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Institute for Writing and Thinking, Bard College

In designing some of the workbook prompts, I have drawn deeply on the philosophy and practices of the Institute for Writing and Thinking at Bard College. As a Faculty Associate of the Institute since 1993, I have had the opportunity to learn via immersion an approach to learning that prizes the promise of intellectual community and recognizes intellectual significance in a much broader range of human experiences and expressions that is typical.  In other words, the approach we take, and offer the students and teachers with whom we work, refuses easy divisions between personal and public meanings and between academic, experimental, and probative ways of knowing and representing knowledge.

Workbooked: 4-Panel Image Sequence, Elizabeth Catanese

To what extent does a hole indicate a break?

What are some holes in your life?

Write a poem which begins with a description of a hole.

How does scale effect perception?

What is the difference between whole and hole?

Make a list of all the times that a mirror has broken in your life.

What were the circumstances surrounding those breaks?

 

 

-- Elizabeth Catanese

 

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Begin Magnification

The Brain Magnified

Breaking Prompts

 

"There was a wall.  It did not look important."

-- Ursula K. LeGuin, The Dispossessed, p. 1

Workbooked: Learning from Extinctions . . . and Life

THE WORKBOOK: IDEAS FOR RESPONDING, WRITING, AND THINKING, Alice Lesnick

What's the Point?

After looking at all these sections and slides and close-ups of the various types of brains, what have we learned? What kinds of trends have we observed? What are we still curious about?

When you saw the sagittal slices of all the brains, what did you notice? Comparing across the sections you probably noticed that there were some general differences between the brains (involving size, shapes of structures, etc). For example, it may seem easier to differentiate structures in the human brain as opposed to the rat brain. It has been found that as one ascends a phylogenetic sequence, there is clearer definition and demarcation of structures, almost as if the brain is better organized. Yet, the closer we got, especially when we made forebrain and hindbrain slices, the more you may have realized that the brains and their structures look quite similar. In other words, yes, there are differences between animals' brains but also deep and fundamental similarities. Here are some pictures to remind you:

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Jessye Cohen-Dan

Untitled

 

re-           

            membering:

 

he tells us, putting back the pieces of something broken, or merely,

            made loose at the seams.

members like limbs,

like these clubs I am not sure I want to pay the

dues for. times are lean and I may need

to scribble over the margins,

 

I may need to borrow your pen on the train.

the seams of me             split

too long in the dark

            with a vow that the sunglasses are for my third eye, beneath

jumbles of dirty black hair

so I still squint

 

and you think I am blind

            but I am re-membering

            the pieces (parts1,2,3)

 

like dogs, I have discovered

            playing dead

(a thin white girl kind of trick)

at first,

Untitled

 Untitled

Jessye Cohen-Dan

re-           

membering:

he tells us, putting back the pieces of something broken, or merely,

            made loose at the seams.

members like limbs,

like these clubs I am not sure I want to pay the

dues for. times are lean and I may need

to scribble over the margins,

 

I may need to borrow your pen on the train.

the seams of me             split

The Frog Forebrain

[insert pic of frog forebrain]

 

Now we are looking at a cross-section of the forebrain of a frog.

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Remote Ready Biology Learning Activities

Scanning electron microscope image of SARS-CoV-2

Remote Ready Biology Learning Activities has 50 remote-ready activities, which work for either your classroom or remote teaching.

Narrative is determined not by a desire to narrate but by a desire to exchange. (Roland Barthes, S/Z)

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