Open-Ended Classroom: “Eliduc” by Marie de France and “The Belt” by Dietrich von der Gletze

Abstract

In Education, we often confuse two concepts, knowledge and wisdom. It is easy to convey facts, i.e., knowledge, without achieving much in our students’ minds. They might learn via (rote) memorization but then simply accumulate data and do not transform mentally, that is, they do not fully learn and hence do not grow in intellectual terms. The ultimate goal of good teaching is really the acquisition of wisdom, which emerges only in the course of time when a person becomes empowered to balance all the available facts, or to determine what facts there truly are. In the face of a growing availability of AI, for instance, and similar knowledge-producing and storing internet sources, we suddenly face the ancient question again: what true education and hence learning means. Examining two significant medieval verse narratives, this paper will illustrate the great advantage of open-ended forums (aka flipped classroom) as a future-oriented teaching approach in this field of inquiry (medieval or pre-modern literature). It is more important, as this paper argues, for our new student generation to understand the complexity of a matter and to have the intellectual competence to examine it controversially and discriminatingly than to know the many facts surrounding a text, an image, or an object, which can be easily retrieved through print sources or online. What truly matters is the individual’s ability to join an intellectual discourse and to engage with the complex issues in a deeply critical manner informed by the many perspectives one can possibly pursue.