This semester, I am teaching a required course of all undergraduates at CUHK-Shenzhen, called "In Dialogue with Humanity." It's basically a global core texts course, with readings such as Plato's Symposium, Biblical texts such as Genesis and the Gospel of Mark, the Analects, the Zhuangzi, Sura 2 from the Qur'an, the Heart Sutra, Adam Smith and Karl Marx (among others). From time to time, I've also added other texts such as Aristotle's Nichomachean Ethics, the Bhagavad-Gita, Simone De Beauvoir's The Second Sex, and Elie Wiesel's Night to the itinerary. In moving from text to text from week to week, the course never stays put for very long.
In many ways, the course is like one of those epic trips you might go on where you stay just a night or two in a variety of different cities or towns. While you don't get the benefit of lingering in one place for an extended time (which is often the way I prefer to travel), you have a different sort of travel experience, one of testing your skills as a traveler (did you pack efficiently? did you remember all your chargers?) and your ability to make sense of a place and what you are looking for in your stay. On such trips, it is good also to be flexible and go with the flow. You might not get to see and do everything you'd like, but if you're open to it, you might get to glimpse a window into a historical period or event, perhaps an expansion of your concept of what it is to be human, that you had no idea about prior to the journey.
In many ways, the course is an introductory course in cross-cultural textual hermeneutics. How does one approach so many different texts that each come from distinct historical periods and cultural locations? What background knowledge do you need to have before attempting to read one of these texts?
The course is structured in a discussion oriented way (hence the importance of "dialogue" being in the title of the course). We spend twice as much time in "tutorial"--think discussion section in the US--as we do in lecture. (Even in lecture, I prefer to incorporate discussion among students and with me; I suppose I'll always be a product of my experiences at Occidental College, where discussion oriented class time was more or less the norm.) The course is modeled on the course of the same name offered at our parent campus in Hong Kong. So, discussion and student leadership of exploration of the texts is built into the design of the course.
I conceive of my own role in this course as being a facilitator of student investigation of the texts. I'm no specialist, not on these texts texts at least (see Adam Smith's The Wealth of Nations). The point is not to completely understand these texts (whatever that might mean), but to gain confidence in struggling with them and in talking with classmates about them. Learning to tolerate uncertainty--perhaps in tune with Zhuangzi--in the process of learning how to read carefully and critically is central to the spirit of the course.
