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Place as Text: Approaches to Active Learning (Second Edition)
Full text linkCONTENTS
Dedication and Acknowledgments
Preface to the Second Edition — Ada Long and Bernice Braid
Introduction — Bernice Braid
Honors Semesters: Anatomy of Active Learning — William Daniel
Honors Semesters: An Architecture of Active Learning — Bernice Braid
Internal Assessment of Honors Semesters — Ann Raia
External Evaluation of Honors Semesters — Ada Long
Student Perspectives on Honors Semesters — Elizabeth Beck
Other Structural Models of Active Learning
City as Text™ — Bernice Braid
Faculty Institutes — William Daniel
Summer High School Field Experiences — Bernice Braid
Sleeping Bag Seminars — Joan Digby
College Recruitment Exercises — Bernadette Low
Orientation Exercises — Bernadette Low
Professional Development Exercises — Bernadette Low
Other Courses — Bernadette Low
Partners in the Parks — Joan Digby
Public Products of Personal Discoveries — Ada Long
An Example of Active Learning in the College Classroom — Shirley Forbes Thomas
Active Learning in a National Context
Honors Milestones — Ann Raia, Rosalie Saltzman, and Ada Long
Future Directions — Ada Long
Recommended Readings — Bernice Braid and Ada Long
Appendices
Planning an Honors Semester — Elizabeth Beck and Lillian Mayberry
Planning a City as Text™ Walkabout — Bernice Braid
Planning a Sleeping Bag Seminar — Joan Digby
Resource People — Ada Long
Sample Honors Semester Evaluation Forms: Pre-Semester Faculty Questionnaire • End-of-Semester Faculty Questionnaire • Post-Semester Faculty Evaluation/Assessment • Pre-Semester Student Questionnaire • End-of-Semester Student Questionnaire • Post-Semester Student Assessment/Evaluation • End-of-Semester Evaluator’s Summary of Group Discussion
About the Author
The Age of False Positives
Full text linkYears ago, when I was beginning to develop field-based learning methods and experimenting with City as Text© as an integrative seminar, I learned a lot from the insights of Parker Palmer. His presentation at AAHE, a talk he called “Community, Conflict and Ways of Knowing” (published later, in l988, in CHANGE Magazine) was a catalyst for those of us in NCHC who were refining the structure of “explorations,” linking them to extended seminar discussions and applying them to research projects, especially in Honors Semesters. Two passages in particular resonate with Joan Digby’s article on students today and remind me just why Palmer’s thoughts were so startlingly on target: I do not believe that epistemology is a bloodless abstraction; the WAY we know has powerful implications for the WAY we live. I argue that every epistemology tends to become an ethic, and that every way of knowing tends to become a way of living. I argue that the relation established between the knower and the known, between the student and the subject, tends to become the relation of the living person to the world itself. I argue that every mode of knowing contains its own moral trajectory, its own ethical direction and outcome
Founder’s Award Speech, NCHC 50th Anniversary Conference, Chicago, Illinois, November 14, 2015
Full text linkWe have always concentrated on how it is that people transform space into place. We have always asked people to look at the surface, then look beneath the surface, to ask “What is it like to live here? For whom? What makes you think so?” If you have time, go to the Art Institute of Chicago, and visit the exhibit “Making Place: The Architecture of David Adjaye.” He uses a version of City as Text to read a culture and environment before he even begins to design a building, in his case because he hopes to reshape “place” by addressing the social implications of buildings. As some of you know, a mantra of mine has always been a sentence from Kafka’s story “A Country Doctor” when the doctor thinks, “To write prescriptions is easy, but to come to an understanding with people is hard.” City as Text is a way of seeing and thinking that becomes a way of doing— and so a way of being in the world. The process itself is democratizing. To see oneself contextualized: that is deep learning, isn’t it? So tonight’s Founder’s Award is about me and my work. It’s about you and your work. And it’s about NCHC and our work. Congratulations on our 50th anniversary
Majoring in the Minor: A Closer Look at Experiential Learning
Full text linkExperiential learning is, for me, a preeminent means to accomplish goals that are fundamental to the entire educational enterprise. It is a set of strategies that structure acquisition of information, analysis of ideas, and self-reflection in order to pull people into active engagement with their world. Among these strategies are skills of observation and interpretation that require learners to take careful note and to examine themselves as processors of the details they themselves assemble into meaningful patterns, thus generating the insight, over and over again, that it is they who create the meaning they come to attach to events and to human interchange. The greater their awareness of what it is they are doing, the likelier it is that the meanings they create will confer on them the edge it takes to move forward with strength and to be part of a world they really want to be part of. In some sense, then, these strategies help students to be actors, not objects of everyone else’s acting on them. Students often say that one or another immersion experience has “transformed” them. We as educators often call this metamorphosis “empowerment.
Majoring in the Minor: A Closer Look at Experiential Learning
Full text linkExperiential learning is, for me, a preeminent means to accomplish goals that are fundamental to the entire educational enterprise. It is a set of strategies that structure acquisition of information, analysis of ideas, and selfreflection in order to pull people into active engagement with their world. Among these strategies are skills of observation and interpretation that require learners to take careful note and to examine themselves as processors of the details they themselves assemble into meaningful patterns, thus generating the insight, over and over again, that it is they who create the meaning they come to attach to events and to human interchange. The greater their awareness of what it is they are doing, the likelier it is that the meanings they create will confer on them the edge it takes to move forward with strength and to be part of a world they really want to be part of. In some sense, then, these strategies help students to be actors, not objects of everyone else’s acting on them. Students often say that one or another immersion experience has “transformed” them. We as educators often call this metamorphosis “empowerment.
Liberal Education and the Challenge of Intergrative Learning
Full text linkThe 1990 publication of Ernest Boyer\u27s Scholarship Reconsidered was a benchmark occasion. Almost immediately the academy endorsed his document\u27s usefulness as a framework within which to examine, maybe rethink, practices of both institutions and individuals which appeared to reflect a riven enterprise. Boyer\u27s perception that exclusive emphasis on scholarship for status and rewards in American colleges was, as the term remained narrowly defined, incompatible with the demands of proliferation and access, and it struck a chord
Cultivating Too
Full text linkIn his plenary comments at NCHC\u27s Washington conference (2000), Sam Schuman raised topics of compelling interest to us all: the role of honors and of the NCHC in the context of attitudinal matters in higher education generally, as he sees them. These topics are important to all of us. What individual honors programs actually do, these days, and what NCHC does for them and for honors are deeply important issues as we begin a new millennium. My response is a personal attempt to frame the issues Sam has raised, consider the same span of time he cites-the final thirty years of the old millennium-and suggest a challenge that honors might well address better than almost any other segment of the academy
The 2021 NCHC Founders Award: Samuel Schuman
Full text linkSamuel Schuman (Beginning in Honors) is the 2021 recipient of the National Collegiate Honors Council’s Founders Award, recognized for his outstanding contributions to both the NCHC and to the professional and scholarly practices of honors education
Acts of Interpretation: Pedagogies of Inquiry
Full text link[T]he world is not given, it is not simply ‘there.’ We constitute it by acts of interpretation. —Jonathan Z. Smith, 1988
In Nadine Gordimer’s 1970 novel A Guest of Honour, the central white figure, diplomat James Bray, is asked by a newly installed Black president to shift from the diplomatic sphere to organize educational structures for a newly minted Black national constituency. Intelligent, sensitive, and empathetic, Bray considers his own sophisticated background in the context of this semi-literate Southern African country and thinks: “What was needed was perhaps someone with a knowledge of the basic techniques of learning. Someone who could cut through the old assumptions that relied so heavily on a particular cultural background, and concentrate on the learning process itself ” (109). Although not himself an educator, he addresses his assignment with a deep respect for the mass of needy people around him—for their keen observational skills, capacity to survive in their unpredictable surround, untapped abilities, and genius at reading innuendo.
Bray’s attitudes and expectations are not so different from those of Paulo Freire. In his Pedagogy of the Oppressed, Freire argues forcefully against the European educational model that has shaped education in the new world for more than a century, a system that results in what he calls “the banking concept.” This concept rests on a social structure that presumes student ignorance versus faculty knowledge; it presupposes a shared and self-validating or self-undermining cultural grounding in class, and it rests on “the assumption of a dichotomy between man and the world” (62). Freire argues that a pedagogy embodying so deep a hierarchical divide both expresses and enforces a power structure that militates against critical thinking. He advocates as a counteraction “the posing of the problems of [men] in their relations with the world.” “Problem-posing education, responding to the essence of consciousness—INTENTIONALITY—rejects communiqués and embodies communication. . . . Liberating education consists in acts of cognition, not transferals of information” (66–67). Problem- posing methodology, Freire says, shifts the student-teacher relationship, which in turn shifts the entire learning/teaching enterprise: “The students—no longer docile listeners—are more critical co-investigators in dialogue with the teacher” (68). For him “the form of action [men] adopt is to a large extent a function of how they see themselves in the world” (71). When I began working on City as Text™ (CAT) as an integrative strategy that would realign the classroom in order to build a problem-setting ambience for the kind of change Freire envisioned, the thinking of Parker J. Palmer was reaffirming
Place, Self, Community: City as Text™ in the Twenty-First Century
Full text linkStudents and faculty who have designed or participated in City as Text™ (CAT) know well that every place they have explored has organized itself into areas, events, and interactions that either immediately or eventually make sense out of contradictory bits of information. This realization might be more self-evident in urban walkabouts but has bubbled up to consciousness in rural settings, forests, jungles, neighborhoods, and even a shopping mall explored at a National Collegiate Honors Council (NCHC) conference.
What lies beneath the surface, we tell our explorers, is what we want to expose to our gaze and unmask for our deeper consideration. What we suspect about “place” reveals what makes it unique: the particular contradictions that reveal themselves only if we look more carefully, critically, and sensitively at what hides them. These underlying contradictions are what we think about when we consider a constellation of CAT questions about a place: What does it feel like to live/be here? For whom/what? Under what circumstances
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