[As the Spring
2017 semester comes to a conclusion, a series of classroom reflections,
this time focused on new things I tried in my courses. I’d love to hear your
Spring reflections in comments!]
On how my most
recent ALFA class evolved, and why I’m glad it did.
This spring
marked the ninth
course I’ve taught in the Adult
Learning in the Fitchburg Area (ALFA) program. As the many posts at that second
hyperlink reflect, I’ve tried to balance my eight prior ALFA courses between
two main focal points: more historical classes, focused in one way or another
on “Expanding Our Collective Memories” (the title of my first ALFA class, way back
in spring 2012) of American history and identity; and more literary ones,
focused on short shared works (usually short stories, occasionally poems) that
we’ve analyzed together. While the literary texts in those latter courses have
often come from our own era, we’ve tended to keep our conversations about them
grounded closely in the details and specifics of the texts themselves, meaning
that in neither of these types of prior ALFA classes have we talked at any
length about current events or 21st century issues. But last fall,
when I sat down to propose my ALFA class for this spring, the time felt right
and important to change that trend, and so I proposed a course entitled “Inspiring
Contemporary Voices.”
As that title
suggests, my initial plan for the course was that we would focus on the voices themselves—talking
at length about interesting, complicated, and of course inspiring individual writers
or figures (one per week for the course’s five weeks). As of this
January preview post, that was still the plan, but I was having a good deal
of trouble settling on the five focal individuals. And the more I thought about
it, the more I realized that that trouble might well be a feature rather than a
bug of such a course in our moment: that we’re in an era when we’re confronted
by a staggeringly wide variety of complex and often dark and frightening issues
and problems; and that trying to find inspiring individual voices or authors in
any sort of vacuum in such a period is both highly difficult and, frankly,
feels disingenuous and silly. So I took a step back and recalibrated, creating
a syllabus where each week focused on a particular such issue (the environment,
science, and climate change in week three, for example) and where for each I
brought in a number of different authors and voices to help us talk about that
issue (a group of pieces from the collection Coming
of Age at the End of Nature for that third week, along with videos
featuring Bill McKibben and 500 Women Scientists
among others).
I’m really glad that
the course shifted in this way, and would highlight a couple particularly salient
effects of the change. For one thing, I was able to include many more voices,
including some I hadn’t been considering at all in the initial iteration: Zareena Grewal
and Qasim Rashid in a week on Muslim
Americans; and John
Scalzi and Holly
Genovese in a week on poverty and class in America, to cite two further
examples. While some of their individual pieces were far from sunnily
optimistic (with good reason), the collective effect of engaging with these
groups of authors and figures was most definitely inspiring. And just as
inspiring was a second main effect of the shift: that it allowed all twenty of the
course’s students to add their voices and experiences into the conversations
far more fully than might have been the case if we’d been focused more closely on
individual authors and texts. What we ended up doing each week, that is, was
brainstorming many different sides to these contemporary issues and problems,
as well as distinct possible responses through which we might be able to
counter and push beyond them. I’m not saying we solved global warming, exactly
(well, not at all), but we most definitely modeled the kinds of informed,
engaged, thoughtful, multi-vocal collective conversations through which we can at
the very least begin to confront such crises. Inspiring indeed.
Last Spring
reflection tomorrow,
Ben
PS. What do you
think? Spring semester reflections you’d share?
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