A draft article by Jon Beasley-Murray, Jennifer Nagtegaal, and Patricio Robles, reflecting on our experience teaching this course:
We welcome feedback and comments.
Some extracts:
“We wanted to do better. The COVID pandemic should have prompted a breakthrough for open, flexible, student-centered teaching. Almost overnight, most of us working in higher education were asked to make dramatic changes in our courses: taking them online; rethinking the place of lectures; reconceptualizing classroom interaction; reinventing forms of assessment. Under intense pressure, universities were forced to drop age-old rules and regulations, and we were all shaken out of our accustomed routines. Almost everything was up for grabs. This should finally have been the chance for those of us who have long been urging changes in our approach to pedagogy to give full reign to the experiments that we had been wishing to try out. But this did not happen. Instead, the past couple of years have seen a retrenchment of some of the more pernicious aspects of contemporary teaching practice, including further outsourcing of pedagogical functions to private corporations whose logic is fundamentally alien to the ethos of the university. A historic opportunity has been lost.
[. . .]
“But it is not too late. In what follows we describe our experience teaching a course in the latter days of the pandemic (in Spring 2022: the first few weeks were online; the rest of the semester was in person, with everyone wearing masks), a course in which we tried to keep to the ideals of openness, flexibility, and student-centered choice.
[. . .]
“We wanted to change the ways in which students thought about literature. More, we wanted to change how they felt about literature. Another running theme throughout the course was the observation that reading is not simply an abstruse cognitive activity, abstracted from the physical world around us. It is also affective: it moves us; we read with our entire body, and with the bodies with which we are in contact. If anything, this contact was more important than the contracts that otherwise structured the course. Hence for instance our video lectures all include a drink pairing.
[. . .]
“Similarly, we had a playlist of music with which we opened each class session [. . .]. We did not always comment on the musical selection; sometimes it was simply a mood enhancer. But reading and thinking are also about mood: we wanted to shift the tone from the anxiety with which students initially associated both reading and study, to enhance instead their sense of confidence and empowerment. [. . .] As a student put it in a blog post: “The first day we were welcomed with music and little did I know every class we would be welcomed with music. Not only that, but everyone being individually welcomed with a hello at the start of class is something I have not seen before, and it makes me really happy.” If they could associate literature with joy, they might reshape their habits of reading.
“Not that we did not seek to challenge students. Indeed, we chose difficult texts and stressed the need to confront the difficulty that literature always poses for us. [. . .] Not that they necessarily achieved this, but it was what we were collectively working towards. Rather than imbibing a pre-given canon of knowledge, we encouraged students (and ourselves) to construct habits of study oriented towards the future: a “study for” a work that is still to come. In the open, picking their own pathways, and taking control of their grade, students rose to that challenge. They did better than we could have imagined.
“Would we do all this again? Absolutely. Our approach was not without its challenges, for us as well as for the students. While the end-of-semester grading was quick and easy, overall it was more work for us than other courses we have taught: we had to read and prepare much more; however prepared we were, we could never quite anticipate what the following week would bring; the course was constantly in flux as its braided streams or pathways came together or diverged; we spent a lot of time simply recording whether students had fulfilled the various elements of their contract (and reminding them when there seemed to be lapses). But it was also more rewarding in almost every way.
“Would we recommend this approach for other courses? Yes and no. This combination of strategies seemed especially suitable for this course, a lower-level literature survey of a field of study that has still to be defined or determined. It may not serve so well in (say) an upper-level seminar, or in a language course, or in another discipline. On the other hand, we will not know until we–or you–have tried! Moreover, as is evident, we did not stick to any one system: we mixed and matched ideas and techniques from many different sources. Others will want to do the same. Keeping faith with the ideals of openness, flexibility, and student-centered choice may well take different shapes and forms in other contexts and situations. The point, however, is to take the risk (in fact, much less of a risk that it appears) of experimentation and innovation: to break old habits and come up with something new.
“On the final day of the course, the only session in the whole semester in which everyone was all together in person, we played music (“Walls Come Tumbling Down”) and handed out drinks (Inca Kola, Perrier, and Colombiana). We debated which had been the best book of the semester—the winner by far, according to the students, was María Luisa Bombal’s The Shrouded Woman. We also asked students to write possible definitions of Romance Studies on the whiteboards. (The best definition? “It is what we want it to be…”) Then we headed outside, to the patio beside which we had been teaching and learning all semester, the other side of the wall of windows that had separated us from the outside. In the open, we took our masks off for a collective photograph. It was not that we had left the pandemic entirely behind us, but (call us Romantics) we felt that we were coming out stronger, thanks to what we had learned. We had escaped the classroom at last.”
