Rigorous ideas are the beginning.
THE MODUS METHOD
Modus brings research into direct encounter, fieldwork, and reflection with others. Each inquiry moves between gathered experience and ordinary life.
ACROSS THE YEAR
Eight inquiries move through Self, Other, Society, and World, with Creation woven throughout. Each inquiry follows a recurring method that carries its question into lived experience.
A REPEATING INQUIRY CYCLE
Each question takes a different form. This rhythm makes it possible to bring an idea into experience, test it in life, and return with an account that can change.
The method returns.
01
Provocation
Competing perspectives from scholarship make a familiar explanation less certain.
02
Encounter
A person, place, practice, or sensory experience makes it tangible.
03
Fieldwork
Fellows test the question in daily life, alone and in intentional dyads.
Circle
The cohort returns to compare what happened and hold different interpretations.
04
05
Offering
What Fellows have learned takes a form another person can encounter, question, or use.
The same rhythm returns across the year. What changes is the question and what Fellows become able to see.
WHY MODUS IS DESIGNED THIS WAY
What changes when the frame changes.
We make sense of experience through habits of attention, assumptions about others, and stories about who we are. These frames help us navigate life. They can also make one interpretation feel like the only possible one.
Ideas open the frame.
Research gives each inquiry substance. Credible perspectives in tension help Fellows examine what an explanation reveals, what it leaves out, and what remains uncertain.
Experience tests it.
Embodied encounters and Fieldwork put an idea in contact with what Fellows perceive, feel, and do. A question becomes relevant to actual choices and relationships.
Others change the view.
Dyads and Circle bring distinct experiences to the same question. Fellows can discover where their first account was partial, then shape an Offering that invites response.
The aim is more than understanding a new idea. Fellows can recognize a familiar story as a story, consider what else may be true, and respond with greater range in their choices, relationships, and contributions.
The learning design draws on research into physical experience, peer discussion, reflection, and preparing to teach. These studies support elements of the design in specific settings; the outcomes of the Modus Fellowship will be examined through Fellows’ accounts, Fieldwork, and offerings. Embodied learning · Peer discussion · Preparing to teach
The curriculum draws from psychology, cognitive science, philosophy, anthropology, the arts, and the natural sciences. Modus brings these fields into conversation at the boundaries of knowledge, where explanations differ, disciplines meet, and questions remain unresolved. Fellows examine what the evidence supports, what remains uncertain, and what each perspective helps them notice in experience.
For example, Ellen Langer’s work on attention and context and Donald Hoffman’s account of perception pose different questions about what we take to be real.
Pierre Bourdieu’s ideas about habitus and social field invite Fellows to examine why certain beliefs feel natural within a group. Dean Buonomano’s research on how the brain processes time raises another question: how do timing and expectation shape what we notice?
Fellows bring these lenses to an encounter, then test what each helps them see in a conversation, choice, or familiar setting.
SCHOLARSHIP IN PRACTICE
Ideas with something at stake.
One question through the method.
QUESTIONS WORTH LIVING WITH
An inquiry needs a grounding in substantive knowledge, a tension that resists an easy answer, and a way for Fellows to encounter and test it in life. The question stays open long enough for experience to complicate the first answer.
What do I miss when I assume another person experiences the world as I do?
EXAMPLE · OTHER
One of many possible questions. Its role here is to show what changes as an idea moves through encounter, life, and the perspectives of others.
01 · PROVOCATION
Fellows examine research on projection, false consensus, and the limits of empathy.
02 · ENCOUNTER
A paired exercise gives two Fellows the same situation and reveals how differently each notices and interprets it.
03· FIELDWORK
Each Fellow asks rather than infers in a relationship that matters, recording what becomes newly visible. Their dyad helps distinguish observation from interpretation.
Fellows return to compare what they assumed, what they asked, and what they learned without treating difference as a problem to solve.
04· CIRCLE
The learning becomes a question, practice, or object that helps another person notice when familiarity is mistaken for understanding.
05· OFFERING
The Curriculum page explores the questions and intellectual landscape of each arc in greater depth.
HELP SHAPE THE FIRST YEAR
Help bring this method to life.
Modus is bringing together founding facilitators, faculty, and partners who can help turn rigorous ideas into encounters and a year of lived practice. If you see a role for your work in the Fellowship, we would welcome a conversation.