• Robbie McClintock, Instructor
  • Office hours @ 2nd floor, Gottesman Library
    Thursdays 4:00 to 6:00 pm and by appointment
    
• Frank Moretti, Instructor
  • Office hours @ 603 Lewisohn Hall, by appointment
    (Call Teresa Gonzales, 212 854 1962, or email her teresa@columbia.edu)

Please note:

     This syllabus continuously undergoes revisions, substantive and cosmetic.  The Fall semester is complete, excepting minor additional tweaks.  The Spring semester changes will be completed in the near future.  In the meantime, the syllabus for 2008/2009 will indicate the sorts of readings we will be discussing during the second half of the course.

     Readings in Communication theory and social thought is a year-long historical engagement with 20th-century thinking about communication and social life and its import for education.  Each week, we will sample the work of a key 20th-century social thinker and discuss his or her understanding of education, communication, and culture.  We call it "Readings in . . ." because each week course participants will engage a different, open-ended corpus of challenging reflection and theory.  Participants should prepare through readings, at once extensive but limited, to discuss, as peers of the authors and instructors, the value and significance of the full body of thought in question.  Hence, our readings are soundings into extensive material that is rich in substance, and engagement with it can be a powerful formative experience. 

     To your right, the Schedule of Meetings links to pages about the readings and discussion materials for each week.  In addition to substantial preparation for class discussions, participants should expect to contribute regularly to the course wiki, which we regard as an extension of the classroom discussion forum.  We will explain how all this works in the first class, Wednesday, September 2nd.  For each week, we list various types of readings — Context  •  Context/Text  •  Text  •  AfterText  •  Supplementary  •  General Background.  The essential reading for each week is the Text.  You should regularly try to prepare that with some care.  The Context, and its variant Context/Text should prove useful in providing context that helps make sense of the main Text — make as much use of it as you can given the constraints on your time.  Likewise, the AfterText should help in developing a sense of the interrelationships between the figures we are reading.  General Background may at times, especially early in the course, serve as a review or overall orientation — again, use it as suits your needs, interests, and constraints.  And finally, Supplementary materials simply point towards the infinite regress of further study that a commitment to an examined life draws one into.  Whether that is a direction for you — 'Go West, young man!' — is a matter for you to decide.

Preliminary reflections on the course and our readings.

     Life throws us into an encompassing communicative ethos.  Teachers, academics, artists, journalists, bloggers, public leaders, intellectuals, family and friends — all of us, educators all — aggregate our activities into a formative ethos, which feeds back upon our efforts, powerfully conditioning them.  This formative ethos, itself massively moving, ever interacting with emergent events, filled with cross-currents and eddies, works on each person in unique, determinate ways, setting limits on our potentialities, defining a complex ecology of feasible actions.  As participants in this formative ethos, we struggle to build up our capacity to understand and anticipate the changing character of it; we seek to grasp how it affects historical action, personal and public; we hope perhaps even to shape it by an increment towards what we deem to be the better, or away from what we fear to be the worst. 

     As participants in the formative ethos, we seek to anticipate what knowledge, skills, and values will prove to be of most worth, both for us and others, as the influence of events, foreseen and unforeseen, reverberates through the formative ethos of our time.  We can strengthen our capacity for such anticipation by generating theories about communication and by thinking about the social character of our circumstances.  We can develop our capacities to understand our selves in interaction with our circumstances by attending to the efforts our predecessors made to diagnose the challenge of self-determination within the encompassing formative ethos that they faced.  In this course, we study examples of such efforts in twentieth-century Western experience. 

     A basic question drives our inquiry.  How does education — understood as an historical component of all human experience, salient in the lives of every person and in the fate of every group — shape human interaction and condition the quality of life?  This basic question poses the great pedagogical problem, which is prior to all professional educative efforts.  To come to grips with it, we need to look, not at the norms and actualities of formal education, but at efforts to explain and interpret the ways in which humans give themselves determinate character and capacities in the course of their historical interactions.  20th-century communication theory and social thought is a rich arena for such inquiry and we can strengthen our capacities for it by contending with the ideas about communication and social action developed by leading thinkers since the late 19th century. 

     We should approach our readings as the work of peers, thinking.  In doing so, we will find them engaged primarily in concept formation, — Begriffsbildung in German, the fashioning of ideas with which to grasp the structure and meaning of human experience.  Concepts, formed to shape understanding and to define value, become formative in their turn, allowing people to try to draw new potentialities from the flux of their experience.  In reading through our agenda of weekly works, we have the task of developing a clear and thoughtful inventory of the key concepts each writer worked to form as he or she struggled to understand complex, ever-changing circumstances.  As a tangible outcome of our work, we should develop conceptual glossaries for each writer that we read as collaborative contributions about each on StudyPlace.

     Each week, we will concentrate on the work of a distinctive thinker, one who merits sustained, close reading.  That is something we can only approximate, trying to do the best we can under serious constraints — too many distractions, too little time, insufficient background.  The course is open to anyone interested in its agenda of inquiry, regardless of prior background or professional intent.  We do not put prerequisites on it and we seek participants from diverse specializations, but we do caution that engagement in the course requires committing substantial effort to it week by week.  For each week, we will have both a contextual and a textual reading.  The former gives useful background to draw on in interpreting the latter, the key resource with which we aim to come to grips.  In class meetings, we should seek primarily to engage through conversation directly with the text in question, seeking to ground what we have to say by reference to particular words and passages in the text we have in common.  The text, our textual reading, not the contextual, needs to provide the criteria for the quality of our understanding, the recognition that after puzzlement indeed the text makes sense to us.

     Participants should not take as the prime objective absorbing a body of established knowledge about some historical synthesis of social thought in the 20th century.  We aim to engage in communication theory and social thought, not simply to know about it.  An appreciation of common themes and concerns should emerge, unique for each participant, but we should not try to read each text as an example of some given context, ticking off which themes and concerns in the context the work reflected, as if the purpose animating it had merely been to illustrate some pre-existent givens.  The contextual readings will have value, not as authoritative summaries of what we should think, but as resources that we can draw on in developing our own understandings of the primary texts in question.  We strengthen our capacities to construe the context of our lives by seeking to appreciate through the close reading of substantial works how prior authors construed the contexts of their lives. 

     In addition, we should not presume that our selection of texts merits attention because it forms an authoritative canon, an optimal foundation for sound theorizing about communications and society in the present.  We select thinkers whose work achieved a challenging intellectual richness, forming concepts that were both deep and broad in relevance to historical experience.  The texts on our list offer us much grist for thought without burdening them with the claim that they are exhaustive or representative.  Proving such claims detracts from the real work of theory and thought.  Instead, we advance that work by building our own capacity to form powerful concepts, to engage in Begriffsbildung, by exercising our capacity to engage such work by others.  We simply want to ask what sort of conceptual resources we find in each text, taking it as an autonomous work that we seek to experience in its integrity, as best we can under the constraints.  We, merely human, need to contend with the work as peers of it, for it is the fruit of the merely human.  What can we learn from the work?  What can we do with the concepts formed in it and conveys through it?  Do these help us make sense of our experience of our world?  What do we find surprising in them?  Disturbing?  Confusing?  Inspiring? 

     As the texts we read are not authoritative, our reading of them must be tentative and initial.  One week permits an encounter all-too-brief.  But there is value to pursuing a breadth of reflective experience.  An expansive intellect samples many works and much experience, returning recurrently with sustained attention to a chosen few of them.  Those constitute a working canon for each of us, deriving its authority from each of us for each of us.  Here we should work more quickly, seriously sampling possibilities.  For what purpose would I include this work and others by this writer among those to which I think in future I might return?  Of what potentials in my own educational and intellectual options do I find this work exemplary?  What cautionary tales may it offer?  To what degree does the work and the concepts it offers support my interior discourse about the meaning of my world and my potential for action within it?  All these are among the many questions before us.

Here are some College-wide course notices.

Teachers College students have the responsibility for activating the Columbia University Network ID (UNI), which includes a free Columbia email account. As official communications from the College – e.g., information on graduation, announcements of closing due to severe storm, flu epidemic, transportation disruption, etc. -- will be sent to the student’s Columbia email account, students are responsible for either reading email there, or, for utilizing the mail forwarding option to forward mail from their Columbia account to an email address which they will monitor.

The grade of Incomplete is to be assigned only when the course attendance requirement has been met but, for reasons satisfactory to the instructor, the granting of a final grade has been postponed because certain course assignments are outstanding.  If the outstanding assignments are completed within one calendar year from the date of the close of term in which the grade of Incomplete was received and a final grade submitted, the final grade will be recorded on the permanent transcript, replacing the grade of Incomplete, with a transcript notation indicating the date that the grade of Incomplete was replaced by a final grade.

If the outstanding work is not completed within one calendar year from the date of the close of term in which the grade of Incomplete was received, the grade will remain as a permanent Incomplete on the transcript.  In such instances, if the course is a required course or part of an approved program of study, students will be required to re-enroll in the course including repayment of all tuition and fee charges for the new registration and satisfactorily complete all course requirements.  If the required course is not offered in subsequent terms, the student should speak with the faculty advisor or Program Coordinator about their options for fulfilling the degree requirement.  Doctoral students with six or more credits with grades of Incomplete included on their program of study will not be allowed to sit for the certification exam.

The College will make reasonable accommodations for persons with documented disabilities. Students are encouraged to contact the office of Access and Services for Individuals with Disabilities for information about registration (166 Thorndike Hall). Services are available only to students who are registered and submit appropriate documentation.