Now Accepting Applications for Fall 2024 Semester (26 Oct 2024 - 8 Feb 2025)
What's in store
✨ 16-week course with 16 participants, including class orientation, participant-led sessions and field trips.
✨ Weekly 2-hour in-person class sessions at CFAW every Saturday noon.
✨ A horizontal learning space that emphasizes autonomy, reflexivity and mutual aid.
✨ Work with the program facilitator to lead knowledge exchanges through a workshop, a lecture, a field trip or any other creative approach you co-design — no archaic assessments.
✨ Explore various sciences intimately, including biological, computational, earth and environmental, engineering, health, physical, and social and behavioral sciences.
✨ Develop a project to be featured in a culminating exhibition, conference, or publication, showcasing your learning journey.
✨ Enjoy a cozy atmosphere with rugs, cushions, and air conditioning, as well as amenities like chairs, projector, screen, sound system, printer, and access to water. Our cat will be your class monitor. 🐈
Together, we’ll learn from textbook knowledge and life experiences in a decentralized classroom like no other.
Join us!
Fall 2024 semester starts Oct 26 2024—Feb 8 2025, with weekly classes on Saturdays 11 AM—1 PM at CFAW, Karachi.
Register with a Rs. 5,000 security deposit to secure your spot, refundable* upon course completion.
* Only Rs. 300 (6%) will be utilized to stock stationery and materials for the semester, with the remaining amount refunded upon course completion.
SPS is designed for
✨ lifelong learners — whether confident or developing your confidence, this space is for you
✨ those not currently enrolled in academic institutions, and wish to go back to class
✨ individuals with a passion for teaching, regardless of prior experience
✨ anyone who observes, listens, and responds to the world, including but not limited to artists, writers, filmmakers, designers, caregivers, political organizers, social workers, chefs, tour guides, environmentalists, tech workers, healthcare workers, policymakers, and researchers
✨ folks without a formal science education or those seeking a reconnection with science in an engaging and enjoyable way are strongly encouraged to apply
Got questions?
A Community Q&A session was hosted on September 21, 2024.
You're welcome to visit the conversation, recapped here.
If your query remain unanswered, feel free to write to me.
What does it mean for a classroom to be interdependent?
School for Poetic Sciences aims to move towards future possibilities in education where the role of the teacher is less and less entrenched. This can be realized in an interdependent classroom stewarded by teacher-participants (that’s you!), where all aspects of knowledge exchange are decentralized and collaborative.
An interdependent classroom dissolves the hierarchy between the professor and the student in a participatory space where we rely on each other’s strengths to learn new things. In such a classroom, teachers act as facilitators, providing guidance and scaffolding while relinquishing sole authority. Everyone brings in their diverse backgrounds, experiences, and skills to connect subjects, disciplines, and projects to reflect real-world interdependencies. Respect, openness, and empathy can make such spaces thrive, and everyone in it nurtures essential skills needed in an increasingly polarised yet interconnected world.
How is it free?!
School for Poetic Sciences is a cooperative learning community where teacher-participants collaborate and share expertise. We design and teach classes together, which allows us to waive tuition fees. A nominal security deposit secures registration and is refundable upon course completion. Only 6% of it will be utilized to stock stationery for the semester. CFAW generously offers us space and logistical support. We seek sponsorships to fund fieldwork, research and final projects, allowing you to focus solely on learning and expanding.
What can an interdisciplinary classroom offer?
To awaken to life on earth, to seek its understanding, and to care for it, we must listen and know. One such way of knowing is science. For too long the sole territory of specialists, science is too important, valuable, and fascinating to be left to scientists alone. To truly engage it, science needs a broader community.
School for Poetic Sciences is born out of a necessity for science education to be re-approached with sensitivity and beauty to unpack its enmeshment in society, culture, and systems. The school invites your unique lens to make these connections in communion, reveal new relationships and patterns, cultivate earth stewardship, and marvel at the wonders of our world. Our school is a rich playground for cross-pollination of methods, and aesthetic inquiry – where we notice what’s there to be noticed, and help each other see what we might not see alone.
Acknowledgments
The program is envisioned and organised by Asad Ali Zulfiqar in partnership with CFAW. The title is inspired by the School for Poetic Computation, an alternative artist-run school in NYC and online, supporting interdisciplinary study in art, code, hardware, and critical theory since 2013. Be sure to check out their incredible work.