Open-ended crowd-sourced projects such as this are inherently a work in progress, as is the method of participation. How it evolves will depend in largely on those who choose to participate in it.
My hope is that the evolving discussions will embody five common traits:
- a commitment to, and enforcement of, a respectful but open-minded and challenging exchange of views (something that I call being “Collegially Disagreeable”)
- a deliberate effort to exchange views with people of dissimiliar experiences, expertise, assumptions, and priorities
- a focus on issues, and the underlying concepts needed to understand them, rather than on advancing suggested actions to be taken on the issues (arguing about actions without a common language or understanding, is bound to result in hostility and failure)
- a willingness to question your own most cherished ideas and to adopt the ideas of others without ego
- a ruthlessness in keeping the focus on only the most important issues and the most foundational concepts. Institutions and individuals alike can manage only so much complexity Seeing every issue as critically important, every concept as foundational, is a type of intellectual hoarding. Strive for spare simplicity. A list of 500 issues and 2000 core concepts will change nothing.
Until there is a sense of the most convenient and productive platform to exchange views, I have set up two crude but straight-forward methods to begin our conversations:
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comments on this site that I will moderate, and
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a public Facebook group – PostPandemic Curriculum Project.
Over time this will certainly change and other methods of participation will be added.
To help you with you get started, and to help you avoid the trap of focusing on those concepts with which you are most familiar, consider focusing on a major challenge facing society and then identifying the concepts that are needed to make sense of the challenge and the proposed options. If you are interested, I’ve provided 4 examples of how I approached this process.
In the meantime I look forward to your participation in our discussions.
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