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Classroom Ecologies: A Proposal
To: Punctum Books
From: Anne Dalke and Jody Cohen
Re: A Proposal for a New Project Exploring "Classroom Ecologies"
Date: October 4, 2013
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A bird sanctuary, |
Querying the “Natural”:
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In such a context, what new shapes might our teaching and learning take, as liminal spaces and excursions, arising in the midst of the crucial, yet impossible separations between country and city, school and not-school, inside and out? Traversing the edges of promise, desire, nervousness and threat, surprising conjoinings that are neither this nor that, contained yet uncontainable, inviting always the unexpected? |
In the middle ages, European monastic communities preserved learning that the Catholic Church forbade; in the 18th century, U.S. slave culture required learning to read in secret. We experience liberal arts colleges as occupying a similar position today: endangered themselves by wide-spread valuing of the technical-and-vertical, attended by students who are read either as privileged outsiders, or as scapegoats prey to predatory fiscal policies and scoffing from “the real world.” |
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We want to tell a different story, one that identifies the liberal arts as a political-and-spiritual cell culture, a resistance group with the capacity to challenge the leading paradigms in American education.We will do so by tracking the chaotic and unpredictable, both unconscious and environmental, as deeply educative, creative, stretching our zone of the possible. We will ask where else this kind of work/play is happening: how broadly can we construe "classrooms"? Teaching (separately and) together, for many years, at a small liberal arts college for women, we now envision a project about “Classroom Ecologies” that enacts and seeds radical teaching practices, in- and outside of classrooms. |
Crafting Sustainable Teaching Practices Transition and Location: On Leaving Home, In Search of a Place of Understanding |
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We want to explore classrooms as testing grounds, paradoxically boxed-in spaces that cannot keep their promise to enclose, categorize, or name, and thus can become productive of conditions ripe for breaking through to experiences of reality, to the piercing that is possible in the intensity and unpredictability of border ecologies. The project we envision would feature the range of our co-teaching experiences, with a particular focus on Bryn Mawr's 360°program, in which an interdisciplinary cluster of courses are designed to address a shared theme or question. |
Eco-Literary: A 360° Cluster
Beginning to imagine the shape this might take, we invited friends, colleagues, and students to comment on what might matter to them in their own work and play. We received an astounding array of rich, imaginative responses, which both affirmed for us a potential readership, and made a powerful case for finding a venue and format that actually enacts the interactive energy of classroom ecologies.
And so: we now address this proposal to Punctum Books, and are of course eager to hear your response.
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