I'm dying to hear how this goes, Dave. This sounds both really fun and also incredibly useful as a way of teaching a wide range of material without resorting to the survey mentality. Or, yes, it is a survey, but a survey of place instead of time?
Thanks, Carrie. You're right it is a survey, but with a different sense of direction.
The idea is to avoid the usual potted (i.e., teleological) histories of commercial expansion and the growth of empire, by redirecting the "survey" (or sampling) onto the geographical axis rather than the temporal one.
Development is always a powerful metaphor, but I wanted to learn how to question its rhetorical force in both economic and literary-historical terms.
Instead, we'll be exploring the notion of "nonsynchronous" (to use Bloch's phrase) modernities as these are experienced in a number of regions. This gets us further away from linear and developmental metaphors of history than, say, "uneven development."
DM
Dave,
Cyberspace just flushed the comment I tried to post (as far as I can tell), so if I end up repeating myself, my apologies...
Let me try again:
I would LOVE to take this course. It would be great to test out my own fledgling hypotheses about the trajectory of late C18 women's poetry against the information provided here; to read a lot of material I ought to know better than I do; and to confront geographical frames and distinctions that I ordinarily just ignore in blithely talking about "the" eighteenth-century. As an advanced undergrad (or even as a grad student) though, I would have opted instead for "Great C18 Novels and the Tradition they Initiated" or "How We Got from Dryden to Romantic Poetry." I tended as a student to be wary of seminars in which the professor was teaching his or her next book, as I was uncertain about how much scope there would be to learn the material in terms that weren't dictated by the instructor's narrow focus. I also worried that if I didn't find the professor's focus interesting (or failed to adequately ascertain what it was) or couldn't find some way to align the stuff I did find interesting with it, I would have a hard time understanding the course material and I would do poorly. Of course, I now recognize that as a student I probably assumed that the professor's focus was much narrower than it in fact was and I was probably willfully blind to the kinds of open-ended issues that the professor's approach made available (that were occluded from the kinds of courses that seemed--on the surface--less directive). But I'm curious about some of the specific pedagogical challenges presented by this course:
(1) (this ties in with an earlier thread about bit introductory lectures) What kind of chronological background will you be giving your students and how? What kind of provisional understanding of "before" 1771 and "after" 1771 will they need to make sense of "1771" and how will you give it to them?
(2) (this ties in with an even earlier thread about undergraduate research) What kinds of guidance will you give them in how to select and frame a subject for their final projects? Will they need to make use of the geographical diversity foregrounded by the course? Will there be room for projects that tell (or work from) a story within a broader time frame?
(3) in the marketing for this course, how do you make it appealing for the smart student who worries that an unacknowledged component of her success in the course will be her ability to read your mind? (let me hasten to add that I don't think you have this expectation!)
Hey KW,
I have been concerned about publicizing the course, and getting the traffic to keep it filled. This is one reason why I developed this in tandem with a capstone course requirement, which other departments are doing, and which I'm hoping we institute. But for now it's just a special topics course, so we'll see.
Frankly, the UH English majors are unpredictable about where they go, because our courses tend to be overcrowded rather than underfilled, especially with teachers known to the majors. But I'm not sure the difference between a survey and a boutique course would really register with a lot of our student, or really send them in one direction or the other. And the course is restricted to 20 anyway, so we could probably make with 10 or so, maybe.
As for your concern #1, I'm thinking about putting a few good readable narrative histories on reserve (Langford?), then using things like the biographies and essays to develop a background understanding of pre-1771.
(I don't want to get truncated, so I'll finish in a second post)
DM
KW sez:
What kinds of guidance will you give them in how to select and frame a subject for their final projects? Will they need to make use of the geographical diversity foregrounded by the course? Will there be room for projects that tell (or work from) a story within a broader time frame?
What I usually do is have them work up material from presentations and/or response essays for their projects. Those do not necessarily have to be comparative, and they can certainly work up a broader time frame than I am doing.
Finally, as for #3, this really hasn't been a problem for me, though I see how a seminar could raise this issue. I suppose I'll stress that this is designed for people who want to have a lot of fun looking at primary materials and writing their own histories, the kinds of things they don't ordinarily get to do at UH. In other words, it's an opportunity for them to pursue their own interests within this framework I've offered.
How does that sound?
DM
That sounds awesome! The emphasis on primary research (and on the course being a survey in space rather than time) might well have swayed even my surly undergraduate self. But for totally self-interested reasons, I'd like to know more details about how you get the historical context going and how you get them to frame suitable research projects in a course that doesn't follow standard survey procedure. I'm guessing you don't just give them a list of the judicious selection of biographies and histories you've placed on reserve and assume they'll recognize and fill in any gaps they encounter themselves (at least, if I did that with my students the books would still be untouched at the end of the semester...) Do you assign particular books/chapters/issues/figures for students to become knowledgeable about and set aside class time for discussing and synthesizing that context? Do you embed the expectation that they assimilate this context within the response papers you assign?
Along the same lines, what are your expectations for the research project and how do you convey those expectations? What kinds of benchmarks does their chosen topic have to meet, and what kinds of guidelines do you give them for the kind/variety/depth of original research you're expecting? I ask because (in case you didn't guess) I'm working up my own syllabus for a research-heavy C18 undergraduate course for next spring, and I'm trying to figure out just what kinds of pedagogical carrots and sticks I'll need to fill in the gap between their native curiosity (which seems to be roused better by independent research projects in weird primary sources than by other kinds of course papers) and the expectations of an upper-level course.
KW,
The course is a year away, so many of these questions are going to be worked out as I develop it. Here's what I've decided, though:
1. The key for undergrad research, I think, is making students responsible for their own contextualizations. The more lecturing I do, the less effectively I'm teaching contexts, because they are not doing it for themselves.
So I'll probably set out units organized around the individual cities, with topics specific to the assigned biography and the literary works covered. So Wilkes will have specific chapters, paired w/ Johnson's writing, and a chapter or essay, say, by Brewer or Wilson presented by a group covering English politics.
I think I"ll do it with groups selecting the topics/contexts they're responsible for, so that they'll present that information to the rest of the class, for which they'll be graded, probably through some combination of annotated bibliography, presentation, and handout.
2. After the very helpful exchange we had earlier with John Russell, a librarian who contributed to our library thread a while back, I've started working with our own librarians about finding discipline-specific guidelines for "critical information literacy" for undergrad English majors.
I'm still processing this myself, but the goal will be for them to learn how to handle a variety of sources, to pursue a topic that reflects the breadth of the readings. I'm really not sure what topics the students will generate, except to say that I want the topics to be driven by the primary texts we read or they learn about, but I'm also hoping we can figure out ways to incorporate other dimensions, maybe by demanding some attention to city or region, as well.
Here's John's helpful contribution:
http://historylibrarian.wordpres...in-instruction/
And these are the English major research competency guidelines that Miranda Bennett, our instruction librarian, passed along to me:
http://www.ala.org/ala/acrl/
abou...scompetency.htm
This is to say, I haven't worked out many of these details, but I assume that these will gradually come along while I make further decisions about the course structure.
My experience is that students may be less concerned about the structure of the course, or the unconventionality of the approach or assignments, than we might be. As long as there seems to be a clear purpose and rationale for what I'm making them do (which I always inform them of), I don't generally have a problem with this. But then again, I've never taught a course like this one, so we'll see.
DM
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