MCP Resources

What kind of course will meet MCP requirements?

By making we mean addressing a need, urge, or uncertainty by manipulating materials that comply yet resist; by praxis we mean ways of doing in which texts, concepts, systems, and facts play central roles; and by creative we mean to highlight praxis that leverages affect and play alongside rigor and insight. While MCP exercises muscles and neural pathways largely excluded from conventional scholarly practices, critical theory and thinking remain integral to our expanded understanding of praxis. The potential domains/media of MCP range from history to psychology and pottery to poetry.

MCP ideals can be incorporated in a course by pairing making/creative assignments with structured reflection. Hands-on work is then one step in a pedagogical cycle: prepare students conceptually, give them a concrete experience, then ask them to analyze how that experience reshaped or complicated their prior ideas. Alternatively, making and creative inquiry may be developed as methodologies by which a student can work through new ideas or make sense of scholarly texts that seem obscure on the basis of analysis alone.

We are particularly interested in courses that incorporate making in the humanities and artistic inquiry in STEM fields.

If you are already offering a course with making/creative components that is open to graduate students, we would love to list it here.  While we would love to see more courses that holistically incorporate principles of MCP, our students can also build study plans in which MCP synthesis arises “across” courses of a more focused making/creative nature.

If you are considering revising a current or future course, here are some starting points:

• If you are unsure what making or artistic assignment to incorporate, think back to the experiences that shaped your own path as a scholar. Did anything you made, performed, or created help you think differently about your research questions? About blind spots in earlier scholarship? About the need to draw on other disciplines or approaches?
• If you do not have extra funding, consider how you might leverage local resources such as the Cantor Arts Center, the Anderson Collection, the Archaeology Center, making@stanford, the Center for Computer Research in Music and Acoustics (CCRMA), the Center for Spatial and Textual Analysis (CESTA), C-ShaRP, the O’Donohue Family Stanford Educational Farm, R&DE’s Teaching Kitchen, and, of course, the Center for Teaching and Learning (CTL).
• Plan logistics and accessibility with unusual care. This may mean providing detailed descriptions in the syllabus, discussing constraints early, and offering one-on-one channels for students to raise concerns. It can help to treat physical, sensory, and affective accessibility as part of assignment design rather than an afterthought.

You are very welcome to reach out to any of the faculty listed as advisers on this website—we will be happy to talk through possibilities.