My students have taken on personas of Enlightenment thinkers (and Thomas Hobbes) and have begun to discuss their impact on today’s society.
Tomorrow is when the project really gets going! I would like my students to extrapolate the ideas of their philosophers into other historical situations. For instance, a question for Rousseau might be, “What are your views on communism and how it worked in Russia during the reign of Stalin?” To answer this question, students not only have to research communism, specifically communism under Stalin, but they also have to figure out how Rousseau would view both.
And this is where I need your help! If you are interested, please ask a question of a specific philosopher under the #MrMHWH. Tomorrow in class, we will research and respond to your questions. While we cannot get to all of your questions, we will do our best to respond to as many as we can.
I personally appreciate any and all help that you can give!
The Philosophers:
John Locke – @LockeinitUp
Rousseau – @SC_JJ
Beccaria- @BoneBeccaria
Voltaire – @VoltaireWorldII
Montesquieu – @Baron_MontesQ
Hobbes – @THobbes88
Wollstonecraft – @Crafty_Mary2
Please also include me on your tweets – @42ThinkDeep!
To find out more about this project, read this post about the experience last year.
What better way to make the Enlightenment come alive than to have my World History students create Blogger sites and set up a conversation on Twitter!
In our activity, students were hired by a consulting firm to bring the ideas of the Enlightenment to a modern “tech-savvy” audience. In small groups, they assumed the identities of various philosophers (Voltaire, the Baron De Montesquieu, John Locke, Thomas Hobbes, Mary Wollstonecraft, and Jean Jacques Rousseau) and wrote a blog post to reintroduce themselves to the world and to discuss how their ideas were incorporated into the United States of America. The posts were then shared under a common hashtag and students, as the philosophers, began interacting with one another.
For the next step, I wanted students to extrapolate the ideas of their philosophers into other historical situations. For instance, a question for Rousseau might be, “What are your views on communism and…
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Michael K. Milton ~ @42ThinkDeep 
Interesting and very informative. I am conducting a series of workshops on Project Based Learning. You blog is an inspiration to me because you are using PBL and finding it fun and engaging for students…plus, I am sure that it is really making your students think.
Thank you, Kali. I really appreciate it!
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