Pedagogy

Teaching as the Art of Staging: A Scenario-Based College Pedagogy in Action

(Stylus/Routledge,2018)

Teaching as the Art of Staging proposes a college pedagogy where instructors act as "impresarios" who create immersive, scenario-based learning experiences, moving beyond the traditional "sage on the stage" or "guide on the side" models. The book provides a framework and practical examples, such as semester-long simulations and role-plays, for “making scenes”: staging dramatic, self-unfolding situations that irresistibly engage students in active learning across disciplines. It argues for a proactive teaching style that challenges students to drive the learning within carefully constructed scenarios, often with unexpected and only gradually revealed dynamics.

Read an expanded Table of Contents.

This cover photo shows some of my space-faring artist-colony students (that’s me in the background) about to detect aliens from the bridge of their starship in one of the “Culture of the Imagination” simulations that Astronomy Professor Tony Crider and I used to run at Elon.

From Guide on the Side to Impresario with a Scenario

College Teaching, Vol. 63, No. 3 (July-September 2015), pp. 99-104

This article is a very brief introduction to the ideas worked out at book length in Teaching as the Art of Staging. It proposes a conception of the teacher as an Impresario with a Scenario, a multi-centric and co-constructivist model in contrast to the familiarly student-centered and constructivist ideal of the Guide on the Side. I argue that the Impresario conception is truer to the practices of many teachers inspired by the “Guide on the Side” model, while at the same time, explicitly recognized and embraced, it opens up appealing and venturesome farther possibilities.

Risking Philosophy of Education

Metaphilosophy, 29 (2008): 145-158.

My Philosophy of Education course is my most adventurous and certainly most explicit use of the impresario/scenario model. Almost every is set up and conducted in a different and ultimately very wide range of styles, each enacting the philosophies of education we are studying. Over the years I published various accounts of this class. This article is a fairly early but still useful one. The overall design and its philosophy are narrated in detail in Chapter 8 of Teaching as the Art of Staging, linked above.

Here is the abstract for the 2008 Metaphilosophy paper:

Teaching philosophy of education offers us a chance to apply the familiar Socratic dialectic to ourselves. But it is very seldom taught in this spirit, if taught at all. Perhaps we fear that such a course would be impossibly self-referential. This paper argues, however, that precisely this kind of self-reference could be its strength. I outline a course of this sort, based upon a number of iterations I have taught over the past few years. A range of different classroom styles are enacted and examined for their hidden assumptions about teaching, learning, and knowledge.

Two heretical essays on Environmental Education

Deschooling Environmental Education

Canadian journal of Environmental Education, 1 (1996)

If “education” is problematic as such, as radical critics such as Illich and Holt argue, then environmental education is problematic too. Despite the seemingly uncontroversial character of the goal of “ecological literacy,” for instance, I argue that this notion is deeply flawed: it replaces a living sense of connectedness with a mandated and technical set of skills - perfect for schools, but that is just the problem. In its place I suggest a broader understanding of what we are about as environmentally-concerned citizens and educators: reconstructing the larger lifeworld in a way more connected to and consistently engaged with the more-than-human world. Schools have a role to play within this reconstruction, but the essential process is much larger and must engage all of us.

A shorter version of this essay first appeared under the title “Instead of Environmental Education”, in Proceedings of the Yukon College Symposium on Ethics, Environment, and Education, ed. Bob Jickling (Whitehorse, Y.T.: Yukon College, 1996).

What If Teaching Went Wild?

Canadian Journal of Environmental Education, 9:1 (2004)

Eventually I moderated my views a little and published this follow-up piece also in CJEE.

 Abstract:

Almost by necessity school cuts us off from the experience of a larger world: from natural rhythms, natural beings, more-than-human flows of knowledge and inspiration. In fact, we could hardly design a worse setting for environmental education! The problem is that, at least for now, we're stuck with it. Part of our challenge is to find ways to work toward and embody a radically different practice and philosophy of (environmental) education within schools as we know them. This paper suggests that even in a traditional classroom it is still possible to unsettle our deeply-felt sense of disconnection from the world, and to begin to reconnect. It may even be possible to make use of school's hyper-humanized and academic setting to this very end. The required pedagogy, however, is rather wild. It is much more personally demanding and unnerving than the usual sorts of pedagogical innovations. The latter part of this paper suggests a series of "everyday and practical" classroom strategies in this new key.

“What If Teaching Went Wild?” also appeared in conference proceedings Philosophy of Education 2002, ed. Scott Fletcher (Urbana, IL: Philosophy of Education Society, 2003).

Another narrative of “Teaching Going Wild”

Moments of Grace

Originally “Under the Open Skies”, Chapter 9 of Teaching as the Art of Staging. Revised and reprinted as Chapter 13 of Steven M. Cahn, Alexandra Bradner, and Andrew P. Mills, eds, Philosophers in the Classroom: Essays on Teaching (Hackett Publishing Company, 2018).

Here is another approach to “teaching going wild”: narratives of some of my farther-out adventures with students “out on the edge of hyper-anthropocentrized modernity… but coming to the very center of the world if one looks at things from a larger-than-human perspective.”

Two unpublished essays on Dewey-inspired pedagogy

This is Dewey on Steroids

This paper begins by outlining ten “Latter-Day Deweyan” pedagogical motifs that together constitute a highly engaged alternative to traditional pedagogies. The middle section of this paper briefly locates these motifs by reference to familiar and surely plausible Deweyan philosophical themes, but then locates them as well, and more fittingly, in a view of things significantly beyond Dewey in turn. The final section offers an earnest that such a pedagogy is possible by illustrating the motifs in practice in specific classes and courses.

Realizing Co-Constructivism: Some Farther Deweyan Reaches in the Classroom

After establishing a Deweyan philosophical space within which to work, this paper sketches an account of an especially venturesome teaching and learning ideal that I will call “co-constructivism”: a vision of students coming to understand and embrace their own roles in consolidating and transforming knowledge and value by realizing those very roles together. The paper then offers two concrete classroom illustrations of co-constructivism from my own classes.