Hi Sara, definitely have a lot of thoughts on this. I believe the classes you're teaching are Olin classes? Looking back on my experience on campus, I think it was difficult sometimes to have conversations because we had so little grounding in any sort of "humanities" literature, and as such words or ideas got thrown around without even a shared understanding of what things mean; e.g., if we're talking about "intersectionality," what are we actually talking about? Whose ideas are we invoking when we use that word?
Building off of the idea of readiness, one thing that I've found helpful in my post-Olin intellectual life is to view the act of reading a text as an encounter between you and a piece of writing, one which has an intellectual genealogy that you probably aren't yet aware of, and whose ideas have also been taken up by others towards various ends, some of which you may agree with and some of which you may not. The ZPD is actually sort of an interesting example of this. In my grad classes, Vygotsky was fairly contentious because he was known to apply his own theories toward ends that were pretty racist (or at least Eurocentric), and that generated a lot of discomfort with the idea of aligning oneself with his theories. At the same time, if you read up on Vygotsky, you find that he was also quite Marxist in his beliefs, and that the ZPD was part of his broader theory of the mind as inherently based in social and intersubjective meaning-making. Today, many of the scholars in my field doing crucial, justice-oriented work are broadly "Vygotskian." These facts can't be summed up into a single satisfying conclusion, but I've found it comforting to view each writing as part of a broader historical context and body of work, one that we can explore in search of a clearer sense of meaning.
Sorry for the long response; very interested to hear how the classes go. Hope you're doing well!
Hi Sara, definitely have a lot of thoughts on this. I believe the classes you're teaching are Olin classes? Looking back on my experience on campus, I think it was difficult sometimes to have conversations because we had so little grounding in any sort of "humanities" literature, and as such words or ideas got thrown around without even a shared understanding of what things mean; e.g., if we're talking about "intersectionality," what are we actually talking about? Whose ideas are we invoking when we use that word?
Building off of the idea of readiness, one thing that I've found helpful in my post-Olin intellectual life is to view the act of reading a text as an encounter between you and a piece of writing, one which has an intellectual genealogy that you probably aren't yet aware of, and whose ideas have also been taken up by others towards various ends, some of which you may agree with and some of which you may not. The ZPD is actually sort of an interesting example of this. In my grad classes, Vygotsky was fairly contentious because he was known to apply his own theories toward ends that were pretty racist (or at least Eurocentric), and that generated a lot of discomfort with the idea of aligning oneself with his theories. At the same time, if you read up on Vygotsky, you find that he was also quite Marxist in his beliefs, and that the ZPD was part of his broader theory of the mind as inherently based in social and intersubjective meaning-making. Today, many of the scholars in my field doing crucial, justice-oriented work are broadly "Vygotskian." These facts can't be summed up into a single satisfying conclusion, but I've found it comforting to view each writing as part of a broader historical context and body of work, one that we can explore in search of a clearer sense of meaning.
Sorry for the long response; very interested to hear how the classes go. Hope you're doing well!