GENS 175-G Exploring Complex Questions: Childhood

Whitman College

Fall 2020: Monday, Wednesday & Friday 11-11:50am

Professor: Patrick R. Frierson (you can call me “Patrick”) E-mail: frierspr@whitman.edu

Zoom site for class (click here), meeting ID 970 1379 1723. The password is Montessori.

GatherTown course site (click here), password Montessori.

Office Hours: Tuesday 8-9 PM, Thursday 1-2:30 PM, and by appointment.

“Office”: https://gather.town/8jEXqjctapnnCpJM/Patrick's Office Hours

Course Description

What is a child? What is childhood? And who gets to be a child? When did you stop being a child? Are you still? How are childhoods and children's experiences framed by social, historical, geographic, and cultural contexts? This course addresses questions about how children can be treated, what is distinctive about the children’s stage(s) of life, what kinds of tools we can/should/do use to understand childhood and how children are theorized about, represented in art and literature, and included in academic research. The texts in the course draw from a range of disciplines (including film/art, philosophy, literature, and social scientific investigation). All sections will start with the United Nations Declaration of the Rights of the Child and include texts like the documentary Babies, writings by Piaget and Montessori, and creative depictions of childhood. Over the course of the semester, talks by each of the participating faculty will help guide students’ exploration of these questions. Each talk will be followed by debriefing sessions with students from other sections within the learning community. If circumstances allow, students will interact with community organizations to facilitate understanding children's experiences in the Walla Walla Valley.

Course Learning goals

Students will demonstrate improved ability to ask increasingly focused and complex questions.
Students will demonstrate improved ability to read inquisitively and generously, with attention to detail and nuance.
Students will demonstrate improved ability to formulate productive questions that guide exploration of a complex text (broadly construed)
Students will demonstrate improved ability to use writing and discussion as means to discover and reconsider ideas.
Students will demonstrate improved ability to understand how a writer’s overt purposes and readers’ expectations influence the structure and style of writing.

Required Readings

Louise Erdrich, The Birchbark House (Scholastic, 1999), ISBN:0-439-30340-6.

Louise Erdrich, The Round House (Harper Perennial, 2012), ISBN: 978-0-06-206525-4.

(Optional) Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Emile: Or, On Education (Basic Books, 1979), ISBN:0-465-01931-5

All other readings, along with the syllabus and handouts, will be available on our course Canvas site.

Course Structure

One of the guiding principles of this course is that the deepest engagement and insight about these challenging texts and issues come about through dialogue: each of us articulating ideas and questions in relation to the ideas and questions of others. While I will sometimes present background information, alternative interpretations, or so on, those occasions will be rare and brief. The bulk of our class time will be spent actively working with the readings and the larger issues that they suggest, through whole-class and small-group discussions and through short writing focused on discovering and reconsidering ideas. This happens best with synchronous (real-time) discussion. So please make sure to reserve our scheduled time slot for Zoom and GatherTown meetings. If you are in a distant time zone and/or do not have access to stable internet, I will do my best to make alternatives available. At present, I plan to have most Wednesday and Friday meetings held synchronously as an entire class. With the exception of the first and last class days and days, most Monday meetings will be small group collaborations, where you will work with 2 or 3 other students on projects I assign, at a time you schedule yourself. During these meetings, I will be available in our GatherTown classroom and I invite you to have your small group meetings there as well.

Course Expectations and Requirements

The first-year seminars are designed to cultivate your intellectual curiosity, develop your abilities to inquire into complex issues, formulate and support coherent arguments, and engage in constructive, transformative dialogue with your professors and peers. Therefore, they key elements of the course are reading carefully, reflecting on what you read to come up with interesting ideas, discussing those ideas with me and your classmates, and then revisiting your initial ideas after class discussion. Following the recommendation of my colleague in the psychology department, I will give you a labor-based grade in this course. If you complete a minimum number of assignments, participate in class, and submit a final reflection, you will earn a B+. Additional optional assignments are available for students who want to raise their grades. Details are provided in a document on the Canvas site called “Expectations and Assignments GENS 175."

E-mail, Canvas, Zoom, and GatherTown

I will distribute important announcements, reminders, and clarifications through e-mail. It is your responsibility to check your Whitman account every day.

You can log into Canvas from the main Whitman web page or simply go to canvas.whitman.edu and log in with your campus username and password. This course will appear as an icon; when you click on it, you will find the syllabus on the main landing page and a menu that includes Files (where all the readings live) and Assignments (where all the assignments live).

Our synchronous meetings on Wednesdays and Fridays will all be held on Zoom. I have a zoom meeting site for our synchronous meetings on Wednesdays and Fridays at 11. Click on the link or use Meeting ID: 970 1379 1723. The password is Montessori. You are expected to be present for all class meetings unless you have an excused absence or have worked out an alternative arrangement with me in advance. When we meet in zoom, everyone should have their cameras turned on. Seeing one another’s faces is an important part of live class discussion. Seeing faces helps alleviate social isolation, and we need to read one another facial cues as signals of active listening, engagement, and just to share emotions and reactions with one another. Being visually present to your peers also helps ensure that you are mentally and emotionally present in the class. Still, I appreciate that you may have poor internet connections or a background environment that you don't want to share with the class. If you need to turn off your camera, you may do so. I also appreciate that some students will have legitimate reasons for not being able to attend synchronous classes. For those students, I will record our class discussions and make them available to classmates by request after each class session. All recordings will be deleted at the end of the semester. (All such students should also contact me to arrange for alternatives to participation in those class sessions.)

There are two GatherTown venues relevant to this class. The first is my GatherTown Office, where I will hold office hours. I recommend that you visit that room immediately, just to look around. You’ll see that it has different areas. I will usually hang out on the comfy couches in the middle of the room. When you get to the room, come on over. If I’m alone, come talk to me. If I’m meeting with another student, you can hang out on the periphery of the room, or you can come closer and listen in to what we are talking about. If a student needs to talk to me about something private, we will go to the desks in the lower left corner of the room. If you see me meeting with someone at those desks, please do not disturb us or listen in. If you have something particularly private to discuss, we can set up a separate meeting. I feel like this room is a fun simulation of an office I wish I had, but we’ll see how it goes. I will also probably hang out in GatherTown at various other times while I’m doing other work at my computer. If you see me there and want to chat, come on over. I have also created a (much bigger) GatherTown venue specific to our class. I’ll usually be hanging out on the beach at the end of the main path, either contemplating the non-sunset or just playing in the sand. You can use this class to meet with others in the class outside of class hours, and I’ll hang out in this space during our regular class time every Monday (where it would also be a good place for you all to meet as a small group), and I may use it to have class gatherings. The password for this site is Montessori.

Students with Disabilities or Special Learning Needs

If you have a documented disability and will need accommodation in this course, please meet with Antonia Keithahn, Assistant Director of Academic Resources: Disability Support, for assistance in developing a plan to address your academic needs. All information about disabilities is private; if I receive notification from the ARC that you are eligible for accommodation, I will provide accommodation as discreetly as possible. Even if you do not have a documented disability, if there are specific ways that I can accommodate your learning style in a way that allows you to better accomplish the learning goals for the class, please let me know and we can work together on accommodations. My goal is to help every single student do their best work in this class, so please talk with me about how we can make that happen.

Academic dishonesty

Cheating or plagiarism will not be tolerated in any form. You have signed a statement indicating that you understand and will abide by the College policy on plagiarism. Any student caught cheating or plagiarizing will result in a minimum of a zero on the assignment, and a maximum of receiving an F in the course. All instances of cheating will be reported to the Dean of Students. (For more details, see the Student Handbook.)

Table of Readings and Assignments (by date)

The table below lists the format of our class (synchronous or asynchronous) with a link to the relevant Zoom or GatherTown site, the readings that should be completed before class for that day, and links to the assignments that should be completed before class. All assignments are due by 10 am Pacific Standard Time on the date listed.

	Class Format	Readings. Be sure that you have read all of these materials and thought about them carefully before class.	Generative Assignments to be completed before class
Mon 8/24	Synchronous. Meeting to be held on zoom at this link. The password is Montessori.	Read the Declaration of the Rights of Child Read the first three paragraphs of Kant’s “What is Enlightenment?”	Refine the question Classroom ground rules.
Wed 8/26	Synchronous on zoom.	Declaration of the Rights of Child Optional: Cregan and Cuthbert "The Convention on the Rights of the Child and the Construction of the Normative Global Child" (excerpt)	Addition, Deletion, Question
Fri 8/28	Synchronous on zoom. Today we’ll think about babies!	Rousseau (Emile, Bloom translation, pp. 37-51, focus on p. 42-44 on swaddling, and also read the second full paragraph on p. 60) Happiest Baby on the Block Birchbark House p. 1-2 and 42-44.	Compare, Contrast, Evaluate
Mon 8/31	Collaborative (GatherTown optional)	Babies (film), available through Penrose library here.	Freeze Frame: Description, Interpretation, Questioning
Wed 9/2	Synchronous on zoom.	Maria Montessori, The Absorbent Mind (Claremont trans.), chapters 3 and 7. Optional: Rousseau, Emile, p. 112.	Montessori reflections.
Fri 9/4	Synchronous on zoom.	Esther Thelen, “The Improving Infant” Also read this article by a former student of Thelen’s, Cole, Lindeman, and Adolph, “Go Naked” (Optional: Esther Thelen, “Evolving and Dissolving Synergies in the Development of Leg Coordination”, in Perspectives on the Coordination of Movement (S.A. Wallace, ed), 1989.)	Experimental design.
Mon 9/7	Collaborative (GatherTown optional)	Piaget readings (theory and observations)	Piaget Reflections
Wed 9/9	Asynchronous	Clearfield talk on effects of poverty on infant learning/how we study infants	Pre-Questions for Prof. Clearfield
Fri 9/11	Synchronous on zoom.	Talk debrief	Post-Questions for Prof. Clearfield
Mon 9/14	Collaborative	Corsaro, "Children's Interpretive Reproductions"	Claim 1, Claim 2.
Wed 9/16	Synchronous on zoom.	Corsaro, Piaget, Montessori. New Montessori reading: The Secret of Childhood, chapters 6, 7, and 27. (I am still working on getting a pdf of this. I will have it up by 9/14.)	New author, New argument.
Fri 9/18	Synchronous on zoom.	Rousseau, Emile, pp. 66-68, 76-82top, 84-87, 97 (”our first duties”)-101, 158 (“But when I represent”)-163, 164-165.	Using fiction to make an argument (Rousseau version).
Mon 9/21		Rousseau, Emile, pp. 164-172, 176-179. [optional: 195-203], 207-208 + Kessen, "The American Child"	From past to future.
Wed 9/23	Synchronous on zoom.	Erdrich, Birchbark House, pp. 1-70	Erdrich first reflections (guided).
Fri 9/25	Synchronous on zoom.	Erdrich, Birchbark House, Part Two. pp. 73-117, and Montessori, From Childhood to Adolescence, pp. 1-22.	Using fiction to make an argument (Birchbark version).
Mon 9/28	Independent	Frierson talk: Moral Development from Childhood to Adolescence: A Montessori Perspective	Frierson Pre-Questions
Wed 9/30	Synchronous on zoom.	Talk debrief.	Frierson Post-Questions
Fri 10/2	Independent 😊	Mid-semester break.
Mon 10/5		Erdrich, Birchbark House, pp. 73-117.	10-on-1, cultural literacy edition.
Wed 10/7	Synchronous on zoom.	Erdrich, Birchbark, pp. 121-186, Alison Gopnik, Parents without Parenting (YouTube lecture)	Refining the question (Birchbark House edition).
Fri 10/9	Collaborative (GatherTown)	Erdrich, Birchbark, pp. 189-239	Erdrich overview.
Mon 10/12	Synchronous	Birchbark House, review all and look at the map on the first pages of the book. Also view the movie Inside Out, available through Penrose here.	Memory Map.
Wed 10/14	Synchronous on zoom.	Larson et. al., Mixed Emotions; Review Inside/Out	Science and Fiction (emotional development)
Fri 10/16	Synchronous on zoom.	Rousseau, Emile 97-101, 212-215, 219-227, 235-37, 244 (“What would be required”)-255.	Compare, Contrast, Evaluate (moral formation)
Mon 10/19		Audre Lorde, “Power”	(How) Poetry Work(s)
Wed 10/21		Terry talk, likely on Audre's Lorde's "Power"; will address depictions of child POV & children perceived / forced to act / bearing consequences as adults	Terry Pre-Question
Fri 10/23		Talk Debrief	Terry Post-Question
Mon 10/26	Synchronous on zoom.	I am 11 (movie) (Password: Whitman2020)	Freeze Frame (I am 11)
Wed 10/28	Synchronous on zoom.	The Round House, pp. 1-83.	Formulate and reformulate guiding questions.
Fri 10/30	Synchronous on zoom.	The Round House, pp. 84-148.	Experimental design 2 (The Round House)
Mon 11/2	Synchronous on zoom.	The Round House, pp. 149-240.	Open Reflections
Wed 11/4	Synchronous on zoom.	The Round House, pp. 241-283, the last paragraph on p. 321, and the Supreme Court Case: Thompson v. Oklahoma. For the case, you only need to read the first few pages that summarize the majority opinion and concurring opinion (pp. 815-817) and then the opening of the dissenting opinion (p. 859). If you want to see a great example of what "originalism" looks like in constitutional interpretation, see pp. 863-865, starting in the middle of 863.	Using fiction to make an argument (Round House edition)
Fri 11/6	Collaborative	Steinberg and Scott, “Less Guilty by reason of adolescence”. Steinberg, OpEd, “Expecting Students to Play It Safe if Colleges Reopen Is a Fantasy”	Write an Op-Ed
Mon 11/9	Synchronous on zoom.	The Round House, pp. 285-317	Refining the Question (Round House edition)
Wed 11/11	Independent	Janning talk - boundaries b/t childhood & adulthood	Janning Pre-Question
Fri 11/13	Synchronous on zoom.	Talk debrief	Janning Post-Question
Mon 11/16	Synchronous on zoom.	Schapiro, “What is a Child?”	Refining the Question
Wed 11/18	Synchronous on zoom.	Blog workshop (details TBD)	TBD
Fri 11/20	Synchronous on zoom.	Montessori, “The Function of the University” Selected College web pages (student choice)	College Web Page Design
Mon 11/23	Synchronous on zoom.