THE DALLAS INSTITUTE
OF
HUMANITIES
AND
CULTURE’S
Cowan Center For Education October 2013 Programming: A Principals Institute Evening Retreat Antigone: When Tyranny and Truths Collide October 1 • 4:30-8:30 pm
A Teachers Academy One-Day Conference Summoning the Heroic In a Cult of Success: Shakespeare’s Henry V October 5 • 8 am — 4 pm
Communitas Teaching Nonsense Passages from Jacques Barzun
October 14 • 6:30-8:30 pm
Superintendents Symposium Athena the Leader: The Art of Persuasion in Aeschylus’ Eumenides
October 24-25 • evening and all day
In December: A Teachers Academy Evening Retreat On The Great Gatsby
Purchase a book on the new Cowan Center button on the Dallas Institute home page. 100% of the profits of this book go to helping the Dallas Institute provide programming designed to deepen, challenge , and inspire the learning leaders who teach and lead in Pre-K-12 schools.
Newsletter Fall 2013 • Volume II, Issue IV
From the Cowan Center Director Dear Friends and Colleagues, Thank you for joining us for another issue of the Cowan Center Newsletter. This time, we are introducing a new feature in our online edition—links embedded in the text that provide access to the full document. In this first issue, we have a link to the first page of Dr. Louise Cowan’s original National Endowment for the Humanities grant from 1983 (page 2), as well as a link to Dr. Donald Cowan’s complete talk about learning that he gave in 1991 to principals (page 4). Please note that the Cowan Center now has a link on the Dallas Institute homepage, the second stage of the transition culminating in a new webpage for the Dallas Institute’s Cowan Center. In the left column of the Dallas Institute homepage you’ll see a white “Cowan Center for Education” box that makes finding programming and information easier for our alumni and friends. Along with programs and publications, the slideshow for the 2013 Sue Rose Summer Institutes is now available for viewing. It’s always wonderful to see teachers engaged in rigorous study, but this year’s slideshow is especially meaningful because it includes pictures of the teachers in both of this summer’s programs: the first Lyric Tradition I class in June and the 30th anniversary Tragedy and Comedy class from July. For our programs this month, we are pleased to note the return of Diana Senechal, who joins the faculty for the Teachers Academy conference on October 5, and Dan Russ, who comes to help lead the Superintendents Symposium at the end of the month. As always, we are looking forward to each of our programs this fall with great enthusiasm. You see, educators are some of the best students in the world. In order to do their work, they live in a state of openness and receptivity. This combined with
the love of learning that lead them to the profession in the first place makes them excited about learning nearly all the time. Speaking of learning, Cowan Council member Diane Ravitch’s new book is out and is a must read for anyone who wants to stay abreast of issues in education. It’s called Reign of Error: The Hoax of the Privatization Movement and the Danger to America’s Public Schools. I also recommend Mark Edmundson’s Why Teach? In Defense of a Real Education and Derek Bok’s Higher Education in America. I’ve just added these three books to my reading list but I have delved into them all. They each have something important to say about the state of education, our culture and our future. From these and other readings, it’s clear that scientism—the absolute belief in scientific standards, “mappings,” Don Cowan would call them—is the thing against which we continue to struggle in human enterprises such as education. If something begins “Research shows,” we are more likely to believe whatever follows, no matter how nonsensical it is. What happened to common sense? We don’t hear much about that anymore. The mighty “Studies reveal” phrase has run common sense into hiding. Of course, science is a way of seeing the world and truth, but it’s not the only way. So here’s a modest paean to common sense, and to knowing and being in all the ways that can’t be measured and charted. Here’s to courage and prudence and honor and joy. Here’s to learning for learning’s sake and for not letting graphs get in the way of real growth. Here’s to remembering the truest sign of learning, the generosity and virtue found in the human heart and mind.
To read the Cowan Center Newsletter online, go to the Cowan Center link on the left side of the Dallas Institute’s homepage: www.dallasinstitute.org.
1984-2013 — 30 Years of Summer Institutes
Then . . . In 1983, prompted by the report called “A Nation At Risk,” Dr. Louise Cowan wrote a proposal to the National Endowment for the Humanities for a grant for a twosummer seminar for high school English teachers. Compelled by what she had come to see as the need to provide deeper, richer learning experiences for school teachers, Dr. Cowan began her proposal in an uncharacteristically negative vein—with a series of bullet points entitled “This proposed institute for secondary school teachers is not.” (Click here for the first page of the original grant proposal.) These oft-noted “nots” were (and unfortunately, still are) basic features of teacher training and college courses which both Drs. Cowan viewed not only as unproductive but also as deterrents to authentic learning. In many programs, the rigor of reflective inquiry and discourse made possible by grappling with primary texts from the various disciplines had been all but replaced with “methods” courses and secondary “ideas.” The Cowans believed that this shift to methods was causing aspiring teachers to lose a sense of the purposes of both learning and education itself. On the “Reason for the Project”
page, Dr. Louise Cowan continued: “The project arises from a conviction that a renewal of learning in secondary schools depends upon an increase of inner authority in the teachers themselves, an authority,” she explained, that for English teachers “can be gained only through a greater understanding of the literary tradition.” Although Dr. Cowan’s proposal actually compromised a few of the NEH’s fundamental rules, they funded the program for two years and then renewed their grant for another two years until 1987, when Dr. Cowan decided that the Dallas Institute needed to have the option to serve more than 45 teachers in each class, the NEH’s class limit. Over the three decades of this summer seminar it has continued largely unchanged from the original program that Dr. Cowan first crafted. The differences are that class sizes are between 50-60 each summer and that Pre-K—12 teachers from all grade levels and subject areas attend with the same reaction as the high school English teachers who inaugurated the first summers of 1984-1985. In thirty years, what are now called the Sue Rose Summer Institutes for Teachers have shown that all teachers need to keep their own
learning alive in order to be able to inspire their students to love learning, too. It’s working, year after year. Comments from 1984: “There is a Chinese proverb that says: Give a man a fish and feed him for a day; teach a man to fish and feed him for a lifetime. You have taught me how to ‘fish.’” “I have been refreshed; I have learned. I will pass this new enthusiasm on to 150 students this year.”
We must commit ourselves to preparing alumni who can carry this ideal of educational “renewal” across the country. “While I always aimed at motivating students, it is a great joy now to have the wherewithal actually to do it!” “I first thought that I would not be able to use the material from the summer in my classrooms. But upon finishing the first week of school, I realize that I use what I learned every day. Consequently, for the first time in my career, I feel as though I am truly a ‘teacher.’”
1984 — At a Glance The Literary Classics: Literature as a Mode of Knowledge (2-summer class)
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The 1984 Epic Tradition summer seminar
Enrolled 45 high school English teachers from Dallas area public and private schools 20 class sessions in 4 weeks
And Now T h e 2 0 1 3 S u e R o s e S u m m e r I n s t i t u t e s f o r Te a c h e r s Comments From 2013: “My Summer Institutes have put into words what I felt to be true of teaching but lacked the capacity to express.” “Last summer’s class enabled me to take heart and find the courage to stand against the ‘tide of mediocrity’ this year.” “There is no other place so sacred as this where love of what is good is shared, honored, and fostered.” The NEW Lyric Tradition I
The Lyric Tradition I: Literature as a Mode of Knowledge (the inaugural class of the final tw0summer program, 1 week each June)
Enrolled 27 teachers who teach grades 2 through college Public and private school teachers from the Dallas area and VA Alumni of both the Epic Tradition and Tragedy/Comedy Teachers’ subject areas include: English, language arts, reading, rhetoric, history, philosophy, geography, humanities 1 alumna from the first class of 1984 (Yvonne Janik, lower right)
Tragedy and Comedy
The 30th Anniversary Class Tragedy and Comedy: Literature as a Mode of Knowledge 3 weeks Enrolled 55 teachers who teach grades 2-12 Public and private school teachers from the Dallas area and AZ Teachers’ subject areas include: English, language arts, reading, history, philosophy, geography, humanities, foreign language, ESL, deaf education, physical science, physics, calculus, algebra, drama, art history, journalism, government
“If the Cowan Center’s vision of education were practiced on campuses and embraced by administrators at all levels, the polis would be transformed.” “The Summer Institute communicates the importance of teaching and education. It is a place where no teacher, regardless of grade level or subject, feels inferior.” “The Summer Institute is the best ‘training’ I have ever received because it inspires me to keep learning and to keep pushing my students to learn.” “More than anything, I believe my experience these two summers has empowered me and validated my role as a teacher—that I cannot be replaced with a script, technology, or mere ‘collaborative learning.’” “I love that the faculty teaches and learns with us in the Summer Institute. Having professors be a part of the learning experience models the importance of the teacher as learner.” “I have always known that I was an intellectual professional, but at the Summer Institute I felt rewarded for it as opposed to being ostracized.”
The Dallas Institute’s Louise and Donald
Cowan Center for Education — 2013 The Teachers Academy • The Principals Institute The Superintendents Symposium • The Education Forum providing year-round learning on a human scale in classes, conference, and events
“As I recall, my first correspondence with Dr. Claudia was a question about ‘intellectual professional’ in the essay of the application. Never before would I have used this adjective to describe myself, but NOW, with a sense of accomplishment, I can!” “My confidence as an educator has been recharged and renewed.”
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From the Archives
Dr. Donald Cowan On Learning—1991
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“. . . Few people, in or out of academia, comprehend the nature of the teaching enterprise. Most people, including legislators and board members, tend to see it as an industry, responsive to the same motivational incentives as salesmen or factory workers—bonuses, contests, prizes, merit raises—or evaluations, demerits, reprimands. Honor, where it is due, is a worthy prize, but I have never known a teacher to teach better because of a monetary incentive. . . . Learning, as I consider it, is not so much a skill as a habit. What we as educators seek to establish in each pupil is a life-long habit of learning. Once a person has learned to learn, he or she goes on learning. As a skill, learning becomes focused, efficient, concentrated on its object. Its scope narrows. As a habit, learning expands, is omnivorous, encompasses everything it comes across. Music provides an instance of both aspects. Certainly a skill must be perfected, on instrument or voice, with technique instructed, drilled, and practiced. But unless that perfected skill is absorbed into the habit, into the intuitive merging with the music, the performance is meaningless. It is the task of instruction to wend a proper path between these extremes, to constrain the habit away from idle curiosity so as to perfect the needed skill but then to break the hold of the skill on the imagination so that the habit of learning can resume its expansion. Doubtlessly you recognize this wayward progress in your own experience. What I am setting up as the guiding principle of education is that learning to learn is the trait we seek to induce in every student in such a way that learning continues to expand long after instruction has fallen away. The stimulation of learning to
learn is, indeed, the fundamental tenet of education. Then it seems to us at the Dallas Institute that the necessary ingredient is teachers who are themselves learners, who can learn from their own disciplines the appropriate mode of knowing which their particular disciplines represent. This is to say that there is something much more general about learning than any one skill involved, or, for that matter, any array of skills. There is a moral sense that accompanies learning, a sense of the justness of the universe outside our own minds. It is not subject to measurement; it is not in the least produced by conditioning. It is an eminently free act on the part of the learner, a way of thought that places his or her mind in conformity with reality. Call it an attitude, if you like; I shall call it a habit, implying thereby an unconscious generalization of experience that remains with a person and shapes the intuition of reality. The experience of learning, then, seems to be what teachers need in order to develop their own habit of learning and to instill that habit in their charges. How can this awareness and this desire be developed? The learning event is the central action of education. You might greet that statement with a good deal of skepticism, because we have certainly not played education accordingly. We pretty much think of education and learning as the same thing. Even when we wax philosophical and recognize that education is what we, as agents of society, do to the young, while learning is what the young do to their own minds, two quite different operations, we suppose that by instructing we are placing a set of structures in the mind on which we can hang information, properly catalogued and indexed for ready recall. To so organize the memory by rote certainly is, to be sure, one of the functions of education and may be sufficient for passing tests or winning quiz shows. But even we educators are beginning to recognize that recall is not enough, and so we change the test so that it involves operations of the mind—simple operations that can still be memorized by rote and exercised mechanically, but a step forward.
The real purpose of education is the making of life-long learners out of every student. This statement is the most important one I shall make today; on it hangs the justification for the program we shall outline for you. The real purpose of education is the making of life-long learners out of every one we instruct. There is no way we can program enough information or skills into the young to make them of much value in the rapidly changing time ahead. Whatever can be done—or thought, systematically, by algorithm we might say, can be done by a machine, faster and more precisely than by a human being— can be and will be. By machinery I mean, in this instance, the computer.
“Learning, as I consider it, is not so much a skill as a habit. What we as educators seek to establish in each pupil is a life-long habit of learning.”
Not that we must master the computer any more than we must be a master mechanic to drive a car. We simply use what a few specialists have provided us. The human beings must ride atop the machinery, must exercise the peculiarly human virtues toward desired ends. Their own inner tutors, as we might call them, must continuously instruct them. It is these inner tutors that we as educators must reach and awaken for the task ahead. . . .” Click here for the full text of this speech.