Introduction

Abstract

Introduction Jacqueline Ellis and Ellen Gruber Garvey This issue is an experiment. For several years, Transformations has published only themed issues. But as increasing numbers of our readers find Transformations through online databases like JSTOR and Project MUSE, we see that although themed issues give editors and authors a chance to think more about how particular topics play out in different arenas, they may not be of great interest to our readers, who are more likely to encounter an individual article. Let us know how this experiment works for you! This issue has given us a chance to revisit themes from other issues: Teachers Talk, for example, is an interview with Lynn Prosen, a New Jersey elementary school teacher, on how she uses gardening in her teaching. In addition to the lovely cross-pollination between K-12 work and university teaching that this interview helps us think about, it offers a new perspective on the work of our issue "Teaching Food" (Vol. 23, No. 2, 2012–2013), in which guest editor Deirdre Murphy interviewed faculty and staff from Green Mountain College, a school very much focused on food production. There's a big difference between controversies over what to do with a slaughtered ox and how to teach children about how seeds germinate, but certainly they are part of a continuum. The discussion of community and collaboration begun in the previous two issues of "Teaching Community" (Vol. 26, No. 2, and Vol. 27, No. 1) continues here. Mariah Doren, in "Working Collaboratively—Teaching Collaboration," explains how art students learn how to work together through the collaboration of their own instructors. The instructors spark and enrich one another's work through their interdisciplinary differences; students read about collaboration and undertake collaborative projects as well. Ivis Garcia's architecture students engage with a gentrifying Puerto Rican neighborhood on issues of safe and usable streets in "Learning about Neighborhood Identity, Streets as Places, and Community Engagement in a Chicago Studio Course." Rather than sticking with conventional focuses on planning buildings or streets in isolation, they interview local residents, explore the neighborhood's [End Page 113] history, and meet with many community groups to find out what the residents' neighborhood and its streets mean to them. In this issue's photo essay, "Teaching from the Outside In: Community-Based Pedagogy's Potential for Transformation," Maria McKenna, Stuart Greene, and Kevin Burke explain their university students' collaboration with high school students in participatory action research, using photography to capture and describe the high school students' lived experiences. Through this approach, the young people draw the older college students and faculty into a deeper understanding of their communities and lives while the college students lend other forms of expertise. Communities are shaped across time as well. Women in science often have a very scanty sense of what the women who preceded them did or studied. They have been limited to the stories of famous scientists such as Marie Curie. But even exposure to a limited archive for a short time can turn their beliefs about women in science on their head, as Amy Fisher and Katie Henningsen explain in their article, "Women in Science through an Archival Lens." Their students explored their university's history through student newspapers, course listings, and other materials in the university archives. Students learned that women a century ago studied sophisticated scientific materials under the rubric of domestic science. When women were kept out of all-male science clubs, they formed their own groups, which were less social and more educational than the men's. If only Lawrence Summers would perform similar research. Jordan M. Reed and Christina Connor also have students analyze pedagogical materials from the past to better see how US history has been narrated and taught in college courses. Using materials available in local university libraries, they encourage their students to develop a critical eye for how textbooks reflect the ideologies of their era in their Methods and Texts piece, "Re-Reading the American History Textbook in the Global Age." We have been writing about digital pedagogy in various forms since our special issue on teaching digital media (Vol. 22, No. 1, 2011). Technology is so much a...