OUR GOALS
“know thyself”
Self-awareness is essential for good writing for it enables self-management of time and emotional as well as intellectual resources.Time management is vital in life, but especially in writing, because the secret of writing as discovery learning; of writing as innovative thinking; of writing as creativity; in short, of great writing, is rewriting. A key to rewriting is allowing enough time to elapse between drafts -- the opposite of procrastination.
To teach the importance of this kind of time management, punctuation and proofreading will be stressed in the grading of student writing for they are good indications of how careful the student has been in his or her writing and how much time has been budgeted between drafts.
know that which is greater than the ego
Better awareness of the world beyond the ego, beyond the conscious self, enables the writer to be open to great inspirations and to be able to tap resources far greater than those of an isolated self. “Only connect” is one of the key mottoes of our course, especially as applies to connecting to that which is beyond the isolated self.
It may also be said to be the central principle of Newman’s Idea of a University, for Newman emphasizes again and again the necessity of synthesis, connection between the various courses and activities of university life, to achieve a strong sense of university education as the unity it is supposed to be rather than the fragmented multiversity it all too often is.
Better awareness of the world beyond the self is cultivated in part by becoming a better reader of the world, a semiotician (reader of signs) aware of the extraordinary impact of environment, the power of place and of history, that is, time embodied in place, as well as one’s “place” in time. Awareness of time embodied in place also entails consciousness of genii loci, the spirits of the great people embodied in a place such as this campus.
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to help students
“create a sense of place” (see Carnegie), especially the campus as an alma mater, a second home.
expand our sense of place as querencia, inscape, instress, genius loci, etc.
help us be inspired by the genii loci of our university; help us get to know our more famous alumni and faculty, past and present; help feel the presence of some of the famous spirits which haunt our campus, embodied in our campus sites (such as Waller Creek haunted by the genii loci of Joe Jones, Frank Dobie, and the students of 1969), and campus buildings, from the Littlefield House to the Humanities Research Center
become aware of time as embodied in place (fossils in Waller Creek, griffins in Littlefield House), to expand our consciousness of time to the origins of the planet and life on the planet, to integrate the meaning of the end of time for the body (death) and for a species (extinction) and to explore alternatives to consciousness of linear time
expand our
personal sense of place (our road maps)
sense of place in nature
sense of home as place
sense of school as place
sense of our university as place
sense of place in terms of both geography and culture
sense of infinite space, of our place in the universe
definition of our ideal place
sense of place in the history of the world and of our civilization, especially the dialectics between Hellenism vs. Hebraism, pastoral vs. urban, Greco-Roman vs. Gothic, modernism vs. antimodernism
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define our college experience in terms of sense of place, especially by comparing it to that of others unlike ourselves, comparing U.T. to Oxford, for example, Austin, Texas, USA, to Europe
define our college experience in time, especially by comparing it to that of others unlike ourselves, such as those of students in the Middle Ages (1200-1500) and the Victorian eras (1837-1901)
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maximize our potential by cultivating both sides of our brains, developing all our multiple intelligences, via guided imagery, sympathetic imagination (extended even to animals and plants)
explore the relation of the verbal to the visual arts and rhetorics (to architecture, landscape architecture, sculpture, murals, paintings, drawings) and to music, especially popular music: Van Morrison, John Denver, Kate Bush, Pat Benatar, Pink Floyd, Jefferson Airplane, etc.
learn to think for ourselves, decreasing reliance on secondary sources, practicing what is known as active, experiential or discovery learning (as in science experiments, the Moore method in math, and Amherst College’s Baird Freshman English course in the humanities)
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know oneself, one’s strengths and weaknesses in learning, writing, reading, speaking, listening
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improve our writing: our motivation (fear vs. love), our creativity (vs. writer’s block and perfectionism, etc. , ), time management (planning, goal setting, etc. vs. procrastination), concentration, polishing , punctuation, documentation, proofreading;
learn the new “writing” of multimedia and the internet, learning the relation of writing to drawing and the visual arts
experience writing as the product of collaboration as well as isolation
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improve reading: read the whole world as a text (semiotics); develop reader-response journals integrating the right with the left brain
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improve speaking in discussion and before groups, including presentations and acting
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improve listening, concentration, and the sympathetic imagination
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places we may “read” on campus and in the rest of the world:
Campus: the Main building, Battle Hall, Sutton Hall, the Littlefield House, electronic classrooms, campus classroom buildings, Waller Creek, the Biology Ponds (Tower Garden), Dobie’s house, Texas Memorial Museum, the Alumni Center, Texas Union, University Christian Church, the Univesity Catholic Center, University Baptist Church, University Methodist Church, All Saints Church, the Story of Texas museum
Austin: Treaty Oak, Taniguchi Oriental Garden, Hartman Prehistoric Garden, Austin Nature Center, Philosopher’s Rock, Barton Springs, Umlauf Sculpture Garden, Town Lake, the state Capitol building, St. Mary’s cathedral, the Driskill Hotel
Via the internet: Galveston, Westminster Abbey, the Palace of Westminster, Yorkshire and York cathedral, Oxford, Kelmscott Manor, Amiens cathedral, Mt. St. Michel, Chartres, Notre Dame, Barcelona
