Studio Syllabus

From Studyplace

[edit] Syllabus Projects

Here are a few starter projects — add and develop more.

• Time, History, and Human Self-Formation: AKA A&HH4078

How have changes in the technologies and understanding of time interacted with n emerging sense of historicity, contingency, and formative possibility in Western experience?

• The Pedagogical Problem: AKA A&HH6577

What have been the key problems that observers have thought it imperative the people develop the capacity, individually and collectively, to cope with through their overall educational formation?

• Social Thought in a Time of Transition: AKA MSTU5606

What have been the major attempts to make sense of the deep socio-historical transformations since the mid 19th century and what should thoughtful educators learn from those efforts?

• and many more. . . .

[edit] Thoughts on the Concept of a Syllabus

As consumerism has encrusted higher education, a course syllabus has changed character significantly. Fundamentally, a syllabus is a listing, originally oriented to the substantive material to which a course pertained. It listed the materials someone who was going to master the subject at hand would need to deal with and provided a schedule for addressing those materials. Increasingly, the course syllabus has taken its point of reference to be the course as such, not the subject to which the course pertains. Thus it has become a descriptive listing of what the student needs to do in order to succeed in the course, i.e., get a good grade, a transformation lucidly commended in "Writing a Syllabus" by Howard B. Altman and William E. Cashin. This change in the character of a course syllabus has accentuated the boundedness of courses as they currently exist in higher education. Additionally, and most perniciously, this change tacitly nurtures extreme passivity in the student — here precisely are the hoops through which you must jump in order to move on to the next set of requirements, the sum of which constitute your education.

Within a studio, the character and function of a syllabus should be very different from what it has become in the well-constructed course. Whereas achievement in a course as come to pertain to the course itself, not to the subject dealt with in it, achievement in a studio pertains to the techne, the skill and art, for the practice of which the studio exists. The agenda, not the syllabus, charts a program of occasions for exercising and developing the skills of the craft. In this case, the skills of the craft are those requisite for building and strengthening the historical and philosophical foundations of education. Participating in the agenda means engaging, not in a delimited set of graded exercises, but in an ongoing process of Nietzschean self-overcoming within the sphere of life work that people engage in through the studio.

Participants in a studio engage in the craft, and the state of the art is the intrinsic measure of excellence operative within it. One does not grade performances within it according to a derivative standard normed to the material at hand; rather critics judge and analyze performances according to their full mastery and understanding of the art — developing and strengthening the historical and philosophical foundations of education &mash; as the activity in which participants in our studio engage, the function of the syllabus takes on two meanings, one relative to the craft and another relative to each craftsperson. The syllabus of the craft lists the resources that define the state-of-the-art — the tools, standards, skills, works, groups, projects, meetings, questions, problems, and so on that people advancing the historical and philosophical foundations of education exercise and address in their work. The syllabus of the craftsperson lists more limited resources that the craftsperson needs to concentrate on in the working present in order to advance the state of his or her art. The craftsperson's syllabus will have general components, building up important skills characteristic of the art, and particular components, projecting plans of work for practicing the art.

Within a studio, a syllabus will be like a bibliography, but different in a subtle, yet significant way. A bibliography lists works cited in a completed study; a syllabus will list works relevant in the process of study. Whether personal or general, the syllabus pertains to the process of work, the bibliography to the results, the outcome of the process. The two overlap, of course, but much essential to the syllabus, to the process of work, may not have an appropriate place in the bibliography, in the outcome, and much rightly included in the bibliography may have been incidental to the syllabus. In our current work, namely in the recursive self-creation of a studio for the historical and philosophical foundations of education, we should develop a general syllabus and test its scope and value relative to a personal syllabus each of us sets for our personal academic and professional priorities. We are in the habit of thinking of a syllabus as something there and fixed at the outset, however. That is not the case in a studio, especially in one charged with the task of creating itself. Neither the general nor the personal syllabus are at hand at the beginning, but rather they should be part of the process, resources that we continuously develop as we proceed into the studio. Relative to an art, collective and personal, a syllabus is continually changing to reflect the changing state-of-the-art.

To complicate things bit further, between the syllabus of the craft and that of the craftsman, there may be intermediate syllabuses associated with the doorways for registration credit that the College registrar recognizes as the formal instantiation of the studio — A&HH4078, A&HH6577, MSTU5606, and various independent study numbers. We want to be careful here so that we do not fall back into course activities, for we have been deeply condition to expecting and performing them through unconscious habit. We can, however, in the spirit of a studio, work on developing syllabuses describing important concerns within the historical and philosophical foundations of education that may serve as parts of the whole craft while occupying the work of many craftspersons. The upshot: ongoing construction of syllabuses develops one syllabus involving all of us, several involving some of us, and still more involving each of us.