The Intergenerational School in Cleveland, Ohio has a unique mission: to “connect, create and guide a multigenerational community of lifelong learners and spirited citizens.” The student body is drawn from neighborhoods all across Cleveland, and students learn in multi-age classrooms. The school recruits adults from the community to serve as mentors, making for a diverse and truly “intergenerational” experience.
Books@Work shares this endeavor toward community and lifelong learning, and it has been a joy to partner with Saint Luke’s Foundation to organize two years worth of programming with The Intergenerational School.
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My first college-level literature class was called “Writing the Essay,” a required seminar meant to teach the basics of crafting an argument rooted in textual evidence. We would write three essays over the course of the class in response to novels, essays and plays we read. I entered the seminar with a chip on my shoulder. I’d always been a bookworm; I knew how to read closely, and I was confident in my writing. It’d be an easy A.
Oh, how wrong I was.
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In the maelstrom of New Year’s media activity, the pervasive hand wringing about the past year and angst about the future seem unavoidable. At a recent holiday gathering, a family member suggested that as an antidote, we might each try to think of a word or two – a mantra of sorts – that might guide each of us in the coming year. After playing with that idea for the past week, I keep coming back to the art of critical thinking as my mantra for 2017.
“Critical thinking” is one of those phrases that gets used often, but that seems to defy definition. Why do we struggle to both define and implement critical thinking in our daily lives?
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We widely accept the idea that collaboration and collegiality are critical workplace attributes, and that the most effective teams are the ones that get along well. But research shows that diverse teams are more productive. With diversity often comes widely different points of view.
Disagreement and differing perspectives are a fundamental characteristic of any team or group – but how does the way we disagree distinguish high-performing groups from others?
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I recently had the opportunity to talk with Lela Hilton, Program Director of the Clemente Course in the Humanities, Inc., about the element of surprise in our respective programs. Founded by the late Earl Shorris, Clemente brings free humanities education to people living in economic distress. The foundational ideas for Clemente may be found in Shorris’ powerful 1997 article in Harper’s Magazine entitled “As A Weapon in the Hands of the Restless Poor (On the Uses of a Liberal Education).” I was fortunate to speak to Earl Shorris before he died about Books@Work. He inspired me deeply and supported my then-fledgling idea of partnering with employers to reach working adults. When Clemente and Books@Work became co-grantees in the Teagle Foundation’s special initiative, Liberal Arts Beyond the Academy, Lela and I were introduced. What follows is a snippet of our ongoing dialogue.
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In a recent conversation, Professor Theresa Grupico spoke reflected on her experiences teaching with Books@Work: “There are these moments, especially when working with a complex novel, where you really see the lightbulbs going on. These are ‘aha’ moments, and they come from discussing a character or a passage from a novel. Reading alone, they think they get it – but as they start to have a conversation, they ask themselves ‘why didn’t I see that?’ They learn from each other and grow together. It’s a wonderful way to approach teamwork, and it shows why meetings are important, why colleagues are important. You get something from those interactions that you don’t get on your own. It is so neat to sit in a room with people and learn about what they are thinking.”
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Talking about literature helps us develop complex skills such as “critical analysis”: the ability to see beneath the surface, to reason through the meaning of details, and to situate the object of analysis within a larger context. It enables vital, careful thinking about texts, yes, but also about people, organizations, experiences. We all become better employees and co-workers, friends and citizens, mothers and fathers, when we improve and refine our ability to understand what’s around us through observation and thoughtful analysis.
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I think that hard conversations reveal that we possess a fundamental sense of justice and responsibility and care. Hard conversations show us, experientially, that we are moral beings, and any education worth the name will allow us to reflect upon, and understand, that personal moral core. . . The last thing I would want my students to do is take a purely dispassionate approach to Chris Burden’s self-destructive performance pieces, the systemic, institutional racism and torture found in J.M. Coetzee’s Waiting for the Barbarians, the traumatic historiographic ambitions of the World War II combat film genre, or the extremely graphic murders described in Bret Easton Ellis’s American Psycho.
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For Shklovsky, art extends life–by making the familiar unfamiliar, it invigorates our attention and in so doing ensures that even minor things make an impression on us. Who among us hasn’t driven or walked a familiar path, only to arrive at the destination with no memory of the trip? Art has the capacity to remind us of the curve in the road, even the sound of cars driving by.
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