Assignment: My Renaissance

My students are studying the Renaissance period in our Rhetoric & Civilization course, and I'm asking them to blog about it.

(Blogging is part of the digital renaissance taking place in our day, an outpouring of new forms of art and communication. So, we are participating in an ongoing rebirth or renewal of culture that is parallel to the period known as the Renaissance in European history.)

Here is what I'm asking my students to do in a post themed "My Renaissance"

Compose a blog post about the Renaissance

• length is about 300 words (400 max)
• refers to self-directed learning
• supports / refers to one of the themes from this period
• personalizes the period (sees this historical thing through an individual perspective)
• well designed visually as a blog post, and includes an image
• includes a meaningful title (NOT: "Blog post #1" or "My Renaissance Post")

I'm also requiring that they respond to one another's blog posts on the blogging platform. I'm cautioning them NOT to lapse into "report mode"--merely paraphrasing some source. I need to see them present in the post through a personal perspective or their own explicitly personal self-directed learning efforts.  Here is an example post.

Brave New Heights

Francesco Petrarch (often called the "Father of the European Renaissance") exemplified the humanists' enthusiasm for antiquity. The old Roman or Greek literature shaped the way he saw the world. In one instance, he read from Livy about someone who said by climbing a certain mountain you could see two separate seas. So, Petrarch took his brother and went mountain climbing in France (Mt. Ventoux).

from my climb up Mt. Timpanogos, 2012

His account of the experience explains what is common: he'd often wanted to climb that mountain, but hadn't gotten around to it. And it wasn't until he actually did the feat that he gained the perspective (both literal and figurative) that he would. That experience echoes my own in finally getting to climb the local Mt. Timpanogos (11,700 feet), which took many hours and much effort. As those who climb mountains know, the view that one earns from taking the climb is more exhilarating than any picture or story by which one vicariously gets that view.

Learning Modes from and for History

Let's look at how communicating and learning has taken place through different media and modes across history, and then try to become more diverse in the learning modes we each use.

Below I outline five learning modes. I first give some historical background on a given approach, then I suggest ways we can use these modes from history to enhance how we learn about history (or anything else). These modes often overlap, but it is helpful to separate them out.

The modes I'll look at:

1. Oral / Aural Learning
2. Visual Learning
3. Digital Learning
4. Experiential Learning
5. Social Learning

Missing from this list is book learning -- not because it isn't important, but because the other modes are those we need more practice in doing.

As you read over the explanations of these, please think about what learning modes that you use most successfully, as well as those you might employ better. Which modes make for the most engaging learning for you, or which work best for a given subject? Which ones haven't you tried, and which promise to make your learning more interesting? 

In the comments, please chime in with your suggestions or with your personal experiences that underscore the value of any of these learning approaches:

"Think Outside the Search Box": 10 Starting Points for Self-Directed Learning

When I invite my students to do self-directed learning, they sometimes default to a Wikipedia or Google search, or they go to some standard notes or homework-help type sources like Shmoop.

Those are not wrong things to do, per se, but they are not the only things that can be done. So, I'd like to encourage my students to "think outside the search box."

Assuming you've selected or been assigned a specific topic about which to learn, how could you then go about doing so in an interesting way?

Here are 10 suggested starting points for autodidacts (self-directed learners):

Personal Experiences with Romantic Art: Example Posts

I've asked my students to explore art of the Romantic period (see instructions). Here, I'd like to model how they might do this. It's a bit tricky, as I want them to write both about Romantic art / artists but also in a romantic way (that is to say, by focusing on personal feeling and experience).

So, in what follows, I give examples of personalizing my experience with some romantic visual art (Francisco Goya's Saturn Devouring His Children); with romantic music (Mussorgsky's Pictures at an Exhibition); and romantic literature (Melville's Moby Dick). Enjoy.

Audiences for Blog Posts, Building One's Ethos

Commercially-oriented blogs, or those blogs in which a person or organization is consciously trying to create and maintain a brand or a public presence -- these blogs already have a very clear sense of their public. Academic blogs, blogs created in and primarily for education -- these do not.

But I want my students to practice their public presence, much in the spirit of Renaissance sprezzatura (but also as a practical matter of learning to be more publicly oriented when posting online).

Here is a teacher's short video about how audience gives educational technology rigor. I heartily agree. Watch the last minute or so, starting at 2:13:

Katie McKnight Podcast Series #9: Where is the Rigor in Educational Technology? from TeachHub.com on Vimeo.

Okay, if we want our blogging to address real audiences, we need to avoid only speaking to ourselves. How is this done? Well, by avoiding "in-speak":

Giving Attribution for Images: Some History and a How-To

I want to show my students how to find, use, and give due credit for images in their blog posts. And I also want to tie this into the history they are learning.

Giving Attribution in History

We can see the origins of giving credit for creative work within the European Renaissance. Of course, authors and creators were given attribution for their work prior to this time, but some things happened that changed the culture of attribution starting from about the 15th century.

Preliminary drawing of Michelangelo's "Libyan" 

For one thing, the secular shift that began at this time put focus increasingly on human ability and accomplishments, not just on divine activity or the work of great people of the distant past. The flurry of creative work in the Renaissance (painting, architecture, poetry, philosophy, etc.) was also accompanied by a medium that made it more possible (and desirable) to give or receive credit for one's accomplishments--the printing press. Individual achievement could be accompanied by individual fame. And so we began to have a Brunelleschi, a Michelangelo, a Petrarch, a Shakespeare. In a period when self-fashioning was in fashion, it became fashionable to achieve notoriety as an individual artist, author, or creator.

This focus on the identity and increasingly, the originality of the individual creator would be amplified in future centuries, especially in the 18th century (where regular, inexpensive newspapers created a market for celebrity), and in the 19th century (when Romanticism idealized creators and creative genius). 

Recognizing the achievements of individuals was not a feature of medieval society, by and large, but over the last few centuries this has become enshrined in western culture (less so in the East), and has been codified in law by way of intellectual property concepts and regulation.

This means we must respect and attend to intellectual property, especially in this, our digital day. How do we do so?

"Sprezzatura" in History and in the Classroom

I am using sprezzatura as both an important theme for my students to understand from the European Renaissance, and also as a method of learning in our classroom.

Dirck Hals, "Haarlem Garden Party" (1620)

Sprezzatura in the Renaissance
In the context of Castiglione's famous book, The Courtier (Il Cortigiano, 1528), sprezzatura meant a kind of nonchalance, a kind of casualness and conviviality that characterized the social interactions of courtiers. But it went beyond manners. In this same book was advocated the ideal of the Renaissance man (or woman): someone who was widely educated and skilled, who could aptly bring into social settings their knowledge in a graceful, interesting way. Imagine a salon setting, some kind of soirée for the elite, in which high fashion and courtly manners were combined with intelligent conversation.

Sprezzatura was an ideal, to be sure, and one that could lead to a lot of bluffing and posing. But in any case it helps us understand how those in the Renaissance valued broad knowledge and ability, especially if this could be brought to bear, with wit or eloquence, in social settings where it could be appreciated.

How might sprezzatura be adapted in education today?

Welcome to Rhetoric and Civilization!

This blog is for students of English 212, "Rhetoric and Civilization" held Fall semester 2018 at Brigham Young University, taught by Dr. Gideon Burton.

Blog Purposes

• Responding to readings
• Exploring the themes for a given historical period
• Raising topics and bringing in sources from self-directed learning
• Developing content regarding a focused topic for an end-of-semester, "finished" post
• Learning to use a 21st century communications platform, especially to bring in social and multimedia aspects of education.

The blog is not a digital dropbox by which an individual student delivers homework to the instructor. As detailed below, students will be required to read an respond regularly to one another's posts, providing an opportunity to profit from fellow student's independent learning and to refine their own thinking.

Regarding the specifics of the blogging assignment...