What were the learning goals for this course?
Great Works (ENGL 2800) is a core class required of all Baruch College students. I have taught two sections, one with twenty students and one with twenty-seven (the latter is more typical). The courses learning goals include:
- interpreting meaning in literary texts by paying close attention to authors’ choices of detail, vocabulary, and style;
- discussing the relationship between different genres of literary texts and their cultural and historical contexts
- writing critical essays employing strong claims and well-chosen supporting evidence.
How did you translate this assignment from the face-to-face version into the hybrid version?
The first time I taught GW it was a hybrid section, so I designed the course from the first to be partly online, partly face-to-face. I sought to create weekly online assignments that helped students keep up with the reading (which was at times very significant, between face-to-face sessions) but also that fostered analytical skills and rewarded intellectual curiosity. I used tools such as VOCAT, the Oxford English Dictionary, and frequent blog posts to facilitate multi-modal encounters with texts outside of class. In class, I led seminar-style discussions, often focusing on more traditional methods, like collective close-reading of passages. Ultimately, I wanted both streams—online and face-to-face—to merge with each other, with classroom discussions informing online work, and blog posts making their way into our discussions.
The second time I taught GW it was not a hybrid, but I retained a number of what I thought were the most productive online assignments. My Blogs@Baruch sites for these classes may be found here:
Great Works course site for 2016 (external link)
Great Works course site for 2017 (external link)
What were the goals of this assignment?
Teaching a hybrid Great Works course, two of my key goals were to nourish dialogic interactions inside and outside of the classroom, and to foster playful yet analytical engagement with the literary form of each text we cover (whether that text is an epic, a play, or a four-line poem).
One assignment that facilitates both of these goals is the “Add a Tale” assignment, which I give alongside The Thousand and One Nights. This assignment asks students to add a tale to the original text, and to reflect on that text’s narrative structure.
The assignment guidelines, in their original incarnation (from my Fall 2016 hybrid GW 2800), run:
Reading The Thousand and One Nights, it is impossible not to notice the multiple ways in which stories fit together. The frame story–of Sharazad’s tale-telling to avoid death–generates story, after story, night after night. Many of these are “nested” inside of other stories: Sharazad’s characters, often at moments of great suspense or crisis, pause to tell one another tales. Even the frame story itself contains multiple stories; Sharazad’s father tries to thwart her plan by telling her several cautionary tales. Moreover, tales fit together thematically, as well as structurally–many are stories of avoiding death through cleverness (as Sharazad does), or about what it is to rule well or badly (issues relevant to her audience, King Shahrayar).
For this blog post (300-500 words), add a tale to The Thousand and One Nights. Follow these directions carefully:
- Choose the point in the original narrative when your tale will appear.
- Include a few sentences (or even a paragraph) from the original above your post.
- Seamlessly tie your story to Sharazad’s–link your text to hers.
- NOTE: Your story may imitate the style of the tales told here. Or it may deviate from that style–but if it does, some other connection (of theme, content, or purpose) should be evident.
This assignment is designed not to replace face-to-face time, but to (1) be a worthwhile activity in and of itself and (2) seamlessly merge with—and enrich—in-class discussion. When I give out this assignment, I spend time in our prior face-to-face meeting going over it in detail. In this session, I introduce students to the classical concept of “creative imitation”—or imitatio—the process by which authors take previous materials, and build on them, both “digesting” previous authors’ work and augmenting it with their own inventions. This assignment asks them to perform just such a dual task: of absorbing the original, and creating something new. In so doing, it gives them a kind of ownership over the text—but it also requires them to engage with that text on a formal level. The resulting blog posts are thoughtful, playful, and often wonderfully creative (I have linked to examples below, in section III).
After the students complete this task and read through (and comment on) each others’ post, we re-convene face-to-face. In this session, students not only discuss the original text and each other’s tales, but share insights into how the intricate work is put together, and how different forms of narrative interlacing reflect the complex content of The Thousand and One Nights. There is inevitably a great deal of excitement, laughter, and praise for each others’ work in this session. Students tend to feel very proud of what they have written—this assignment is often a bit of a breakthrough for students who claim they aren’t good writers—but also to have gained deeper insight into what the texts’ original authors wrote, and how they wrote it.
What were some of the challenges you faced?
The first time I gave this assignment, it worked well, but I felt too ‘central’ in our discussion of the students’ posts and what those posts illuminated about the original text in our post-assignment face-to-face session. I was the one person in the room who had for sure read all of them. I decided to make some changes, so that students were encouraged to interact more deeply with each others’ work.
The second time I gave this assignment, in the Fall of 2017, I added another layer, asking students to comment on each other’s tales by adding yet another tale. (Previously, they provided responses as readers, rather than as collaborative writers). I plan to do this every time from now on. Adding a tale to their classmates’ tales deepened our online and face-to-face discussion of form and content (discussed above). It also did another kind of work. Generally when teaching this text, I give a mini-lecture on its history: it has many authors and compilers, most anonymous, and yet it hangs together as a whole. Creating our own multi-authored additions, our classroom practice mimics (in streamlined, compressed form) the “making” of the original text. My mini-lecture can now open up, becoming a lively discussion of the interplay of individual creativity and larger narrative project. The students’ first-hand experience as authors—writing individually and yet collaborating—enriches their understanding of how the text was made, and how that process imports meaning.
This change also has the added benefit of deepening the class’s sense of community.
Course Site Links:
I have taught Great Works twice and used this assignment both times. The first incarnation may be found here (search the page for “blog post #9″).
Student work can be found here (click backwards, to older posts, to see other examples; this was one of the last ones posted). In this incarnation, students had to comment on a peer’s post, but did not have to add a tale.
The course site for the second incarnation can be found here.
Examples of student work for the second incarnation can be found here.
Note that while this was not a hybrid section of 2800, I imported a great many techniques from the hybrid seminar and assignments from my original hybrid class. I believe this is the version of the assignment I will use in future classes, hybrid or not—the adding a tale to another student’s tale really worked well!
License:
The materials created for this submission are licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License
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Laura Kolb has taught English at Baruch since 2014. She has written for Shakespeare Studies, SEL, and the TLS, and she recently completed a book manuscript titled Fictions of Credit in the Age of Shakespeare.