Jason Arenstein
Assistant Professor of Writing, Institute for Core Studies
First-Year Writing Program, Institute for Writing Studies
A.B.D. in Early American Literature, Indiana University
M.A. in English, Queens College, City University of New York
B.A. in Liberal Arts & Ecology, The Evergreen State
College
arenstej@stjohns.edu
My fundamental objective as an educator is to stimulate and
support my students' intellectual progress. I believe that the
first-year writing course is the cornerstone of contemporary
liberal education, and that the aim of education—especially
liberal-arts education—is the development of the students' minds
and consequently, their selves and their self-knowledge. I sidestep
the debate over whether or not such education makes one a better
human being and contend that it is a requisite part of becoming a
self-actualized human being. I hope to develop my students'
critical-analytical reading, thinking, and writing skills and to
thereby encourage and support them in living conscious and
deliberate lives. I intend that my pedagogy will support my
students' efforts to engage with the world in a meaningful and
sustained way as individuals, professionals, and citizens. To these
ends, I build my teaching around several core principles: the
importance of beginning with the student's interests and using
those interests to ground our work in developing composition skills
and strategies; collaboration, conversation, and intellectual
community; Web 2.0- and e-literacy; the fundamental role of real,
live inquiry; the importance of a sequential assignment "package"
in which each writing opportunity builds on what has preceded it;
approaching writing as a process of thinking; emphasizing close,
reasoned analysis and precision of thought; and providing students
with the opportunity to develop intellectual projects that may be
continued long after they move on from my course. My current
professional development priorities with regard to pedagogy are
continuing to develop a curriculum that provides students with the
opportunity to create their own blogs as vehicles for entering
real-world conversations, and redesigning my syllabus to
incorporate weekly conferences with each of my students.
I have recently published in PresenTense 6 an essay on
possibilities for contemporary Jewish pilgrimage, and I have a
novel on the back burner, but my primary writing project at present
is a consideration of how protagonists in early American literature
approached their labor as a route to transcendence; I am
particularly interested in Herman Melville's Moby-Dick, Henry David Thoreau's
Walden, Frederick Douglass's two
autobiographies, and Rebecca Harding Davis's "Life in the
Iron-Mills." Whatever the subject matter, I try to approach writing
just as I ask my students to—as a means of thinking, as an
opportunity to take notice of something that I don't completely
understand or that I simply want to spend some time thinking about,
as an opportunity to develop and think through the questions that
seem to me to be worthy and needful of this kind of sustained
consideration. I am particularly interested in pilgrimage and
perambulation, and in how these intersect with various
socio-cultural-ethnic traditions. In terms of composition
scholarship, I have been growing interested in exploring
alternative venues and scheduling, including, as I discuss above,
blogs and other online venues, and weekly individual conferences
with students.
Some recent presentations and service activities include:
--"The Smithy of the Self: Taking Ownership of One's Self Via
the First-Year Writing Workshop." "Who Owns Writing?": A Conference on the
Future of Rhetoric and Composition. Hofstra University,
Hempstead, NY. October 16-18, 2008.
--Committee on "First-Year Writing: Readings" (Institute for
Writing Studies conference)
--Reader for The St. John's Humanities
Review
--Title III Technology Grant Program