A few weeks back on Palimpsest, while gearing up for the start of a new semester, George asked the following:
When you've assigned 2 or 3 articles of secondary reading for one class meeting, how do you provoke, manage, promote, (what-have-you) class discussion?
I struggle with George's question every semester, and too often, rather than confront the awkward silences of a discussion that never really gets off the ground, I simply change horses in mid stream and launch into lecture mode.
The question, though, reminded me of a handout I created for my undergraduates five or six years ago. I went in search of it today and found it buried in an old teaching file on my desktop. The premise behind the handout is this: that the ability to participate effectively in class isn't hardwired into our genetic code but is instead a specialized skill that must be taught and learned, just like literacy.
Feel free to adopt and modify the following for your own purposes. Among other things, the language needs to be updated for the digital age (all the references to hardcopy sound a little anachronistic to me now that I assign more and more softcopy . . .)
Art of Participation
If only we could all read (or even skim) a text once and then wax eloquent on it during class discussion. While a fortunate few possess this skill, most of us don’t. No need to despair, though, for you too can sound brilliant in the classroom. The trick is to cultivate the rarefied art of Sprezzatura: "well-practiced naturalness" or "rehearsed spontaneity," a trait possessed by the most gifted conversationists, debaters, politicians, intellectuals, teachers, socialites, and others whose business is serious discourse (scroll for a good definition). Here are some tips:
1. When preparing for class, first read your assigned text once, commenting in the margins as you go along. This is a highly idiosyncratic process. Your jottings are personal—don’t fret because others can’t decode them.
2. Selectively review your text, returning to those passages you found most significant, compelling, and interesting. Familiarize yourself with the style and language of these excerpts. Here’s an idea: memorize a favorite line or passage. The idea is to really interact with the piece, lingering over details and technique.
3. Use your dictionary to look up unfamiliar words.
4. Here is the challenging part: Start to make connections among the different passages you review. Actively seek out patterns: of thought, tone, language, intention, imagery. Build your own system of cross-references in the margins of your text to help you reaccess (during class discussion or when writing a paper) those interconnections.
5. While identifying patterns is incredibly important, don’t be afraid to address contradictions. A willingness to grapple with inconsistencies is the sign of a sophisticated mind. Mark those places in your text that seem to belie other passages. How can you account for these contradictions?
6. Don’t hesitate to bring in outside knowledge when it is relevant: Does a particular word, phrase, sentence, passage, or chapter in the text under consideration remind you of another text (or movie or painting or piece of music) you have encountered elsewhere? Consult that other text (movie, etc.). If you have time, take a few notes on it, and then give some thought to how you might relate it to the class reading.
7. (The most difficult part of all): Be a prophet! Anticipate (in advance of discussion) others’ responses to, concerns about, and interests in the text at hand. Consider how you might intersect with their comments in class. The ability to follow up on a peer’s (or teacher’s) response substantially contributes to the quality of classroom time.
8. Finally, learn to support general assertions with textual evidence. Direct the rest of us to a particular passage in the text that illustrates your point (use your marginal annotations to help guide you in this pursuit).
The title of a short SF story by Spider Robinson, which I've included on my AVT 600: Research Methodologies syllabus. It's set in a future society with no public domain to speak of, the dire consequence of which is artistic sterility. Musicians, in particular, are hamstrung by the fact that most of the finite (extremely large, but still finite) number of possible melodic permutations are already spoken for. Computers are pressed into service to search for the few remaining non-proprietary strings. It's a sobering premise, almost Borgesian at times in its treatment, and one that beautifully conveys the aridity of a world with no creative commons.
I'm adjuncting again for the Art and Visual Technology department at George Mason University. Last Spring I taught Writing for Artists; this time around it's a graduate-level research methodologies course. Course description below the fold.
What is research? Conceived in narrow terms, it is secondary rather than primary, derivative and scholarly rather than original and creative, verbal rather than visual in its material outcomes. One of the goals of this course is to stand such conventional wisdom on its head. A more expansive definition of research collapses many of the traditionally held distinctions between scholarship and creativity. At its best, scholarship--like artistic creation--contributes new knowledge, truth, and even beauty (and is in this sense primary); while artistic creation--like scholarship--extends, revises, and reinterprets the cultural record (and is in this sense derivative, in the most positive sense of the word). The legal, cultural, and technological conditions that must prevail for this kind of artistic paradigm to thrive are--not coincidentally--broadly compatible with those that make art history possible: reproduction, preservation, and access—cornerstones of museum and library science—demand institutional structures that strike a balance between open source and closed source; between the rights of creators and the rights of users—themselves potential creators in a dynamic feedback loop. An important theme of the course will be intellectual property law and the ways in which it supports or obstructs these fundamental artistic and curatorial values. Other topics will include metadata, standards, and documentation; the creation of durable electronic art; the artist as preservationist; the use of visual evidence; the role of technology in transforming art history; image search and retrieval systems; and science and art research.
Throughout the semester, class readings and discussion will underscore a paradox of research in the visual arts: much of what we know about images has historically been channeled through words. Whether it is a picture that has descended to us in verse or a catalogue raisonne that describes the objects it inventories or a digital image retrieved through controlled vocabularies, the lesson of art history is that language plays a pivotal role in the transmission of pictorial information.
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Full syllabus available here. There's also a course blog--still an unstrung harp, but that will change soon.
If you've checked in with Accidentals and Substantives in the last month or so, you'll know that I've been doing some redecorating around here. I've re-designed the site with 12" monitors in mind to complement my shiny new Powerbook. Every time the new banner image loads in my browser window, though, my eyes fixate on that little sliver of background color at the far right of the screen that the final thumbnail fails to cover. I've considered posting a prominent "Mind the Gap" sign so that visitors don't fall through the crack. I wish I'd been more precise calculating the size of the image layers from the outset, but numbers aren't my strong suit. As a stopgap (ahem) measure, I might try selecting a color in the thumbnail to extend the image outwards a hair, but my concern is that by correcting for notebook monitors I'll be making things worse for desktop monitors. I don't want to fuss too much more with this. Any suggestions or tricks of the trade?