At UVa, flash mobs learn for sake of learning

Taking a page from “flash mobs” — those sudden assemblies of people brought together by social media — University of Virginia students and faculty are gathering outside the classroom for special lectures simply for the sake of learning.

Starting this semester, the students have been organizing via e-mail “flash seminars” taught by UVa faculty members. Topics so far have included: “Liberal Arts in the Era of Late Capitalism,” “Can Buildings be Carbon Neutral, and Should They?” and “There is Much to be Angry About: Are We an Apathetic Generation?”

Faculty members want to participate, they say, because the flash seminars are an opportunity to teach about a topic of personal interest to students who want to listen and learn, rather than get a grade or earn course credit.

The students take part, they say, because the seminars are a chance to learn from top faculty members who are often from outside their particular course of study and also to engage with fellow students interested in intellectual discussion.

“I like to think that Thomas Jefferson would probably approve,” said flash seminar participant Lily Bowles, a third-year UVa student from Washington, D.C.

Bowles was one of 15 students who attended a flash seminar Thursday night at a small cottage at UVa’s 3,000-acre Morven Farm property near Monticello and Ash Lawn-Highland. Architecture professor Bill Sherman gave a talk titled “Aging in Place” that described the house he built for his retired parents and the principles of designing architecture for an aging population.

Flash seminars, Sherman said, are an exciting phenomenon because they are initiated by curious students interested in sharing knowledge.

“Everyone is doing it out of their passion for learning,” he said. “It’s what the university is about in its purest form.”

The students asked Sherman to deliver a flash seminar after they read an article about the house in northern Albemarle County he designed for his parents and how it tested principles that can make housing friendlier to aging occupants. For example, certain steps at the house are designed to convert into a ramp. The garden is surrounded by a short wooden wall that can double as a bench for his mother while she tends the flowers. And the kitchen provides a wide view of approaching visitors, as psychological studies have shown that older people want to feel more secure in their homes.

Stephen F. Railton, an English professor at UVa, gave the semester’s second flash seminar with George Riser of UVa’s library system. At their seminar, they showed off some of the library’s rarest and most treasured items housed in the Albert and Shirley Small Special Collections Library.

“It's always astonished me how many students spend four years at UVa, these days even walking back and forth over the new Special Collections vault and stacks on their way to the Greenberry’s coffee in the Alderman library lobby, and never ‘check out’ any of the wonderful materials we have here, from a page from the Gutenberg bible to the edition of Walt Whitman's poems that Sylvia Plath used as a college student herself, with her comments in the margins,” Railton said in an e-mail.

Railton’s goal for the seminar, he said, was “to give students an idea of what they could find in Special Collections, and may want to use in their course work or just to gratify their own intellectual curiosity.”

Future flash seminars are planned to include a lecture by Greg Fairchild, a professor in UVa’s Darden Graduate School of Business Administration titled “The Business of Beauty.” Another will be delivered by religious studies professor John Portmann on “Sexual Generosity.”

Laura Hansen, a fourth-year nursing student from Rochester, N.Y., is helping to organize a flash seminar by Dr. Don Detmer, a professor of public health, who will give a talk titled: “Your Privacy or Your Health: Why Can’t You as an American Choose to Support Both Research and Care?”

Hansen said she likes the idea of flash seminars because they allow her to learn alongside students from outside the School of Nursing.

“It brings together a really diverse group of students,” she said. “We have students come from Nursing, the College of Arts & Sciences, Architecture, Engineering.”

Each week’s flash seminars are listed in an e-mail sent out to roughly 1,000 students who have asked to be added to the list. The effort is entirely student initiated and is meant to operate without leaders or organizational structure.

“We want to keep it very impromptu,” said Laura Nelson, one of the key originators of the idea. “We realized that there’s a lot of interesting stuff going on at UVa — and really every university — that a lot of students don’t have a chance to experience.”

Learning at college, Nelson said, should not have to be confined to the classroom.

“The learning spaces extend beyond the walls of the University of Virginia,” the fourth-year student said.

Down the road, Nelson said, professors are planning to host flash seminars at their homes. One, a history professor, has suggested taking students on a day trip to Washington to visit museums. Another, an English professor, is planning to go on a hike and read poetry with students.

“It’s really endless where you can go with this,” Nelson said.

The flash seminars are open to UVa students, faculty, staff and the surrounding community, Nelson said. To see the latest schedule, go to www.flashsems.com.