Last week Nate of What in the Hell suggested to me that we both experiment with the 21 Questions Youtube video in our classroom and compare notes. I haven’t yet gotten a chance to look at the video Nate referenced but this got me thinking. With this medium we now have the technology to collaborate in teaching. Not only is it possible to assign texts that we would like to read together, but it is actually possible for us to design assignments that make use of the internet so that our students might collaborate with one another. Over at Perverse Egalitarianism the Braver reading group has, I believe, been a tremendous success. If I have not participated in that discussion it is because I have already been coded in a particular way such that I would be unproductive to the discussion itself and such that my views, honest as they are intended to be, would be characterized in a less than charitable or productive way. Nonetheless, the Braver reading group has shown that such forms of engagement are possible. Why not take it to the next level and develop courses together in tandem that would read one text together over the course of the semester. I am not suggesting that the entire course should share the same texts, but simply a single text. It would be possible to set up either wiki groups or yahoo groups that students would join so that they would be required to interact with one another across the country or the world, enhancing the entire learning experience through collaborative debate and investigation of both the text itself and the topics that the text generates. Simultaneously, faculty would be able to coordinate texts that they want to study or read in greater detail, generating potential conferences, journal issues, or edited collections with one another. This would be an effective technique both in generating shared research and new pedagogical approaches. Ultimately I would be interested in seeing an interdisciplinary approach to such “team teaching”. While I deeply value Nate’s thought and envy his grounding in Marxist thought, I think that such a pedagogical experiment would be most productive if somehow it could meld philosophy and lit courses, philosophy and sociology courses, philosophy and history courses, and so on. My desire is to learn from my colleagues in other disciplines: their research methods, their ways of posing questions, their ways of gathering evidences, their evidences and so on. This is one of the reasons that my experience teaching with Jerry the Anthropologist was so productive in my own thought and pedagogy. At any rate, it would be possible to form a collective where we form collaborative networks from semester to semester or every other semester or every couple of years, where we parcel up experiments and texts and form these networks. Ultimately our students benefit by being drawn into discussions with those outside of their local geography and engaging in discussions from a variety of different disciplinary perspectives. From a Marxist perspective such a pedagogy would be an element in the process of moving beyond the ghettoized university system to a more global sort of discourse, much like what we’ve already been doing here in the theory web where we’ve already been forming our own discourses, questions, trends, journals, publication projects, movements, and presses. Some of us have discussed the possibility of forming another EGS. This would be a step in that direction.
August 13, 2009
August 13, 2009 at 7:00 am
Sorry…. what’s an EGS?
August 13, 2009 at 1:11 pm
EGS is the European Graduate School:
http://www.egs.edu/
Check out the faculty.
August 13, 2009 at 2:36 pm
So what do you mean by setting up your own EGS? Do you mean an American version or one set up to allow different approaches to the EGS (which is kind of the Philosophy version of McDonalds).
I think for SR or OOO the potential is there for a small research group along the lines of the ANT dudes. Mind all this is way out of my organizational league as a lowly PhD candidate but I am fascinated by such things.
August 13, 2009 at 3:00 pm
Hi Paul,
I don’t know that I’m thinking of forming something like EGS, though it would be terrific to have such an institution here in the States. The interesting thing about EGS is that it’s formed through intellectuals that wish to collaborate with one another. What I had in mind when I mentioned EGS was something like the role that corporations have played in global politics. Just as the corporation has gradually eroded the nation-state, the internet gradually erodes university-centric modes of intellectual production. In the traditional university model, you get highly centralized programs that play a tremendous role in defining the intellectual field through their hiring practices, the journals they publish, their presses and so on. This is one of the reasons that it has proven so difficult for alternative philosophical modes of inquiry to find a place. With the internet it becomes all the more possible for thinkers to instead choose their own collaborations, form their own presses and journals, and so on. I am not suggesting this is a panacea or that it is an entirely good thing. Clearly the corporations have had a number of highly negative consequences even if the possible end of the nation-state and the increasing trend towards international law are welcome things. These historical movements or developments are not unambiguous. But they do open up new possibilities.
August 13, 2009 at 5:01 pm
I am currently a student at EGS. More institutions like it that are faithful to both the suggestions you make above and to the framework within which EGS operates are necessary to remain contemporaneous with the shape of “the field” as it develops.
The emergence of “digital humanities” has done the most to develop this sort of contemporaneity. ( http://dev.cdh.ucla.edu/digitalhumanities/2009/05/29/the-digital-humanities-manifesto-20/ )
Katherine Hayles’s and Greg Ulmer’s work is exemplary as well in that they both attend to “the humanities” in digital humanities, not just “the digital.” This is also the case with EGS.
August 17, 2009 at 3:30 am
hi Levi,
Thanks for the kind words. I think this is a much awesomer idea than what I had in mind. My suggestion was simply to teach a pop culture AI game thing about some philosophy. What you suggest is a whole nother level, and sounds really awesome. In the short term as an official thing I don’t think I could participate without getting a fair few things cleared, hoops to jump through and so on, cuz I’m at a very big institution and am very, very low on the food chain. As an unofficial thing though, as experiments in the direction of an official thing, I could totally see this working. Two possible groups spring to mind to check in with about this, to see if more collaborators could be found. One is the edu-factory.org people. The other is this group here where I live called Experimental College – excotc.org – and I think both groups are pretty well networked with other folk who’d be into this. My time’s going to get sparser real soon, after my daughter is born, but I’d like to be involved in further conversations about this (we could use freeconferencecall.com among other resources, to get this going).
Two other projects that are semi-related too –
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:WikiProject_Murder_Madness_and_Mayhem
and http://www.appstate.edu/~stanovskydj/capitalsyl.html (excerpt: “The Wikipedia article on Capital, Volume I was created and written by members of this class in the past two semesters. You will volunteer to edit and improve two sections of the Wikipedia article.”)
take care,
Nate
August 28, 2009 at 3:36 am
[…] to assign would be terrific. I think I might have frightened other people off with the proposal of extended pedagogy. The point of extended pedagogy is not to structure classes in the same way, but to provide an […]