Collegium Institute’s Food for Thought program is an informal dinner seminar where students engage fundamental questions in community without the stress of grades or papers. Students meet weekly for dinner and conversation at Harrison College House, which cosponsors the program. Brief readings of 10 pages or less per week will be provided to all participating students.
The first module of Fall 2021 is entitled: How to Be a (Human) Student Again. For the past 18 months, higher education has been salvaged through digital platforms. Screens were our exclusive classrooms as we all learned together how to learn virtually. It was a sudden and (conceivably) temporary solution to a crisis, but it was also an acceleration of longer-term developments to shift numerous elements of traditional education onto digital platforms. Proponents of these shifts celebrate the greater access, convenience, and geospatial connection that they enable. Critics gesture toward losses in learning, formation, and community, some of which might be measurable and others less tangible.
As we return to campus this fall, this Food For Thought module explores the significance of in-person learning both in principle and in relation to pressing social issues that command our attention today. By chewing together on provocative texts of the past and present, we ultimately will consider the values and practices of becoming non-virtual human students again.
This seminar is open to all Penn undergraduate students.
If you have any questions, please email Emmie Brown at emmieb@sas.upenn.edu