cover image Teaching Democracy: A Professor's Journal

Teaching Democracy: A Professor's Journal

John A. Minahan. Delphinium Books, $20 (0pp) ISBN 978-1-883285-01-2

Assigned to teach a composition class called ``The Personal Essay'' at Brown University in the '80s, Minahan gathered texts from past and present to stimulate dialogue in his classroom. From his journal we get glimpses, often dismaying as well as amusing, of students among the brightest in the land who confess ignorance of such seminal Americans as Emerson. We track their development in discussions nutured by the Socratic methods of a wonderful teacher. Impatient with educational theories and theorists, Minahan, an adjunct lecturer self-described as a ``stealth professor'' because, disregarding academic practice, much of his time on campus was spent in the company of students, affirms the need for compassion, the grounding of democracy that must be in place in the classroom. Readers will be invigorated by this lively confluence of reading and writing. (Sept.)