So, it’s important to admit that I was feeling grouchy about the first OLI meeting because Pinterest seems like a stupid online scrapbooking service. And it kind of is. But our first meeting also reminded me with clarity that tools are what we make of them, and in fact I found it helpful and interesting to have to define my terms for the liberal arts clearly enough to get the images I wanted– and then, despite not being a really visual learner myself, I found that as I scanned the images, I would end up seeing even more in them than I anticipated. An example of this was my image that showed a tattoo of Dickinson’s phrase “dwell in possibility.” Dickinson is what took me to the image; seeing the tattoo made me think of all of my students who sport literary tattoos of Whitman, Eliot, Plath, Woolf, and more (okay, LOTS of Harry Potter) and that made me think about lifelong learning, about carrying what happens in the classroom into the world with you (even embodying it), which I also embraced as a value of the liberal arts.
Lessons:
1. Do not question Martha’s genius again.
2. I should really get a tattoo.
3. Like my experience on Pinterest, the liberal arts can lead us to unexpected insights and conclusions. We may believe we are searching for one singular, perfect image/answer, but a whole bunch of possibilities and choices open before us, and from them we might learn more than we anticipated and deepen our understanding of an idea.
#3 agrees with what Marcel posted– that we lose sight of big questions, that students or educators or parents or policy makers or employers may see education too much as a vending machine: put in the right change and you will get a tangible product. Even more than “art for art’s sake” (an ideology I don’t really believe in at the end of the day) I want to make my students believe in learning for learning’s (messy, wonderful) sake.
I found it interesting in our discussion that as a group we gravitated very little toward skills. I know I eventually felt pressured (this is an accurate term for it) to include writing and speaking (though I cheated and called my picture “dialogue,” which interests me more). And I am fully committed to teaching writing skills, but also I want my students to see writing as part of the exploration, a way of learning and of expressing themselves.
Inquiry and Discovery
Possibility
Life learning/Learning into life
Empowerment and Transformation (of self, of world)
Collaboration and Dialogue in a community of learners
Worldy? I don’t have the term yet, but I want something that draws in service, activism, diversity.