Redefining Nature in a Post-Wilderness World
Posted by johnacaseyjr in Environmentalism, Updates on May 31, 2018
Review: Emma Marris. Rambunctious Garden: Saving Nature in a Post-Wild World. New York: Bloomsbury, 2011.
“When conservationists focus on ‘pristine wilderness’ only, they give people the impression that that’s all that nature is. And so urban, suburban, and rural citizens believe that there is no nature where they live; that it is far away and not their concern. They can lose the ability to have spiritual and aesthetic experiences in more humble natural settings” (150).
This quote really captures the point that Marris is trying to make here. In a way, her book pairs nicely with Bill McKibben’s The End of Nature (1989). Both argue that human induced climate change in what has been referred to as the Anthropocene Era has made the concept of ‘wilderness’ (land untouched by humans) untenable. Traces of the human are present in every landscape. When we try to remove them, we are simply engaging in a different form of human interaction, historical preservation applied to the land. Once we become aware of this fact, she argues, we must then consider what a responsible environmentalism can and should look like in this new era of human history.
Not surprisingly, Marris’s work also pairs well with William Cronon’s history in Nature’s Metropolis (1991), which shows the complex economic relationship between country and city, and also in Changes in the Land (1983), which demonstrates that the natives had already shaped the landscape to meet their needs before settlers from Europe arrived. It was simply shaped in a way that was illegible to these eighteenth-century migrants from western Europe. Consequently, they saw the landscape as ‘untamed.’
Most of the book is designed to convince readers that we live in a post-wild world using research from science and the humanities as evidence. Near the end, she proposes a solution, in a model kind of like Michael Pollan’s in The Omnivore’s Dilemma (2006), to create what she calls a ‘rambunctious garden.’ This is the kind of nature that we already see in and near our homes. Readers are simply encouraged to see that landscape as ‘nature’ and tend it more consciously for the benefit of the global community.
Marris’s book is highly readable and very useful to anyone who cares about the environment but feels stumped about where to start combatting climate change. As someone who came of age during the era of Earth First and the tongue and cheek “Save the Planet. Kill Yourself” bumpersticker, I find Marris’s approach to environmentalism surprisingly sane. This is a type of climate warrior ethos I can get behind. If you’re a teacher and are looking to teach popular science in your classroom, this is good place to start.
Dear College Professor: On Your Incoming Students
Posted by johnacaseyjr in Updates on May 21, 2018
Welcome to Pedagogy & American Literary Studies
PALS is thrilled to have a guest post by Clay Zuba, a teacher at Xavier College Preparatory High School in Phoenix, Arizona. Zuba writes about his prior experience in the college-level classroom and asks higher education professionals to consider how to best serve the level and teaching needs of incoming students. Zuba makes the point that we need to understand how students develop as learners in order to best meet their needs. For more from Zuba, you can find his nonfiction and fiction writing about House of the Seven Gables here.
via Ed Lim Photo
It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a preponderance of professors, have at least once or twice recently said to themselves, “students today . . .”
Fill in these ellipses with your most common complaint about students entering your classrooms. You may find that they cannot read critically or write clearly. Perhaps they don’t…
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Being Poor on Campus
Posted by johnacaseyjr in Updates on May 1, 2018
I know what it’s like to be part of the working poor. I’ve worked as an adjunct (part-time faculty) for many years at multiple schools and as a full time non-tenure track professor for almost 8 years. My current job, which pays me $46,000 before taxes and comes with health and retirement benefits, is the best job I’ve ever had.
I know what it’s like to buy generic food at the store and clothes without a brand name. I know what its like to walk into a restaurant and search the menu for something I can afford. I know what it’s like to get collection calls on bills I can’t pay and to fear of getting sick because my insurance has lapsed. Insurance I couldn’t even afford to use. I know what it’s like to be poor.
I’m saying this not to elicit sympathy or make anyone feel bad. I’m saying this because (for some reason) poverty is one of the last no-go areas of conversation on college campuses. It’s ok to talk about ethnic, racial, and gender diversity. Disability is now more accepted than it once was. That’s not to say there aren’t still problems, but people are talking about these groups and the unique issues they face on campus. Schools are creating programs to help them.
What do low-income students get? It depends on the school, but the recent Chronicle story on the University of Michigan shows that trend might be changing. A guide “Being Not-Rich” on campus was created by students at the University of Michigan who are low-income and also (in some cases) first generation college students. This crowd sourced document was meant to fill a gap in student support services that focused almost solely on financial aid and not enough on the indirect ways in which being poor influences a person when they attend college.
I can’t speak for everyone, but I remember my own days as an undergraduate and graduate student. I was blessed that my parents worked at the University of Vermont. Without tuition remission, a key benefit of their job, I wouldn’t have been able to attend college at all. Our family was in that awkward position of being too rich to be considered poor by FAFSA and too poor to be considered rich. Hell, me and my parents didn’t even understand what FAFSA was or how to fill it out. Scholarships and grants. No idea. I applied for several schools, knowing all along that UVM was it. No money. No option. No real guidance to indicate to me otherwise.
Most of my friends went off to state schools around the country. Some to private. As in high school, I got to hear through the grapevine about their ski trips and treks around the world. Meanwhile, I was working summers in a series of odd jobs to help pay for books and fees as well as repairs to my car (A 1987 Oldsmobile I called my ‘car of many colors’ because I covered the rust spots with spray paint and never could get the colors to match the original paint color on the car.) My vacation was a working vacation for most of my undergraduate years as a deckhand on a car ferry. I got some sun and time on the water, but I also had to empty chem-toilets and scrub down soot stained gunwales.
Graduate school was meant to be my escape. I moved to the big city (Chicago) from Vermont. Finally I was so poor that FAFSA deigned to give me money. I had to figure out its mysteries on my own, however, as neither of my parents had more than an associate’s degree that they had paid for by working while attending school. Different times.
I had money, thanks to FAFSA and a TAship, but not much else. I had to find a place to live and set up new networks of friends. Starting from scratch. I also discovered that the money FAFSA gave me was mostly loans and those wouldn’t even cover all my bills. In addition, I discovered that education is not a cure all for poverty. Sometimes it heightens the contrast between what a low-income person doesn’t have and what those with money do. Yes, money, but also cultural capital.
This last part is where I’ll end. One of the things I like about the crowd sourced guides to being “not-rich” on campus is that they are not theoretical. People write down what they have lived. I also like that they are nuanced. Someone who hasn’t experienced life in low-income conditions can’t know that a book is a luxury. A real treat. That a vacation is probably a chance to pick up more shifts at work. That after school activities are also a luxury and (sometimes) embarrassing. After all these years and degrees, I still don’t like classical music. I listen to it, but it feels foreign to me. I especially dislike modern composers that so many faculty seem to like. Some classic country or blues/rock is more my speed. And, yes, I like mimetic art. No modernism for me. Pretty flowers twice a day over Picasso or Pollack. How many seminars and symposia have I gone to where my tastes are declared “debased” and “infantile.”
I’m a proud son of the working class who (even as a professor) still has to hide his identity as one of “the poors” to fit in. So to those low-income students in college, I get it. You’re not alone. I feel out of place sometimes here as well. But here’s the thing, good ideas don’t belong to anyone. They are the property of those who use them.
I’ve used my education to be an everlasting pain in the ass to management in higher ed, many of whom claim to be leftists and “radicals.” I’ve also used it to help my students, most of whom are low income and feel a little out of place adjust to college life. I teach them not only my subject area, but the things I wish I had learned while in college.
Poverty should not be considered a permanent social status. Nor should it be ignored as a real barrier to success. Providing more money is one way to help, but so is acknowledging the real class divides on campus that mimic those in the country at large.
I respect all people regardless of their background. As a proud son of the working class, I simply ask those who haven’t lived in low-income circumstances to do me the same favor.
Director’s Corner (NeMLA Blog Post #23)
Posted by johnacaseyjr in Chicago Literature, NEMLA, Updates on March 2, 2018
View Outside My Classroom Window. February 22, 2018. Photo by John Casey.
Greetings from Chicago!
Looking at my list of Blog Posts, I see that it has been since October that I’ve last written anything for this column. I guess the easiest way to explain that (aside from Holiday planning and travel) is that I didn’t have much to write about in those intervening months.
Today I decided to open my computer and write what will be my second to last post as Director of Anglophone/American Literature at NeMLA. My position ends at this year’s conference in Pittsburgh.
Before I launch into the topic for this post (the role of the imagination in literary studies), I just want to take a moment to thank a few people who have made my experience as Director incredibly rewarding. First, there’s Ben Railton, who put into my head the idea that I could self-nominate for this position and actually get elected. Then there are my fellow Director’s Susmita Roye and Lisa Perdigao both of whom I have had the privilege of collaborating with on Special Events programing. I learned a lot from their past experience. Thanks to Carine Mardorossian for being so patient with me as a newbie to NeMLA and to Brandi So who helped me with more than a few software glitch issues. Finally, I’d like to thank the members of NeMLA, without whom there wouldn’t be a need for a board at all. It’s been a privilege to serve you in the role of Director and a real treat to get to view the session proposals for the entire conference. Let no one tell you that literary studies isn’t strong as a field. It’s simply evolving (perhaps a bit slowly) to meet the times.
I hope to meet some of my readers in Pittsburg and hear the wonderful research projects you are working on. Remember to look for my signature bow tie. : )
Several semesters ago, I taught a version of a course on Literary Criticism and Literary Theory that began with a pair of essays. One was by Susan Sontag and the other by Jean Paul Sartre. In the first of these essays, Sontag decried the violence of literary analysis as it is taught in schools, ripping apart a work of art to see how it works rather than appreciating it for what it is–a mode of expression where the parts are greater than the whole and meaning can never fully be discerned. She made the daring claim that we should simply learn to emotionally engage with art as art rather than forcing it to mean something. Sartre, in contrast, argued that art and artists had an obligation to engage their audience to effect change in the world. (It’s not accidental that Sartre is probably better known and understood for his fiction than his philosophical treatises.)
These essays were meant to provoke a semester long conversation on what exactly this thing we call “literature” is and what as dedicated readers we are supposed to do with it. Not surprisingly, we came to no consensus on these issues. Here are how my thoughts have evolved on the subject since I first chose to introduce it in this class.
On the one hand, I find myself agreeing with Sontag. Poems, Short Stories, Novels, all the ways that humans can be creative are not like machines that can be ripped apart and studied for how and why they work. Perhaps the best critique of this reductionist approach to literature comes from Edgar Allan Poe when he explains his poem “The Raven.”
Yet, on the other hand, I can’t help but feel drawn to Sartre’s perspective that no form of communication is disinterested. Even artists want something from us.
How do I reconcile these twin beliefs? I focus on characters in fiction who become more real to us than the people we see on the streets every day.
This semester I am teaching an Introduction to American Literature course. I’ve always been committed to teaching works by lesser known and local authors. This spring I chose to meet that goal by teaching a course on Chicago Literature.
So far we have read poems by Carl Sandburg and Gwendolyn Brooks. Works by contemporary poets Eve Ewing and Kevin Coval are yet to come. We’ve also read novels by Theodore Dreiser (Sister Carrie) and Richard Wright (Native Son) and still have works by Nelson Algren and Bill Hillmann waiting for us towards the semester’s end.
Since our classroom looks out on the loop and the Sears Tower, it’s not hard for us to envision the world these writer’s create.
Teaching the Sandburg poem “Halsted Street Car,” I told my students to think of their morning commute. How many of us have seen the exhausted workers whose faces are “tired of wishes / empty of dreams.”
Reading Sister Carrie, I asked them to imagine her walking through the State Street shopping corridor, arm in arm with her dapper salesman boyfriend Charles Drouet. Who, I asked, are the Carrie’s they see walking that same street today? Where are the Drouet’s? The materialist desires both represent are far from gone. Otherwise, why would the stores still be there?
With Native Son, we reflected this week on the legacy of the Kerner Report and the growing number of black males in prison. I asked my students to find cases similar to that of Bigger Thomas and they delivered. I asked them to imagine what Bigger’s life would be like without racial barriers and we couldn’t. Even in our imagination he remained a criminal, just maybe not a double murderer.
Now as we move on to Gwendolyn Brooks, we are considering the role of black women in the worn out communities of the South and West Sides who are asked to hold the tattered fabric of community together against tremendous odds.
I see Sister Carrie and Charles Drouet, Bigger Thomas and his mother, Sandburg’s Contemporary Bunkshooter, and Gwendolyn Brooks’ Sadie and Maude and Chocolate Mabbie. I see them all when I walk the streets of my Chicago.
And what do these fictional characters become real mean to me?
First, they remind me to be careful. That it is easy for the imagination to wander into the realm of stereotype and through that engage in prejudiced actions.
Second, they remind me that although Chicago is a city that isn’t kind to fools and where a wrong turn can lead to a quick end, it is also a city of resilience and incredible kindness (especially among those who have nothing). Some of the kindest and most decent people I have meet are from areas in the South Side that outsiders are warned to stay way from.
And third, they remind me that the imagination is about envisioning what isn’t there or what might be and not simply a way to see “what is” in a different light. One persons’ realism, after all, is another person’s utopia.
As a teacher, I never know what my student’s will take away from my classes. Teaching literature itself can be as unpredictable as the art we examine. I do hope, however, that my students will think about the thorny issue of how “art follows life” and use that as a spur for action. To create the neighborhoods they want to live in rather than driving over the same damn potholes their grandparents cursed at.
Until Next Time….
John Casey
Review: Chicago Renaissance by Liesl Olson
Posted by johnacaseyjr in Chicago Literature, Updates on December 22, 2017
Ask someone what comes to mind when they think of Chicago literature and they are bound to resurrect the usual suspects such as Carl Sandburg, Theodore Dreiser, and Nelson Algren. They might throw in Gwendolyn Brooks and Richard Wright for good measure if they know anything about the city’s tortured racial past. But modernism? Probably not.
How many readers, let alone residents of Chicago, for instance, know that that the 1913 Armory Show (often viewed as the debut moment of modern art) made a stop at the Art Institute of Chicago or that Gertrude Stein’s 1934 tour brought her to Marshall Field’s on State Street for a book signing where crowds waiting to meet her forced the temporary closure of part of the store?
These are just a few of the pleasant discoveries one makes in reading Liesl Olson’s new book Chicago Renaissance: Literature and Art in the Midwest Metropolis (Yale University Press 2017).
Dr. Olson is currently Director of Chicago Studies at the Newberry Library of Chicago and has written extensively on modernism. That knowledge comes through in the writing and endnotes. Her book shows how Chicago’s perceived status as “second city” in terms of cultural influence actually served it well allowing local patrons of the arts (many of them women) to promote new trends in the arts rather than feeling pressure to preserve the venerable aesthetics of an earlier age.
Dr. Olson introduces readers, probably for the first time, to such figures as Harriet Monroe (founder of Poetry magazine), Fanny Butcher (literary editor for the Chicago Tribune), and Bobsy Goodspeed (President of the Arts Club from 1932-1940).
Even though the book is about the artists who created their own brand of modernism in relation to Chicago, these patrons of the arts steal the show. They serve as a reminder of how literary history is shaped by those who promote various artists and that many of those promoters are not faculty at colleges and universities. It is also a sad reminder of how women’s role in literary history (then and now) is too often overshadowed by that of men.
In fact, a recurring theme in Olson’s book seems to be the resistance of institutional repositories of culture (such as the male dominated universities) to changes in the arts taking place in the early 20th century and the contrasting attitude of the non-academic reader (many of them women) to such difficult writers as Gertrude Stein and Ezra Pound. Non specialist readers in Chicago seemed to welcome modernist fiction as a movement that better reflected the changes they felt were occurring (good and ill) in their world.
The book is structured in a manner that will be familiar to any reader of academic studies with an introduction, five chapters, and a conclusion. What makes this book unique, however, are the “interludes” between each chapter that present a scene connected in some way to the previous chapter as well as the one to follow. These bridges between chapters (rather than distracting from the analytical and narrative trajectory of the book) bring the moments Dr. Olson describes to life.
Chicago Renaissance is a delight to read as well as a revelation for anyone who thinks they understand the literary history of Chicago. It could not have come at a better time for me as I’m teaching a course on Chicago Literature this spring at UIC, but it is a book with something of interest for more than teachers and scholars.
Chicago Renaissance is a fitting homage to the readers, patrons, publishers, and distributers that make literature possible in the first place. A nuanced examination of the complicated relationships between artists and the marketplace. What better place to examine that relationship than in Chicago, once referred to as “the heart of American Materialism.”
Director’s Corner (NeMLA Blog Post #22)
Posted by johnacaseyjr in Higher Ed, NEMLA, Updates on October 30, 2017
UIC East Campus Quad (photo by John Casey)
Greetings from Chicago!
After an extended period of warm weather, fall has made its appearance in the upper midwest. It’s now the tenth week of the fall semester on campus and this semester has been an incredibly busy one for me.
As usual in the fall, I’m teaching four courses instead of my usual three to meet the greater than anticipated demand of undergraduate enrollments. All four are Composition I courses and focus on analyzing genres of writing and formulating arguments. My students are finishing up a group project on a Code of Conduct for students on campus and are now beginning an Opinion Piece on immigration law.
In addition to my undergraduate teaching, I also spent seven weeks working as Interim Program Coordinator for Graduate Studies in English, helping graduate students prepare for preliminary exams and the job market.
These commitments on campus have kept me from doing much else (including writing a blog post). Today is the first time in some time that I’ve been able to turn my thoughts to issues not related to student reading, writing, and advising.
What I’d like to talk about this month is the term “Independent Scholar” and how it reflects the need for a change in how scholars and scholarship are understood in the US academic context.
I owe this topic to Megan Kate Nelson, a historian of the post-Civil War Era United States, who gave up a tenure track job to speak and write outside of a university context. She wrote a blog post in September of this year titled “Hey Academics, Please Stop Calling Me an ‘Independent Scholar” that got me thinking about how and why institutional affiliations matter in the creation and distribution of knowledge and what the future of that system might be as the ranks of academic labor continue to be filled by part-time and teaching intensive positions.
Scholars have always written and discussed their work outside of an academic context. These have been, historically, the true public intellectuals. What seems new, however, is the obsession (at least amongst academic circles) of qualifying the status of such writers and speakers as “Independent Scholars.”
To a certain extent, this sobriquet makes sense. Universities and colleges are obsessed with branding in an era of scarce resources. What better way to brand than have faculty travel around the globe to present their research with an institutional name prominently displayed on their book jackets, name tags, and event brochures?
The moniker of Independent Scholar becomes a way of simultaneously welcoming “outsiders” into academic discussions on a topic of common interest while at the same time reminding them that they are, in fact, outsiders. Their research is not connected to a brand and (sotto voce) perhaps not as worthy of our attention as this other material vouched for by an institutional affiliation.
Most of my readers won’t be shocked to hear that academic life retains something of the men’s club environment of the 19th and early 20th century. When you’re in you’re in. When you’re out you’re out. No amount of “Gatsby-like” success will change that.
What makes this problem particularly acute right now, however, and demanding of every scholar’s attention, is the continued decline of the tenured professorate with its emphasis on research, teaching, and service and its replacement by a precariate whose primary tasks are teaching and service.
Amongst the precariate, I enjoy a privileged position. I work full time (3/3) with benefits and I’ve been at my job long enough to obtain a two year contract. However, my teaching load is predominantly First Year Writing, which makes up the majority of courses taught in my department, and comes with an expectation of departmental service. Except in the fall when I teach four courses for the extra income, my teaching load is not especially burdensome. Nor is the departmental service requirement. Right now my main tasks are to evaluate one other colleague’s teaching and serve on the Steering Committee, a position I was recently elected to.
The pressures I face are primarily income related, the need to find additional work to supplement my full time income so I can afford to live in Chicago, and course selection related. I tend to teach the same courses on repeat and it takes effort to not get burned out on them. Especially when I’m teaching a group of students who often need a lot of additional help in order to succeed.
Into this hectic schedule, I somehow manage to shoehorn my research, usually in the spring semester and also over the summer. However, that research doesn’t count towards anything with my employer. I am evaluated primarily on my teaching evaluations and observations as well as the record of my departmental service. Thus, for me at least, research is a hobby that I (sort of) can indulge thanks to my job.
I wonder how many scholars are in a similar position with research relegated to a hobby they do in spite of their work rather than as a part of their work. I also wonder how many scholars are doing their work mostly as a way to keep and advance their employment position. I can count on both hands the number of disappointing monographs I’ve read by authors who clearly needed the book for a tenure file or to move up in status from visiting to permanent faculty.
The pressure that the changing professorate is placing on research will someday (probably soon) make us all “Independent Scholars.” As a result, I think it’s time for us to consider Dr. Nelson’s request that we drop institutional affiliation from our conference badges and programs and refocus our attention on the point of scholarship in the first place–the ideas.
One of the things I enjoy about attending conferences such as NeMLA is the ability to be judged on the merit of my research and writing rather than my pedigree. At my home institution, I tend to be invisible amongst the research crowd because I’m part of the “teaching pool” assigned to manage courses no one else wants to teach but that must be taught. Not so at NeMLA. I (at least) don’t care what your employment status is. I want to geek out with you for a while on the ideas you care most passionately about.
Taking away one more barrier to participation is the least that academic events can do at a time when financial pressures make it difficult if not impossible for people to attend these gatherings.
Until Next Time…
John Casey
My Spring 2018 Courses
Posted by johnacaseyjr in Higher Ed, Updates on October 14, 2017
ENGL 161
CRN 14458 – TR 9:30-10:45
CRN 14460 – TR 3:30-4:45
Everything By Design: Writing About Chicago’s Infrastructure
Infrastructure is all around you. The roads you drive to work or school, the water that comes out of the faucet in your home, the lights you turn on when it gets dark, and even the schools you have attended are all examples of infrastructure. These intricately designed systems for organizing space are fundamental parts of our lives that we often take for granted until they malfunction. But what is the logic behind the systems that make up infrastructure and how were those systems created? What is the future for infrastructure, particularly in the Chicago area? These are just a few of the questions we will explore in this class as we use the subject of infrastructure to learn some basic skills of academic research and writing.
ENGL 109
CRN 24547 / 24548 – TR 11:00-12:15
You Were Never Here: Author’s Writing In And About Chicago
What comes to mind when you hear the word Chicago? For some it’s stockyards and steel mills, but these have been gone from the city’s landscape for nearly three generations. For others it’s the stories of violent crime, but Al Capone is a distant memory and many neighborhoods are not touched by the gang activity on the evening news. Some see the city as a patchwork of neighborhoods with different ethnic backgrounds at their core, but rising rents and mortgage prices have turned many ethnic neighborhoods into urban shopping malls. The Chicago that seems ‘real’ to you depends on what you already believe before picking up the book. In this class, we will examine the strong emotions that readers have about Chicago and the narratives that either seem real or fake to those reading them. Readings for the class will include classic novels such as Sister Carrie and Native Son alongside more recent works by local authors such as The Old Neighborhood. We will also read poems by Carl Sandburg, Gwendolyn Brooks, and Louder Than a Bomb youth poetry slam founder Kevin Koval’s recent collection A People’s History of Chicago.
Director’s Corner (NeMLA Blog Post #21)
Posted by johnacaseyjr in Higher Ed, NEMLA, Updates on August 28, 2017
Greetings from Chicago!
The start of the fall semester is fast approaching and while I will miss the more relaxed schedule of my summer days, I am looking forward to meeting the incoming class of first year students at UIC. I often forget how unique my experience is on campus as I look out at a group of students who are truly diverse in terms of ethnicity, race, gender, and religion. These students teach me about what “America” is actually like and what it can be in the years to come even as I help teach them the literacy skills they will need to succeed.
Fall is always the busiest semester for me and this fall is no exception. I’ll be teaching four sections of Academic Writing I, the first class in the First Year Writing sequence, with a total of 96 students. This year I’ve decided to focus that class primarily on genre so that we can consider how the forms we choose to write in signal to our readers what we intend and shape the ways we use language. I also plan to consider how our language choices as writers can shift the ways in which readers understand a genre. Stay tuned as the semester progresses to hear more on how my writing classes are going.
In this month’s blog post, I’d like to consider the role of classroom design in the way that faculty teach. For those of us who read Inside Higher Education or The Chronicle of Higher Education, articles on the death of the lecture and the need for more active forms of student learning are commonplace. There has also been a resurgence lately in these publications of articles on the pros and cons of using technology in the classroom. What gets missed in most of these articles, however, is any real discussion of the actual classroom. How is it designed?
As with most form’s of infrastructure, the physical reality of the classroom is taken for granted. A board, some desks, a few square feet of floor space sufficient to cover max enrollment. Maybe a TV or projector system. But if colleges and universities want to change the way they teach, there needs to be greater emphasis on the spatial design of the classroom.
Traditional lecture halls were designed with a sloping or step down tier system. There also tends to be a curvature to these lecture halls. Students eyes are thus directed downward towards a common focal point–a lectern, chalkboard, whiteboard, or projector screen. Aside from the access issues these rooms present for physically disabled students, who might not want to sit all the way in the back or right up in the front, this traditional design sends a clear message about who is in charge and how knowledge gets distributed. Some faculty might try to counter this trend by using the room in a unique way, but the design can’t help but frustrate that intent. Group work and peer to peer discussion will always lead back to the focal point down below.
Rooms designed for a lecture/discussion format or a lab are a little better in terms of floor design. The floor space is flat and holds a smaller number of students. Some have fixed desks while others have movable desk and chair combos. Often, however, the square footage of the room prohibits a great deal of movement of these desks. It also takes considerable time and effort for faculty and students to rearrange desks for small group activities and discussion. The path of least resistance, therefore, is to leave them pointed towards the lectern, chalkboard, whiteboard, or projector. Student vision is distributed in a straight line but is still directed towards the professor. Thus turning the classroom on most days into a smaller lecture hall with a flat floor.
Of the two existing options in classroom design, the spaces allocated for lecture/discussion classes have the greatest potential for adaptability. They often, however, have too many students in them to make movement practicable on a regular basis. One solution, certainly controversial, is to reduce the number of students placed in these classrooms or at the very least to revisit how max occupancy standards are arrived at. On my campus, the Fire Marshall is the main factor determining this rather than pedagogical research. There is definitely a need for more research on the optimal number of students that should be in a room for a certain type of teaching method to succeed. This would give student advocates and faculty interested in changing to more active learning strategies some data to make their case for much needed changes. Right now, much of the discussion on this topic remains anecdotal and (therefore) gets ignored by campus administrators.
For those campuses lucky enough to have the money to build new classroom facilities, the issue is a different one. Should new lecture halls be built to create spaces for an evolved version of a venerable teaching method? Or should all new class space follow the call for more active learning (sometimes called a flipped classroom)? I’m of the opinion that new construction should contain spaces for all types of educational method currently applied such as lecture and lecture/discussion. New experimental spaces should also be constructed that allow for project based learning–small group activities and discussions. These spaces should imagine such active learning as on-going and not simply one method of using a lecture/discussion space.
This fall one of my first year writing courses will be held in an experimental classroom. It is a traditional lecture/discussion classroom that is being fitted with new desk and chair combos as well as touch screen monitors assigned to various clusters of desks. These monitors are supposed to allow students to work in small groups on assigned activities easier as well as discuss readings. The monitors are connected by a wireless system to the podium at the front of the room, which will allow me (should I choose to do so) to project what each group is working on up on the main projector screen for the entire class to see. I’m sanguine about what I’ll be able to accomplish in this set up with that group of writing students. As I get a better sense of what is different, I’ll let you know since I’m also teaching in three more traditionally designed lecture/discussion classrooms.
What I can say before I even get started in using the space, is that I’m afraid classroom designers (and some faculty) focus too much on technology (projectors and screens) as well as desks. The real focus (in my opinion) should be on square footage, focal points, and lighting. There should also be some consideration on storage for backpacks and winter coats as well as access to electrical outlets. For the experimental classroom I’m teaching in, I believe that racks will be installed under the chairs. We’ll see how that works. The electrical outlet set up will remain the same. Temperature of the room and wall color are also important. And, just as important, the room should make disability access seamless. Too often, the design of a classroom makes it feel like disabled students are being accommodated. They should be allowed to feel like the other students attending the class.
I hope that you all enjoy the waning days of summer.
Until Next Time…
John Casey
NeMLA CFP Reminder (Submissions Due 9/30)
Posted by johnacaseyjr in NEMLA, Updates on August 21, 2017
The due date for NeMLA abstracts is fast approaching–SEPTEMBER 30. NeMLA will be meeting in Pittsburg, PA this year and will showcase a wide variety of research in the fields of literature and language with a conference theme of “Global Spaces, Local Landscapes, and Imagined Worlds.” You can view a full list of sessions proposed for this conference here: https://www.cfplist.com/nemla/Home/cfp.
Every year Area Directors have the opportunity to promote sessions and roundtables on topics of interest to them or that they believe are under-represented at the conference. Among the sessions and roundtables I’ve proposed this year are:
What Counts As A War Story?
This roundtable will examine narratives of war that don’t fit the traditional mold of male-oriented and combat-centered fiction. After all, there are many ways to serve in the military and plenty of women in uniform. You can submit an abstract for a presentation to this session here: https://www.cfplist.com/nemla/Home/S/16693.
Material Culture Studies and American Literature
This panel examines the tension between objects and ideas in American fiction. What do U.S. authors have to say about the physical environment around them? How does it support or contradict their beliefs about the world? Papers on book and periodical history are also welcome. Especially when the author addresses their own concerns about the production and distribution of their work. You can submit an abstract for a paper to this session here: https://www.cfplist.com/nemla/Home/S/16694.
Teaching Disability in American Literature
This roundtable continues what was a fruitful discussion in Hartford, Connecticut on the topic of disability in American literature. I’d like abstracts to consider not only new texts to teach as part of a disability studies curriculum but also new ways of teaching disability in the classroom using fiction. You can submit an abstract for a presentation to this session here: https://www.cfplist.com/nemla/Home/S/17059.
What Happened to the Reader?
This roundtable considers the experience of non-traditional and non-specialist readers of fiction. Presentations are especially welcome that examine teaching literary texts in not for credit courses and among non-traditional student populations. You can submit an abstract for a presentation to this session here: https://www.cfplist.com/nemla/Home/S/17060.
I hope you’ll consider submitting a proposal for NeMLA 2018. If you have any questions about the sessions I’ve proposed, please feel free to contact me about them.
As a reminder, NeMLA welcomes all scholars regardless of their employment status. A limited number of travel awards are available for Graduate Students and Contingent Faculty. You can find out more information about these awards here: https://www.buffalo.edu/nemla/awards/travel.html.
Enjoy these last few days of summer and I look forward to seeing some of you in Pittsburg!
John
John A Casey Jr 