sleepcamel.net : brad weikel

I just took a quick coffee break to read Wading in the Deep: Supporting Emergent Anarchies, a short article by Naeem Inayatullah at Ithaca College, which was given to me last week by a close friend of mine and a former student of Naeem's. Quite frankly, I was blown away... it has been at least three years since I read such a provocative piece on pedagogy in higher ed.

In a nutshell, the article describes the author's experiments with muting his teaching drive - minimizing his impulse to lecture and facilitate discussion and, instead, surrendering a tremendous amount of power to his students. They set the reading schedule and run the discussion, and he only intervenes when asked. They fight, they complain, they get fed up and skip class... and they come away having learned more from each other than he could have taught them himself.

"...as an instructor I may often see [my students'] interest, better than they, but only they can uncover and claim that interest. Only through their own labor do they realize themselves." -- Naeem Inayatullah

Inayatullah's pedagogy is, for me, very reminiscent of the Comparative History of Ideas (CHID) program at the University of Washington, which has attempted to institutionalize this process - with some success - through a model of peer facilitation: several undergraduates are given weekly discussion sections, which they run without any supervision. It was precisely this model which convinced me of the revolutionary potential of higher ed and led me to pursue my graduate studies... and precisely its total absence at Georgetown which has discouraged me from continuing on to a PhD after I finish my masters.

Now, as always, I am torn -- higher ed, being inherently conservative, rarely does anything revolutionary, especially for those who interest me the most: the undergraduates... and so I find myself looking to direct my efforts elsewhere. But every so often, I am reminded of the transformative power of a hermetic, self-reflexive learning community, and become nostalgic for the future I'm not pursuing.

I am reminded of the time that my father, somewhat disparagingly, asked me if I was "planning to be another Jim Clowes," referring to my late cousin and CHID mentor. Oh, that I had such commitment...

[ Edit (7/31/08): Where I think Inayatullah comes up short is his unimaginative approach to the physical space of the classroom - though he doesn't address the issue head on, he has nonetheless defaulted to the institutional norm of placing the learning experience inside a very conventional learning space: the classroom. I'm curious what he thinks about group study abroad programs. In my own experience, they foster the same sort of learning space that he cultivates in his courses, except that the students have an inverted relationship to the classroom -- instead of encountering the classroom as a disruptive, violent place in a normative world, they encounter disruptive, violent learning experiences outside the classroom, and retreat to the classroom for quiet self-reflection and contemplative discourse. ]