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Campus | Bryn Mawr |
Semester | Fall 2018 |
Registration ID | EMLYB001019 |
Course Title | Emily Balch Seminars-Complex Thinking:Simple Wisdom |
Credit | 1.00 |
Department | Emily Balch Seminars |
Instructor | Siesing,Gina |
Times and Days | TTh 11:25am-12:45pm
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Room Location | |
Additional Course Info | Class Number: 2703 The Balch Seminars introduce all first-year students at Bryn Mawr to a critical, probing, thoughtful approach to the world and our roles in it. These challenging seminars are taught by scholar/teachers of distinction within their fields and across academic disciplines. They facilitate the seminars as active discussions among students, not lectures. Through intensive reading and writing, the thought-provoking Balch Seminars challenge students to think about complex, wide-ranging issues from a variety of perspectives. Current topic description: One of the most powerful facets of a liberal arts education is the chance to develop rich new ways of understanding our complex world in a community with other people who love to learn. How do we grapple effectively with such multi-faceted topics as political polarization in the US, cross-generational paradigms for social justice, ways of thinking about cures for malignant diseases, or methods for repairing interpersonal or societal harm? How do we think about the big question of whether institutions like ours represent a “bubble” apart from “the real world” or a reflection of the world in all its complexity and a place to build skills and practices relevant to living in the world and making it the best place it can be? When people from diverse backgrounds – both in terms of formal training and lived experience – come together to analyze gnarly questions and to seek new approaches to addressing those questions in our world, it helps to have methods for listening well and for finding common ground. Building our capacity for understanding complex situations from multiple perspectives and cultivating wise practices for cutting through complexity and handling areas of uncertainty can be a deeply beneficial kind of learning in community. In “Complex Thinking, Simple Wisdom,” we’ll use case studies to explore the value of using multiple lenses to understand complex issues in nuanced ways. Readings will range from articles in The New Yorker on paradigm changes in the health sciences and in education to Pew Research Center studies and infographics on US political bifurcation to Huffington Post essays and personal blogs on generational differences and how these affect ideas about activism and justice. The wisdom traditions we’ll explore through classic and contemporary writers are ones that have provided those who grapple with nearly unsolvable questions the insight to reframe these questions in ways that create new possibilities for holistic understanding and for moving forward individually and collectively. To integrate these wisdom texts into our explorations, we’ll draw on such readings as Chögyam Trungpa’s Shambhala: The Sacred Path of the Warrior and Pema Chödrön’s “No Right, No Wrong,” Melissa Gayle West’s Exploring the Labyrinth, and the Peace Prayer of St. Francis of Assisi. This course is an opportunity to develop skills and confidence in close reading, attentive listening, and in-depth discussion based on exploring multiple perspectives and building a shared understanding among seminar members. Your writing in the seminar will include response papers, online discussion with peers, critical essays, and revisions supported by peer comment and regular one-on-one conferences with the instructor with the goal of helping you to craft effective arguments that engage, clarify, and persuade. |
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