If I were to teach 1cr/cocurriculars at Olin, what would they be?
Emily Wang recently asked me if I'd ever considered teaching a 1-credit evening course at Olin (which alumni can do, because of the finite amount of bandwidth humans have...
- A Brief Survey of Engineering Education History and Philosophy (springboarding off the Purdue graduate class for inspiration, but with some major tweaks)
- Radical Tansparency (applying open source philosophy to both software and non-software settings)
- Somatic awareness and bodywork (I will probably do this informally in the dining hall or somewhere else on a semi-regular basis anyway, because MY shoulders need it)
- Using Engineering Analogies to Explore Learning and Pedagogical Theories (something I've wanted to do again since 2007, when MetaOlin delved into it; we were the first student-run course/StuCourse at Olin)
- Awkward Dialogues: Techniques and Practice (the topics we'd practice on would probably be stuff like feminism, spirituality/religion, leadership/politics, sexuality, etc -- the content would be "here are techniques and participation architectures that make it possible to dive deep into things without snapping into habits we may not want in the room")
- A Sign Language Subset for the Olin Campus (I'd need to have a co-instructor who was actually fluent in ASL for this, but basically -- I believe there's a fairly small subset of phrases, words, etc. that would make lots of sense to add to the Olin gestural language -- we already have a few Olin-specific gesture practices that we teach first-years when they come, like the thumbs-up during discussions.)