Dive into the past and you will see this theme will emerge time and again: the purpose of studying history, philosophy, and poetry is to help us lead better lives and be better people. The humanities are an education for the soul.
Placed next to these paeans to education, the aims of the "Theology of Dostoevsky" course are crippling. Reading Dostoevsky will help students will learn how to "contextualize literature within its anthropological milieu." Dostoevsky will teach them to see "the unique interpretive problems inherent in studying creative genres" and discussing his works will help them "communicate more effectively, verbally and in writing, about theological literature." That is the purpose of reading a man regularly called the best novelist in human history! We read him to "meet academics standards for writing and notation!"
How painfully limited.
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Calcflow on Steam - 0 views
exercising judgment in teaching about controversial issues - scatterplot - 0 views
The Scholar's Stage: Teaching the Humanities as Terribly as Possible - 0 views
The Art of Unlearning - 0 views
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I see two main views of learning. The first is like stamp collecting. The person wants to collect more and more knowledge, mostly for the purposes of showing it off to people they want to impress. The knowledge here is largely inert and unimportant for their lives—it’s just a collecting hobby accruing more facts and ideas. There’s nothing wrong with stamp collecting. Knowing facts and ideas, even if they aren’t particularly useful or central to our lives, isn’t a bad thing. It’s probably a superior hobby to many other pursuits, since knowledge can, at least some of the time, spillover to more practical consequences. The other view of learning, however, is centered around unlearning. This is the view that what we think we know about the world is a veneer of sense-making atop a much deeper strangeness. The things we think we know, we often don’t. The ideas, philosophies and truths that guide our lives may be convenient approximations, but often the more accurate picture is a lot stranger and more interesting.
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A good meta-belief to this whole unlearning endeavor is to be comfortable with the idea that everything you know is provisional, and that underneath what you know is likely a more complex and stranger picture. Human beings seem to be naturally afraid of this groundless view of things. I’m not quite sure why that is. It may be that this kind of epistemic flexibility might start to question societal norms and rules of conduct, and so people who think too much about things may have an amoral character. That’s certainly the perspective of many traditional religious viewpoints on things, which discourages open-ended inquiry in favor of professing allegiance to dogma.
Home | Immersive Education Initiative - 0 views
Anthropologist studies why professors don't adopt innovative teaching methods - 0 views
NYU Tandon's VR App Debuts at SXSW, Aims to Make Blood Cells More Fun Than Bloodshed In... - 0 views
The Necessity of Looking Stupid | Just Visiting - 0 views
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I’ve found students to be very insightful when it comes to understanding and assessing their own learning and very forgiving of my “mistakes.” Just about 100% of what I now do in the classroom has been “authorized” by student feedback, not given through end-of-semester evaluations, but collaborative discussion. Ask students if something worked, and they will tell you. The best part of moving the professorial pedestal out of the room is that all of us get to be a little less fearful, and little more brave.
Tools for Scaffolding Students in a Complex Learning Environment: What Have We Gained a... - 0 views
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"This article discusses the change in the notion of scaffolding from a description of the interactions between a tutor and a student to the design of tools to support student learning in project-based and design-based classrooms. The notion of scaffolding is now increasingly being used to describe various forms of support provided by software tools, curricula, and other resources designed to help students learn successfully in a classroom. However, some of the critical elements of scaffolding are missing in the current use of the scaffolding construct. Although new curricula and software tools now described as scaffolds have provided us with novel techniques to support student learning, the important theoretical features of scaffolding such as ongoing diagnosis, calibrated support, and fading are being neglected. This article discusses how to implement these critical features of scaffolding in tools, resources, and curricula. It is suggested that if tools are designed based on the multiple levels of the student understanding found in a classroom, tools themselves might be removed to achieve fading."
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