discussions on tuesday sept. 6
please post your feedback about the discussions as comments to this post.
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Beyond Class?
What is the role of a Watauga College discussion leader? How can each of us become the most effective TA we can be? How can we achieve our potential as a team, TA's and faculty, in class and beyond?
This blog is dedicated to exploring these and other questions. May it become a resource for the continuing experiment of Watauga College.
This blog is dedicated to exploring these and other questions. May it become a resource for the continuing experiment of Watauga College.
1 comment:
My discussion this past Tuesday went pretty well. First I asked the question on why we are here and went over the mug&jug and scaffolding idea, which went over really well. We spent some time going over L&D's idea incentives, which they were very comfortable, then moved on to the social science exercise asking why do underage people try to buy beer? This went alright. It was hard to try to think about where the discussion wanted and needed to go and take it there at the same time, but in the end I felt pretty good about it. We were rushed to make conclusions, which I blamed on Joe's story of the Vikings and Bud's interruption.
I would like to use next Tuesday's discussion to really push the students. All of my students have firm grasps on the materials we've been using from the text, and some are noticeably bored with sticking to the texts. Here are some questions I would like to address in a more theoretical discussion on Tuesday:
Why do we have dichotomies?
Who makes them?
Where do we find them?
How do I interact with them daily?
Who benefits from their existence?
Why should I try to go beyond them?
How would I do it if I wanted to?
While the Human/Nature dichotomy is prevalent in our society, I think it would be of use to isolate some that students encounter more noticeably.
What if we started out by asking them what were the last 3 most important decisions that they made and tease out the dichotomous nature of the decisions.
Of all the ones listed, we could isolate one or two of the most common and deep reaching, then figure out how they came to be.
From here we could ask the question of who benefits from such dichotomies and ask if we really must think and act according to the rules that a dichotomous society imposes.
If dichotomies are just constructions that benefit the status quo, then how do we move beyond them? Here we would engage the students in finding ways of thinking that actually take them beyond dichotomies and complicate the picture. This would be the toughest part and may be an unanswerable question but I believe it would begin the conversation that we are looking for in this course.
Such a discussion would involve making sure the students have a firm grasp of what it means for something to be "constructed" as well as an understanding of the question "whom does discourse serve" as asked by Foucault.
In Utopias, we came to understand that we weren't challenging the students enough outside the text. In other words, by sticking with the books, we made it too easy to just coast along, read the sparknotes and get an A. That hasn't happen yet, and I think that a discussion of this nature would prevent this from happening in Dichotomies at all.
-Adam
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