Bridging Cultures Institute 2002

Teaching the Humanities in An Integrated Manner (Anne Dalke)

Let's begin with our own experiences ... of reading this picture

What do you see? Write the story of the picture in the institute forum area (see responses).

Let's tell each other our stories ...

and add Sharon's (the artist's...)

Some history ... Serendip ...

... and tranformation

Science/culture intermingling

What do you think about "intermingling"? (Remember those Renassaince artists and their "aversion to mixing"?) What do you see as the advantages and disadvantages of more intermingling in curricula and classrooms? Write your thoughts in the institute forum area (see responses).

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What possibilities (what new drawing/interpretations) exist in integrative teaching?
How I got here and how I teach "science' now ...

High school/college disinterest/phobia
Reawakened interest seven years ago (at age 45)

• With Kaye ...
  • "anoriexia nervosa is clearly a ... 'multidimensional disorder," with familial, perceptual, cognitive, and possibly, biological factors interacting in varying combination in different individuals ..."
    Susan Bordo, Unbearable Weight: Feminism, Western Culture, and the Body, 1993
  • Increasing awareness of need for science in gender studies
• Difficulty handling science texts
• Success with recognition of ambiguities
• Telling and Retelling Stories About Ourselves in the World
  • faith in "tacit knowledge"
  • loopiness

"Why should not we also enjoy an original relation to the universe? Why should not we have a poetry and philosphy of insight and not of tradition, and a religion of revelation to us, and not to the history of theirs?" Ralph Waldo Emerson, "Nature"

Consequences for upper level literature courses

• Praxis
• Feminist Difference in Literary Theory
• Big Books of American Literature
• Thinking Sex

Playing, to end, with a project on tacit knowledge....

1. Collect data on tacit understanding
2. Interpret the observations you have made
3. Identify what new questions your expla natory theory raises
4. Can we change it? What would change/how would we act differently, if we did?

What do you think about "tacit" knowledge? Write your thoughts in the institute forum area (see responses).


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