Philosophy and education

I (Heather) am on the road this week at the Society for the Advancement of American Philosophy's annual conference (this year, in chilly Grand Rapids, MI).  This conference highlights pragmatist philosophy, and there are often sessions on using philosophy to solve the problems of our time.  That is especially true this year since the conference's central theme is sustainability.  I went to a fine panel discussion this morning put together by the host institution, Grand Valley State University, about community and project based education.

Though the central ideas aren't new to Green Mountain (as we have many, many classes that use service learning, and, of course, every GMC student does a service project in our Environmental Liberal Arts gen ed capstone course), I did get some ideas about ways we could better "scaffold" service learning opportunities to make them more useful both to students and to partners.  Many folks who work with students on service learning projects develop "partner fatigue" when they tire of projects that aren't successful or productive.  To avoid this, GVSU tries to scaffold the experience so that students take more than one semester to conceptualize and activate project components.  We're starting to do this in our first-year experience by having Voices of Community (our second-semester writing course) students engage with capstone students about project development.  It's on our radar, but something I hope we can facilitate more as we build our first-year experience.

GVSU's Danielle Lake uses the engaged pedagogical philosophies of John Dewey and Jane Addams in a course in which she has students frame community issues as "wicked problems" which requires that they explore the complexity of social or ecological problems before posing lasting solutions.  I've been thinking that the wicked problems approach might be useful to us as we think more about building toward the capstone projects.  Minimally, it requires students (and faculty) to more fully understand the social and ecological systems in which we live (and serve), which I would think makes empathy more likely.  THAT is certainly central to Deweyan and Addamsian pragmatist philosophy.