May 2010 Archives

Last fall, Teaching and Learning with Technology shot some footage of me in the classroom as I was teaching my Philosophy 200 course on Socratic Politics. In that course, I made extensive use of blogs in the hopes of empowering more active student engagement with the material in the course.

Dialogue Between Two Trees In My Wild River...!!!
Originally uploaded by Denis Collette...!!!

Subsequently, I posted a screencast of a related presentation entitled the Pedagogy of Blogging that articulates why I consider blogs pedagogically important.

Today, as I address another group of faculty from the Rock Ethics Institute, I would like to focus attention on one specific dimension of teaching ethics, namely, the cultivation of the excellences of dialogue.

Obviously, ethics is a multifaceted thing, and there are many ways to teach it.  This presentation, however, is designed to point the virtues or excellences of dialogue which are themselves best taught by being practiced.

So, I will begin by focusing on the way I used blogs in one of my Philosophy courses in order to empower students to take an active role in their own education.  One of the main pedagogical goals of the course was to cooperatively develop with my students the excellences of dialogue, some of which I consider to be: openness to difference, an ability to embrace ambiguity, patience, generosity, and ethical imagination - the ability to imagine new possibilities of relation when old habits reveal themselves as corrosive, limited and limiting. 

The Approach to PHIL200: Ancient Greek Philosophy

In order to illustrate something of the experience my students and I had in this course, we put together this video which attempted to capture something of the level of dialogue in which we were engaged and the dynamic nature of the community we created together.

The video below was produced by me and my students. It uses only the words that were posted on the blog, but for the video, we read excerpts directly to the camera in order to add a visual dimension to our written conversation.

Remains of the Centre Furnace Stack
Originally uploaded by Christopher Long

Delivered on May 15, 2010 at the Graduation Ceremony for World Campus Students 

We gather here today to celebrate a milestone in the lives of each of our graduates. To arrive at a milestone, however, is a rather peculiar thing. For a milestone is less a destination, than the identification of a distance travelled, an orienting marker that reminds us of where we have been and suggests the distance we have yet to travel.

It is fitting that we gather here, in Innovation Park, at a crossroad, where I-99 joins Rt. 322 and the two roads proceed together for a distance before separating, each moving, as you soon will, in a direction of its own. We stand here too, not far from the remains of the Centre Furnace stack, preserved along Rt. 26 at Porter Road as one enters State College from the east. There, in June of 1855, the Board of Trustees of the Farmers' High School gathered to inspect the 200-acre farm General James Irvin of Bellefonte had offered as a site for what would become the Pennsylvania State University. 

Those stones too stand in a long tradition of milestones, stretching back to Roman times, when milestones marked the distance between cities; and they gesture yet further back in history to the ancient Greek practice whereby travelers would add a stone to the pile that marked a significant crossroad. 

The Greeks called such stone piles hermata, naming them for Hermes, the god of boundaries and crossroads, the messenger god, who is present anywhere humans traverse the threshold of their private lives and enter into relation with one another to exchange ideas and commerce. Hermes, the traveler, the god of communication and community, seems to have been at work among those stone remnants of the Centre Furnace stack; for an entire universe of ideas has brought young women and men together here in the hills of central Pennsylvania.