Our Grant Project - Jim Roney and Peter Rothstein

Happy Stumbles and Nurtured Hopes

Our Grant

• Grant was to work on our IC course Knowledge, Modernity, and the Self

• Think back through the nature of the course, asking:– How does it fit in the evolving world of the liberal

arts?– Should the content of the course change?– Should the way we teach the course change,

replacing the model of an hour of lecture followed by an hour of discussion?

Desired Results

• A new version of the course to be taught in the fall of 2015, including supporting materials and/or book (I’m auditing a couple of moocs.)

• Perhaps this work could become a scholarly publication on the ideas and subject of the course. (Give Paul Schettler the credit or blame for this possibility.)

• Workshop with other faculty to share ideas on teaching IC courses

Advantages of IEI Grant

• Time to step back and think about what you are doing

• A motivation to organize ideas into a coherent plan and the resources to get started carrying it out

• Chance to do what you want to do rather than meet the demands of outside agencies

Small Problems

• Not really that much money• Process can involve resubmission and criticism

of your ideas (a plus if you are used to it) • It’s hard to focus on an individual grant when

other institutional initiatives may demand your time and difficult to find others with the time to join you.

Our Initial Questions

• How can we explain the nature and purpose of a liberal arts education to students?

• How can we change the content of the course to reflect changes in the last decade or so?

• How can we incorporate the insights provided by SoTL into our course?

• How can we share our work with other faculty and get them to help us?

Liberal Arts• We have long used the work of Martha

Nussbaum who describes liberal education as preparing free citizens for global citizenship.

• Her three necessary attributes:– Critical self-reflection– Global citizenship: respond to others with recognition

and concern– Narrative imagination: hear others’ stories

• Problems with her view include a danger of ethnocentrism and an inadequate treatment of science

New Questions

• Is interdisciplinary work different from the liberal arts?

• Does a liberal arts education have any content, or is it only skills?

• Is there a difference between professional education (understood as broadly as possible) and liberal arts education?

• What is the relationship between undergraduate research and the liberal arts?

Modernity, Knowledge, and the Self?

• The modern was the topic of the “new” core curricular courses introduced in the mid-nineties; they replaced courses on the western canon.

• The now canonical postmodern texts that changed the humanities appeared from the mid-sixties to the mid-seventies of the last century.

• What are or will be the core debates of the second and third decades of the 21st century?

The example of science as a form of inquiry

• The modern narrative of science is one of progress as ever-expanding knowledge leads to ever-increasing control over the natural and social worlds.

• The postmodern narrative about science describes a white, male, European and American social construct that supports the hegemony of the liberal political and economic system.

The present moment?

• One purpose of our course has been to get students to understand and take seriously the debate between the modern and postmodern accounts of who we are and the purposes we pursue.

• Current Concern: Is arguing that science is a social construct really the best way to fight climate change and other problems?

• Has the modern/postmodern debate over knowledge been replaced by another one?

Reading List

• I read about ten books on these topics this summer and am now convinced I need a new way of thinking about this.

• Unsure what it will be, but probably involves big data, the statistical self, and a reconsideration of classical philosophy and continental critiques.

What kind of questions should a citizen know how to ask?

• What kind of questions should a citizen be able to ask and answer?

• How should she or he answer them? • What kinds of information would be needed?• What should a citizen be able to read?• Should the answers be written?• How about discussion? Should citizens be able to

debate fundamental questions in a reasoned manner? What vocabulary does it take to do that?

Teaching Method?

• Can we break up the lecture followed by discussion model?

• Sample quiz, or directed free writing, on the next slides

• Develop materials or write a book to be read and used in advance of the class sections

• This process will last a year and a half or more

Question One

What common-sense aspect of the modern does this quote remind you of? Why?“Kepler’s gravestone in the Protestant cemetery bore an epitaph that he had written himself:I measured the heavens, Now the earth’s shadows I measure/ Skybound, my mind. Earthbound, my body rests.”Kitty Ferguson, Tycho and Kepler: The Unlikely Partnership that Changed Forever Our Understanding of the Heavens, 2002.

Question Three

Imagine that you are a friend of Kepler’s and that you want to help him reconcile with his wife. Write a short list of the points you might make to help him understand her hostility, her father’s behavior, and his own frustration and anger. Relate their behavior and his reaction to the social changes and tensions within the modern. Do not attempt to think like a 16th or 17th century individual. Just use contemporary educated language.

Close reading: First Sentence of the novel

Johannes Kepler, asleep in his ruff, has dreamed the solution to the cosmic mystery. He holds it cupped in his mind as in his hands he would a precious something of unearthly frailty and and splendor. Oh do not wake! But he will. Mistress Barbara, with a grain of grim satisfaction, shook him by his ill-shod foot…John Banville, Kepler.