for remaking higher education in the United States.