A Pedagogy of Risk: Project-Based Learning, the Humanities, and Material Practices

Designing and fabricating material objects has long been a part of design and engineering education but has never played a large part in traditional humanities courses. Leading to profound and enduring insights for the students, project-based learning requires a flexibility often denied by the constraints of Humanities syllabus requirements or the expectations (and abilities) of the class. In this presentation, Hugh Crawford (Georgia Institute of Technology) explores a series of interventions — from forging harpoons while studying "Moby Dick" to felling trees with Thoreauvian axes — and the efficacy as well as the obstacles of such approaches in Humanities curricula.

About the speaker

T. Hugh Crawford (PhD in American Literature, Duke University) is associate professor in the School of Literature, Media, and Communication at Georgia Tech. Concerned with the relationship between abstract knowledge, skill, and materiality, his teaching is based on a cognitive science approach to the materiality of knowledge and the material circumstances of learning. He has published on literature and medicine, cinema and science, medical imaging technologies, the novels of Herman Melville, and the poetry of William Carlos Williams.

This event is hosted by Connected Academics at ASU.