Group items tagged

Humanities/Teaching Practices and Principles Inefficiency Thinking and reflection from a humanities perspective is anything but efficient. It's not about the straightest path to a goal, it's about exploring the various twists and turns along the way. Tell all the Truth, but Tell it Slant / Success in Circuit Lies. Specs/schmecs In the humanities, we want to open up as many possibilities as we can. Explore. Take a random path and see what happens. Your final draft of an analysis will always be very different from what you first thought you were going to produce. Complexify When's the last time you heard a humanist say or write, "I'd like to simplify that idea."? It's just not what we do. We like to "complicate the idea", "explore the nuances", "unpack the implicit assumptions". "Complexify". Scope-creep One of the hardest things to explain to a student in the humanities is what, exactly, it takes to move from writing a B paper to writing an A paper. If you are bold and tenured, you might tell them that they need to give "a certain 'je ne se qua'", to which the most likely response is, "WTF?". I think that what we want is scope-creep. Go beyond what we've covered in class. Explore things that you think are suggested in the assignment, but aren't explicit in the assignment. Move beyond the specs, and power through sorting out the consequences of doing so. Scope-creep is the bread-and-butter of the humanities. Maybe of any pursuit in academia, for that matter?