Part II:
Course Design
Course Design: An Experiment in Literary
Futurity
Daniel
DeWispelare
Systematized
study of vernacular literary texts (in English rather than Greek or Latin) is
not very old. In fact, one could argue that what we do (or try to do) in
contemporary literature departments has its taproot in the mid-eighteenth
century, when a host of mostly Scottish Enlightenment intellectuals began
writing anglophone texts on “rhetoric” and “belles lettres” as a way to figure
out what counted as education in the brave new political entity stemming from
British colonial expansion. For them, and for those who adapted their models
into the American educational system, literature was teachable only insofar as
it inculcated the proper responsibilities of that new species of moral
citizenship that attended imperial nation statehood.
Take
a look, for example, at Welshman Sir William Jones’s “andrometer" (below),
a document of this period that has obsessed me for years, not least with the
curious way it measures out educational achievement against dwindling
days. The step-by-step advancement in knowledge—from “Speaking and
Pronunciation” (age 2) to “Grammar of his own Language” (age 6) to
“Compositions in Verse and Prose” (age 16) leads inexorably toward “Virtue as a
Citizen” (age 50) and “Perfection of Earthly Happiness” (ages
65-70). If only! But I think the residue of this way of thinking
endures in many of our own versions of what literary study is, specifically
because models like Jones’s are an initial stage in a dialectic of
enlightenment—to be construed less negatively than Adorno’s—that continues
unfurling today. It is no accident, for instance, that the first and most
interesting antitheses to models like Jones’s came from late-eighteenth-century
feminists and educationalists like Mary Wollstonecraft, Maria Edgeworth, and
Hannah More, women who saw no space for themselves in Jones claustrohobic
man-system and therefore set out to make space, which for some meant invoking a
Rousseauvian model of childhood wherein the “mother tongue” serves as the
medium within which our first experiences of morality and citizenship
unfold. From there it is but a small hop to vernacular literature as a
nation’s linguistico-moral fundament, then another jump to the specifically
internationalist interest in socialist realism, and so on.
I
begin with this loose version of my sense of literary and cultural history
because I find it tremendously useful to keep in mind this presumed dialectic—real
or not—when planning a class, which is a task I think we might all agree is
challenging, revealing, and always—inevitably—an experimental stab at divining
some as-of-yet concealed literary futurity. What I mean is that designing
a semester-long course implicates past and future configurations of the very
course you are designing! Thus, your own course should contain your own
theoretical claims about both past and future, at least to the degree that they
exist here in the present.
For example, I have now twice at GWU designed and taught a course called I call
“Anglophone Romanticisms.” My own intervention into this topic begins with
my understanding of the title, for in the official catalogue this course is
actually called “The British Romantic Movement,” a title that was for several
decades understood to signify richly textured but hermetic formalist readings
of only six male poets—Blake, Wordsworth, Coleridge, Shelley, Byron, and
Keats. So, my title “Anglophone Romanticisms” is an attempt to update
“The British Romantic Movement” by focusing on Romantic-era writing in all its
messy abundance, from broadsheets to gothic novels to religious and political
tracts, a much broader textual swath, yet still one under which I can
anticipate and account for lyric-poetry-heavy expectations students often have
when they enroll in this course. Even while the entire course is aimed at
rescripting these expectations, I know that knowing the topic still means knowing of the topic’s traditional
moorings. This is itself a lesson in the knowledge’s contingency, and can
be a good conversation to have with students, when the time comes.
To recap, for me the opportune difficulty in course design echoes a line I
write regularly on student papers: every sentence should look both forward and
backward. In a course, I try to have every element recapitulate past
understandings of the topic while also setting forth new ones. Since this
is the overall goal, each week’s subroutine is related: every new week of class
should both recapitulate and extend. This is vague, and perhaps overly
meta-literary historical, so what follows are a few concrete procedures I
follow in my planning process. While in marketing the phrase “the more
you spend the more you save” is little more than a tricky wheedle, in course
planning it is seems absolutely true, so true as to be trite: time spent
planning saves you time in the long run.
1. A great course-planning brainstorm can begin with a word cloud. I like
to start with a blank paper and try to organize my own knowledge about the
matter into thematic constellations. If I am teaching Romanticism, for
instance, I start with words that are key to my own research as this is where I
am most at home: “sensibility,” “abolition/slavery,” “empire,” “performance,”
“class,” “nationalism,” “translation,” “standard language,” and “dialect
writing.” These are my core terms, transcendental signifiers, or points de capiton, as Žižek has
it.
2. I add to my core terms by meditating on the meta-literary historical
terms I know have always been affixed to the subject “Romanticism,” but yet
which might not be totally central to my own work or investments, words like
“genius,” “authorship,” “individualism,” “nature,” “loco-description,” “ruins,”
“the gothic,” “Hellenism,” and “Byronism.”
3. Finally, I try to call up that set of terms emanating from cutting-edge
topics I have read about recently in the field but which I am also equipped to
talk about to undergrads. The cutting-edge is no use if I summarize it
badly or if the students have no way in. Here I am particularly trying to think
about possible developments in the field, and recently, I have had core terms
like “human/animal relations,” “thing theory,” “transatlantic,” “diplomacy,”
“the Georgic,” and “Methodism.”
4. With core terms from these three categories—the present of my own
research, the past of my training, and the future of the field—I plot the core
terms out on apiece of paper, draw a circle around each one, and then begin
adding lines radiating out from each and ending in some note. For notes,
I try to think of texts that exemplify my understanding of the term, primary
and secondary, all sorts of texts really. I write those in. I then
go about thinking of texts that link different key words together, and
moreover, different key words from each category. Can I find a text that
will pull together “empire,” “genius,” and “the Georgic,” for instance? By all
means I can, and that text is James Grainger’s The Sugar Cane (1764).
5. So, I have a big messy paper and I have a lot of potential texts,
hopefully all of which can crisscross across my core terms in interesting
ways. This is just the beginning though, because now I have to submit the
excess of my thoughts to those constraints built into any semester. To
me, these constraints seem built around several problems that any teacher must
creatively solve, and a step toward solutions means dealing with these problems
as questions:
a. Time—There
is always far less time than you think. Always. And so the best thing to
do is to think of your brainstorm as being for you while your heavy and
repeated distillation of your brainstorm is for your students. Pick only
a few texts and make sure they are mixed media. Try to make sure these
texts meet a certain standard of efficiency. That is, a novel that takes
a week and a half to read should allow you to cover at least three or more of
your core terms; by contrast, a poem read in small groups in one class might
fill only one coverage need.
b. Progression—Do
you want the course to proceed chronologically? Thematically?
Alphabetically (not a great idea)? Otherwise? Do you want to take a mixed
route, one example of which is when you present several independent thematic
topics which in themselves unfold chronologically. A short sequence on
“sensibility from 1780-1800” followed by a short sequence on “abolition from
1780-1800,”etc.
c. Pace—As
you all probably know, a good course designer is totally in tune with the
university schedule, an average student’s time commitments, and your own
capacities. A good course designer knows when students are—simply because
of time pressure—going to fail at tasks that it's your job to help them succeed
at. It’s bad if students don’t do the reading, but it is also bad if they
are forced into pretending they did, because that merely layers pretense and
indignity (for everyone) over failure. Setting students up for failure strikes
me as a grave pedagogical error. I’ve made this error several times,
partially because there is a fine line between challenging and demoralizing
readers, but partially also because I haven’t been mindful of the fact that one
gets very, very good at processing written material in the years one spends
toiling as a graduate student and beyond.
d. Assignments—I
like assignments to be mixed and many, specifically because I like to offer
students a variety of ways to demonstrate that they are partaking of the
material we are working up together as a class. I am among those who have
students do regular discussion question postings. I believe writing is an
indispensable skill—elemental rather than secondary to learning.
Therefore, I have undergrads write shortish papers and do peer review. I
mix papers with very specific questions with papers that are totally
open-ended. I ask students to meet with me talk about their writing at
least once a semester, but hopefully more frequently. Lately I have been
interested in seeing how well students are at the oral genres that humanities
can teach, and so I am having students do more and more presentations of their
own work, in conference simulations and more informal settings.
e. Evaluation—Evaluation
in the humanities poses a series of philosophical conundrums. I won’t get
into these, but I will say that I have been in the unfortunate situation of
being at the end of a semester and realizing my evaluation mechanisms did not
adequately account for the intellectual energy students expended.
Elsewhere, I have had to give As to students who didn’t deserve them but who
met the letter of the law, even while students who obviously expended much more
effort got lower grades. My evaluation strategies now attempt to correct
for this but asking that students “show their work” as it were. I like
revision in writing assignments (over multiple iterations) particularly because
I like to evaluate how well they are recalibrating their work based on reader
responses.
6. Having set the mind to work on these problems, I think one is bound to
have a decent course design, or at least the beginnings of one.
I’ll end this rumination on course design by again stressing its experimental
dimension. Teaching is an education, and experimenting in teaching is
something that creates risk while enabling reward. I am not one to
casually let i-banking metaphors sneak into my prose, but here I will just say
that leveraging experimental risk with works, topics, and units one can teach
incredibly well is a good and safe idea. Some things will inevitably
misfire. After all, etymology teaches us that the word “syllabus” is
likely a mistranscription of an accusative form of the Greek word “sittybas,”
meaning parchment or title-slip. But a lot of experiments will succeed,
thereby moving from experiment to repertoire. Without question, there is
much more to say, and I’d love to continue this conversation in other forums.
Feel free to email me with any thoughts or suggestions: dewispelare@gwu.edu.
The Devil
& The Delight is in the Details: Practical Matters in Course Design
Maureen Kentoff
When approaching course design, once the overall theme and scope of your course
has been determined, and the various subtopics teased out, the remaining
and very detail-oriented steps include selecting the texts,
developing assignments, and strategizing class structure and participation.
Today’s post will focus on selecting and scheduling the texts. The following
suggestions are based on courses grounded in literature and/or cultural studies
that focus on primary sources, which are supported by secondary source
readings. I am always happy to share my syllabi and other “lessons learned,” so
feel free to contact me any time at mkentoff@gwu.edu.
Selecting & Scheduling the Texts:
Designing a course focused on literature, culture, and/or theory
can be both fun and challenging. As for finding the ideal texts, in addition to
having a few “must haves” or personal favorites in mind, I generally begin by
reviewing the major literary or critical anthologies (e.g., W. W. Norton &
Co.), starting with their Table of Contents. Then I skim the possible
selections, and finally I read the complete text before committing it to the
syllabus. I have also referred to the Teaching Guides that often accompany
various publishers’ anthologies, and found them to be incredibly helpful (e.g.,
Norton provides them free with adopted texts, and they also have a great
website with additional materials). However, it is imperative that
my research stretch beyond the standard collections to include more
specialized, not necessarily “canonical” sources—those that focus on
underrepresented or lesser known authors, genres, and topics. Examples would be
primary texts or critical essay collections that address gender, ethnicity,
class, sexuality, corporeality, etc. Another strategy I use is to find the
landmark essays for a particular topic and then check the bibliography for
other resources. And if you are teaching a survey course that is based on a
particular anthology, do not feel limited by the selection or the order of the
content. In my recent Intro to American Literature courses, I have used the
Norton Anthology, but supplemented the syllabus with plenty of non-canonical
texts. I also deliberately avoid proceeding in a purely chronological order
(which is often the order of traditional anthologies). Rather, I design the
syllabus around major themes—and my schedule handout is oriented toward a more
visual representation of these groupings. This encourages students to place the
readings in context and to consider works intertextually, while also providing
analytical coherence for paper topics.
Pressed for time and looking for a few short-cuts? You can always review other
professors’ syllabi thanks to the GW English Department archive and the
internet! But when you are developing a new course (and/or one for which
related anthologies or syllabi are not readily available), association websites
and listservs can be incredibly helpful. For my current course on Gender, Place,
& Time, I utilized the Society for the Study of American Women Writers
(SSAWW) listserv, on which I posted a request for primary text suggestions and
received many recommendations for authors or books that I had never read.
Subsequently I have assigned three novels that were new to me. As for the
students’ feedback on the readings? So far so great!
Finding pertinent primary and secondary sources can be a rewarding and
insightful journey, with many diversions down memory lane. The flip side is
that having to edit down your selection can feel like cutting off a limb. But
edit we must. For an undergrad class, I generally assign a longer primary
source (such as a novel, play, or other full-length film or text) over the
course of one week, or two 75-minute classes. Depending on the week, I might
also choose one or two brief secondary resources—or, even better, key
excerpts—to focus the discussion. For those days when shorter pieces are
assigned (e.g., poems, short stories, essays, critical selections, or film segments),
experience has taught me that attempting to discuss more than 2-4 items total
(and 4 is a stretch) in one class can be overwhelming—students will feel rushed
and you will likely end up short-changing your lesson plan.
To help students budget their time, I kick off each semester with tips on how to
read a secondary source. A popular strategy is to begin with the intro and
conclusion; next, look for the overall structure of the argument and focus in
on key paragraphs; then finish by closely reading or skimming the pertinent
details, as needed. I also advise students to anticipate that it may take them
twice as long to read a critical or theoretical essay than it will to read,
say, a fictional piece of similar length. And, at the risk of being ridiculously
pedantic, I suggest they plan ahead by noting the number of pages assigned for
each class, then divide by the hourly rate at which they generally read that
particular genre. I have also learned (the hard way) to assign shorter texts
for the first class after Spring Break or Thanksgiving. But I do take the
liberty of assigning slightly longer texts after a three-day weekend. And I
leave open the final class or two of the semester (which helps if we’re running
behind!) for writing workshops or individual meetings to discuss their final
paper assignments.
As for my current course on Gender, Place, & Time, at first I assumed that,
in addition to days focused on primary texts, there would be a few
classes dedicated to theory lectures and discussions. But I had difficulty
choosing the “perfect” secondary sources to assign—there were so many! So, by
default, I developed a simple schedule of only primary texts, with the
intention of layering in secondary sources on feminism, place, and time as the
content of each class dictated. But to my delight, these theories have evolved
organically from the students themselves via class discussions, Blackboard
assignments, and individual class presentations in which the student reports on
a secondary reading that they have researched. Then, before
each paper assignment, I help them organize these ideas and fill in the blanks
with additional key thinkers and theories, as needed. In sum, although this has
been an extremely challenging course to design, it has certainly been the most
rewarding, and continues to be a collective work in progress.
Daniel DeWispelare is Assistant Professor of English at the George Washington
University. His research is in eighteenth and nineteenth-century literature,
especially Anglophone Romanticism(s) in a Global Context, the History of
English Languages, Sociolingustics, Dialect Writing, History of Literacy,
Historiography,Translation Studies, and Literary and Critical Theory.
Maureen Kentoff is a 5th-year doctoral candidate in English and lecturer in
American literature at GW. Her work focuses on 20th-century women's
personal/political narratives and feminist theory.
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