Students taking Literature and the Land spend two out of every three classes outside. Here they learn about beekeeping at a local farm.
HARKNESS I
DATE WITH A PHILOSOPHER
n a classroom in the basement of Phillips Hall, senior
WITH A
Alex Shook is the first to volunteer to read her narrative out loud. “I’m nervous about my date with a dead philosopher,” she reads, deadpan, launching into a humorous description of Starbucks, her selected location for a fictional blind date with the medieval Andalusian savant Averroës. “I feel a sharp tap on my shoulder. Must be him, I think. I look over and instead of a wizened old Spanish man, I see a young girl with pigtails and a blue dress.” So starts Shook’s imaginative conversation with Averroësturned-8-year-old-girl (the result of an assignment to write a personal dialogue with a philosopher) and one of the sessions of Epistemology, a class that debuted last winter. Designed and co-taught by three veteran Academy faculty — Religion Instructor Kathy Brownback P’08, Theater and Dance Department Chair Sarah Ream ’75; P’09, P’11 and Science Instructor Tanya Waterman — Epistemology explores the nature of knowledge: how the perception of knowledge has evolved over centuries; the different forms of knowing
TWIST
Teachers and students are moving beyond the traditional Harkness model to explore new subject matter and new ways of engaging with the content, and each other By Nicole Pellaton
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