The Philosophers' Cocoon

By David Egan (Hunter College)

I recently finished teaching a course on aesthetics for the first time. Because aesthetics is a topic that students have an independent interest in (insofar as they all have at least some interest in the arts, even if that interest is primarily satisfied by Netflix) I tried in a number of ways to incorporate their own aesthetic experience into the class. One of the more successful experiments was a "scavenger hunt" that I held roughly every week-and-a-half to two weeks.

The hunt itself worked as follows: I would post a challenge on the course website for them to take a photo according to some specified criterion and a week later in class we would review the results together. The grade for their contributions was low (5% of the total course grade) and they got full credit if they made at least three contributions over the course of the semester: no grade and no judgment for the content of the posts. (More than three contributions counted toward extra credit for their participation grade.)

In selecting topics for the scavenger hunt, I aimed to find assignments that would feed into the material we'd be discussing in that class, and the most successful assignments were the ones that did that most successfully. I'll give a couple of examples:

• For the class in which we looked at the Analytic of the Beautiful in Kant's Critique of Judgment, I invited students to take photos of artifacts that they thought were unintentionally beautiful. Items included a view of cigarette butts through a subway grate and a half-finished building wrapped in lime green protective sheeting. These images helped us think about the difference between the practical gaze of, e.g., the construction workers on the house and the "disinterested" gaze that finds the half-finished building beautiful. 
• For a class on intention and interpretation, I challenged students to photograph an intentionally-made artifact where the intention behind its making was unclear. Submissions included unintelligible graffiti and a tree garlanded with teddy bears and other knick-knacks (thank you, Brooklyn). Looking at these images helped us think about how much we rely on unthinking inferences about the intentions behind the artifacts we encounter, and what happens when we try to make sense of an artifact without being able to make any inferences about the maker's intention.
• A little more obviously, I got a discussion of Plato's Forms going by encouraging students to take photos of items that in some sense exemplify their type: we got the quintessential skateboarding shoe (beat up Vans, apparently), the dandelioniest dandelion, and much else besides. And that helped motivate a discussion of what we have to have in mind in order to be able to say of different items that they're more or less exemplary of a given type.

I teach at Hunter College in New York, which gives us an especially aesthetically rich environment to work with, but part of what made the hunt work–and what makes it replicable anywhere else–is how the students didn't draw on aesthetic clichés but tended rather to direct their attention to the unglamorous features of their own urban experience: lots of gritty or bizarre urban landscapes and not a lot of photogenic skyscrapers. One of the important things the hunt achieved is that it got them thinking about the aesthetics of their everyday environment. It also encouraged them to take the ideas they were learning outside the classroom and apply them to the city around them. And I think for the most part both they and I found it a lot of fun.

I think the real challenge in implementing this is to find the right sorts of criteria for each hunt. Some of mine worked better than others, although the students were creative enough that they found some interesting stuff even when my guidelines were vague or not ideally targeted to the day's reading. But I think the sweet spot for a good scavenger hunt challenge–like the first two of the three examples I give above–is to find something that's not too "on the nose" in the sense of just exemplifying an idea that's in the reading, but rather is a way of prompting reflection on a distinction in the reading or motivating an argument in the reading or something along those lines. Something that furthers the conversation in the classroom rather than just being an example of something we're talking about in the classroom.