This is one of the reasons why IF does not ask its panelists to define their terms. Attempts to define our terms rarely if ever succeed. Other reasons include the recognition that we typically have several different definitions of each of our terms, especially if they name things that merit discussion; that definitions suggest a kind of finality and omniscience that we rarely have in real life; and that dictionary definitions are often outpaced by life and the burgeoning language that we use to describe it.

But the main problem is that definitions might stop thought. Definitions tend to lull people into a false sense of security and certainty. And this might stop people from wondering and exploring their understanding of what is, or what might be. We can learn much more about poetry if we keep wondering what it is and dreaming what it might be. And we can learn much more about privacy, property, science, depression, regulations, and other IF areas of concern than we ever could by defining them if we keep exploring and developing the contrasting policy possibilities that pertain to them.

Let me tell you what happened in a public discussion of IF’s Privacy & Privacy Rights report that I recently facilitated. The policy possibilities emanated from four different concepts of privacy: 1) privacy as liberty; 2) privacy as secrecy; 3) privacy as autonomy; and 4) privacy as property. One of the participants objected that each participant seemed to have his or her own definition of privacy and that we were thus talking past each other. We were not. All of these concepts of privacy are in the public arena, and our society and legal system operates with all of them. Ultimately, we live in a democratic society and we have to recognize such diversity and proceed with democratic policy decisions that are based on it.

I noticed during this discussion that when the participants read through the possibilities in the privacy report and started to discuss them, they seemed to let their minds grasp these different concepts of privacy. It was an exciting experience for me to watch some of them bring a new world into focus and suddenly make complete sense of it. It may be even more exciting to think through possible ways to act and speculate about what might ensue from the different possibilities that emanate from these different concepts. In this way, the lack of strict definitions allows us to better explore and understand other positions and possibilities.

Here, someone may argue that we need definitions to solve our problems—for otherwise we may talk past each other. But IF is not trying to solve any problems. It is trying to promote thoughtful exploration and development of contrasting policy possibilities.

But quite aside from that, we often limit our understanding of a problem by trying to define it—which in turn may aggravate the problem by making us unable to see its cause. Consider, for example, the 2005 London suicide bombings. The British Military Intelligence briefly scrutinized one of the terrorists prior to the attacks. But he did not fit their profile of a terrorist and thus was not kept under surveillance. It seems to me that having definitions can easily close our minds to real possibilities, and that not having them may often help us to keep an open mind and save us from problems that we ourselves may create or exacerbate by keeping our minds closed.

Are you still wondering how we can discuss something without defining our terms?

Just try it—just let your mind wander and wonder!

This is a large part of what poetry is all about.

The good news about my students’ presentations is that they went off very well, and were well-received.  They included a large number of artworks that we’ve discussed over the course of the semester, and one slideshow included a floating cartoonized version of my head floating around, with my jaw opening and shutting nutcracker-style while a computerized voice recited, “But is it art? But is it art?”  That drew a big laugh, especially from my colleagues.  What really made me feel good about the end was that I think that the IF process really helped my students do group work better.  It wasn’t great, but compared to some of my colleagues, it was quite successful.  Three colleagues I spoke to had planned to have their classes make presentations, but jettisoned the idea in the end.  All three are excellent teachers, but in one case the students had mutinied against the professor the previous week, refusing to do any more group work since they couldn’t get along, and in another case the professor dissolved the groups after two students ended up getting physically violent with each other (something I haven’t seen here at our all-women campus).  So it might just be that the personalities of my students meshed better, but I attribute part of the success to good preparation through the IF process.

The floating-cartoon head also illustrates a change in my class.  I realized sometime in early November that I was thinking so hard about how the course was going and how to get them to facilitate, and how to help them manage their own work, that I never relaxed in the classroom.  This is different from how I typically work.  Usually I build more of a rapport with the students in the classroom, but it wasn’t happening with my IF class.  They were stressed out, since I had given them some very difficult readings, and difficult writing assignments.  Some rose to the challenge (at least partly), but others more or less checked out, and probably put me in the category of hard professor you can’t understand.  What also made it difficult is that I wanted to teach them some philosophy, but they hadn’t signed up for a philosophy course, per se.  They signed up for a course on art.

So the last month was spent with more small group discussions with easier material.  I focused on the value of arts education.  They read a Psychology Today piece by Michelle & Robert Root-Bernstein on teaching creativity to scientists through art, a report about an art teacher who uses art as therapy for troubled high school students, and I assigned a TED talks online video on creativity by Sir Ken Robinson.  The material was much more accessible, and they did a better job with discussions in November.  One piece of the course I jettisoned was facilitated discussions with middle school students.  As my student assistant put it – “our students are so insecure and unsure of their skills middle schoolers will eat them alive”.  So rather than set them up for sure failure, I dropped a part of the course I had hoped would be very educational for them.  Instead, I added some classes where we did a blind chocolate tasting (to talk about aesthetic judgments and whether they are based on anything objective), we had a music-listening session, we visited a museum, and I took them out for dessert to a nice restaurant.  All these things helped loosen everyone up, and improved the course.  I kept their main, and very difficult, writing assignment, which I helped them through by commenting on several drafts for each person.

The end of one of the student slideshows sort of summed up their experience in my course: “We talked about art a lot.  We still don’t know what it is…in fact, we know less than when we started this course.  But we learned what kind of chocolate we like…and we learned to facilitate.”

Michael Gettings

One of the things I realized is that the readings I’ve been assigning my class have been far too difficult for them to understand.  In a lecture-based course, I would have had more time to explain a lot of the readings to them, but I chose instead to let them grapple with the texts in their own discussions.  This was too much for them.  Jeff suggested that I provide them with material they can more easily digest.  Since my course fulfills a university research requirement, I have to take them to the library to learn how to search databases, create bibliographies, and more.  So I took them one day last week to search for new material to read in the coming weeks.  Our next topic is the Value of the Arts in Education.  Since I know little about this topic, I figured they could find sources and I can sort through them and select the better ones for class readings.  They split into pairs, and they looked for newspaper, magazine or journal articles about the value of the arts in primary, secondary or higher education.  They are turning in their annotated bibliographies today, so I’m curious to see what sources they’ve come up with.  Certainly they’ll be easier to read than professional journal articles in philosophy!

I’ve also decided to make their small group discussions briefer, and include more full-class discussions each week.  This is so that I can break up the monotony of small group discussions, since they were getting burnt out.  This also means I can pull some activities out of my bag of tricks.  They will read a little David Hume (which I’ll help explain) on the standard of taste, then we’ll have a chocolate tasting and talk about whether judges come to consensus about what is of value in art (or chocolate, as the case may be!).  I’ve done this before with classes, and it’s been fun for them, and they learn something.  I’m also going to have them each submit a piece of music they like, and write a paragraph explaining why they find it aesthetically interesting or valuable.  Then I’ll put the class playlist together, and we’ll discuss how we write about art, and what the role of criticism is.  So a few of these activities, which have been successful in the past, will improve things I hope, giving them more variety.

Their groups have written rough drafts of group reports for our earlier discussions on the question “What is Art?”, and the results are acceptable so far.  Each report is 8-12 pages, and they seem to have done a decent job collaborating on the result.  I’m meeting with each group today to give them feedback and advise them how to best revise the reports.

Well, that’s it for now.  As I’ve gotten very busy I’ve fallen off my weekly posting schedule that I set for myself, but that doesn’t surprise me at this point in the semester!

Michael Gettings

I began last Tuesday’s discussion groups by facilitating one of the discussions myself, with my student assistant facilitating the other group, which we did for about 10 minutes.  Then we handed facilitation over to the groups’ facilitators.  I thought a bit more modeling was in order, since the students didn’t really seem to be grasping the art of facilitation.  In my individual meetings with facilitators after their discussions, about half of them don’t really get what is expected of them, and half get it, and can be rather self-reflective.  I have them each fill out a self-assessment prior to meeting with me, and I review it and share my own evaluation of their facilitation, emphasizing what they can do next time to improve.  All of them say they understand the value of learning to facilitate, but of course they’re going to tell me that – I’m the professor.

My biggest job now is getting them to the end of this “What is art?” module, and figuring out how to design the next module, which needs a complete overhaul.  I’ll post again when I’ve figured some of that out.

Michael Gettings

I split my class of twelve into two groups of six each, and I used Sue & Jack’s Team Membership Survey tool  from the Guidebook for Student-Centered Classroom Discussions, along with my own grasp of the various personalities of the students.  I’ve been trying to get the groups to work on their responses to our broad question “What is Art?”.  The responses so far are quite vague and poorly formulated.  I had intended the responses to be akin to theories of art – a lofty goal, as it turns out.  Right now what they’ve produced are ideas from “Everything is art” to “Art has to have meaning, and meaning can be just about anything” to “art is the expression of an emotion or idea, or the product of that expression”.  So yesterday I gave them the somewhat more concrete task of first listing all the works they have studied or seen that challenge conventional notions of art (what I call the “gray area cases”), then pretend they are on a grants committee for the NEA, and they have to determine which works are art, and so receive NEA grant funding, and which ones aren’t.  I asked them to look at the list of their responses to the question “what is art?” and ask about each response “does this response help us decide whether these works are works of art?”  If the response doesn’t help them decide which works are art and which aren’t, how can they revise the responses to make them more informative?  I told the facilitators to not get hung up on getting a perfect response – the task is to generate possible responses, not necessarily correct ones.  I also had them read an article that defends one theory of art – the Institutional Theory.  I held that up as a paradigm of theorizing, but noted that the theory has its own problems.

When they struggled with the task for 15 minutes or so, I asked each group to number the responses, then index each gray area artwork, by putting the number of each response next to it, if that response counted the work as a work of art.  Guess what?  Every response said every work was a work of art.  I pointed out to them that this means that they haven’t come up with 7 or 8 different responses, but all the responses are functionally the same.  Lights went on.  Since I’m working with theory, not necessarily policy, I was trying to get them to see that if you have 8 policies which all give you the same result in all test cases, you really only have one policy.  They ran out of time, but are eager to start over on Tuesday and try to revise the possible responses to differentiate them better.  Thank goodness.  The peer mentor assigned to my class regularly gives me looks during the small group discussions.  She is doing her best to not jump in and create order out of the chaos.

The facilitation is going reasonably well, although I can see that the baseline skills of these first-year students isn’t what I’d like it to be.  They have a hard time thinking about ideas other than their own.  Some have a hard time listening, and often the small group gets taken over by whichever student has the strongest personality.  The quieter people haven’t facilitated all that well, and some have told me they never want to do it again.  But I’m meeting with them after each session, giving tips and words of encouragement, and everyone sees the value in eventually learning how to facilitate well.  Next week my peer mentor and I are going to each facilitate a small group for 10 minutes, to model how it’s done.  I realize that at 18 (and even 17!) years old, these students just aren’t at the level to really have the confidence to step in and facilitate.  But I remain convinced that they can learn to do it.

I’ve had to jettison parts of my syllabus already in the interest of making discussion work in my classroom.   While I had planned on having half the class meetings in a lecture+discussion format, it’s turned into 2/3 IF-discussion pretty quickly.  And there are so many things to teach them that I’ve scaled back the readings, and some of the discussion of the readings.  Whether this is the right decision, I don’t know.

Finally, two colleagues at Hollins have asked me what the flip charts and easels are for, and when I described what I was doing in class, they were interested.  I’ve received two invitations to present to faculty groups, and I gave an impromptu 10-minute summary of IF discussion in my classroom to a group of 15 faculty teaching our first-year seminars.  We also have a leadership certificate program, and, given that I’m teaching facilitation as a style of leadership, I applied for my course to count towards the certificate in leadership studies.  The director of that program has asked me to present to a group of faculty who teach in that program, and talk about facilitation as leadership.  I’m trying to keep expectations low, and let them know that I claim no expertise!  Perhaps when my IF course is done, I’ll present something to the group in Spring 2010, and bring one or two of my students with me to discuss how facilitation looks from a student perspective.  We’ll see.  Already I’m well over-committed and I don’t know enough yet about what I’m doing or how it works best, so I’m trying to hold everyone at bay.  But it’s nice to know that there’s interest on our campus from some faculty.

Michael Gettings

I also have a peer mentor in my course who is a senior.  She has no grading responsibilities, but she is there to model college learning in my classroom and serve as an advisor to the students.   Through her I’ve learned about some of the interpersonal issues that have arisen among the members of the class, and these issues are forcing me to consider how to best navigate this group so they can have constructive discussions.  So far, it’s going alright, but if the present dynamics are left as they are, things will take a turn for the worse.  Fortunately, some of the facilitation techniques have helped, and I’m going to include more think/pair/share and other techniques to ensure that discussions are more balanced.  A round-robin activity already worked well on Tuesday, since it forced some of them into more active roles.

I summarized our Tuesday discussion and posted the summary online for my students, and they responded well so far.  They produced two conceptual possibilities that could describe the nature of art.  Both possibilities are only in a nascent stage – they are more like germs of ideas rather than fully formed possibilities.  They also produced a list of 6 important concepts surrounding art (intention, appreciation, context, etc.) which we will pick up again in next Tuesday’s discussion.

Finally, wish me luck this Sunday as I attempt to use an IF-style discussion model in a Board of Trustees retreat for a local school, where I’ve been asked to facilitate a discussion.  I’m going to try to get 16 Board members to generate a set of possible responses to the question “What can we, as a Board and as Board members, do to further the mission of the school?”  I only have 2 hours to get the job done, so I’m going to have to work quickly with them.  I’m packing my flipchart and markers!

All the best to everyone!

Michael Gettings

The Yes Men – undermining corporate authority and thinking

The Art Guys – questioning values and behavior

The Situationist International – marxist – surrealist attack on capitalist thinking and ideology

Banksy – subverting ideas, spaces and traditions in art and culture

Fluxus – questioning the arts and notions of art as aestheticized object [overview by Stewart Home] [Fluxus Portal]