September 3, 2015: Fall 2015 Previews: Interdisciplinary Studies Capstone

[As another Fall semester kicks off, a series of preview posts—this time focusing on new things I’ll be trying this semester. Leading up to a special pedagogy post this weekend!]

Three reasons I’m very excited to be teaching our IDIS Capstone for the first time.

1)      The Senior Projects: I’ve had the chance over the years to serve as the advisor for a number of individual such projects, in which our IDIS majors combine three distinct disciplines into one culminating effort. To cite two examples: a student combined English, Psychology, and Human Services/Counseling to create a novella about domestic abuse; another combined English, Art, and Communications/Media to create the opening pages of a graphic novel about King Arthur. These projects exemplify interdisciplinarity and undergraduate achievement, and in this Capstone course I’ll have the chance to work for the first time with a group of students as they design, research, and produce their senior projects. Can’t wait!

2)      Applying Interdisciplinarity: Alongside their work on those individual projects, the course also features a shared topic and group of readings and materials. For my version, I plan to modify and adapt my summer graduate course on Analyzing 21^st Century America, asking the students to use a variety of texts, media, and disciplinary perspectives to analyze such topics as #BlackLivesMatter, satire and humor in American culture, controversies and debates in sports, and the role of the media and popular culture in our unfolding presidential election. I hope that these collective conversations will inform the students’ individual projects, but in any case I know that they will produce valuable insights on our 21^st century moment and culture, and on what interdisciplinary thinking offers us as members of that society. Can’t wait!

3)      I’m Me!: I don’t imagine that readers of this blog will need much convincing that I’m very much about interdisciplinarity. But long before I began blogging, that concept and skill has informed nearly every academic decision and goal of mine: from choosing to major in History and Literature to working to create an American Studies program at Fitchburg State, to name only two of the nearly limitless examples of this emphasis. I also work to bring interdisciplinarity into every class I teach. But at the same time, the IDIS Capstone will be the first course I’ve taught where interdisciplinary research and writing, reading and analysis, thinking and scholarship will comprise the most central elements and goals. So I say once more, with feeling, can’t wait!

Last preview tomorrow,

Ben

PS. What do you think? Things you’re hoping to try or do this fall?

September 2, 2015: Fall 2015 Previews: First-Year Writing I

[As another Fall semester kicks off, a series of preview posts—this time focusing on new things I’ll be trying this semester. Leading up to a special pedagogy post this weekend!]

On two ways to bring the digital to a traditional writing classroom.

For the Spring 2014 semester, I created an entirely new syllabus for my First-Year Writing II course, one focused on Analyzing 21^st Century America. As you would expect, that course focused significantly on digital topics and elements: from units on social media and analyzing movies and TV shows watched online to near-constant conversations about online identities, communities, communication, and more. Yet at the same time, partly by design but mostly because there’s only so much overhauling one can do of one’s pedagogy in any given moment, I kept my assignment types and their semester-long scaffolding much closer to what I had employed in my prior Writing II courses, and much more traditional (in the sense of the pre-digital composition classroom, that is) than were the syllabus and its units, readings, and conversations.

This fall, for my next section of First-Year Writing I, I’m trying a complicated experiment—not overhauling the syllabus I’ve used successfully for many years and sections, yet still both bringing one of my favorite aspects of that digital Writing II into this one and (I hope) improving on that course’s one less innovative element. For the former, I’m going to try to use digital resources to provide students with many more options for our units and readings than has been the case in prior sections. For example, we start with a unit on personal essays (reading and then writing/analyzing them), and I’ve always used a handful of examples from the Seagull Reader: Essays anthology. I’ve still ordered that book and will have us read and discuss some of those example essays, to give us a shared group of core texts; but I will also highlight pieces of personal writing on blogs and tumblrs and other websites, as well as examples in other media (such as YouTube channels and Ted talks). Each of those forms and genres comes with its own specific elements and choices, of course—but there’s no reason why we can’t discuss and analyze each of them, and why I can’t give students the choice of with which ones they most want to work.

That final point comprises the way I’m hoping to improve on my digital-centric Writing II course: by offering students creative assignment options that similarly utilize the digital. That is, if a student wants to create his or her Assignment 1 personal essay as a tumblr post, or a YouTube video, or in some other digital or multimedia form, it seems to me that I should be encouraging rather than limiting such a range of choices; and that the students can then apply their analytical skills and writing to that work with equal rigor and depth in any case. I don’t think a First-Year Writing course can or should forego analytical, academic writing in its more traditional forms, but as with the creative survey assignments about which I wrote in Monday’s post, I don’t think it’s either-or: that, indeed, allowing for a greater range of creative assignment options and responses can help students develop their analytical skills alongside and in conjunction with their unique voices and skills. I have no idea what the results of this hypothesis will be in the Writing I experiment on which I’m about to embark—but I’m excited to find out, and, as always, will keep you posted!

Next preview tomorrow,

Ben                                      

PS. What do you think? Things you’re hoping to try or do this fall?

September 1, 2015: Fall 2015 Previews: Honors Lit

[As another Fall semester kicks off, a series of preview posts—this time focusing on new things I’ll be trying this semester. Leading up to a special pedagogy post this weekend!]

On the challenge and excitement of bringing an old favorite to a new audience.

As I mentioned in my fall preview post back in May, this semester I get to teach a couple new courses: the Interdisciplinary Studies Capstone (on which more in Thursday’s post); and the Honors Literature Seminar. I’ve had the chance over the years to teach and advise a number of wonderful students from our FSU Honors Program (formerly known as the Leadership Academy), and because I sat for a year on the Honors Curriculum Committee and my colleague and friend Joe Moser is the program’s new director, I’ve certainly also heard and thought a lot about its curriculum, goals, and identity. But this will be my first chance to teach our department’s contribution to the Honors Curriculum, the required Literature Seminar that Honors students take as part of their general education courses; and I’ve decided for this first Honors Seminar to go with one of my oldest academic friends and the subject of my dissertation and first book: America in the Gilded Age.

Make no mistake, I’m well aware that this topic and time period won’t be easy to sell and connect to a community of students born in the mid to late 1990s (a century after the Gilded Age’s conclusion, that is). Moreover, because this is a literature seminar and one geared for Honors students to boot, I’ve gone ahead and chosen five demanding and challenging texts as our main reads: Helen Hunt Jackson’s Ramona, Elizabeth Stuart Phelps’s The Story of Avis, Stephen Crane’s Maggie, Charles Chesnutt’s The Marrow of Tradition, and Sui Sin Far’s Mrs. Spring Fragrance. I love all five of these books and believe they are well worth our time and energy; but none of them are particularly accessible for modern audiences, and four of the five (all but Crane’s novella) are in the 400+ page range. For a community of students that quite frankly doesn’t always have the time to do the reading (and those issues of jobs, families, obligations, busy lives won’t go away with Honors students), I know that this group of texts is going to present a semester-long challenge.

While such challenges can be their own reward, that’s not why I’ve made these text and course decisions. One reason, ironically but definitely, is timeliness: the issues covered by these texts and the units they’ll help introduce (Mexican and Native American histories, women’s rights and experiences, poverty and work, race and oppression, and immigration, respectively) remain just as central to our own era as they were in the Gilded Age; whether you believe we’re in a new Gilded Age or not, there’s no doubt that the earlier period and ours have a great deal in common. At the same time, reading such texts and analyzing the Gilded Age isn’t just about referencing our contemporary moment—it’s also, and most importantly, about understanding this complex, crucial historical and cultural and literary moment on its own terms. Indeed, we can’t possibly consider what the Gilded Age has to offer for 21^st century America unless and until we do the work to analyze that era—and I’m very excited to spend a semester doing that work with some of FSU’s best students!

Next preview tomorrow,                                                    

Ben

PS. What do you think? Things you’re hoping to try or do this fall?