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Teaching The Grateful Dead, Happenings, & Spontaneous Pedagogy, Ryan Slesinger
Teaching The Grateful Dead, Happenings, & Spontaneous Pedagogy, Ryan Slesinger
Dialogue: The Interdisciplinary Journal of Popular Culture and Pedagogy
To teach a course on the Grateful Dead I developed a praxis I call “spontaneous pedagogy” that pairs academic rigor with flexible curriculum details to enable creativity and engagement among students in a truly studentcentered classroom. The pairing of spontaneous pedagogy with the Grateful Dead course worked well because the subject emphasizes improvisation, which initially inspired and—during the course—paralleled my praxis. I had developed this praxis previously, implementing it each semester from 2007 to2010 for one Composition II unit on definitional arguments entitled, “The Nature of Reality.” Students were asked to define what they consider as real and apply that …