Day One: The Rules of the Game

I find it interesting that in a class where I would like to foster an open environment to encourage creativity I open by being such a jerk. A whole list of “if you don’t want to do this, this or this, then get out of this class.” Part of this is driven by having taught in this project based way in the past and having students in class who really don’t want to be there or don’t want to work in the way I am asking them to work. I really do love posing question that I have no answer for, but I can see that for some people this is very frustrating. Especially if they are used to an educational model that judges them on how correct their answers are.

I think the main thing I want to avoid is students thinking that this class will be easier then other classes since I am less interested in using grades as punishment (or reward) and more interested in the work produced. I tried to impress upon both sections of the class that I am giving up a good chunk of my authority and my position as arbiter to the class. This places the students into a position where their input, comments, ideas, etc are just as valid as mine. But, it means wanting to take on that responsibility. What I mean by this is that a collective mind is really only as strong as the whole – a whole created through the energies of all involved. Disengaged minds means that the collective is weaker than if it is constructed with engaged minds. So – Day one ends up being mostly about the rules of the game.

After monologing about the syllabus, requirements, expectations, etc we got to the fun stuff. We went through Debbie’s warm up exercise – which I have really grown to love. Yes it feels odd, and sometimes it would just be easier to just cut to the material for the day, but I really do enjoy the decompression time from one activity to the next. Taking a few minutes to stretch out and then play a game provides that window of transition. It also functions as a group activity since we do these tings as a group. I still haven’t hit on a good first day game yet though. We played “what is inside” today with a tin filled with objects that rattled. The point was to imagine what these objects might be – with no reality restrictions. Theoretically these objects could be anything. But we do tend to circle around the possible. The answers to this question are individual and so I feel like we need to do small group exercises next class since there is safety in numbers.

The warm up and game gave way to sharing names, area of study and something unique or interesting. The hope is that by the point the class is engaged, or at least more awake than when we started. Next we generated the list of Self, Society, and Cosmos terms and ideas. The list was not radically different from last year for the Aesthetics of Dissonance class, but exploring it through the postmodern frame revealed a lot of sort of mater narrative grand scheme unifying ideas. Since Postmodernism challenges these ideas this was a great place to start this class.

I know that in having taught this way in the past it will take us some time to get acquainted with each other. The hard part is getting students to the point where they are willing to take a chance on a project without having to be concerned with grades or judgment. It is at this point where I think we can get some real work done. So – we will see how things develop.

Of course, in retrospect, rather than prattle on about the structure of the class I could have just shown the students this video.