One of the intellectual benefits of teaching at a community college is the way that teaching introductory classes over and over again pushes you repeatedly back on basic questions: what are the essentials, the fundamentals? This semester, I’ll teach Introduction to Urban Studies for the third time. My current sense of what’s essential: The thing I want every student to get from the class is some practice in observation, practice in noticing at least some of the layers of community or common life to which they belong. This means using one’s senses and reporting on what one has sensed. It also means noticing what’s not immediately available to the senses: aggregates, relationships, history, purposes. Thus the class includes observation-based writing and also reading (and writing about) literature and essays from various eras, using of statistical data, attending to natural history.
But what I am most interested in is something else. I think of it as the difference between residing in a place and dwelling there: that is, the difference between being located somewhere and being a part of the place, belonging to the place (or having it belong to you). To contemplate something to which you are connected–say, your city–ought to lead to a deeper love for, and thus a sense of responsibility to, that thing. A class can’t “teach” that love, in the sense of explicitly or directly conveying it–certainly not in the sense of requiring it–, and whether students attain that love is not something I can easily measure or will try to measure. But I think a class can open the way to a deepened experience of that kind, and so I think a lot (inconclusively, of course) about how my class can allow for the possibility that students will find, through the class, an invitation to become dwellers in their own city, to have greater love for their city (perhaps through love of a particular neighborhood), and to have a sense of what they owe their city.
The goal you plan for and the goal you hope for: they aren’t the same.