Summer philosophy course gives high school students a chance to experience and critique high performance classrooms

Shoshana Mitchell found posting her work on a Wiki after midnight a great way to communicate with classmates.

Sina Kimiagar discovered the Webster white boards opened up a whole new world of presentation techniques.

Genna Lipari thought the in-class laptops were distracting, but loved the flexible furniture in Room 120, and the way “everything folds up and you can roll everything.”

These and a lucky handful of other high school students from neighboring Palo Alto lived and breathed drama and philosophy during the month of July this past summer. They were participants in a new experimental class entitled “Philosophical Stages,” created and taught by graduate students Corby Kelly and James Collins, both advanced Ph.D. candidates.

“Coming from a classroom where everything is the same every day – the teacher’s desk at the front and rows of desks for the students – you come in here and everything moves and changes,” said Kimiagar. “It makes so much difference when you can change the energy flow and the conversation.”

“If only we could bring this all back to our schools,” added classmate Lipari. “You can’t move the desks at all and you have to practically crawl around them, plus they have a tendency to tip over.”

Gathered for three intense weeks of study in a course that combined theater, literature and philosophy, these students took time out to reflect on the impact of learning in an advanced resource classroom. Room 120, where they met each day, is one of several technology-rich learning spaces in Wallenberg Hall’s first floor.

At the end of their course, participants produced and performed in a play called Antigone Reflected, which was staged in the Peter Wallenberg Learning Theater. Antigone Reflected combined selected scenes from the ancient Greek tragedy with personalized scenes of reflection. The performance will be made into a DVD this fall.

From the teaching perspective, class co-directors Kelly and Collins found the space forced them to think and act creatively.

“As a result of teaching here we’ve come up with ideas of how we would change our methods elsewhere, even in a subject as seemingly simple as beginning Latin,” said Kelly. “I saw students in this class come alive while standing at the interactive (Webster) white board. Being able to switch up the orientation of the room has the affect of refreshing everyone. You can go from being part of the audience to bringing tables together and creating a discussion group or pushing everything to the side, standing up and working as a team.”

Kimiagar likened the experience of learning in Wallenberg Hall to that of “a free range chicken,” only half-joking since the movement supported by the flexible furniture and 360 degree white boards greatly facilitates class activities.

“In regular classrooms they toss out fish,” concluded Kimiagar of her Wallenberg experience. “In a class like this with all the versatile tolls, they show you how to fish.”

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For more information:

A new grant awarded by the Stanford Humanities Lab will continue to expand the Philosophical Stages Project for next summer. Visit their web site to read more:

http://shl.stanford.edu/research/philosophicalstages.html.

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