[With the start
of a new semester comes all the new opportunities and possibilities provided by
a fresh group of courses. In this week’s series I’ll highlight a few of those
semester plans, among a couple other things on my Spring 2015 radar. I’d love
to hear about your spring plans and goals in comments!]
On what three
kinds of independent student work add to my semesters and perspective.
This spring, I’ll
have the chance to direct my fourth Interdisciplinary Studies (IDIS) Capstone
project. Students majoring in IDIS
at Fitchburg State are required to produce a senior project that combines
three different disciplines; this past semester, for example, I worked with a
student who combined English Studies, Art, and Comm/Media to create the first
pages of an amazing graphic novel based on the King Arthur legend. My spring
student will be bringing together English Studies, Early Childhood Education,
and Psychology to study children’s books and their impacts on our individual
and communal identities. Each of my Capstone experiences has been revelatory
for me, opening my eyes to new ways to combine these disciplines and see our
world, and I look forward to seeing where this one takes both the student and
me!
I’ll also be
directing a different kind of individual undergraduate work this spring: an independent
study, where a talented and dedicated student works with me to create a
semester’s syllabus investigating a topic of interest to him or her. This
student, whom I’ve taught in two prior courses and who is one of the couple
best undergraduates I’ve worked with in my career, is hoping to apply to PhD
programs next year and wanted to fill in one of the gaps in his coursework to
date: Modernist American poetry. To say that I’m excited for the chance to
spend a semester talking about Ezra Pound and Gertrude
Stein, H.D. and Marianne Moore, T.S.
Eliot and William Carlos Williams, and the Harlem
Renaissance poets (among others) would be to understate the case. But in
truth, I’m much more excited still to see how this student responds to these
poets, and how my own perspective on them grows and deepens through his work
and our conversations. I’ll keep you posted!
Finally, I will
be working this spring with two graduate students who are completing their
Master’s theses in our M.A. in Literature program. By complete coincidence, the
two theses are interestingly complementary: one student is re-reading Fitzgerald’s
The Great Gatsby as an immigrant
novel through connections to a number of 21st century such novels;
and the other is analyzing Junot
Díaz’s The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar
Wao as a new kind of immigrant fiction, one informed by the genre
of autoethnography as well as many only formal and stylistic trends.
Compared to any of these other kinds of independent work, graduate theses are
far more truly individual, and I see my role mainly as reading and responding
to their work and ideas, rather than providing the kinds of more overt direction
I do in the undergraduate cases. Which also means that I learn at least as much
from the process each time as I contribute to it—and I can’t wait to see what I
will learn about these past and present texts and their social and cultural
contexts from these two strong students.
Final preview
this weekend,
Ben
PS. What do you
think? Spring plans you’d share?
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