I talked
about learning communities before. I think they can be good things, but they
aren’t immediately easy by any means. They take active acts of imagination to
conceive of how one field can crossover into so many others.
I took part
in a workshop where the idea was to brainstorm a way to create a learning
community between people present in the workshop. At my particular table, I was
partnered with a woman who taught calculus. Now, I am not going to stereotype
math professors, but the particular woman I was with didn’t have much in the
way of imagination. She saw no way to connect calculus to English composition.
I came up
with the idea of having students read and study the developers of calculus
Leibnitz and Newton, possibly even delving into the particular reasons they
developed calculus in the first place. I could present them with the practical
considerations they dealt with and their time period, and then in the calculus
class they could learn about how those problems were solved.
Back in my
class students would write essays detailing the processes used to arrive at the
solution and to support the formulae with logical deductions and proof. This, I
thought, was doable, even exciting.
I looked to
the woman for more ideas and asked for what teaching methods she uses and what
types of problems they would be trying to solve. All she could do was talk
about the various equations they would talk about, and that she wouldn’t grade
any essays in her class.
There’s a
fundamental mindset in the teaching of certain disciplines that must be
addressed before true learning communities can be established.