Newswise — Amidst a tsunami of news stories, editorials, and frenetic discussions of futuristic massive open online courses (MOOCs), The Pennsylvania State University Press is relaunching a familiar title, subtly renamed, for a community whose scholarship has provided undergraduates with as much as one-fourth of their courses for at least half a century.
Journal of General Education: A Curricular Commons of the Humanities and Sciences, the new signature for JGE: Journal of General Education, is the result of a probing discussion among scholars from Northwestern University, University of Michigan, Harvard College, University of Southern California, Portland State University, and The Pennsylvania State University. "We asked a group of visionaries with deep commitment to undergraduate education to describe a journal capable of reinvigorating and sustaining the ideas and ideals of general education," said Patrick Alexander, the director of Penn State Press.
“General education too often provides a home for large-enrollment, revenue-generating courses, with little to help students understand the ideas and ideals of intellectually disciplined discovery,” says new editor Jeremy Cohen. “Journal of General Education: A Curricular Commons of the Humanities and Sciences will distinguish itself as a journal focused not on scholarship of general interest to colleagues engaged in undergraduate education writ large, but as a scholarly commons for those interested in general education as a distinctive curricular cornerstone of the arts and sciences, capable of placing academic disciplines and professions and cultural, social, and political behaviors into a meaningful context.”
The inaugural issue, to appear in March 2013, is a colloquium focused on E. O. Wilson’s The Social Conquest of Earth. Among the nine contributing essayists are Wilson, who has twice won the Pulitzer Prize for nonfiction; Richard Alley, who was a member of the cohort awarded the 2007 Nobel Prize for groundbreaking work on climate change; Donald Kennedy, Stanford University president emeritus and former editor of Science; and rhetorician Jeanne Fahnestock. “Their work presents a compelling argument for purposeful general education grounded in the kinds of questions posed by Wilson’s The Social Conquest, questions Wilson has taken from the title of Paul Gauguin’s iconic 1897 Tahitian painting Where Do We Come From? What Are We? Where Are We Going?” says Cohen.
“Ferment in the Field,” planned for the journal’s second issue, will examine a growing unease with general education’s cafeteria-style aggregations of courses and loss of curricular purpose through the eyes of education philosopher Nel Noddings, Syracuse University president Nancy Cantor, Portland State president emeritus Judith Ramaley, New York University historian Thomas Bender, and others. This double issue will appear in fall 2013.
Journal of General Education: A Curricular Commons of the Humanities and Sciences is editorially housed at Northwestern University in Qatar, where Jeremy Cohen is the chief academic officer. It is published by The Pennsylvania State University Press, University Park, PA.
#### Questions and requests for interviews may be addressed to Jeremy Cohen, editor, [email protected], or Patrick Alexander, director of Penn State Press, [email protected] .
Examination copies are available upon request and may be directed to [email protected].
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