User:RobbieMcClintock/Notes
From Studyplace
Contents |
[edit] A Personal Syllabus
Nietzsche once observed that educational institutions reveal their stupidity in expecting a professor to be profound every week at an appointed time and place. Serious thought does not lend itself to scheduled regularity. I agree and have never been a good student in the sense of dutifully fulfilling assignments. As a student I am happiest and most productive following my interests, pursuing what I perceive to be significant connections as one thing leads to another.
Two things have long deeply bothered me as a professor. The first: I rankle at having to state a long time ahead of time what I am going to teach. It is all premised on the expectation that all we do is dribble out a fixed quantum of information about this or that, scoped out years ago, one grain after another as if our minds are the narrow waist of an hourglass, passing the sands of wisdom exactly at the pace of the credit-hour. I want what I think to inform what I profess, and I do not know now what I will be thinking a year hence. The second: the credit-hour is a procrustean bed that makes it impossible for professors and students to do justice to really important works within the formal curriculum. Great works are great because they repay extended, thorough, uncompromising study, but who can now test that power? Who in academe can take on the truly difficult and pursue it to the limits of their endurance and ability? With everything scaled to a few short hours of weekly work, earnest minds do small things thoroughly and the glib confect from ignorance obscurities devoid of depth.
A place for study is a place to push inquiry to the limit, to follow out the unexpected connection, to tackle questions one cannot answer.
[edit] Recent talks
[edit] A Writing Life: A Discussion, April 25, 2007
[edit] Disclosing the Commons, a talk December 5, 2006 at the TC EdLab
[edit] Recent publications
- Homeless in the House of Intellect: Formative Justice and Education as an Academic Study (New York: Laboratory for Liberal Learning, 2005).
- "Educational Research." Teachers College Record. Online.
[edit] My aspirations for StudyPlace
I am an intellectual historian who has dabbled a lot with digital technologies over the past 30 years. My area of academic specialization (if I must confess to one) concerns the relations between educational theory and political theory, primarily in the 20th century, but really throughout the Western tradtion from Homer and the Pre-Socratics on. I have studied Rousseau, Kant, and Hegel in recurrent periods of intense engagement.
I like writing essays. Among them, I wrote "Toward a Place for Study in a World of Instruction" early in my career. It explains convictions that are still central to my work. "Study" derives from Latin, studium — "zeal, eagerness, application, enthusiasm; devotion to, goodwill towards a person or cause; application to learning, study." Study, the student's enthusiasm to develop and extend herself, should be a powerful activating force in efforts to educate, but the dominant understanding of "education," a synonym for depersonalized schooling, pays little heed to study and relies far too much on teaching as the sole causal agent in the process. Through StudyPlace, I hope again to give study its due.
As a student, a life-long student, I am devoted to understanding and advancing what it is that educates. I have spent my career at Columbia University and Teachers College as graduate student and faculty member, yet I still feel, perhaps proudly, as an outsider in both, too much the academic for Teachers College and too much the educationist for Columbia. I think we mean well at TC, as at other schools of education, but as educators we are too easily satisfied when mediocrity combines with good intentions, and as researchers we too often cultivate method without substance, cloaking well-worn principles of practice in evidence that seems new because all that came before it has been forgotten. I started my career believing that educators had to answer 1950s critics like Arthur Bestor and Hyram Rickover by making pedagogical practice far more insightful and intelligent and by achieving a broader vision and more exacting standards in educational scholarship. Forty-five years later the situation has become much worse.
I want to stop talking about education and start talking more about educating. Talk about education is really talk about schooling, about filling passive pupils, through the causal action of teachers and other educational resources, with information and skills that their elders deem good for them. Schooling may or may not educate; all-too-often it fails miserably, and when it succeeds and when it fails, it does so for reasons that inhere in the concrete and complex interactions among numerous specific persons. All parties to those interactions — pupils and students, teachers and parents, professionals and the public — all need a fuller, subtle, and confident understanding of what educates and what does not. StudyPlace, as a global pedagogical commons, exists to help all people, fully and freely, to inform their comprehension of what educates, to improve their ability to educate themselves through passionate study, and to help others engaged in educating themselves to do so with greater effect and value.
[edit] Explorations
[edit] The Digital Commons
- "Thinking is common to all" Heraclitus (B113)
The digital commons is becoming a powerful emergent phenomenon. On it see the page on social software.
The more traditional concept of a tangible commons is being rediscovered, presaged by Polanyi and currently explored by various economists as they become increasingly alert to the problem of externalities in market theory. Ecological problems and ideas lead considerations back to the recognition that we live in a common space, not a prvate domain.
- Karl Polanyi. The Great Transformation: The Political and Economic Origins of Our Time.
- Peter Evans. Embedded Autonomy: States and Industrial Transformation.
- J. Rogers Hollingsworth & Robert Boyer, eds. Contemporary Capitalism: The Embeddedness of Institutions.
- Jane Jacobs. The Life and Death of Great American Cities. (The genius of Jacobs' work is to use the concept of a commons in matters that others interpret through the concept of the market or the state.)
- E. P. Thompson. Customs in Common: Studies in Traditional Popular Culture. (There is a powerful set of connections latent in political and cultural history that bear development, reaching back through the sense of the commons to civic republicanism and into early modern and ancient history.)
- Eric Nelson. The Greek Tradition in Republican Thought. (Is this relevant to the idea of the commons? What is the political theory of the commonwealth?)
[edit] Authorship
How is the activity of authoring be changing in a world in which the digital commons becomes more important? How has the activity of authoring, of writing, of speaking, of communicating, changed with changes in the means of intellectual production? Obviously changes in these means will change the activity of working with them, but not that much attention has been paid to these changes as one might expect. The center of recent attention has been more on the changes in the dissemination of what gets created, not on changes in how the creation process works and what results from it. Or is this an appearance arising from what I have previously chosen to read and study? Resources:
- Henri-Jean Martin. The History and Power of Writing.
- Sean Burke, ed. Authorship: From Plato to the Postmodern, A Reader.
- Mario Biagioli & Peter Galison, eds. Scientific Authorship: Credit and Intellectual Property in Science.
- A. S. Collins. Authorship in the Days of Johnson. (1927)
- William Charvat. The Profession of Authorship in America, 1800-1870. (1968)
[edit] Conversation, the salons, etc.
- Stephen Miller. Conversation: A History of a Declining Art.
