[As this new semester gets underway, it does so amidst a particularly fraught moment for teaching & learning the Humanities. So for this week’s Semester Previews series I’ll highlight one thing from each of my courses that embodies the value of the Humanities for us all—leading up to a special weekend post on MLK Day and the Humanities!]
I could
easily reiterate much of what I said in Tuesday’s post about my Am Lit II
course in this post, as my Short Story syllabus includes some of the greatest
American stories (from some of our most important authors) and all of them have
a great deal to tell us about us and our world—perhaps most especially
contemporary gems like Danielle Evans’ “Boys
Go to Jupiter” and Jocelyn Nicole Johnson’s “Control
Negro,” but certainly also enduring classics like James Baldwin’s “Sonny’s Blues“ and
Toni Morrison’s “Recitatif.”
But in this post I want to talk instead about the mode of instruction for this
course, which is the latest example of something I’ve done at least once every
semester since 2017: teaching an
all-online course (this one is also accelerated,
something I do roughly half the time with these online courses). My many posts
here about teaching online, including the two hyperlinked in that last
sentence, make clear the challenges that this mode presents when it comes to
literature courses (and probably any courses, but those are the ones that I’ve
had experience with), challenges in response to which I continue to work on
strategies. But at the same time, what I’ve seen time and time again in these
online courses, at least at Fitchburg State, is that many of the folks taking them
quite simply would not be able to take in-person Day classes—they work
full-time, they have families, they are in the military, they have
circumstances of all kinds that make these courses not just the best but really
the only option. One of the reasons I love teaching
at a public university is the chance to help every American who wants a
college education to get one—and what could be more vital to the Humanities and
to America than finding ways to help even more folks do so?
Last
preview tomorrow,
Ben
PS. What
do you think?
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