Read more
This book is one English professor's assessment of university life in the early 21st century. From rising mental health concerns and trigger warnings to learning management systems and the COVID pandemic, Christopher Schaberg reflects on the rapidly evolving landscape of higher education.
Adopting an interdisciplinary public humanities approach, Schaberg considers the frequently exhausting and depressing realities of college today. Yet in these meditations he also finds hope: collaboration, mentoring, less grading, surface reading, and other pedagogical strategies open up opportunities to reinvigorate teaching and learning in the current turbulent decade.
List of contents
Prologue: No Place Like HomeIntroduction: The Depressed
1. We're All Screens
2. Early Warnings
3. Learning Management
4. Against Sheep
5. Trigger U.
6. Ecophobia
7. Environmental Humanities?
8. Public Humanities?
9. Skimming the Surface
10. Autotheory
11. Beginnings
12. Chance Meeting
13. Theory Today
14. END MEETING FOR ALL
15. Night Writing
16. Less Grading
17. Tenure
18. Exhaustion
19. Well-Rounded
20. Turning Kids into Capital
21. Writing Together
22. Adjusting
23. First-Year Seminar
24. Pitt's Law
25. Into the Unknown
About the author
Christopher Schaberg
Summary
This book is one English professor’s assessment of university life in the early 21st century. From rising mental health concerns and trigger warnings to learning management systems and the COVID pandemic, Christopher Schaberg reflects on the rapidly evolving landscape of higher education.
Adopting an interdisciplinary public humanities approach, Schaberg considers the frequently exhausting and depressing realities of college today. Yet in these meditations he also finds hope: collaboration, mentoring, less grading, surface reading, and other pedagogical strategies open up opportunities to reinvigorate teaching and learning in the current turbulent decade.
Additional text
If the title page didn’t say Christopher Schaberg so plainly, I might have assumed the author was Guy Montag, protagonist of Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451. Both are suffering through a takeover by the machinery, technological and bureaucratic; both hold onto a humanistic ideal in the midst of it all. Pedagogy of the Depressed is in some ways precisely the opposite of what its title promises: rather than depressing, it’s a hopeful pushback against the pervasive air of depression and lowered expectations that has overtaken too many of our classrooms, and whose metaphor—if not cause—is Covid-19 and the ubiquity of the Zoom screen. Come for the jeremiad—but stay for the wise encouragement, that this work we do with students still matters. Perhaps matters more than ever.
