[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 how getting creative
can help both students and professor keep things fresh.
The first-half
American literature survey was one of the classes I taught in my first semester
at Fitchburg State University, and while I’ve significantly revised my syllabi
for the other ones—First-Year Writing I (on which more in Wednesday’s post) and
Ethnic American Literature (about which I’ve
written many times)—in the decade since, I’ve kept the American Lit I
syllabus almost identical since that initial Fall 2005 iteration. I promise
that that’s due not to laziness but rather to success: I have found that American
Lit I is consistently one of the courses in which I feel that my students do
the best work, develop their voices and ideas most successfully, respond
most positively to the readings and conversations, and so I’ve never wanted to
reinvent a wheel that seems to be rolling very smoothly just for the sake of
reinvention.
At the same
time, there’s a danger in keeping any syllabus too static, especially one with
which I’ve taught for ten years (and at least 15 sections). And while that
danger is partly for the students—who, I firmly believe, can sense when a
professor is not engaging with the material as much in the present moment as we
ask them to do, and who understandably might respond by giving less of
themselves to that course as well—it’s even more there, I would argue, for the
professor. We’ve likely all had that teacher who seemed to be lecturing from
the same yellowed notes he or she had used many times before, for whom this
particular section and semester was literally no different from many others
that had come before. Since my classes are capped at 30 students and thus
operate almost
entirely as discussions (rather than lectures), and since I do all my own
reading and grading of student work, it’d be impossible for me not to engage
with this new group of students—but nonetheless, it’s just as important for me
to engage anew with the material in front of us, rather than relying on my
prior experiences or perspectives.
More and more, I’ve
come to believe that offering creative options for student assignments and
writing represents one vital way to keep things fresh. Again, that’s partly for
my own sake: reading 30 compare and contrast essays is far more compelling when
even a portion of those essays take the creative option and create (and then
analyze) a dialogue between their two authors (to name one example of a
creative option I’m considering for this semester’s Am Lit I). But it’s most
definitely for the students’ sakes as well: my most successful Am Lit paper has
always been the first, in which I ask the students first to imitate a chosen
passage and then to use that imitation to develop their close reading of that
passage; and I’ve come to realize that there’s no reason why I shouldn’t offer
similarly creative options for the course’s later two assignments, and lots of
reasons why I should. I don’t think I’ll require the creative work in papers 2
and 3—not everyone benefits from or prefers that option—but I plan to offer it
as an option in each case, and hope and believe a number of students will take
me up on that offer. I’ll keep you posted on the results!
Next preview
tomorrow,
Ben
PS. What do you
think? Things you’re hoping to try or do this fall?