Talk:MSTU5606-MSTU5607
From Studyplace
We expect active class participation by each
The misplaced emphasis on career training and the isolation of the professions have produced a pair of effects which every teacher has seen in class. The first effect emerges in the students who dare not make any statement at all on a given subject because they are not exerts on it. Such people are the destined victims of false experts. The second effect emerges in those students who believe that anything they say sincerely is true. Much modern school teaching encourages this belief out of a fear of discouraging the free flow of creativity. These two forms of mindlessness reflect one another. [1]
During class sessions, we converse about the readings, formulating observations, questions, and connections through informed, exploratory exchanges. Let us aim neither to state authoritatively what a text says or means, nor to blurt forth the degree to which we like or agree with what it seems to say. Let us raise thought-provoking questions about it; let us seek clarification of difficult concepts and arguments; and let us explore possible connections between the ideas we find in the text and matters of concern in our own realms of experience. Ignorance is an uncertain awareness, a boundary layer between the realm of familiar acquaintance, belief, understanding, and know-how, within which each lives, and the insensible unknown all around us, to which we are simply oblivious: we read and converse to push against this boundary, extending the limits of our ignorance, expanding the realm of sensibility within which we live. Robbie McClintock 09:17, 5 May 2007 (EDT)
WikiWork Pages and les pensées d'escalier
Salon discussions in eighteenth-century Parisian society took place in a large room, usually on what we would call the second floor. Participants, who would come and go, would leave by going down the stairs, and naturally they would often have that brilliant thought that would have settled the discussion decidedly to their advantage while walking down those stairs, chagrined that someone else had shown them up. This second thought became known as a pensée d'escalier, a stairway thought. A wiki-based discussion, whatever it may lack in food, drink, and other creaturely amenities common in Enlightenment salons, offers a way to register a pensée d'escalier far better than turning around and charging back into the salon to interject the thought to startled guests. So, following our class discussion, we do not need to leave fallow WikiWork pages like Emile Durkheim (1858-1917) or Ferdinand Tönnies (1855-1936), etc., and the Talk pages for each of these. They stand open for further contributions — your pensée d'escalier — or even — something a French philosophe might have relished — the ex post facto editing of what you have said. Go to it! Robbie McClintock 17:45, 20 September 2006 (EDT)
A standing call for potential readings
Broadly speaking the list of our readings represents a selection of modernist social thinkers in the West whose work spans roughly the 100 years from 1875 to 1975. The selection of writers does not represent a canon; we will change it some from year to year. Currently it is heavily skewed towards male writers born in Western Europe or North America. We are not interested in balance for the sake of balance. We are interested in a broad selection of thinkers who sought in their work to be radical, in the sense of going to the root of things, perhaps, more often than not, radical like another root, a radish, with a sharp tang and a red skin. We have thought aloud about adding more women writers — Rosa Luxembourg, Simone Weil, Simone de Beauvoir, Ruth Benedict, and Margaret Mead are on a shortlist for possible inclusion and a broader articulation of the pros and cons would be helpful. Hence, as we go along, suggestions about additions and subtractions would be interesting and helpful. Important questions in these considerations are who to add, what text to use, and who to drop, and what would the net gain and loss be in doing so.
Let's try to situate this discussion on this Talk Page (Talk:MSTU5606-MSTU5607) with a series of headings like "Drop Durkheim" or "Add Luxemburg", which can become a running discussion throughout the year (and beyond, for that matter). Let's distinguish that discussion from another potentially important one that might center on the selection of texts to read by a particular writer currently on our list, assuming that writer will not be dropped. For each, the "discussion reading" is a small part of a large and complex corpus. Is it the right part? For instance, the front matter and Book One of Tönnies' Community and Civil Society might have been a better selection for him that Books Two and Three. Let's put discussions of that sort on the Talk Page for the selection of readings, in this case Talk:Tonnies Discussion. Most of the time, you will have read only the "discussion reading" and therefore you will not have a considered opinion of what reading would have been better, but you might have a very helpful opinion about why the reading we did was not very helpful in coming to grips with the work of the person in question. And you may have some idea of what sort of alternative reading would have been helpful, and youmay have encountered reference to alternative texts that you think might have been better. If so, raise the possibility. It will help inform, and complicate, the choice of "discussion reading." Robbie McClintock 17:09, 20 September 2006 (EDT)
Study Group
Hi everyone,
Is anyone interested in starting a study group to go over the readings? A few people have expressed interest and said that the study group could meet on Monday or Tuesday night. Does this day/time work for other people?
I was thinking that we could meet in the CCTE Dept (322 Thompson in TC) at the table in the back of the department or I could speak with the department secretary about scheduling the conference room.
Please let me know if you are interested and which night/time is best for you. I was thinking we could switch the days around to accommodate the different schedules that people have.
Regards, Brian
- I'm not sure if this is the right place for the above "study group" comment. I'm moving out of the discussion tips template -- feel free to remove it if it doesn't seem right.
- Matt 17:28, 24 September 2006 (EDT)
Add Marx
Taking up Robbie's invitation, I would like to suggest that Marx is added to future versions of the course. If I have to suggest who he should replace, from the people I am or have recently become acquianted with, I would suggest Tonnies. There are several reasons I think Marx should be on the list.
1) History - he is the more or less explicit protagonist (and inspiration!) of many of the authors on the list, so he is an important part of the intellectual development we are tracing,
2) Contemporary relevance - many people seem to think he is, in contradistinction to some of the people on the list (Tonnies, etc), making an intellectual come-back today (see for instance Tony Judd's article in a recent issue of the New York Review of Books, but think also, of modified versions found in the influential work of Slavoj Zizek and Antonio Negri)
3) Substance - he makes a number of very important, and often incredibly problematic, points, and both the points AND the problems should be brought to light. As the course is laid out today, I will often feel like bringing Marx or his inheritors to bear to expose weaknesses in the material assigned, but this often obfuscate that the Marxist points are often equally problematic, if in different ways.
Let me know what you think. It would be especially interesting to hear why he is not already there, given the names on the first half of this term of the course, his absence seems very visible to someone like me, which on the one hand makes the absence make good sense - his arguments could be well-known from other courses - but also sometimes makes me wonder whether this is generally the case, is Marx so widely read today? I do not know.
Portal & Course Overview Columns
I'm not sure if the following problem is due to my computer or not, but I cannot see the right hand navigation bar for this course. When I leave my pointer over where the navigation bar used to appear, I still see the link along the base of the window. I got to the course through the StudyPlace Plone link in the left hand navigation box - if this problem is not due simply to an error with my machine, could this route to the course site be responsible for the missing navigation bar?. Eric Strome 18:39, 4 December 2006 (EST)
Except where