The journey starts ...
I spent a fascinating evening on Monday getting a lesson plan ready for the first session, discovering many things for myself, which I wish I had more time to contemplate to inform my own understanding of the issues I want my students to think about. The internet proved itself to be a useful and rich source of material I could use to introduce the themes.
Gathering materials
For some time now I've been subscribed to Brainpickings, a wonderful website curated by Maria Popova, which gives you a weekly diet of insights into art, science, literature and culture, many of the recurrent themes being identity, creativity, imagination, potential, visuality, so exactly what my project aims to explore. When I entered 'identity' into the site search box, I discovered delightful illustrations by Maira Kalman and a video with the artist herself talking about identity, existence, art and mortality. I thought that could be a good starting point for the lesson, especially that clip is just around 4 mins and a good blend of the verbal and the visual.
I spent a fascinating evening on Monday getting a lesson plan ready for the first session, discovering many things for myself, which I wish I had more time to contemplate to inform my own understanding of the issues I want my students to think about. The internet proved itself to be a useful and rich source of material I could use to introduce the themes.
Gathering materials
For some time now I've been subscribed to Brainpickings, a wonderful website curated by Maria Popova, which gives you a weekly diet of insights into art, science, literature and culture, many of the recurrent themes being identity, creativity, imagination, potential, visuality, so exactly what my project aims to explore. When I entered 'identity' into the site search box, I discovered delightful illustrations by Maira Kalman and a video with the artist herself talking about identity, existence, art and mortality. I thought that could be a good starting point for the lesson, especially that clip is just around 4 mins and a good blend of the verbal and the visual.
TED talks provided me with another listening, a lecture by Thomas Metzinger, a philosopher, for whom 'self' does not exist as such as he considers it to be a process rather than a kind of entity. He explains his views using references to cognitive psychology and neuroscience, using examples of experiments such the rubber hand experiment and research into phantom limbs, discussing philosophical concepts of the self model and a transparency metaphor.
The lecture by definition is a bit a heavier and more complicated but constitutes a good contrast to the artist's personal talk on different levels, as a speech genre, nature of justification provided for ideas, language used and even visuals (although sadly Metzinger's slides have not been filmed - in the lesson I used a different video). I've used the contrast not to pass value judgements but to show there are different perspectives to look at an issue and different ways of talking about it, ways which perhaps complement each other and certainly enrich our understanding. The mix of approaches should appeal to the scientists and humanists alike and provide a good example of weaving, the personal and impersonal, visual and verbal, formal and informal, so what the project aims to achieve.
Thrown into the deep end
In the first session, the students were presented with initial questions about self to help them ease into the discussion. They enquiries about the meaning of 'self', in response to which I asked them about their associations. Among the brainstormed words there were I, me, what is inside me, identity, who I am, soul. One of the questions was 'what am I?' and answers varied from very specific 'I'm a student, I will be a manager' to very general 'I'm a human being'.
Their first reaction to the video was confusion. They seemingly didn't understand much but in feedback and with each other's help they were able to reconstruct some of the main ideas such as the notion of self being fluid, dynamic and not static, being associated with what we love doing, something grounded in the present - it was interesting to listen to their analyses of Kalman's statement 'Ich habe genug' but in the end we'd decided it was meant to be positive even though she introduced it when talking about mortality. It was mature of some students to acknowledge her views without judgment even though they noted they construct their identity based on alternative bases such as faith and religion. Generally we thought that the identity might be subject to changes even though there was some disagreement as to how big or minute the changes could be, whether those were just superficial modifications or whether they could affect our 'core', our 'true nature', apply to the container (body) and/or the contents.
When trying to explain their thoughts, the students used some metaphors, mostly related to travel, 'journey', 'getting lost', being 'at the crossroads, etc, which is welcomed as metaphor is something we are going to look into in more detail quite soon.
To finish with they all opened their gmail accounts and as homework they are to add their reflections to the 'Who am I' online wall - I'm excited to see what they add.