Tag Archives: Henry David Thoreau

Design Pedagogy Values

“We too have our thaws. They come to our January moods, when our ice cracks, and our sluices break loose.”

­–Henry David Thoreau, Journals January 29, 1854

What might a course look like designed around values? My response to this question, when it first came to mind, was to dodge it. What are my core values? What really matters to me as a college teacher? And do my teaching philosophy and practice reflect my values?

Questions about core values are always a part of the conceptual and practical work of designing a course. For me, these questions have proven persistent, and quite troublesome, every time I begin preparing for a course, or making the time to reflect on my pedagogical intentions and choices. These kinds of questions have troubled my thinking with others in curriculum development as well. Perhaps I am finally understanding what I intuitively grasped as a graduate student designing curriculum in a large expository writing program: that pedagogy and curriculum are both constituted as a complex relationship among not only subjects of study, and a learning environment, but learners’ and teachers’ experiences and motivations, social histories, and professional aspirations and commitments.

More recently, I have been working through a series of more specific questions. How might honesty or forgiveness, for example, determine an assignment or an approach to assessment? What does an honest assignment look like? How might one design a course for trust? What are the values that inform a curriculum discussion or proposal, or that shape the contours of an academic program? Questions like this are often avoided precisely because they unsettle the way we do things. But things are what they are because they got that way—and they can be changed.

The current-traditional approach to organizing a course mostly begins with skills to be mastered, or information or concepts to be conveyed, and an orderly sequence to cover the material students need to learn. Another approach to design starts with the outcomes of a course and then organizes activities from the rear end to guide students to the desired outcomes. Last year, however, my thinking about course design, pedagogy, and values emerged in collaboration with my friend and colleague in Biology, Karen Cangialosi. We pulled together a webinar, Promoting Student Agency to Improve Teaching and Learning, for a series of workshops for professors in the University System of New Hampshire.

In our webinar we proposed that in thinking about our core values we naturally find ourselves thinking more about our relationships with students. I explained how I had challenged myself years ago by sharing these values with my students. Not only did I make visible my core values in the language on my syllabi––Honesty, Trust, Generosity, Compassion, Forgiveness, Collaboration, Centeredness, and Wholeness. For I began using the values as a framework for teaching and learning.

The list of core values contributed to my reflections on what I hoped to do in the classroom; the values also reminded me of the necessary and ongoing work of learning from my students. I was reminded, for instance, that it is useful to be more open with students about the choices I was making on their behalf. I had always invited students to consider why we were doing what we were doing—“teaching the why,” in the words of Cathy N. Davidson, founder of Humanities, Arts, Science and Technology Alliance and Collaboratory (HASTAC) and the author, most recently, of The New Education. But I found that more open and direct conversations with students about their reading and writing in my classes allowed us to more authentically speak to the work we were doing in relation with one another.

Most recently, teaching and learning in a global pandemic, the importance of clarity around values when working with students and colleagues has become more visible. One example is my colleague Robin Derosa’s work creating what she calls Values-Centered Instructional Planning. Robin argues that pedagogy “is not an ancillary or optional part of conversations about remote teaching. Pedagogy is the category that describes how we teach.” These pedagogical values organize the mission-aligned framework she has developed with her colleagues, the Open Learning & Teaching Collaborative at Plymouth State University.

In the coming weeks my plan is to write about the values that center my professional and personal life. My core values guide me in the classroom, among colleagues at my home institution, and in my professional relationships beyond the College. In digging around in the place where I find myself, in this winter mood, I hope to take advantage of the cracking ice and sluices breaking loose—of how I made my way to where I am, and perhaps to turn up some useful lessons about where I might be going.

photo credits: Mark C. Long

The Magic of Monadnock

马克·龙(Mark Long) is going to China.

With an invitation in hand to be part of an American delegation to the “Poetry Bridges Continents: China and American Pastoral Poetry Symposium” to be held on November 11-16, 2018 at Yancheng Teachers University, Yancheng, Jiangsu, China, some of my summer work will include my contribution to the symposium.

The symposium will present academic panels, keynote speeches, and bilingual poetry readings. The delegation, while visiting, will give readings and lectures, and meet with faculty and students. Additionally, to strengthen our East-West connections, at a special ceremony during the symposium, the YCTU library and Mason library of Keene State College will exchange special collections. We will set up a Mondanock-region poetry collection at the host Chinese university that would a sister collection to ours at Keene State College, and we will solicit from poets represented in our collections to donate volumes towards the sister collection.

The Yancheng symposium is part of a cultural exchange that began this past fall at Keene State College with the colloquium, “The Magic of Monadnock:  Poetry Bridging Continents.” We hosted poets from China and poets from the Monadock region to explore the geographies of the Monadnock region in New Hampshire and the Maoshan in the southwestern Jiangsu province. The four-day international gathering brought Chinese and American poets to Keene State College for a cultural exchange open to and involving students, faculty, and the larger community.The Mason Library’s Monadnock Poetry Special Collections, The Redfern Arts Center, The Thorne Art Gallery, and the Division Arts and Humanities were co-sponsors of the event. The week celebrated the pastoral in all its possibilities, with performances, readings, collaborations, discussions, including a field hike to Thoreau’s Seat on the slopes of Mt. Monadnock.

Roger Martin reading a poem by Henry David Thoreau at Thoreau’s Seat on the slopes of Mt Monadnock

I am grateful to the poet and professor Rodger Martin and professor and College archivist Rodney Obien for including me in this project.

Lunch-at-Halfway-House Hotel foundation: Henry Walters, Zichuan, Mark-long, Brittany-ONeal, Linda Warren, Rodney Obien, Rodger, Martin (photo by Chen Yihai)

Henry Walters, Rodger Martin, Mark Long, Brittany O’Neal, and Zichuan at Thoreau’s Seat, Mt. Monadnock

One of the events at “The Magic of Monadnock: Poetry Bridging Continents” was honoring Professor Emeritus William Doreski with the re-naming of the Doreski Archive in Modern Poetry at Mason Library. To commemorate the occasion, Chinese poet and scholar Zi Chuan, presented him with Chuan’s original calligraphy of a poem dedicated to Dr. Doreski.

Within the Circuit of this Plodding Life

Within the circuit of this plodding life,
There enter moments of an azure hue,
Untarnished fair as is the violet
Or anemone, when the spring strews them
By some meandering rivulet, which make
The best philosophy untrue that aims
But to console man for his grievances.
I have remembered when the winter came,
High in my chamber in the frosty nights,
When in the still light of the cheerful moon,
On every twig and rail and jutting spout,
The icy spears were adding to their length
Against the arrows of the coming sun,
How in the shimmering noon of summer past
Some unrecorded beam slanted across
The upland pastures where the Johnswort grew;
Or heard, amid the verdure of my mind,
The bee’s long smothered hum, on the blue flag
Loitering amidst the mead; or busy rill,
Which now through all its course stands still and dumb
Its own memorial,—purling at its play
Along the slopes, and through the meadows next,
Until its youthful sound was hushed at last
In the staid current of the lowland stream;
Or seen the furrows shine but late upturned,
And where the fieldfare followed in the rear,
When all the fields around lay bound and hoar
Beneath a thick integument of snow.
So by God’s cheap economy made rich
To go upon my winter’s task again.

-Henry David Thoreau, from The Natural History of Massachusetts (1842)

Featured Image, Broad-Distance Pavillion, From Illustrations To The Poems Of Huang Yan-Lü (1701–02), By Shih T’ao, Metropolitan Museum of Art

“Now comes good sailing”

Today is the bicentennial of the birth of Henry David Thoreau. It is good to see Thoreau celebrations and stories of Thoreau in the news, including an exhibit at the Morgan This Ever New Self: Thoreau and his Journals. Happy birthday Henry!

Last week I picked up a copy of Laura Dassow Walls’ just released biography, Henry David Thoreau: A Life. I am now reading the chapter “Transcendental Apprentice,” that covers the years 1937-1841. Working for the past two years on a Emerson project has prepared me well for this delicious summer reading.

As it happens, about two weeks ago, I spent some time with Laura and friends in Detroit at the twenty-fifth anniversary conference of the Association for the Study of Literature and Environment. One evening we dropped in on the storefront of Shinola, where Laura and I shared a moment of pleasure when we ferreted out from an employee the origins of the phrase “shit from Shinola.” We then enjoyed pizza and beer on a deck at the Motor City Brewery, and took in music by the Mongrel Dogs, before huddling under two small bumbershoots with Jim and Julianne as we were thoroughly soaked on the way back to our hotels by a heaving Michigan downpour.

In the “Preface” to her biography, Laura writes that “Thoreau struggled all his life to find a voice that could be heard despite the din of cynicism and the babble of convention.” She then points to the strange but explainable story of Thoreau’s life that has set up shop in our cultural imaginary:

That he was a loving son, a devoted friend, a lively and charismatic presence who fill the room, laughed and danced, sand and teased and wept, should not have to be said. But astonishingly, it does, for some deformation of sensibility has brought Thoreau down to us in ice, chilled into a misanthrope, prickly with spines, isolated a hermit and a nag.

Reading Laura’s story about Thoreau’s life I am recognizing the Thoreau I have come to know as a devoted reader of his work–whether in reading and teaching the more widely circulated publications, or in my own saunters through the journals and manuscripts over the years. “Today, two hundred years after his birth,” Laura writes,

we have invented two Thoreau’s, both of them hermits, yet radically at odds with each other; one speaks for nature; the other for social justice. Yet the historical Thoreau was no hermit, and as Thoreau’s own record shows, his social activism and his defense of nature sprang from the same roots: he found society in nature, and nature he found everywhere, including the town center and the human heart.

As Ralph Waldo Emerson wrote in “Thoreau,” “The country knows not yet, or at least in part, how great a son it has lost.”

“All this is perfectly distinct to an observant eye, and yet could easily pass unnoticed by most. Thus each wind is self registering.” Henry D. Thoreau’s final journal entry, dated November 3, 1861. The Morgan Library & Museum; purchased by Pierpont Morgan, 1909.

What is remarkable, to me at least, is how the in inventions of Thoreau persist, both in the scholarly and the cultural spaces in which these versions of Thoreau appear. Perhaps Laura’s story–sharply detailed, sensitive, alive–will do its little part in reanimating a more holistic vision of our place in the world. Thoreau saw, Laura notes,

the end of one geological epoch and the beginning of the next, and the unease he felt is rampant today, infecting the headlines and blocking our own imagination of the future he believed he was helping to realize. Thoreau could see the ground was shifting, and, in the sheer audacity of his genius, he decided it was up to him to witness the change and alert the world.

As Thoreau is reported by his sister Sophia to have said on his deathbed, at forty-four years of age, “Now comes good sailing.”