Welcome to Humanities & Ethics

Humanities & Ethics at Woolman is probably unlike any other academic class with the words "humanities" and "ethics" in the title. While the elective credit students receive technically encompasses hours spent in shared work, chores, nonviolent communication, and community meeting, the two in-class hours on Thursday afternoon form the core of the course. 

We gather in the meetinghouse, start with a group game (most recently "Find your mama like a little penguin") and then move into experiential activities meant to support self knowledge, self articulation, and community building. The focus of the class is our own humanity, and our own ethics. There's no homework in H&E, no readings and no assignments. Everything we do for it happens in those two quiet hours. 

On the first day of class it was a silent group mural activity, which has become a traditional class opener. Everyone gathers around roll paper that's been taped to two long tables. Using multi-colored chalk pastel and the occasional prompt from me, everyone rotates around the table and together create a collective art piece. The only real guideline is to respect the work of the person who proceeded you - that means it's fine to embellish, add to, enhance, etc., but obscuring somebody's work is not OK. Some prompts are abstract - "draw a shape," 'color with a different color" - while some are more specific like "Draw something that you have to give others." 

The result is a weaving of overlapping color, images and styles that is as much a blending of the unique individuals who created it as it is something new, more than the sum of its parts.  

Once we hung it on the wall, we identified pieces we recognized as "our" work, and also pieces we had embellished or added to, or pieces we had collaborated on. There were lots of much-loved images that were the product of collaboration. 

Posed with the question "How is this exercise a metaphor for working with people?" the students had a lot to say:

It doesn't go quite how you think it should, but the results can be surprising. It's messy. We improve on each other's work. Some things get lost in the shuffle. Together we do an amount of work  (and fill an amount of space) that we could never do alone.