“Was not their mistake once more bred of the life of slavery that they had been living?—a life which was always looking upon everything, except mankind, animate and inanimate—‘nature,’ as people used to call it—as one thing, and mankind as another, it was natural to people thinking in this way, that they should try to make ‘nature’ their slave, since they thought ‘nature’ was something outside them” — William Morris


Thursday, March 14, 2013

"The Flipped Classroom"

...or "the classroom" if you are a humanist. It means you do the reading beforehand.

The idea that this is new or amazing is a symptom of the terrible dislocation between engineering, science and the humanities.



2 comments:

Chris said...

You're probably right that teachers of humanities courses may already employ techniques that work in flipped classrooms. But the difference isn't that students read before they go to class. The "flip" seems to be what a student would normally do for homework in a traditional setting s/he does in classroom and what a student would normally do in the classroom in a traditional setting s/he does for homework.

So for humanities course students may spend most of their class time in small writing workshop groups or doing close-readings, and spending their time out of class listening to a brief explanation of concepts or watching a lecture.

There are many traditional lecture-style teachers in the humanities--at least enough that the flipped classroom is worth discussing.

Chris said...

You're probably right that teachers of humanities courses may already employ techniques that work in flipped classrooms. But the difference isn't that students read before they go to class. The "flip" seems to be what a student would normally do for homework in a traditional setting s/he does in classroom and what a student would normally do in the classroom in a traditional setting s/he does for homework.

So for humanities course students may spend most of their class time in small writing workshop groups or doing close-readings, and spending their time out of class listening to a brief explanation of concepts or watching a lecture.

There are many traditional lecture-style teachers in the humanities--at least enough that the flipped classroom is worth discussing.