Fall 2023 Lonergan Lecture

On December 6, the Toth-Lonergan Visiting Professor of Interdisciplinary Studies for the Center for Catholic Studies, Francesca Zaccaron, Ph.D., delivered this fall’s public lecture, "Communication, Cosmopolis, and Contemporary Education." Taking place in the Walsh Library Beck Rooms, the talk explored the role of communication as mediation in contemporary education, classroom challenges presented by technology, and practical ways to incorporate the functional specialty of communication in teaching. 

In the wake of Covid-19, technology has become a classroom norm and a powerful vehicle for communication in an increasingly online learning community. However, with this power comes a responsibility which Lonergan’s idea of "cosmopolis" as a dimension of consciousness, cultural force, and community in which communication is central for contributing to the good can help teachers and students to navigate with care.  

The work of cosmopolis is to make operative timely and fruitful ideas, taking aim at rationalizations that restrict views and enabling people to expand their horizons in the search for truth. This is especially relevant to contemporary education, in which students accustomed to the internet’s information abundance may develop a habit of seeking quick answers over truth, falling victim to "fake news", and to value information over being, leading to disassociation between online and off-line reality. 

With this understanding, Zaccaron contended that in the digital age, educating the whole person, as per the mission of Seton Hall University, goes beyond establishing the proper place of technology in a curriculum: "The focus should be not just if and how we should use technology in class, but on how we can teach and help students to use it responsibly." Making students more attentive to and reflective on how they use technology is a step toward the interior conversion which is the starting point for the undertakings of cosmopolis.

As a concrete example of this task, Zaccaron described the work of Parole O_stili, a social awareness project founded in 2017 and based in her hometown of  Trieste, Italy. As indicated by its name, which reconfigures the Italian phrase Parole Ostili ("hostile words") into Parole O_stili ("words or styles"), this initiative takes seriously the role of language as mediation; words are just as powerful on the screen as on the page, and the people reading them are just as real and vulnerable to their influence. Through its "Manifesto of non-hostile communication", Parole O_stili prepares students to meet and reverse the challenge of decline by creating a culture of healthy online interaction.  

The event closed with a practical question and answer session, allowing participants to further discuss the obstacles to effectively teaching a generation raised online—including the ever-present distractions of cell phones and social media, students being less in practice with extensive reading, and the potential sense of isolation in virtual classrooms—and to hear Zaccaron’s personal insights and recommendations from her experience teaching philosophy during the Covid-19 pandemic.

Zaccaron is the Center’s fifth Toth-Lonergan Endowed Chair, the first woman to hold the role. In addition, she has served the Seton Hall community as Visiting Lecturer for the Praxis Program of the Advanced Seminar on Mission (Center for Vocation and Servant Leadership) since 2016 and was appointed GEM Visiting Fellow in 2019. Visit the Center for Catholic Studies web page to read her full profile and learn more about the Toth-Lonergan Chair.

Categories: Arts and Culture