Serendip Studio

Serendip is an independent site partnering with faculty at multiple colleges and universities around the world. Happy exploring!

The Teaching & Learning Initiative: Nepali Style

Submitted by Briana Bellamy on Thu, 08/23/2012 - 2:34pm

Hello beautiful Serendip world!

My name is Briana Bellamy, I'm a BMC alum '11. Recently, I returned from an incredible year of living in Nepal, working on a project funded by the Davis Projects for Peace grant. The project was called Sharing Knowledge for Peace, and its basic structure and philosophy grew from something that may be very familiar to some of you: the Teaching and Learning Initiative (TLI). As a sophomore at Bryn Mawr, I became involved with the staff-student branch of the TLI as a student mentor with a wonderful man from transportation services. It completely transformed my experience at Bryn Mawr, and became a huge part of both my sense of community and personal development. The relationships I built through the reciprocal model of the TLI and the deep learning I experienced both in these relationships and in the reflection meeting had a deep impact on me. I went on to become a coordinator for the program, and even wrote my thesis about it, exploring the inner workings of friendship, community, and shared spaces. I knew there was something powerful about the dynamics at play, and I was curious as to how the model of intentional reciprocal teaching and learning relationships could be valuable in other settings.

Serendip Studio Mixing

Women in Walled Communities "mixes" literary, educational and sociological perspectives, in order to explore constraints and agency in the institutional settings of women's colleges and prisons.

How are individual actors silenced? How do they chose and use silence? How do they come to voice? What are their visions? And what are the intersections among silence, voice and vision, inside and outside the porous boundaries between institutions and the wider society?

About Serendip Studio

Welcome to Serendip Studio, a digital ecosystem for exploring. We're glad you stopped by, and hope that you will stay to collaborate with fellow travelers, who are asking questions that have no boundaries. There are plenty of websites out there which will tell you what to think; Serendip instead aims at helping you to think for yourself, in the process formulating new questions and new directions for exploration. Nothing on Serendip is "authoritative," but there is lots here that you can learn from and contribute to. Need a few pointers to get started?

Currently, our focal areas of activity include dialogue-based learning, public teaching, and special projects in community-based digital publishing. Have an idea about a new project? Please contact us.

How Serendip Studio Fosters Communal Innovation: A Process-Oriented Approach

We explore boundary conditions of any content space we are working with, and innovations occur when those conditions change in a generative way. This is probably the most significant way in which "mixing" disciplines (among other "mixes") has the potential for radical change.

I Love You (Post Script Series)

Submitted by jrlewis on Sun, 08/19/2012 - 5:37pm

Regeneration

Infradiaphramatic

Cardiopathy

jrlewis's blog

Breaking my Heart (Post Script Series)

Submitted by jrlewis on Sun, 08/19/2012 - 5:34pm

/exchange/breaking/lewis

jrlewis's blog

Pussy Riot has been censored!

Submitted by bluebox on Sat, 08/18/2012 - 9:05am

On the front page of the New York Times today, Pussy Riot has been sentenced to 2 years in jail. We started a class talking about them so I thought I'd share this.

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/08/18/world/europe/suspense-ahead-of-verdict-for-jailed-russian-punk-band.html?pagewanted=all

Breaking My Heart

Julia Lewis

Breaking into the reader’s mind is the beginning of any piece of writing. It might be as violent as a rock through a window or as subtle as habituation to an alarm clock. The form of writing that specializes in breaking is poetry. At least, that is what I, a poet, would like to argue. In this essay, I’m going to talk generally about the role of breaking in poetry and specifically about my own breaking problem.

Poetry is a study in the art of breaking at several levels. Words are cut at their joints to make the prescribed syllable counts in forms such as haiku. Other times, words are spliced into one another, my favorite example of poetic license. (Do you know what a syllaship is?) Line breaks complicate meaning at the sentence level- raising the question is a sentence equal in meaning to the phrases set together in a line? More dramatically, what happens when a sentence is stretched over two stanzas? Breaking creates the fearful space in a poem, the not entirely empty white page. The way words and phrases in poetry break away from the reader is probably why poetry is so difficult to read. Poems are unstable beneath the reader’s eye. In his poem, Introduction to Poetry, Billy Collins addresses readers’ desire for stability in poetry.

“But all they want to do

is tie the poem to a chair with rope

and torture a confession out of it.”