Bonni Stachowiak [00:00:00]:

Today on episode number 480 of the Teaching in Higher Ed podcast, Teaching Philosophy Outside with Ryan Johnson. Welcome to this episode of Teaching in Higher Ed. I’m Bonni Stachowiak, and this is the space where we explore the art and science of being more effective at facilitating learning. We also share ways to improve our productivity approaches so we can have more peace in our lives and be even more present for our students. I am so pleased to be welcoming today’s guest to the podcast, Ryan J. Johnson is an associate professor of philosophy at Elon University in North Carolina. He has written three monographs, and since Ryan is with me right now, I am not going to attempt my French. Ryan is going to tell us what those three monoliths are, including pronouncing them in French.

Ryan Johnson [00:01:06]:

Sure. The first one is the Lucretius Encounter. Then Deleuze, A Stoic. And the more recently co-authored with Biko Mandela Gray is Phenomenology of Black Spirit.

Bonni Stachowiak [00:01:17]:

Thank you for doing that. I could have handled phenomenology. I appreciate you sharing all three of those titles with us. Additionally, Ryan is the co editor of Nietzsche and Epicurus: Contemporary Encounters with Ancient Metaphysics and the Movement of Nothingness. His current book project is on the radical abolitionist John Brown. Ryan’s teaching is an experiment in improvisation and as you’ll hear a lot about in this episode, occurs almost exclusively outside. And Ryan, tell us about three things that you love that we can learn more about if we read your bio.

Ryan Johnson [00:01:58]:

I love John Coltrane. I love jazz. I love trains and walking with my wife in cities.

Bonni Stachowiak [00:02:06]:

Oh, wonderful. I was embarrassed because I emailed you at some point and I was emailing you as I often do, early in the morning or late at night, and I thought that I spelled Coltrane Coltrain, and I thought, oh, my gosh, that’s so embarrassing. I’m going to back and apologize and be safe. It was late. It was late, but I went back and I had spelled it correctly, so no need to apologize. But now I’ve told the world about even just thinking that I might have misspelled. Well, I am excited to have you take us back in time, although this is not the most cheerful time for most of us in our lives. But take us back to the fall of 2020 when you were required to return to teaching in person and talk a bit about how you approached that experience.

Ryan Johnson [00:02:56]:

Absolutely. But I also want to say thank you so much for having me on this. I’m a big fan of the show and it’s a delight to talk to you and about these things in particular. So after the world shut down in spring of 2020, most people stayed online. But I was required to go on campus. And seeking to cultivate the kind of engaged educational experience that I and Elon has pride yourself on, I tried to find ways to do it safely. And as being in the American South means you can be outside almost the whole year, I started to notice around campus these large wedding tents. Asked about them, and then started to experiment with them. And as I did that, I started to notice all these things about campus that I didn’t or that one does not as one moves through rather than sits in and resonates with, especially the sounds. What are the dominant sounds on campus? What are the kind of patterns at which people move? What are the movement of the trees versus the light versus the animals versus people? And starts to tune into the ways in which the campus was alive and started to see those for their educational potential.

Bonni Stachowiak [00:04:11]:

You’re reminding me a bit about the Mary Oliver poem. Instructions for living a life. Pay attention, be Astonished, tell about it. You’ve kind of gone through all of that and now you’re telling about it. I know you talk a lot about this in your writing and at Elon, but it’s so fun to get to have this conversation. So you’re telling us a little bit about how you were paying attention in some different ways. What did you notice about how students were paying attention in some different ways?

Ryan Johnson [00:04:39]:

A bunch of things. I’ll say two in particular. The first thing I noticed was there’s distractions and I initially thought in that transition from inside to outside that these were bad and of course there will always be bad distractions that usually have to do with cars. I also am not a fan of cars. But I then noticed how certain kinds of what seemed distractions actually were ways of bringing together. And that when we would hear or experience things, noises, whatever, we would come to. Experience them together and we would use them they would begin integrate into our discussions and maybe more so our awareness of ourselves as a class. And that gets into something later on that the publicness of the class. The other thing I noticed was just the energy in the room and I say the energy and attention to connect that because as everyone who has taught inside learns, it can be drowsy and people can fall asleep and no one fell asleep and no one looked drowsy. And I think I started to suspect a lot to do with the way in which the sounds, the light, the air invigorated our conversation and then that kind of energy brought a different kind of attention.

Bonni Stachowiak [00:05:58]:

There is so much around attention and I remember gosh a number of times early on in the podcast people being critical of our use of the phrase pay attention and specifically the word pay as if our students owe us something they need to not only pay tuition but also pay their attention. And I think of that as in just wanting to be careful. To what extent do I need to try to live in someone else’s world and try to control them. And I certainly Dave, evolved considerably over the almost 20 years I’ve been teaching in a higher education context. I feel freed from that in a really healthy way. I’m grateful for that transition in my own approach. Did you ever have that where you felt this or maybe you still do today?

Bonni Stachowiak [00:06:49]:

Just this. Pay attention to this is really, really important, and sometimes it comes from really good places. It’s not necessarily a bad you talk about bad distractions versus good distractions. And so I’m attempting to not say bad pay attention to me versus good. Because part of why we got into what we do is because we care about these things so deeply, and we think that they’re important in our lives and in the world.

Ryan Johnson [00:07:10]:

Yeah. My first reference to a suggestion will be to Jacques Grancia’s, the Ignorant Schoolmaster. And he’s this 19th century French pedagogue who had this radical principle that all intelligences are equal and takes that as the basics. And I take that very seriously. And I’m not really actually concerned in evaluating ranking intelligence at all. And if you are, I’m a little suspicious of that. Right. And so his idea of the relationship between the teacher and a student is not intelligence to intelligence, the banking model, but instead will to will. So what a teacher ideally does is foment increase and intensify another’s will, not of a certain thing, but just at something. And so often what I simply do is structure a classroom by ways of intensifying one’s will to learn. I often try to think that these kind of things are what we should focus on a bit. But I kind of structure my classrooms in a way that allows us to be flexible, so that if I say, let’s read this book, the ways in which one read it or the things that one takes from it, I want to take this from the students. So then if I have a variety of these intensified attentions and I always love etymology, so that intensity and attention is important there, my role, then is to be kind of like a conductor and harmonize these attentions and these intensities so that we can collectively create some kind of educational experience.

Bonni Stachowiak [00:08:48]:

Oh, my goodness. I don’t even know where to begin. But let’s start with tell me more about the etymologies of university and intention.

Ryan Johnson [00:08:55]:

Yeah, I should check really quickly to make sure this is true. But attention is Teneri. So ah means at, and ten means to hold. And intensity, I think it’s the same thing at int. So it’s holding. Teneri is in. Teneri is to hold, and in is in. And so they’re both kinds of holdings. They’re both kind of holdings either at or within. And so those sense of being, of holding something together, being beholden of all those kind of things, I think are involved with. As soon as you start going to these etymologies, and that’s just an easy one with intensity and attention.

Bonni Stachowiak [00:09:32]:

A book that I really enjoyed reading on this topic was James Lang’s Distraction or Distraction or Distracted now I have to go look it up. Sorry James Lang.

Bonni Stachowiak [00:09:44]:

I’ll put it in the show notes. So I’m sorry I failed him. At any rate, he really gets us to not think about as if it were ever possible to get rid of all distractions and as if it were possible to get rid of all distractions through a method of compliance or some form of punishment or restriction, that kind of thing. And I think that his approach. And you just really spoke about this, and I’d like to have you share even more. But rather than think that we could even ourselves, remove all distractions from our own lives, why would we expect that from other human beings? Do you know anyone able to do that? But also, what I love about your analogy of being a conductor and harmonizing, it brings in not just the university Mosaic. Of course, I’m mixing metaphors here because that’s so much fun, but just beauty of the kinds of people that we get to work with in teaching and learning. But also, you think about most good music. It’s not all the same volume the whole time. So the ways in which a good conductor would rather than thinking, I need to have all of the attention all of the time, you talked about holding things, and I believe at some point you also talked about pointing at things. Did I get that phrase correct?

Ryan Johnson [00:11:10]:

Yeah, for sure. Absolutely. Yeah. I was thinking about, rather than mosaic, keep it in musical medleys or something like that. Yeah. So I guess the first thing is, well, what kind of experience is it to be completely free of distraction or as much as possible, prison, solitary confinement. Right. Or and this is an interesting way to think it monastic life, so there’s interesting two versions of that same kind of thing. But, of course, if we’re preparing students to live well, this is maybe one thing that philosophy is always trying to do, education is always trying to do. Then there’s artificial constraints by removing distractions, as if when you’re in the world and you have a job and you’re a parent or you’re a partner, as if you’re just bombarded with distractions. So what are we doing there if we’re trying to get rid of distractions? And this is one of the things I really learned about going outside, was that distinction we mentioned earlier between good and bad distractions. And so if you think about attention in an environment where distractions are gone, like inside a classroom, because classrooms are meant to be cutting off the distractions in a way. Right. I’m always struck by what my former colleague and my great teaching inspiration Anthony Weston said. Is it’s so funny that we do philosophy or teach philosophy, which is supposed to be about the world by literally closing the door on the world and then the classroom. And so, in some fun way, I want to throw that door open and go outside and engage the world in all its university, all its madness, and all its life. And so when I’m outside, I used to be annoyed. I started to be annoyed a bit by paying attention or distractions here or there, but I started to have these good and bad distractions. So what do I mean by that? A good distraction is one that can help us come back together, can allow our attention or our stamina to have a release to return. So example when you’re having an intense conversation, like in a philosophy class, and a lot of my classes are about race, so they’re multiply intense sometimes all the time. People, their mind just wanders, right? And when you’re in a room, what happens, I think, is that your wandering gets stuck. Then it gets bouncing off the room to really extend this metaphor a bit. And then you never come back to the kind of intensity that you might come into a classroom. Because I take it as presumption that students want to learn. I take it as a presumption that everyone wants to learn. What happens in a classroom, I think, is that that attention just drifts you from that initial impulse. But when you’re outside, you have these soft fascinations, maybe like a squirrel running away or a bird flying or leaves rustling. You might need some kind of distraction for a while. You might need a little break, and your attention can just follow. I’ve seen students do this follow, just follow that bird for a few seconds, and it exhausts itself. And then they come back to the conversation with a kind of energy and focus that allows us to maintain those kind of intense educational experiences.

Bonni Stachowiak [00:14:25]:

I’m hearing you talk about the ways in which individuals may cultivate greater attention through a counterintuitive thing where my mind has gone away with the bird. And now I have flowed back to that center of what’s being explored. I imagine there would also be ways in which the class may do that a little bit more collectively. I’m remembering a time we had quite a collective experience indoors in a classroom. A lizard had gotten inside, and that was hysterical because I had discovered a little scientific experiment. Sociology, I guess, would be you either run away from or to the lizard. You don’t have neutral feelings about what I discovered that day. And so we have that shared experience. I mean, this has been almost two decades, I think, since those people would have been in that room. But I bet you that they probably remember it. I mean, especially the guy who held the lizard. His name’s ian. And whenever I would touch base with him, we will often return to him holding the lizard up. That could also be by the way because there’s a photo of it and it shows up on the photo memory sometimes for me on my phone. I realize the ways in which photos affect our memories speaking of good and bad but I do think there is those collective experiences where some sort of distraction could be called good because what we’ve actually done is formed a shared memory of our learning community. Did anything come to mind as far as your shared learning memories in classes all the time?

Ryan Johnson [00:16:04]:

That’s one of the other really fun things about it is that what counts as a classroom when you’re outside now is open to creation. So that when you’re inside you don’t have to set up the borders of the classroom, they’re just there. But outside you have to think about well where do we end? How far apart can we be and how close can we be there’s? The borders of a classroom are now very, very porous. And if they’re very, very porous, then you have to constantly be I’m going to keep harping this world, maybe attending to them. And as they change or not, and as they’re constantly porous and constantly changing, the external classroom world, which is now just on the other side of invisible line now is intensifying our sense of self, our sense of togetherness, our sense of a class. And two examples may way of describing this one would be the animal one which is now we constantly have animals in our classroom. This is not a joke but I Dave Hawks always in my classroom. Right, this is a joke. I find it interesting that Hawks seem to really like hearing about spinoza. But in that spinoza class one time we were sitting there and I heard like 10ft behind me a noise and what happened was that hawk actually was attacking a squirrel and then that took some time before that was over. But like your lizard, you can bet we talked about that hawk for the rest of the semester, right? And that had that sense of share like no, we had this thing and because this gets to the introductory thing, the improvisational nature of it, I think that provosition is one of the highest forms of thinking and so my classrooms are always improvisatory which is partially my love of jazz. And so having those spontaneous things, those improvisational things as encounters that we now have to respond that I didn’t plan, no one planned now we have to respond to them and we can only respond to them together so they become ours and as we dave a shared thing we become closer knit. Another way that happens is not only encounters with nature, especially unplanned ones at those porous borders, but also with people. So people are constantly walking by because we’re outside and what that happens then is that sometimes we’ll be having a conversation about something, maybe it’s a topic that I know a little about. Then I’ll see the professor who’s expert in that walk by and say, hey, come here. And then I’ll say, hey, class, ask her. She’s actually an expert in African religions. Why don’t you ask this question to her? And then now the class begins to speak to another as we and have that kind of conversation again, calling attention to ourselves as a collective. Or I’ll see students from other classes who know I’m outside because people are constantly seeing me. Everyone on campus like, oh, I saw your class. Oh, I saw your class. Oh, I saw your class. And then students hear that too, and they’re like, oh, I saw your class. Oh, I saw your class. And I start to really think about that sense of what it means to be to be a we. And that then means that I have constantly changing visitors. And this was really meant to exacerbated or intensified at the beginning of last semester because it’s kind of complex. My last semester was the spring and then the fall before. I don’t tell GIB students exams. They have to create exams and then do them. And one of their exams was to plan a class for the first day of the next semester. So the end of the fall semester, plan the class for the first day of the next semester, the same class, and then come to class pretending to be students in that class. But the other students didn’t know that, and they did that for several days. So for like two weeks, the students who were actually in the class didn’t know who was actually in the class. And so they’re constantly asking the question, the philosophical question, the thing that makes a we a we. Who are we? And so that constant phrasing of that was then echoed with the porousness of borders, with the encounters with animals and other visitors, with improvisational experiences. And maybe the last one I’ll mention, since you mentioned photos, is that tours now always come by our class. So touring parents are coming by and seeing this model, what they imagine is the perfect example of liberal arts classroom. And people are constantly taking photos and sharing them. And so there’s photos of us all around the internet.

Bonni Stachowiak [00:20:53]:

I’m really frightened for my mixing metaphors because it’s about to go even deeper. Ryan, are you ready? So I want to repeat some phrases that I’m gleaning from what you’re sharing. So you talked about borders being porous. You also used the word boundaries as a synonym, I believe, for borders. Then you talked about jazz, and I’m going to add in another one because I do love jazz. I also love the dancing that is performed and has been performed in history. With jazz, one type of dancing would be the lindy hop, which is done. And so when we think about improvisation, when we think about jazz, you think about swing dancing, the Lindy hop. There is something or improvisation in general. You talked about the improvisational nature of teaching and learning. So there is something that’s holding it together. It isn’t that there are no boundaries. It isn’t that there is nothing in jazz that you can be assured is holding you there with a piece of music. So there’s the downbeat. And even if we don’t know music enough to know what those things are called, there is the safety and the rest in knowing that. And when musicians don’t have that, then it certainly creates that dissonance, which can be fun too, by the way, to experience. But I do think that you mentioned talking about race a lot in your classes. So I’m wondering at which point does the feeling of safety and solace need to be considered as we are taking risks with experimenting with new language and new ideas and wanting to make sure that our language matches with our values being stretched and challenged in the ways that we might in a good liberal arts education.

Ryan Johnson [00:22:39]:

Right? Yeah. The two things I hear in that good question is structure and safety. And safety, one is a little easier to deal with because this is a kind of truism. But safe spaces are always not safe, equally safe. Right. There is space for some people and we have and institution, like a Peter premierly white institution. The safety is those who are predominant. Right? So safe spaces are not what I’m after the cliche and I think it works, but it’s cliche I cultivate not safe spaces, but brave spaces. Right? Spaces where you can screw up, where you can say the wrong thing and have a generous hearing. And generous hearing might mean forgiving but it might also mean being called to task. And weighing that in a predominantly white institution, especially as a white man myself, is a very complicated thing. It’s totally possible and needs to be done if you actually believe it’s true. And people who think that that’s not possible just don’t believe it and don’t care enough. So I care and I’ve been doing that for many years, especially when I moved to the south. I’m from the north of the US. And I moved to the south. My wife is an immigrant and I started to study with black philosophers. So through years of cultivating very minor things, the smallest of things, gestures, phrases, intonation are important for cultivating those spaces that are brave and generous. And the way to do that, I think the best way to do that is just you cultivate intimacies. So from day one, we’re thinking about the nature of relationships. We’re getting people, students, I hate to use an economic metaphor, but invested in each other and to make those relationships tighter and more trusting. And as that trust and as that intimacy occurs, that’s when those kind of risks, that’s when those kind of feelings of safety are safe enough to take the risk and to hear hard truths or hear things that may be uncomfortable for them begin to really occur. So that’s the first thing. And what’s interesting about the outside nature of that is that there’s a kind of seeming informality this gets into the structure question, a kind of seeming openness or not even seeming literal openness, right? Because now the boundaries or borders are the horizon. So that nature, I think students have said, make them feel far more comfortable discussing these kind of things. So rather than the intensity of like fluorescent lights in a brick or cement classroom, talking these things in places that are just naturally just make us feel better and rejuvenating and more comfortable are far better for that. So having tough conversations calls for me in Dave spaces I found to be far better outside. The second question about the structure and not the lack of structure. I think the only thing I would add here, because you said it really well, is the way in which improvisation can be structured. In fact, improvisation must be structured in some way. The question is the source and the timing of the structure. So I often try to create classrooms as space structures through which students energies can come in and then to create and adapt those structures. So I like to create the classroom structure with them or kind of co construction. So there’s definitely structure, I just don’t impose it or I offer it and then I allow it to be to adapt and to bend. And maybe the example of this is that from the first few days of each class I have outside, which are all of them, we try out different parts of campus and see which classes like which places more. And we eventually, a few weeks in, end up finding a place that we really do like. Even we try other ones. Maybe later on we’ll keep coming back to that and so we’ll begin to have located the borders of the structures of us in this space or this area campus.

Bonni Stachowiak [00:26:49]:

And I imagine that you are in I mean, you already described this, how the last class brings some things into the next class and that your own. It’s not like you’re saying, hey, does anyone have any ideas of anywhere? I’ve never elon, but I imagine it’s not a tiny campus. And so you have some ideas, but yet you’re knowing and recognizing that each person is different and each class learning community is different and you’re bringing that wisdom into the experience. You use the word horizon and I can’t help but quote from your piece on this topic, which is in the show notes. You quote one student talking about this experience learning outside. When I am inside, I just can’t see, but outside, my vision and thinking expand to the horizon. Love that. Before we get to the recommendation segment, there’s one other thing I’d like to ask you. About and that is the history of teaching philosophy as a public art. I imagine you have already touched on many of these themes but anything else that you want to share? Just about this area of history and how it connects with how we do things today and also how we don’t do things today.

Ryan Johnson [00:27:58]:

Yeah, there’s this kind of obvious thing which is that learning happened long before we had spaces we called learning where they should happen, right like long before we had schools. And that can be not only the kind of thing we might consider education today but I take lots of inspiration from other models of learning. In fact, a friend of mine, Becky Vartabedian at Phosphor Regis in Colorado and I are writing a paper about apprenticeships. So about thinking about philosophy, learning philosophy as an apprentice based apprentice model kind of thing. So of course apprenticeships happen all over the place too and often in public and farms and fields or whatever. Or of course the more classic model of Socrates having conversations in the agora in the open and outside of Athens and the port or Buddha under the Bodhi tree or walking. There’s another really very public way of learning. So there’s this long history of that and of course there’s other there’s just the nature of what it means for public education to be public. I’m in Canada right now and the private versus public education is very different than it is in the US. And I know I’m leaning into the different senses of public versus private there but I mean it who is the education for the people? Right? The way I’m using it is drawing upon all those traditions and all those histories and with the nature of saying, with the added emphasis of saying we are learning in public not just for ourselves but for the public. Right. That education isn’t simply about this kind of neoliberal I’m improving my CD or I’m improving my value not about doing it for others, doing it for the public. And when you’re on campus you’re in very public view and they want to connect their individual learning to all those other things, to all those other people and to the community in general.

Bonni Stachowiak [00:30:07]:

So powerful. Yes, of course when we set up these borders we get some unintended consequences that happen in a sense of false safety, I think. I think teaching and learning is very intimate things to have happen and yet that feels terrifying sometimes.

Ryan Johnson [00:30:26]:

I won’t name them but there are campuses around the country which are literally walled and have guards. I’ll leave it at that. If we’re questioning about education is for the value of the individual and the public well, someone’s rejecting something there.

Bonni Stachowiak [00:30:41]:

This is the time in the show where we each get to share recommendations. I love the recommendation segment because there’s such a feeling of serendipity and people tell me so regularly how much they love they. Never know what’s coming. Well, I feel like I dave the recommendation that just draws upon so many themes that we’ve talked about. And so back on episode 457, carrie Mandela recommended this app called the Merlin Bird App. Merlin I think it’s the name of the app, but Merlin Bird ID. And at the time, I thought my parents dave been really into bird watching, but it was kind of like, oh, that’s other people’s thing. And that’s so nice of Carrie to recommend that, but that’s not really something that I’m about. And then I ended up seeing a story about it. I was like, hang on a second, because one of the recommendations I have had in past episodes was to get outside. And I spoke about my now cultivated habit of sitting in our backyard. And I love eating a bowl of oatmeal and being outside because I think sometimes I think, oh, to go into nature, I have to go for a hike. And it’s like, no, you actually have yes, I live in a suburb. But you do have nature in your backyard. There are hummingbirds, there are things like that. And so it came to me anew.

Bonni Stachowiak [00:31:55]:

Where I thought, let me just I. Didn’T realize that you could actually just on this app, you just press a button and it will listen for the birds that are around you. You download a database of birds within a large region. I believe mine was California and Washington, if I’m remembering correctly, about the map that it showed me before it downloaded on my phone. But I’ve just now twice been able to be sitting back there. And I think so often our phones can be a distraction, and it might be like, why would you ruin this moment in nature and pull your phone out? But for me, since I don’t sit there for that long, it actually, in a weird way, helped center me and listen, which I don’t find that experience very often with my phone. But I found myself really wanting to listen for the birds. And the first day I tried it, they did suggest to you that you don’t just rely on the sound of the bird and its ability to identify that, but it also suggested that you have a visual indication. And I didn’t do it the first day it talked about a hummingbird, and then I didn’t end up seeing that exact hummingbird. But I thought, I’ve seen those exact I know I see those all the time in our backyard. But this morning I was back there, and it talked about a wren. So I’m listening so very carefully. And then I look, and it’s right there. It’s right there, and I’m seeing it on the app, and I’m hearing this beautiful bird song. And the nice thing about it is you can keep a life list, which of course, in this case, it’s my 52 year old in some months life list. There are now three birds on them as of today. But I do appreciate that just ability to sort of travel some different places, even if it’s just traveling down. We live somewhere near the beach. You go down to the beach and what are the different birds that I might be able to collect their songs and their images in this app. I love being able to go back and revisit other people’s recommendations and then just to be able to see the manure with my own context and my own challenges of really wanting to attend to life in more ways of full presence. And it really did just help me have that full presence. And I’m so intrigued by the whole it’s the Cornell Research ornithology Research Lab, and so there’s all these different things that are connected with it where they do a bird count. So it’s very scientifically based, but as a total hobbyist, I’m having a blast and would recommend that people check it out, even if you don’t think you’re a bird person. But I just found it lovely and I feel like it ties to so many of the things that you and I just had a chance to talk about. So I’m going to pass it over to you for whatever you’d like to reflect on because I did just talk about a bird app. And maybe you maybe this is new to you, but also for whatever you have to recommend today.

Ryan Johnson [00:34:42]:

Yeah, it’s funny that you say that, because I was just recommended that too last week. I’m trying to remember who it was. I think it was this. I can’t remember who it was, but it’s weird. And you start spending your time outside in a place that people don’t normally spend that time outside. So basically I get the campus and I get the campus usually early, like at 08:00 a.m.. I’m usually there till like 08:00 p.m.. Not every day, but many days. And I’m outside pretty much the entire time. So it’s just so strange the kinds of things you notice. And of course, the things you notice are the bird. So I know when the hawks are upon which part of campus, at which hour of the day. And I know when these kind of birds are happening. And I know when the vultures came. Just my whole orientation actually lifted. And partially this, because we have these a lot of my classes happen around fire pits. They put these fire pits on campus. And these Adirondack chairs in Canada, they call them muskoka chairs, but they’re back like this, right? And I firmly believe that Adirondack chairs are the best kind of chair for having good philosophical conversations. And so my whole orientation on campus is slightly up and it’s lifting that whatever kind of version of your perspective is lifting it like that totally transformed my whole way of so I’m walking around the Alcantara people, I’m looking up and everyone else is like, where are you looking? There’s this bird over here. So anyways, yes to the bird app.

Bonni Stachowiak [00:36:09]:

You just helped me name why I like it so much because I have been so enjoying sitting in the backyard. That is a really peaceful tradition that I find. But yeah, I’d hear birds chirping, but that’s where it would end. I didn’t know what kind of bird it mean. So now it just opens up a whole universe for paying attention at a far more precise level. And I suspect, Ryan, that I will begin to notice patterns like you just described. And then it’ll be fun too to try different places and different times of the day and that kind of thing. Yeah, thank you for that. Helping me name. That why it was so it really, I think, is going to help me notice things more and be more present in a new way. And technology so rarely does that for me. That’s a totally not technology often distracts me is what I would like to say. It does help me notice a lot of things, sometimes too much.

Ryan Johnson [00:37:05]:

There can be bad distractions. On that note, there’s no technology in my classes outside. So it’s books, paper and pencils and person. That’s it. And it’s very funny. Near the end of the semester when the students are starting to create their exams and they will bring up their phone, they’re like this feels weird, they feel bad. There’s habit and they appreciate it. They love the rule. Even if there it’s hard to technology can be good.

Bonni Stachowiak [00:37:35]:

Is that a rule that you instill or is that something that you invite them to instill together? That’s something that you do come in.

Ryan Johnson [00:37:41]:

Yeah. So there’s a couple of ones that I just set up, that I set up that on the other ones are about how you orient your body. Actually really simple one is when you talk, don’t just look at me. Students often just look at the teacher. And I’ll do it in such a way that I’ll actually hide behind a chair so they can’t look at me, but things like that. I was going to offer three just little suggestions or recommendations. The first one is since we talked about Coltrane and since my next book is structured like a Coltrane album and he’s a North Carolina person, a Love Supreme is one of the best albums of all time. And particularly interesting is the new version of it, which has the there’s only two known recorded live recordings of them. There’s one they know about from 65 in France. But then in 2008, someone found in this guy’s basement recordings of the Seattle version of it. And on the new comprehensive or whatever they call it, the complete version of it, they have that and it is crazy and amazing. And speaking of proposition, some of the people that he played with the band is usually four people. There are other people with this band, they didn’t know the music, so then they were playing it as they were just going along and it’s wild. Yeah. So that Seattle performance of The Love Supreme, the other one, it was going to be there’s a movie that came out last year or two years ago called 3 Minutes a Lengthening. And what it was is, I think this man in Texas or somebody in Texas somewhere in the US, found these 16 millimeter film recordings schools in their basement and couldn’t really discern what they were looked like from the 40s somewhere in Europe. And then they shared them with the Holocaust Museum in DC and they put them on their website and then they started to figure out people started to talk about Sea and watch it and say, oh, they identify people in it. And what it ended up being was about 3 Minutes of Color, a film of a small town in Poland the year before the Nazis came in and destroyed it. And what they then do is they kind of see like a detective activity, where they try to identify where it is, who the people are, what happened to them after the war happened. And so it’s this beautiful archival forensic hunt for Exit and Days. And it goes from taking a three minute film into a full feature length. And the last one is one I actually haven’t read yet. But talking about improvisational things, I rarely teach books. I’ve read, I learn with them, I read with them. I model the learning rather than the knowing. And so I’m about to have a class, of course, outside, and it’s going to be only on black music. And I’m beginning with Angela Davis. The great philosopher Angela Davis. Her book Blues, Legacies and Black Feminism. Gertrude Ma Rainey, Bessie Smith and Billie Holiday. And that’ll be the opening text for that. And in that class, speaking about attention, we’re going to have listening sessions in the middle of class in between our intense conversations. And so I just bought, or Elon just bought for me an outdoor speaker so that we can now listen to music outside. Because of course, listening to outside, listening inside are very different experiences.

Bonni Stachowiak [00:41:07]:

Oh, wow. Right as you were describing it, I thought, oh, I hope there’s a soundtrack for this one that sounds amazing.

Ryan Johnson [00:41:14]:

Well, that’s part of the idea is that every day there’s going to be a student DJ who’s going to select songs, they’re going to refer extrapolate from the reading and they’re going to build up the soundtrack. And the final exam, I hope, will be some kind of party listening party where we go through and listen to all the songs. And then this is the kind of the call to attention of who we are, who we become, and then see move through our actual song history and try to define ourselves.

Bonni Stachowiak [00:41:45]:

That sounds incredibly powerful. I am so grateful to be in touch with you, Ryan. I hope this is just the first conversation of many because I feel like I kept having to sit here and discipline myself and say, don’t ask him about it. Don’t ask him about it. What a wonderful first conversation with you that I hope becomes one of many. You have so much to give and fun to also bring the discipline of philosophy. I’ve done a lot of episodes with Stem in the titles and lots of episodes with other disciplines. And it’s fun to have I mean, not that I haven’t had philosophers, but I mean, just to have that in a title and to be thinking about it in a way that is, of course, very relevant for your discipline, but also really for everyone. Because, as you said, this is kind of how so much of this all began. So what a joy to know you and for all that you brought to the conversation today. Thank you for your generosity.

Ryan Johnson [00:42:36]:

Oh, it’s totally my pleasure. It’s a delight to talk to you and your fabulous podcast. And I would welcome anyone who hears this, who wants to talk, to really reach out. Love talking and teaching.

Bonni Stachowiak [00:42:47]:

Yes. And I will say Ryan shared a story before we began recording about meeting his co author at a conference. He really, actually has lots of evidence to what he just said being very true about him as a scholar in terms of your curiosity and humility to want to collaborate with others, what a fun thing that that is.

Ryan Johnson [00:43:08]:

Thank you so much.

Bonni Stachowiak [00:43:11]:

Thanks once again to Ryan Johnson for joining me for today’s episode about teaching philosophy outside. Thanks to each of you for listening. Today’s episode was produced by me, Bonni Stachowiak. It was edited by the ever talented Andrew Kroger podcast. Production support was provided by the amazing Sierra Smith. If you’ve been listening for a while and haven’t subscribed to the weekly update. You can receive the show notes from the most recent episode, along with other things that don’t show up, such as quotable words, related episodes specifically curated by me for that episode and some other goodies. So head on over to teachingandhireed.com/subscribe and thanks so much for being a part of the teaching and learning community. See you next time.

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