In this professional seminar, we reflect on the role curiosity and inquiry play in the way we conceptualize ourselves as thinkers and makers. Together, we will consider:
How has the practice of observing, looking, and noticing shaped your identity as a thinker/writer/maker?
What can we learn from the ways in which professions and disciplines describe their process of inquiry?
What can we learn about ourselves and our communities by listening to one another’s cultural experiences of curiosity?
How can the study and practice of art cultivate curiosity and build a reflective community that centers equity and justice?
The course is designed to cultivate agency, challenging students to take ownership over their own cognitive and creative development. Students will:
build capacity to recognize and articulate questions, developing a greater sensitivity to how questions shape our environment, our relationships, and identities.
read and listen to popular non-fiction, scholarly works, and creative writing that enrich and complicate our understanding of curiosity.
engage in experiential activities throughout the course to gain experience with diverse modes of critical inquiry and response.
complete writing assignments that strengthen their ability to think critically, reflectively, and creatively.
build a vocabulary (both visual and verbal) for describing their experience of curiosity, developing a metacognitive practice.
Syllabus: Notes from an Accidental Professor by Lynda Barry
Slow Looking: The Art and Practice of Learning Through Observation by Shari Tishman
Creative Care: a Revolutionary Approach to Dementia and Elder Care by Anne Basting (also podcast interview here)
Braiding Sweetgrass by Robin Wall Kimmerer
“Age, Race, Class, and Sex: Women Redefining Difference” in Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches by Audre Lorde
"The Case for Curiosity in the Fight Against Anti-Blackness: Why We Need a Beginner’s Mind" by Shanelle Matthews
Fantasies of the Library by Anna Sophie-Spring and Etienne Turpin
A Neuroscientist and a Novelist Put Creativity Under a Microscope (To the Best of Our Knowledge podcast interview with Siri Hustvedt and Heather Berlin)