[lit-ideas] Re: Potlach etc.


On Sep 28, 2007, at 3:43 PM, Robert Paul wrote:
My seminars now take the form of an archeological dig. I stake out some territory and explain why I think it's worth digging here.
This is a nice trope. I wonder if the dig is helped or hindered by something like a six degrees of separation relevance rule, whereby from any starting place (Isadora Duncan's work) one can in not that many jumps arrive at (here, via scarves) the Oxford-Cambridge boat race.
I believe that the students' fundamental task is to find enlightening patterns in information, to perform a sophisticated version of Big Bird's game--three of these things belong together; one of them doesn't belong. I don't really care if, two years after finishing my course in Scottish history, a student can't recall the date of the Covenant. When checking facts is so easy, why would retaining facts be thought a valuable goal? What I want is for students to learn some things about how historians tackle primary and secondary sources, come up with interpretive patterns, test them in discussion. So if it turns out that I have staked out x ground and a student wants to go to location x plus scarf, we'll talk. If x plus scarf is too far away for us to be able to judge what he or she is doing, I'll steer him or her back; if it's not, then go for it. Last semester was the first time I've ever had students trying to pass off work done in one class for research undertaken in mine. Since they have to report week by week on progress, "try" was the operative term. 


We all read some things together to develop
something of a common vocabulary. And then we dig, which is to say that students follow their own curiosity into the reading list, or propose alternatives, and then report back to the group on what they find. Thus we all learn. At the end of the semester the question is, "What did you learn?"
I wonder if that's quite the right question, if the answer is phrased in terms of learning that so-and-so, as if the model were learning Boyle's Law.
I was too terse. The meaning of "what did you learn?" should be clear from the syllabus, at the outset: What interpretive patterns fit the information you considered? Which among them seem stronger than the others? Why?
PNCA's president is currently pressing me to develop a proposal for a bachelors degree based on this model of teaching. I'll do so, but it will take some reflection. I think it works very well with upper division students who know that education is expensive and who want to make the most of their experience. That's who I teach currently. I'll propose something a little different for freshpersons. 

Class size matters, I think.
We have an upper limit of 18 in any liberal arts class. The only people who lecture are the art historians, in their survey course. Everything else is a seminar. 

Thank you for your thoughtful response.

David Ritchie,
Portland, Oregon
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