Judith Summerfield – författare

What does liberal/general education mean, in promise and practice? Debate about what a college degree should be is as relevant today as it was two hundred years ago. This book respects the complexities and concepts of liberal and general, pushing at their historical and rhetorical legacies to redefine and reaffirm their potential in a new age. Faculty and administrators from across the seventeen colleges of the City University of New York (CUNY), the nation’s largest urban public university, re-examine these critical issues. Through recollection, vision, debate, and disagreement, the contributors state what the public university needs to be in the new century.

Compositions, A Life: An Autoethnography is the story of Judith Summerfield’s life, within the varied worlds in which she has lived. Told by a master storyteller who is also a scholar of narrative and a compelling teacher of writing and literature, the book embraces a meta-textual approach. Summerfield focuses on ethnographic elements of language, family, culture, and history, beginning with her childhood in a coal mining town in southwestern Pennsylvania with a story-telling father who survived the Russian Revolution in Ukraine, and an American-born mother who insisted she learn "proper" English usage. She chronicles her education during the feminist, Civil Rights, and cultural revolutions of the last century, and critically self-examines her years of teaching and leadership at The City University of New York.The book includes twenty-five writing prompts, and twenty-plus images to engage reader response by the individual reader, and for introductory writing courses, graduate and professional programs, and in community writing groups."Judith Summerfield’s latest book, Compositions, a Life: An Autoethnography, is a celebration of all the ways a story can be told: through family history both harrowing and mundane, through elegiac portraits of place, through photographs of people living and dead (and recipes in their handwriting), and above all through the act of writing stories into being. It’s part folk art, part writing manual, part cultural history. This is a book to read with a pencil in your hand, because Summerfield will inspire her readers to commit their own stories to shimmering life."—Crystal Benedicks, Ph.D., Department of English, Co-Chair of First-Year Experience, Coordinator of Writing Across the Curriculum, Wabash University "In Compositions, a Life: An Autoethnography, Judith Summerfield weaves together individual and collective history to reflect on the texts, people, places, and institutions that have informed her thoughtful work as a teacher, writer, and higher education administrator. Interspersing personal memoir with engaging writing exercises, Summerfield not only explores the narrative compositions of her life but also asks readers to reflect on stories of their own. Compositions, a Life is a powerful and poignant testament to the ways in which we are all connected and an argument for why we must continue to strive to understand ourselves and others, through storytelling, reading, writing, listening, and community."—Caroline Hellman, Ph.D., Professor of English/Interim Special Assistant to the President, City Tech, CUNY

Compositions, A Life: An Autoethnography is the story of Judith Summerfield’s life, within the varied worlds in which she has lived. Told by a master storyteller who is also a scholar of narrative and a compelling teacher of writing and literature, the book embraces a meta-textual approach. Summerfield focuses on ethnographic elements of language, family, culture, and history, beginning with her childhood in a coal mining town in southwestern Pennsylvania with a story-telling father who survived the Russian Revolution in Ukraine, and an American-born mother who insisted she learn "proper" English usage. She chronicles her education during the feminist, Civil Rights, and cultural revolutions of the last century, and critically self-examines her years of teaching and leadership at The City University of New York.The book includes twenty-five writing prompts, and twenty-plus images to engage reader response by the individual reader, and for introductory writing courses, graduate and professional programs, and in community writing groups."Judith Summerfield’s latest book, Compositions, a Life: An Autoethnography, is a celebration of all the ways a story can be told: through family history both harrowing and mundane, through elegiac portraits of place, through photographs of people living and dead (and recipes in their handwriting), and above all through the act of writing stories into being. It’s part folk art, part writing manual, part cultural history. This is a book to read with a pencil in your hand, because Summerfield will inspire her readers to commit their own stories to shimmering life."—Crystal Benedicks, Ph.D., Department of English, Co-Chair of First-Year Experience, Coordinator of Writing Across the Curriculum, Wabash University "In Compositions, a Life: An Autoethnography, Judith Summerfield weaves together individual and collective history to reflect on the texts, people, places, and institutions that have informed her thoughtful work as a teacher, writer, and higher education administrator. Interspersing personal memoir with engaging writing exercises, Summerfield not only explores the narrative compositions of her life but also asks readers to reflect on stories of their own. Compositions, a Life is a powerful and poignant testament to the ways in which we are all connected and an argument for why we must continue to strive to understand ourselves and others, through storytelling, reading, writing, listening, and community."—Caroline Hellman, Ph.D., Professor of English/Interim Special Assistant to the President, City Tech, CUNY

This volume captures the spirit of collaboration and innovation that its authors bring into the classroom, as well as to groundbreaking undergraduate programs and initiatives. Coming from diverse points of view and twenty different disciplines, the contributors illuminate the often perplexing debates about what matters most in higher education today. Each chapter tells a unique story about creating vital pedagogical arenas that have the potential to transform teaching and learning for both faculty and students. These exploratory spaces include courses under construction, cross-college and interdisciplinary collaborations, general education reform initiatives, and fresh perspectives on student support services, faculty development, freshman learning communities, writing across the curriculum, on-line degree initiatives, and teaching and learning centers.All these spaces lend shape to an over-arching, system-wide project bringing together the often disconnected silos of undergraduate education at The City University of New York (CUNY), America’s largest urban public university system. Since 2003, the University’s Office of Undergraduate Education has sponsored coordinated efforts to study and improve teaching and learning for the system’s 260,000 undergraduates enrolled at 18 distinct colleges. The contributors to this volume present a broad spectrum of administrative and faculty perspectives that have informed the process of transforming the undergraduate experience. Combined, the voices in these chapters create a much-needed exploratory space for the interplay of ideas about how teaching and learning need to matter in evolving notions of higher education in the twenty-first century. In addition, the text has wider social relevance as an in-depth exploration of change and reform in a large public institution.

This volume captures the spirit of collaboration and innovation that its authors bring into the classroom, as well as to groundbreaking undergraduate programs and initiatives. Coming from diverse points of view and twenty different disciplines, the contributors illuminate the often perplexing debates about what matters most in higher education today. Each chapter tells a unique story about creating vital pedagogical arenas that have the potential to transform teaching and learning for both faculty and students. These exploratory spaces include courses under construction, cross-college and interdisciplinary collaborations, general education reform initiatives, and fresh perspectives on student support services, faculty development, freshman learning communities, writing across the curriculum, on-line degree initiatives, and teaching and learning centers.All these spaces lend shape to an over-arching, system-wide project bringing together the often disconnected silos of undergraduate education at The City University of New York (CUNY), America’s largest urban public university system. Since 2003, the University’s Office of Undergraduate Education has sponsored coordinated efforts to study and improve teaching and learning for the system’s 260,000 undergraduates enrolled at 18 distinct colleges. The contributors to this volume present a broad spectrum of administrative and faculty perspectives that have informed the process of transforming the undergraduate experience. Combined, the voices in these chapters create a much-needed exploratory space for the interplay of ideas about how teaching and learning need to matter in evolving notions of higher education in the twenty-first century. In addition, the text has wider social relevance as an in-depth exploration of change and reform in a large public institution.