Books
The Fact of Memory
114 Ruminations and Fabrications
A child keeps a pet cloud in a dresser drawer. A man has coffee with his doppelganger. A 20-something stunt double performs pirate swordplay at birthday parties. A schoolkid ponders the absurdity of Hell. A woman sings a Diana Ross song to a stranger across a subway platform. In this genre-defying collection of short prose pieces, Aaron Angello explores the subtleties of recollection, imagination, and the connections, both momentary and long-lasting, between oneself and others. Each piece riffs on a word from Shakespeare’s Sonnet 29; over the course of 114 days, Angello woke early, meditated upon a single word from the sonnet, and wrote.
The results are sometimes funny, sometimes profound, and sometimes heartbreaking, accumulating into a map of a mind at work, a Gen X coming-of-age of sorts, seamlessly invoking the likes of The Golden Girls, Spinoza, Rick Springfield, and Rimbaud. The Fact of Memory uses its innovative structure to pause and consider how language—and people—can both enthrall and abandon us, how the invincibility of youthful ambition gives way to the nuanced disappointments of aging, how unanswerable philosophical questions can share the page with glimpses of our former selves navigating a fragmented past.
Coming April 2022
The Synergistic Classroom
Interdisciplinary Teaching in the Small College Setting
-co-edited with Corey Campion
Among the many challenges confronting the liberal arts today is a fundamental disconnect between the curricula that many institutions offer and the training that many students need. Discipline-specific models of teaching and learning can underprepare students for the kinds of interdisciplinary collaboration that employers now expect. Although aware of these expectations and the need for change, many small colleges and universities have struggled to translate interdisciplinarity into programs and curricula that better serve today’s students.
Written by faculty engaged in the design and delivery of interdisciplinary courses, programs, and experiential learning opportunities in the small college setting, The Synergistic Classroom addresses the many ways faculty can leverage their institutions' small size and openness to pedagogical experimentation to overcome the challenges of limited institutional resources and enrollment concerns and better prepare students for life and work in the twenty-first century. Taken together, the contributions in this volume invite reflection on a variety of important issues that attend the work of small college faculty committed to expanding student learning across disciplinary boundaries.
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