Status Updates From Generous Thinking: A Radica...

“Opening the notion of the intellectual, or the peer, to a much broader range of forms of critical inquiry and active project participation has the potential to reshape relations between town and gown, to lay the groundwork for more productive conversations across the borders of the campus, and to create an understanding of the extent to which the work of the academy matters for our culture as a whole.”

This chapter had me wanting to highlight almost everything. All English teachers need to read the Beyond Naive Reading subsection of chapter 2. “[R]eading of a wide range of type of texts has the power to open us to other perspectives, to other experiences, to other lives, to create a connection between our private selves and the public sphere…[scholars] must be willing to demonstrate our love for our work…”

“Empathy in this sense is not something we have, not something we feel, but something we must wrestle with, and something we must continue wrestling with, with no expectation of ever pinning it down…[it] becomes a practice…Practices are not about perfection but about a continual, impossible attempt to perfect they are ways of being in the world” (67-68).

I’m intrigued by the premise of how generous thinking can change the college.