Last month, January 5th 2017, I received an email from one of the archivists at the UMass Boston library in response to a query I’d launched in December. My current research and interest in Dr. Maria Montessori stems largely from having discovered Montessori mentioned throughout the scholarship of Ann E. Berthoff. Berthoff is professor Emeritus at UMass Boston, so I figured the library might have some papers or something from her estate. I hoped to discover how it was that Berthoff came to cultivate an interest in Montessori. I found out.
Berthoff’s Forming, Thinking, Writing Redux
“I have tried to present both logical and rhetorical principles in conjunction with exercises in composing and to show the choices we make when we write can be made more intelligently and with a greater sense of control if we have a method” (p.2).
Montessori Method Chapter IV “Environment: Schoolroom Furnishings”
“The method of observation is established upon one fundamental base–the liberty of the pupils in their spontaneous manifestations.” (p. 54)
“…so that the children may be free to go and come s they like…” (54)
8121: Ball’s “Show not Tell” and Hocks’ “Visual Rhetoric”
C.E. Ball’s article argues (to traditionally-minded academics who consciously or unconsciously denigrate new media texts’ potential for “true” scholarship) that new media scholarship—that is, scholarship written as new media text, not necessarily about new media—deserves to be valued. She identifies a “gap” between what new media scholars say and what they do (409). In order to establish an ethos within the academic community, they publish (as Ball is doing, and she notes the irony) in print-privileging journals. She notes, too, that new media scholarship requires authors to “[cross] so many disciplinary and departmental boundaries, which makes it necessary for scholars to show colleagues across fields that one can work in new media (and not just write about it)” (407).