Serendip Studio

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

Restorative Justic Mural Arts Tour, and trip to Eastern State Penitentiary

Submitted by Anne Dalke on Sat, 06/23/2012 - 9:58am

Sat, 09/22/2012 - 10:50am

Catch 9:50 R5 to Market East
11-1 trolley tour, 1-2 tour of Eastern State
On your own for return...

Christine Sun Kim Meets with Silence Class

Submitted by Anne Dalke on Sat, 06/23/2012 - 9:55am

Thu, 10/25/2012 - 2:15pm - 3:45pm

Youth Art and Self-Empowerment Project (YASP): Campus-Wide Event

Submitted by jccohen on Sat, 06/23/2012 - 9:44am

Wed, 09/26/2012 - 7:00pm - 9:00pm

Campus-wide event (Dorothy Vernon Room)

July 4th

Submitted by admin on Wed, 06/20/2012 - 2:23pm

Wed, 07/04/2012 (All day)

"why try to define or label the work?"

Submitted by Anne Dalke on Tue, 06/19/2012 - 8:10am

“My Struggle” has set off a debate about which genre it properly belongs to. The original Norwegian version put the word “novel” on the title page, implying a certain distancing from the real events the book portrays, but that designation has been removed from the American edition, a decision that Mr. Knausgaard attributed to his American publisher, Archipelago Books.

“It was a conscious choice not to label the book for the reader,” Jill Schoolman, the founder of Archipelago, wrote in an e-mail. “I feel that ‘the project’ dwells comfortably between (and embraces both) fiction and memoir. (Aren’t they always inextricably entwined?) Why try to define or label the work?”

--from He Says a Lot, For a Norweigan. Books. The New York Times (June 18, 2012)

Anne Dalke's blog

Black Islands (for ME)

Submitted by jrlewis on Mon, 06/18/2012 - 9:03pm

Her eyes

Are a black,

Black notebook

Filling a five-star five subject

Notebook of the month,

A part of her.

A teenager

Hates her brown eyes

Dirt dark chocolate ice cream.

Her eyes are a blank book.

Blue and light alliterate

Beautifully.

The young

Neurobiologist is poet

Learning the mechanism of sight.

Her eyes are a black Macbook.

Her eyes are a book born

Apart from her.

jrlewis's blog

Untitled

Submitted by jrlewis on Mon, 06/18/2012 - 8:55pm

The first time

My mom told me I was fat

Was freshman year of high school.

She clarified,

I weighed as much as my six-foot-tall father.

She stocked the house with diet cola.

She said, “ten pounds would be easy to lose.”

Which wasn’t right…

My father was wasting away, a neurodegenerative disease.

My mother baked chocolate chip cookies twice a week

For my father. After school, I stopped at the supermarket.

Then she said to me, “twenty pounds are doable with a teenage metabolism.”

The doctor prescribed my father chocolate ice cream at every hospital meal.

When I was a senior,

My arm measured the same circumference

As my father’s thighs. I hate that fat and bulky muscle on my arms.

What is so smart about lifting dumbbells?

My father is dead.

All I can think

When I look at my boyfriend’s nakedness is

That he’s impossibly skinny...

Education is Life Itself: Evolution, Unconscious and Reflective Processes, Change

by Paul Grobstein and Alice Lesnick

Abstract

Schooling often rests uneasily on presumed dichotomies between coverage and inquiry, skill development and creativity. By drawing on the often under-recognized parallels between biological evolution and human learning, this essay argues that formal education need and ought not forego the unconscious exploratory processes of informal learning. Rather than posit as natural the cultural story that formal schooling must prepare students to integrate with given cultures and foreknowable futures, the evolutionary perspective shows that education is better thought of as preparing students to create cultures and to change, and foster change, in relation to unknown futures. The properties that distinguish formal from informal learning -- conscious reflection and a degree of collective consensus about what constitutes knowledge at any given time – are, we argue, useful not as ends in themselves, but as tools for maximizing, sharing, and extending unconscious, evolutionary learning. Working with them as such offers a way out of some of education’s persistent problems. Two autobiographical case studies provide grounded examples of these evolutionary changes and indicate pathways of inquiry by which to pursue them.