Reminders:
Week 3 & 4 updates
The mid-week update is meant for conveying the agenda for the upcoming week’s session but we haven’t had this week’s session yet. So this time I will include both sessions in my mid-week update.
Week 3
Do glance through Vandana’s suggested reading list; 1-3 are compulsory, the rest are optional:
https://www.jasonhickel.org/blog/2018/10/27/degrowth-a-call-for-radical-abundance
https://www.filmsforaction.org/articles/towards-alternatives-radical-ecological-democracy/
https://www.brainpickings.org/2014/01/29/carol-dweck-mindset/
https://grist.org/article/indigenous-people-can-manage-their-forests-better-than-anyone-else/
Class is on Friday at 7:00 PM IST
Week 4
I want to start with the flowchart of the course from week 1:
So far we have approached wicked problems from the ‘I’ perspective and the homework elicited your imagination of the future. Weeks 3 & 4 mark the transition to the ‘we’ where we will form groups responding to the same idea (writing a letter from 2030) but the setting will change to a collective letter writing task.
This is also as good a time as any to remind you that Socratus’ approach is to evoke collective wisdom that already exists in the course community. It’s a flipped classroom in that:
The main task of the course is to take you through a series of artifacts, i.e., a series of letters from 2030 to 2020 that take on an increasingly ‘collective’ perspective
The goal of the live sessions is to introduce you to ideas and techniques that will help you complete the letter writing tasks from 1 above.
Homework one evoked your personal point of view. We will now move to a group perspective, where you will be asked to take on (collectively) a ‘third party’s perspective,’ say, a tribal woman in Jharkhand. That will occupy us for three more weeks. Then we will move to the final artifact that represents an imagination of India as a whole in 2030 - a letter from India to India.
The course is primarily a learning space and a learning community for producing these artifacts.
Readings for Week 4
Week four is on collective wisdom. I was planning on assigning some readings from the three books but formal (from the feedback form) and informal feedback (emails etc) I am getting suggests that reading academic texts is an unfamiliar task - Kaviraj’s book in particular seems to be too heavy a lift.
So I am shelving the demand to read hundreds of pages and focus our efforts on articles and essays. I will summarize the relevant parts from the books in the newsletter. Here are a couple of readings about collective wisdom and co-creation to get you started for week 4:
Check out this page for parts 3-7 of that series and many other resources.
Thanks Rajesh for this mail which makes the path clearer - I like that part of co- creation, which promises to be exciting. Meanwhile the feedback form is a like a outsized hammer - ratings and rankings don't count for much Id rather give a write up and jottings - so I'll put in a few stars or ranking numbers and give the actual feedback in the last part which provides scope for it. Thanks n Cheers