The Anchor Course
Syllabus
Serving as an anchor for the Reconciliation League’s summer session, this course asks students to consider the following questions: How do we build bridges across the chasms that so often divide us? How do we live and learn across difference – not in ways that simply tolerate one another, but in ways that celebrate appropriately the differences within and between us? What formations of thought and action do we need to develop so that difference becomes an opportunity rather than a threat, and how do we translate these formations into practices that we carry with us? And, finally, how do we mobilize the habits of mind and skills learned to work with others to advance society?
Through reading, writing, discussion, and debate, students will chart not only the development of their own thinking and awareness but will also sharpen their understanding of the nature of interconnectedness, ecumenical dialogue, and reconciliation processes.
By the end of the session, students will have created their own individual commonplace book of knowledge and reflections, and will have designed a proposal for a collaborative project that advances the aims of the League. As they return to their campuses for the Fall semester, they will work (with guidance from program mentors) to make these projects a reality; they will then reconvene with their cohort in January to compare their experiences and identify future possibilities.
Completed before the first class:
The commonplace book is a personal notebook in which quotations, observations, prayers, and stray thoughts are gathered, often under topical headings, for later retrieval and use. The term “commonplace” comes from the Greek koinos topos and is linked to Aristotle’s suggestion to use topoi, or “places” in the mind, to locate arguments on which an orator could draw for different occasions. The concept was later transformed in the early modern period into a humanist pedagogical tool, championed by Erasmus in De Copia (1512) as a way of training the mind through the labor of selection and arrangement. John Milton, Francis Bacon, Thomas Jefferson, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Virginia Woolf, and W. H. Auden are examples of writers who kept commonplace books in one form or another. Commonplace books foster a particular relation between reading and thinking, encouraging not the passive consumption of texts but rather the slow accumulation of fragments that, gathered and then reencountered over time, become the material out of which one’s own mind is built.
For this course’s commonplace book project, we will provide a template that helps students to (1) identify useful quotations and ideas from the course’s reading and viewing assignments and (2) make observations about the relationships among the various forms of knowledge that they encounter during the summer session.
The commonplace book is intended to enable students to think self-consciously about the “knowledge base” that they are creating during the summer session – and during their college careers and beyond. A knowledge base consists of both content – “knowledge” in its familiar sense – and the skills necessary to engage with the content meaningfully. The knowledge base provides the materials from which research questions arise, the standards against which interpretive judgments are measured, and the shared reference points that allow scholars to communicate across specializations.
Although it provides a foundation from which to conduct further inquiry, a knowledge base should also be seen as dynamic: it evolves as new research compels a rethinking of previous assumptions and questions. The knowledge base and new research exist in a reciprocal relation: the knowledge base prompts new research; new research provides new knowledge; and that new knowledge must be incorporated back into the knowledge base.
Of course, the knowledge base that students build during the summer session will be a subset of the larger knowledge base that they are building as university students. This course will offer students a model of critical thinking in which they assess what they are learning in their second summer course. It will offer a model of how to put together knowledge, skills, and methods from different disciplines that is broadly applicable to both college and lifelong learning.
As part of the summer session, all students will engage in a set of creative arts workshops devoted to “making,” whether that be painting, ceramics, woodworking, a theatrical performance, or something similar. In these workshops, students will be introduced to the basics of an artistic practice that is new to them and will in the process experience the rewards and frustrations of artistic creation. It is not expected that students will become experts by the end of a workshop. Instead, these experiences are designed to illustrate, in another context, the importance of process, which is integral to any pursuit.
The retreats are designed to enable Reconciliation Fellows to build on the key concepts introduced in the course. They give participants the chance to reflect on, and put into practice, the ideas that they’ve been studying in an academic setting: self-reflection, cosmopolitan conversation, and engagement with the unfamiliar. Each retreat will present practical and experiential challenges, and opportunities to engage with the surrounding world in new and perhaps unfamiliar ways. This time away from their usual lives and habits, and away from their digital existence, will enable Fellows to return to “normal” with fresh eyes and new perspectives.
Every Fellow also takes a seminar with a leading scholar.
