Brain, Education, and Inquiry

Bryn Mawr College, Fall 2010

Session 3

Class is itself an experiment in a particular form of education: co-constructive inquiry

Learning by interacting, sharing observations and understandings to create, individually and collectively, new understandings and new questions that motivate new observations

 I first read "Fun Home" in Anne Bruder's class on Women's Life Writing last spring. In that class we talked about all forms of life writing--from autobiography to blogging. Towards the end of the semester, we concluded our study with Bechdel's "Fun Home." Unfortunately I don't have my notebook from last semester here to tell me exactly what we discussed with respect to Bechdel, but because it was at the end of the semester, I do remember trying to apply and wrap up many themes we found throughout the course, to Bechdel's work as well. Throughout the course we spent significant amounts of time discussing what gives an author the authority and credibility not just to write, but to write in a way such that we the reader believe them.

 I thought our discussion about "playing the game" with Reality Hunger was interesting.  In a way, I think I played Shields' game because I didn't keep going to the appendix to check which segments were quotes and which were his words.  I knew that he included quotes, but it wasn't until after Tuesday's class that I felt the need to flip back and check what he was quoting and what he wasn't more and more.  

Biology in Society Senior Seminar

Bryn Mawr College, Fall 2010

Session 3:
"She's a woman": "Fact" or ... ?

• Are "woman" and "man" well-defined discrete categories?
• Should we try and make them so?
• Is biology relevant to such a discussion?
• What does biology have to say?  How should it contribute?

Some thoughts from last session

Reading Reality Hunger has made me see that any piece of writing is a craft of art, and then the writer rearranges the different parts of the artwork to get a complete picture, as D. Shields said: "What actually happened is only raw material; what the writer makes of what happened is all that matters."