A&HH6577-08/Overview

From Studyplace

Please Note — During the 2008 Autumn semester, A&HH6577: The City as Educator is meeting as a planning group to design and develop a 4000-level course on the city as educator to be offered for the first time in the Spring 2009 semester. The planning group will begin with the partial draft syllabus that follows and work to revise and complete it. We will work to select and test out interesting readings, frame and sharpen topics to be covered in the weekly sessions of the course, and to plan projects that participants in the course can pursue outside and in class meetings. The box to the right has links to the draft topics for the Spring course (left column) and to an evolving agenda for working group this Fall (right column).

[edit] Initial Draft Description of the Spring course

Most children grow up in cities and most teachers work in urban schools, yet educational convention holds cities to be corrupting and urban schools to be bad.  Thus, all-too-often education in cities starts out with a tragic sense of pedagogy – self-doubting and demoralized.  Can this received wisdom change?  Participants in The City as Educator will study how the city has developed in the modern era as a nexus of formative influence and opportunity.  Positive for some, negative for others, the city has been the place through which countless persons have shaped their determinate lives.  What aspects of city life help and what ones hinder, how and why?  Through The City as Educator, participants will use historical, literary, sociological, and architectural resources to explore formative interactions in urban settings which nurture and limit persons as they seek to realize their human potentials.

We can best understand cities as complex places, as distinct from bounded areas.  We will start The City as Educator by reflecting on this distinction between area and place and noting some of its implications for the study of education.  We will consider cities to be places where the organization of interaction has two important features –

• First, the city affords people a high level of random access, making all the possibilities located there directly available to everyone according to their choice, and
• Second, the city offers each person opportunities for many more types of interaction than any individual can fully engage in.
  

Consequently, cities are places where persons must choose what they will and will not do, when, where, why, and how, for the first feature empowers choice and the second forces it.  In urban environments, the fullness of a person's education, the person's self-formation, unfolds as his or her choices build up into cumulative effects through which the person acquires distinctive character and capacity.  We study “cities as educators” by observing what resources urban life provides for making such choices and by interpreting how the resulting patterns of choice support and limit the life experience of those who engage in them.

During class meetings through the semester we will discuss a variety of urban places and events at which formative interactions take place, for better and for worse.  We will have a brief background reading for each of these discussions and a short introductory presentation opening things up.  Discussion topics will concentrate on forms and sites of random access that have developed historically as characteristic of urban interaction, making formative choices possible and diversifying the range of their possibility.  Barring mid-course corrections, these discussion topics will include how urban experience emerges by memorializing names and deeds in specific places and how a series of urban occasions – funerals and games; drama and festivals; courts and juries; rituals and pilgrimages; markets and fairs; salons, clubs, and pubs; contagions and crimes; factories and stores; stations, ports, and stops; parks and gardens; museums and libraries; schools and universities – define opportunities for chosen educative interaction.

A wealth of literature about cities and urban life exists — novels and autobiographies, histories of notable cities, and numerous studies in urban theory.  The link to bibliographic references in the navigator bar to the right leads to initial lists, illustrative of these urban literatures.  The City as Educator aims in part to winnow some of these materials by assessing how well a particular work illuminates the formative power, for good and ill, of urban experience.  Towards this end, participants wanting academic credit for the course should post to The City as Educator site two short, reflective essays, concisely evaluating how well or poorly a chosen work from each list enables a reader to better understand the educative influence arising as people interact in urban places.  These critiques will be due October 28th and December 9th. For more information on grading policies, see below.