Spent hours at my desk yesterday turning the corner on Fall, alas.
First it was the shockingly costly and distasteful task of ordering and paying for Middle & High School textbooks. Sticker shock? How about $146 for a History text, $174 for French, $190 for Chemistry…
And then, adding injury to insult, the poor kids will have to lug those backbreakers up and down stairs and hallways all year. Sisyphus never had it so bad! I say it’s time to de/reconstruct the paper textbook mill. Coulda paid for ’em all on an iPad, Nook, or Kindle for less, and avoided the strain. The old way of doing textbook publishing is entrenched, though, it’ll take some blasting to move it.
But then, yesterday, the thoroughly enjoyable process of setting up new blogs for the students in my university courses. Fortunately my ways aren’t all so entrenched.
I’m pleased with the provisional results, which I can’t fully unveil here in their experimental “beta” run. We’ll get the kinks out first. But I can say that the Intro site, dubbed “CoPhilosophy,” takes both name and inspiration from this passage in William James’s “Essence of Humanism“:
Ethically the pluralistic form of [humanism] takes for me a stronger hold on reality than any other philosophy I know of–it being essentially a social philosophy, a philosophy of “co,” in which conjunctions do the work. But my primary reason for advocating it is its matchless intellectual economy. It gets rid, not only of the standing “problems” that monism engenders (“problem of evil,” “problem of freedom,” and the like), but of other metaphysical mysteries and paradoxes as well.
(That’s James in 1903, on the left, collaborating with his Harvard colleague Josiah Royce at his summer place in Chocorua, New Hampshire. Sat on the very spot myself a year ago.)
CoPhilosophy (or to adapt experimental philosophy’s “X-Phi” shorthand, Co-Phi) will for our purposes mean a collaborative search for wisdom and mutual understanding rooted in small research-&-discussion groups that will interact both in and out of the classroom. “Conversational, interpersonal, talkative, discursive, mutual,” my new site proclaims, “Co-Phi aims to be philosophy that listens and learns.”
We’re going to run a similar experiment in Happiness 101, too.
Why do it this way? For one thing, to test James’s hypothesis about the superiority of “social” philosophizing. For another, to begin exploring the mostly-uncharted collaborative potential of the 21st century classroom. For a third, though this is really primus inter pares, to model and adopt the best new ways of teaching and learning we can devise together. Old ways for the old, new for the young (and young at heart). It may well be time for what Virginia Heffernan calls a “digital-age upgrade” in the way we do things in academia. Or not. There’s only one way to find out.
But I think we’ll still do some collaborating out on the James Union Building stoa. Some things should never change.