Teachers and Teaching and Community

A lecture, reading and discussion course, and eventually (late in the term) a reflective course on the way in which Corvid is building a community through teaching, a community in which learners become members for a time. To explore seriously and slowly the work and life of teaching. The class is not concerned with how to get students or even with how to teach, but what to teach and why to teach that; with what teaching is in the world. It is about the indeterminate community a teacher enters into and the existential task of teaching. It is about how to make a person-as-teacher out of the available materials.

What is teaching? What is not teaching? Who teaches? Who is taught? Why teach formally? Can we teach without schools? This course assumes and argues that we are members of a mystical, eternal community of education, which is to say a cosmos of change. What might we suppose the teacher is totally committed to if that is so?

More immediately practical, the course meetings will serve as a support for current teachers as they begin and prolong the work and play of teaching. Also, students will find it helpful to think about their learning from the side of teaching.

Readings (some complete, some excerpted)

Parker Palmer - To Know as We are Known. More on and by Palmer here
Paul Goodman - The Community of Scholars
Jacques Ranciere - The Ignorant Schoolmaster (free here)
Ivan Illich - Deschooling Society (free here)
Werner Jaeger - Paideia
John Henry Cardinal Newman - The Idea of a University (free here)
E.F. Schumacher - Guide for the Perplexed
Frederick Rudolph - The American College and University: A History
Anthony Weston - "The New Deweyan Caucus: teaching on the edge", from Jobs for Philosophers
M.C. Richards - "Centering as Dialogue" and "Pedagogy" from Centering
Page Smith - Killing the Spirit: Higher Education in America
John Milton - "Of Education" available here or here.
Michael Inwood - "Culture and Education" from A Hegel Dictionary
Alfred North Whitehead - "Universities and Their Function" in The Aims of Education, available here.
Eugen Rosenstock-Huessy - "Teaching Too Late, Learning Too Early" in I am an impure thinker
Scott Buchanan - "The 1937-1938 Catalog of St. John's College" in Embers of the World. More by Buchanan here.
various delights and surprises from Lapham's Quarterly vol. 1:4 "Ways of Learning"
Matthew Crawford - "What is College For?" from Shop Class as Soulcraft
"Record on the subject of education" from the Classic of Rites (Liji), edited by Confucius et. al. Found at the Chinese Text Project, here

Here's one organization's bibliography on education.

Possible field trips

Teacher: Eric Buck
Location: Union Square, Somerville
Schedule: Sundays 5-8 pm, beginning February 6
Cost: tip jar
Method: lecture, reading and discussion (eating too)
ENROLL IN THIS COURSE

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