[With this week’s
final papers and exams comes the end of another semester at Fitchburg State
University, and with it a series of semester recap posts, this time focused on
inspiring student work and ideas! Please share your own semester reflections in
comments, and/or your spring plans and goals leading up to a predictive weekend
post!]
For the individual
student presentations in my American Lit I survey course, I ask the students to
share three things: a couple bio and career highlights for their focal author;
a couple close reading starting points for one of the readings by that author
with which we’re working that day; and, most individually, an outside
connection, some way they’d link this author and/or text to something from
their own perspective, knowledge, experiences, or the like. That final one is
not an easy element, but it can lead to some really interesting links, as
illustrated by these three examples from this semester’s section:
1)
Our first presenter, focused on William
Bradford’s Of Plimoth Plantation,
got us off to an inspiring start: in his outside connection he linked Bradford’s
visions of arrival, the New World, and its native cultures to those from multiple
other explorers, both of the future United States and those from other places
and times (such as Marco Polo). I make sure that students don’t feel they have
to have such immediately relevant outside knowledge to fulfill this presentation
element—but if and when they do, it can provide an impressive additional layer
to help frame our discussions, as did this presenter’s outside contexts for
Bradford and our first class conversation for sure.
2)
Just as valuable as such contemporary
connections, however, are ways to link an author and reading from one historical
moment to figures or events from other time periods. Our presenter on Chief
Pontiac and his mid-18th century speech on Native American mythologies,
identities, and relationships with European cultures, did just that: she linked
Pontiac’s speech to Malcolm
X’s 1964 Washington Heights speech (source of the famous “We didn’t land on
Plymouth Rock” line), thinking about how these orators use and revise cultural
and national history to engage their audiences and develop their positions. I
had never thought to link these two American speeches, but immediately saw the
relevance and value of doing so, a great argument for this kind of
cross-historical outside connection.
3)
Finally, there are those more personal outside
connections, the kind that allow the students to link one of our seemingly distant
authors and readings to aspects of their own lives and identities; these always
offer great reminders of how much of our own perspectives is always in our
readings and analyses of any material. This semester, for example, the student
presenting on Catherine
Maria Sedgwick’s Hope Leslie linked
Sedgwick’s creation of a character’s 1st-person storytelling voice
within a 3rd-person narrated work of fiction to her own challenges
and goals as a creative writer, helping remind us that all of our authors (whatever
their genre) are creative writers not at all unlike us as we face our own
writing struggles and efforts. A particularly inspiring and pitch-perfect
lesson to take away from these presentation outside connections!
Next recap
tomorrow,
Ben
PS. What do you
think? Other reflections or predictions you’d share?
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