TCCTA members are urged to attend the general session of the TCCTA annual convention, on Thursday, March 1, 2012, at the Embassy Suites Hotel and Conference Center in Frisco.
Speaking on “Teaching and Civilization” will be Patrick Allitt, Cahoon Family Professor of American History at Emory University.
Dr. Allitt says, “Most of our work as teachers is highly practical, sometimes repetitious and detailed. It’s easy to forget that we are also involved in passing along the great heritage of our civilization to the rising generation. As the world becomes more complex, our task becomes more daunting, but centuries of experience have shown that we are able to instill an astonishing variety of ideas and concepts in our students’ minds. What makes teaching a particular challenge in our era is the fact that we offer it not just to a privileged minority but to everyone, men and women, rich and poor alike. This talk is a reflection on that accomplishment and a tribute to the men and women—teachers—who are the guardians of civilization.”
Dr. Allitt will also be speaking at the Professional Development Seminar, Friday, March 2. Here's a link with more information on this presentation.
The speaker was born and raised in England and graduated in 1977 from Oxford University. An Americanist specializing in religious, intellectual, and environmental history, the professor earned his Ph.D. in American history in 1986 from the University of California, Berkeley. He was a postdoctoral fellow at Harvard Divinity School and has been at Emory since 1988. Author of six books, he is also the presenter of six lecture series with The Teaching Company (www.teach12.com) on aspects of American and British history. His current research and writing project is a history of the intellectual and political opponents of environmentalism, from the 1960s to the early twenty-first century.
He was the director of Emory College’s Center for Teaching and Curriculum from 2004 to 2009, where he looked for ways to improve teaching. In this critical administrative position, he led workshops on a wide variety of teaching-related problems, visited dozens of other professors’ classes, and provided one-on-one consultation to teachers to help them overcome particular pedagogical problems.
A widely published and award-winning author, Professor Allitt has written several books, including The Conservatives: Ideas and Personalities throughout American History; Catholic Intellectuals and Conservative Politics in America, 1950–1985; Catholic Converts: British and American Intellectuals Turn to Rome; and Religion in America since 1945: A History. He is also author of I’m the Teacher, You’re the Student: A Semester in the University Classroom, a memoir about one semester in his life as a university professor. In addition, he is the editor of Major Problems in American Religious History. He has written numerous articles and reviews for academic and popular journals, including The New York Times Book Review.
Allit's "I'm the Teacher, You're the Student" is one of the best practical accounts of a systematic approach to teaching that I have read. I'm excited that he is coming to TCCTA.
Posted by: David Ross | January 10, 2012 at 12:09 AM