[This semester went fast, felt slightly more familiar than the very strange last couple years, and featured some wonderful individual moments that exemplified why I do what I do. So this week I’ll highlight one such moment from each class—share your own Fall moments in comments, please!]
On truly,
inspiringly multi-layered and multi-vocal class discussions.
There are
lots of reasons why I keep using the same America in the Gilded Age syllabus
for my annual section of our Honors
Literature Seminar (I might not always get to teach this course and work
with these amazing community of students every Fall, but as long as I have the
chance I’ll most definitely keep taking it!), including the presence of
favorite individual texts as I discussed in that hyperlinked post. But high on
the list is how much this syllabus, especially as I’ve gradually honed it over
nearly ten iterations by now, allows us to do multiple AmericanStudies things (maybe
the trio of Most AmericanStudies Things, even) at once: discussing and close
reading complex literary texts and other genres of primary sources at length;
considering through them and those conversations broader questions about the
relationships between literature, culture, society, and history; and, when
appropriate and always thoughtfully, connecting those various discussions and
threads to issues in our contemporary moment and world.
Generally
those multiple layers happen gradually and across the semester as a whole; but
sometimes, when things are really cooking, they are featured simultaneously in
individual, inspiringly multi-vocal class discussions. This semester we had one
such amazing class conversation on the last day of Unit 3, the Unit focused on
themes of work, class, and wealth/poverty and in which our main readings are
four texts by the great Stephen
Crane. With the table having been set pitch-perfectly by a couple excellent
student panel
presentations, we moved into a class-wide discussion that truly balanced
close readings of Crane’s works, debates over whether and how such literary
texts can be activist when it comes to issues like poverty and homelessness,
and connections to economic and social inequalities and injustices and the
possibilities and limits of the American Dream in our present moment and
society. My voice was part of the mix for sure, but mostly in the “following up
great student comments, framing some of their main ideas, and helping get us to
the next voice and idea” kind of way. Quite simply, discussions and days like
that are why I do what I do.
Next
semester moment tomorrow,
Ben
PS. Fall
moments you’d share?
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