[The Fall
semester is just around the corner, so this week I’ll preview some of the
courses and plans for which I’m excited as a new semester gets underway. I’d
love to hear your own upcoming courses, plans, work, or whatever else has you
excited for Fall 2016!]
One thread I’m
definitely adding to a new undergrad seminar, and one I’m wondering about.
When I started
designing an English Studies Senior Seminar on Analyzing 21st
Century America (our department’s Senior Seminar rotates between all our faculty
and focuses on a new topic each time it does so), I knew I wanted to include
and modify a number of aspects of last
summer’s hybrid grad course on the same subject: the overall
interdisciplinary methodology, including short stories from a contemporary
Best Of anthology complemented by readings from a variety of other
disciplines; collections of online materials grouped around key 2016 themes
like climate change and cultural appropriation; and student presentations on TV
shows and films that portray and engage with our moment in one way or another.
All of these will look different in both an undergrad course and a
semester-long in-person one than they did in a hybrid summer graduate course,
but hopefully all will continue to work as well as they did last summer and
will help us talk about the complex topic that is our 21st century
nation and world.
One of the key
differences with a semester-long course as compared to a five-week one,
however, is that we have room for many more readings, and indeed for books as
well as short stories and online materials (to be clear, our grad students can
handle multiple books in a summer course, but I opted for lots of shorter readings
instead). I considered a few different options for how to select those longer
readings for the seminar, but as the year unfolded felt more and more certain
that it made sense to group them around an inescapable 2016 theme: #BlackLivesMatter.
We’ll be reading four texts that all connect to that movement and issue yet
offer a variety of disciplines and forms that will hopefully keep our
conversations evolving and fresh: two creative literary works, Chimamanda
Ngozi Adichie’s novel Americanah
and Claudia Rankine’s
poem Citizen: An American Lyric;
and two works of nonfiction, Michelle
Alexander’s The New Jim Crow and Ta-Nehisi Coates’ Between the World and Me. I also
hope to bring in excerpts from many other writers and works, from Jelani Cobb to
Jesmyn
Ward, Fruitvale
Station to Blackish, and
more. I fully expect that these conversations will get testy and heated at
times, as they should and must—but also that every student, and their teacher,
will gain a great deal from each and every reading and conversation on this key
topic.
Speaking of key
topics and heated conversations, though—I knew when I proposed a seminar on
this topic that the presidential election would come to its culmination during
the semester, but I have to admit that I didn’t quite think through whether and
how to make it part of our class. Of course many of our topics are inherently
political, and will require us to talk about contemporary debates and divergent
perspectives and the like; yet that’s still not the same (it seems to me) as
talking overtly about Trump and Clinton, and about (for example) my
own increasingly strong feelings on that choice and election. As I’ve discussed
before in this space, my perspective on politics in the classroom is an
evolving one, yet I remain convinced that my
job is centrally about helping students develop their own voices and
perspectives, not sharing mine with them. I haven’t figured out whether and how
I can directly bring up and bring into our class the election without doing
more of the latter than I’m comfortable with—but I know that’s an inescapable
question with which to grapple in a course like this, and I’d very much
appreciate any thoughts and tips you might have!
Next preview
tomorrow,
Ben
PS. Thoughts on
this course? Other previews or plans you’d share?
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