Learning by doing

Started my Renmin University of China International Summer School course today - Monday morning 8am for the students, Sunday 5pm for me in California. There are 50 students in the class, too many to see or engage through a zoom/voov gallery, so after introducing my 

Deweyan pedagogy, we divided them into six groups my teaching assistant had set up. I'll be meeting with each group twice in later sessions, but for today I wanted to make a personal connection to them - and for them to connect to each other. Learning by doing!

The results were grand. I'd told them that Deweyan teaching offers not rote answers but problems which provide occasions for thinking, and each group's answers to the prompts were indeed thoughtful - and different enough from the others that I shared all with the class.

(This is a digest I'll bring up at the start of the next class in two days.) Aren't we lucky to have each other, I mused, to think together about the challenges we face... We went on to consider definitions of the humanities, ecological/environmental humanities and - our topic - 

"Anthropocene Humanities," but I hope the pluralizing opener, engaging their words and ideas before introducing authoritative ones, made the issues real to them, as well as my commitment to our shared endeavor. Online isn't great, but we're off to a good start.