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Annotated Syllabus
As I began designing this survey course, the most important aspect I kept in mind was who my students might be. Survey students are an interesting mix. On the one hand, you have students who come to the class with a passion for the course content. Some may be even early in their English major, looking for foundational knowledge of the discipline. Other students are there because it is a general education requirement. It's easy to assume because there is an element of choice with gen. ed. requirements, students are likely to be at least interested in the topic, but as Daniel Chambliss and Christopher Takacs warn in How College Works, we are often too quick to interpret students' college experience as made up of thoughtful choices when in reality much of their experience is up to chance. Did the course fit into their schedule? Were their open spots? With survey courses, I think it's essential to recognize the range students' initial engagement levels and motivations for taking the course.
As such, I thought a lot about how to create buy in from different students. I thought about what students might expect coming into the course and how I could use those assumption to create engagement. I divided the course into three units, each themed around something stereotypically associated with early British literature: Arthurian literature, Queen Elizabeth I, and witchcraft. It wouldn't be wrong to say that this course is built around students' stereotype of early British literature and is equally meant to challenge those stereotypes.
I used the three unit structure, which covers less texts, because it better interconnects the texts that are used. When I first taught an Introduction to British Literature and Culture I survey, I received feedback from students that looking over many texts over large expanses of time made the texts feel disconnected from each other. The unit structure allows me connect texts by theme, time period, or medium and adds a greater sense of structure to the course that enables students to better make meaning from our discussions.
When I first began designing this course, I used Claire Majors and Elizabeth Barkley's Learning Assessment Techniques to help me think of my goals. Using their Learning Goals Inventory quiz, I realized that the most important things in the course for me were helping students to care about the material, learn foundational knowledge, and apply that knowledge. I have tried to incentivize student care by placing them at the center of each major assignment whether as an author in the Arthurian tradition, writer in their identity construction, or as a director of a modern adaptation of an early modern play. In these assignments students are applying the learning of more abstract concepts from class to real writing situations.
Below is a page by page break down of my syllabus. It can also be downloaded and read as PDF using the link below.
As such, I thought a lot about how to create buy in from different students. I thought about what students might expect coming into the course and how I could use those assumption to create engagement. I divided the course into three units, each themed around something stereotypically associated with early British literature: Arthurian literature, Queen Elizabeth I, and witchcraft. It wouldn't be wrong to say that this course is built around students' stereotype of early British literature and is equally meant to challenge those stereotypes.
I used the three unit structure, which covers less texts, because it better interconnects the texts that are used. When I first taught an Introduction to British Literature and Culture I survey, I received feedback from students that looking over many texts over large expanses of time made the texts feel disconnected from each other. The unit structure allows me connect texts by theme, time period, or medium and adds a greater sense of structure to the course that enables students to better make meaning from our discussions.
When I first began designing this course, I used Claire Majors and Elizabeth Barkley's Learning Assessment Techniques to help me think of my goals. Using their Learning Goals Inventory quiz, I realized that the most important things in the course for me were helping students to care about the material, learn foundational knowledge, and apply that knowledge. I have tried to incentivize student care by placing them at the center of each major assignment whether as an author in the Arthurian tradition, writer in their identity construction, or as a director of a modern adaptation of an early modern play. In these assignments students are applying the learning of more abstract concepts from class to real writing situations.
Below is a page by page break down of my syllabus. It can also be downloaded and read as PDF using the link below.
britlit_survey_syllabus.pdf | |
File Size: | 2178 kb |
File Type: |
Texts: As I considered editions of texts I had a few key considerations. The first was annotations and glossing. In whatever edition I used, I knew that solid introductions and annotations would be important for students to get the most out of the text. But I wanted to make sure the editions I chose didn't have an overwhelming amount of annotations either. I also made sure that all of the texts have their annotations and glosses on the same page as the texts, as opposed to the back of the book.
My second main concern was pricing. While a typical English course's entire book list is often the same price as one STEM textbook, I wanted to make sure that the editions I chose were both practical for students and affordable. The Hackett, Folger, and Revels Student editions were all $16 or under. The Folger edition is also free online. Susan Doran's Queen Elizabeth I is currently listed on Amazon for $25, but it is also a hard cover book, whereas the other editions are paperbacks, and it includes a lot of images. Dolan's biography provides so much useful information to our discussion of Elizabeth I's life and literary influence that it justifies the price. The Longman Anthology of Literature Volume 1A is the most expensive of all of the course texts. Amazon lists it for $63, which is hefty. But there are a lot of used editions for around $30 available on Amazon and AbeBooks.com. While the price for this text is steeper than the others, it has an Arthurian literature unit in it not included in similar Norton anthologies and it has almost all of the texts that we'll be examining in the first unit of the class. If students buy a used copy, as I'd recommended in an email before the beginning of the course, then there's little difference in price of the text per the unit of our course.
I also make students aware that I list all of the texts in the order that we'll be reading them. This makes an easy reference for students on a budget to know what order to buy books if they can't afford them all at once. It saves them the work of going through the schedule on their own.
Accessibility: In the past, I've tended to put them towards the back of the syllabus. I now try to put them in the first or second page, and I've customized my statement. My hope is that these choices signal to students that accommodation plans are a normal and important part of my course design, not an after thought.
Cohorts: Since using gamification in my FYW courses, I've come to appreciate how placing students in teams enhances participation, creates social support networks, and can enhance learning. Placing students on teams, especially in general education courses where students are likely not to know each other, is an important part of my pedagogy. It gives students space in the classroom to get to know and support one another.
My second main concern was pricing. While a typical English course's entire book list is often the same price as one STEM textbook, I wanted to make sure that the editions I chose were both practical for students and affordable. The Hackett, Folger, and Revels Student editions were all $16 or under. The Folger edition is also free online. Susan Doran's Queen Elizabeth I is currently listed on Amazon for $25, but it is also a hard cover book, whereas the other editions are paperbacks, and it includes a lot of images. Dolan's biography provides so much useful information to our discussion of Elizabeth I's life and literary influence that it justifies the price. The Longman Anthology of Literature Volume 1A is the most expensive of all of the course texts. Amazon lists it for $63, which is hefty. But there are a lot of used editions for around $30 available on Amazon and AbeBooks.com. While the price for this text is steeper than the others, it has an Arthurian literature unit in it not included in similar Norton anthologies and it has almost all of the texts that we'll be examining in the first unit of the class. If students buy a used copy, as I'd recommended in an email before the beginning of the course, then there's little difference in price of the text per the unit of our course.
I also make students aware that I list all of the texts in the order that we'll be reading them. This makes an easy reference for students on a budget to know what order to buy books if they can't afford them all at once. It saves them the work of going through the schedule on their own.
Accessibility: In the past, I've tended to put them towards the back of the syllabus. I now try to put them in the first or second page, and I've customized my statement. My hope is that these choices signal to students that accommodation plans are a normal and important part of my course design, not an after thought.
Cohorts: Since using gamification in my FYW courses, I've come to appreciate how placing students in teams enhances participation, creates social support networks, and can enhance learning. Placing students on teams, especially in general education courses where students are likely not to know each other, is an important part of my pedagogy. It gives students space in the classroom to get to know and support one another.
More information about the major projects can be found below under the assignment guidelines.
Attendance and Tardiness policies: Attendance is a tricky thing because it's an indirect ways of grading participation. The point of attendance is getting students in the classroom with the hope that once they are there they will participate. But I also understand that sometimes students are going to miss class. They may be sick, taking care of a relative, feel the need to participate in an important event. That said, I do believe that student attendance and participation affects class moral and discussion quality. Given that most of the grade is based on projects that can be completed outside of class, I try to strike a balance in my attendance policy. I deduct 5 points from the student's overall grade when they hit 9 absences or miss 18% of the total course. Students who miss 19-30% of the class have 10 points deducted from their total grade. Given the heavily discussion based aspects of the course, I am willing to fail students who miss more than a third of the class with 16 absences.
Group Quizzes: Group quizzes serve three functions for me. The first function may be the most familiar: it's a mechanism to check that students both read and understood that day's reading. This could be done individually, but the benefits of doing reading quizzes as groups leads me to my second and third functions. The second function is that it is a time for cohorts to work together. It gives them the opportunity to socialize together around an activity. The third reason is that it helps students. Group quizzes tend to be scored higher than individual quizzes, and if one student hasn't done the reading, the quiz spaces gives them an opportunity to get an idea of what the reading was about before class so that they're not completely lost in the following discussion.
Forums: Given short period of our class, forums are one way to keep the discussion going afterwards. As you'll see in the schedule forum posts go between acting as a space for virtual peer review and questions meant to get students thinking about the themes in the texts.
Informal writing assignments: Informal writing assignment are either pre-planned writing workshops or participating in things like adding to our course's Padlet timeline. I plan on grading these activities on a pass / fail scale to reward students for their participation in the course.
Assignment Submission Policy: I have a PC to work from and am unable to open documents in .pages. While some LMS systems allow me to limit the file types students can submit, others don't. I find that it's easy to be upfront with students about my technological limitations and offer an explanation for why I'm requesting specific file type submissions. There's less accidental submissions in file types I can't open when I add in this type of comment in the syllabus.
Late Work Policy: At some point students are going to need some breathing room on a project. The late policy I've laid out allows students to extend work on one of their three major projects. The email part of the policy is a hold over from using a Learning Management System that did not have a submission notification system. I don't anticipate needing this part of the policy with a different LMS.
I do not accept late work for items that are time sensitive, whether that's needing be there in person to take a group quiz or participating in the conversations that are designed to happen alongside the week's readings for forum posts.
Group Quizzes: Group quizzes serve three functions for me. The first function may be the most familiar: it's a mechanism to check that students both read and understood that day's reading. This could be done individually, but the benefits of doing reading quizzes as groups leads me to my second and third functions. The second function is that it is a time for cohorts to work together. It gives them the opportunity to socialize together around an activity. The third reason is that it helps students. Group quizzes tend to be scored higher than individual quizzes, and if one student hasn't done the reading, the quiz spaces gives them an opportunity to get an idea of what the reading was about before class so that they're not completely lost in the following discussion.
Forums: Given short period of our class, forums are one way to keep the discussion going afterwards. As you'll see in the schedule forum posts go between acting as a space for virtual peer review and questions meant to get students thinking about the themes in the texts.
Informal writing assignments: Informal writing assignment are either pre-planned writing workshops or participating in things like adding to our course's Padlet timeline. I plan on grading these activities on a pass / fail scale to reward students for their participation in the course.
Assignment Submission Policy: I have a PC to work from and am unable to open documents in .pages. While some LMS systems allow me to limit the file types students can submit, others don't. I find that it's easy to be upfront with students about my technological limitations and offer an explanation for why I'm requesting specific file type submissions. There's less accidental submissions in file types I can't open when I add in this type of comment in the syllabus.
Late Work Policy: At some point students are going to need some breathing room on a project. The late policy I've laid out allows students to extend work on one of their three major projects. The email part of the policy is a hold over from using a Learning Management System that did not have a submission notification system. I don't anticipate needing this part of the policy with a different LMS.
I do not accept late work for items that are time sensitive, whether that's needing be there in person to take a group quiz or participating in the conversations that are designed to happen alongside the week's readings for forum posts.
You may have noticed that I leave a lot of Wednesday classes blank in this schedule. That is intentional. Given the short 50 minute classes, there is often a lot that goes unsaid in one class period. The unscheduled Wednesdays are days that I have set aside to either revisit the previous period's content or to offer opportunities to discuss older texts light of newer readings. Some periods could be used to do short games, such as The Trial of Gawain game outlined in Creating the Premodern in the Postmodern Classroom : Creativity in Early English Literature and History Courses.
When Wednesday classes aren't being used as days to recap previous materials, they act as days to get new historical contexts. One activity that I have put into the schedule is to regularly update our class's Padlet timeline. You can get a sense of what a Padlet timeline looks like in the 30 second video below. By placing students in charge of the timeline and making historical connections to the works we read, I place them in the position of experts and coresearchers, which gives students a sense of autonomy and control over their learning experience.
When Wednesday classes aren't being used as days to recap previous materials, they act as days to get new historical contexts. One activity that I have put into the schedule is to regularly update our class's Padlet timeline. You can get a sense of what a Padlet timeline looks like in the 30 second video below. By placing students in charge of the timeline and making historical connections to the works we read, I place them in the position of experts and coresearchers, which gives students a sense of autonomy and control over their learning experience.
Assignment Guidelines
Project 1: I took an Arthurian literature course during my MA program. We read different Arthurian romances from Geoffrey of Monmouth to Malory. What struck me was how writers layered their stories to construct an informal canon of works and events in Arthurian literary history. I was also struck by how writers had very different interpretations the same characters. It reminded me of fan communities, fan fiction and fan art communities in particular. These fan communities draw from a work that is considered canon but then create stories, characters, and reinterpretations that fit their own creative needs. Gender bending, race-bending, shipping characters, often to create LGBQT+ representation, is common in a lot fan communities. Since watching the shifts in interpretations of characters like Arthur, Lancelot, and Guinevere are so pronounced and interesting to trace even into the modern day, I wanted to give students a means to participate in the tradition.
I designed this assignment by drawing inspiration from both Fan CULTure : Essays on Participatory Fandom in the 21st Century and Fandom as Classroom Practice : a Teaching Guide. The one word of caution that appears in both texts is that using fanfiction in the classroom setting requires careful set up in class that I've only touched on a little bit in the syllabus. This kind of assignment is an appropriation of fan culture, which in and of itself is not considered a bad thing. But if teachers don't introduce the practice as part of larger subculture, students can get wrong ideas about what it means to be a part of fan writing communities. The one example that came up again and again was a class lead by graduate students asking undergraduate to write and comment on fanfiction in a widely used platform. The students unaware of the practices of the community gave harsh comments to non-classmates (something that was not done in that community). The students ended up upsetting the community that they had entered to learn from. For me, the take away is to acknowledge the appropriation and keep fanfiction made in the class on a class platform. If students enjoy the experience, they are welcome to join fan communities on their own.
The other thing that I kept in mind while designing this assignment and set up is that not every student will be comfortable with the idea of fanfiction. A lot of that stems from the cultural differences between the medieval Britain and today's culture, particularly in regard to copyright law. So I've set aside time in the course to discuss the history of copyright in the US. That way students can see where some of our culture's concerns with fanfiction may stem from.
For those who still remain uncomfortable with the fanfiction writing aspect, whether they dislike the idea of fanfiction or fear that their creative writing ability is not the best, I've designed the assignment so that it is heavily graded on a reflection of their fanfiction writing experience rather than the fanfiction itself. At the end of the day, this isn't a creative writing class. Although I encourage students to be creative, the learning goals are met through the process of being creative rather than the product. The reflection piece gives me a more accurate understanding of what students are learning in the class than their creative writing alone.
Project 2: As with Project 1, my goal is to put students at the center of the assignment. In this assignment, their writing is treated as an equally interesting subject as the writing of Elizabeth I or Edmund Spenser. My goal with this assignment is to have students think about the rhetorical situation and strategies used in these very different contexts. At its heart what I'm asking students to write is an analogy paper. How is situation their writing similar to their own? But the best analogies are the ones that know their affordances and their limitations, a distinction that can be seen in the descriptions of an A paper.
This project also became a way for me to support students with resume writing. Alongside the instructions, I would provide resume writing guides like this one to support students learning a new and often used genre.
Project 3: For Project 3, I have students use Waklet to create a visual essay that modernizes one of the three early modern plays. Waklet is a free content curation platform that allows users to upload and save content from across the internet. It enables users to extensively comment on their exhibits, which is why I prefer it to Padlet. The ease of curation and ability to link to other content is also why I prefer it to Word. You can get a sense of what I'm envisioning for student assignments by looking at the Waklet essay I wrote as part of the National Humanities Center's online Medieval Africa and Africans course here.
This assignment is designed as a multimodal essay because we are studying drama, which itself is a multimodal form. Since we will spend most of our class time examining the texts of the plays, this assignment is designed to supplement students' understanding of drama as a medium. I want them to think about how lines are performed and how the visual elements of the play affect audience reception. As with Project's 1 and 2, I also want to place students at the center of the assignment. I want to signal that their interpretation matters, so they are tasked with bringing the plays into the 21st century.
I designed this assignment by drawing inspiration from both Fan CULTure : Essays on Participatory Fandom in the 21st Century and Fandom as Classroom Practice : a Teaching Guide. The one word of caution that appears in both texts is that using fanfiction in the classroom setting requires careful set up in class that I've only touched on a little bit in the syllabus. This kind of assignment is an appropriation of fan culture, which in and of itself is not considered a bad thing. But if teachers don't introduce the practice as part of larger subculture, students can get wrong ideas about what it means to be a part of fan writing communities. The one example that came up again and again was a class lead by graduate students asking undergraduate to write and comment on fanfiction in a widely used platform. The students unaware of the practices of the community gave harsh comments to non-classmates (something that was not done in that community). The students ended up upsetting the community that they had entered to learn from. For me, the take away is to acknowledge the appropriation and keep fanfiction made in the class on a class platform. If students enjoy the experience, they are welcome to join fan communities on their own.
The other thing that I kept in mind while designing this assignment and set up is that not every student will be comfortable with the idea of fanfiction. A lot of that stems from the cultural differences between the medieval Britain and today's culture, particularly in regard to copyright law. So I've set aside time in the course to discuss the history of copyright in the US. That way students can see where some of our culture's concerns with fanfiction may stem from.
For those who still remain uncomfortable with the fanfiction writing aspect, whether they dislike the idea of fanfiction or fear that their creative writing ability is not the best, I've designed the assignment so that it is heavily graded on a reflection of their fanfiction writing experience rather than the fanfiction itself. At the end of the day, this isn't a creative writing class. Although I encourage students to be creative, the learning goals are met through the process of being creative rather than the product. The reflection piece gives me a more accurate understanding of what students are learning in the class than their creative writing alone.
Project 2: As with Project 1, my goal is to put students at the center of the assignment. In this assignment, their writing is treated as an equally interesting subject as the writing of Elizabeth I or Edmund Spenser. My goal with this assignment is to have students think about the rhetorical situation and strategies used in these very different contexts. At its heart what I'm asking students to write is an analogy paper. How is situation their writing similar to their own? But the best analogies are the ones that know their affordances and their limitations, a distinction that can be seen in the descriptions of an A paper.
This project also became a way for me to support students with resume writing. Alongside the instructions, I would provide resume writing guides like this one to support students learning a new and often used genre.
Project 3: For Project 3, I have students use Waklet to create a visual essay that modernizes one of the three early modern plays. Waklet is a free content curation platform that allows users to upload and save content from across the internet. It enables users to extensively comment on their exhibits, which is why I prefer it to Padlet. The ease of curation and ability to link to other content is also why I prefer it to Word. You can get a sense of what I'm envisioning for student assignments by looking at the Waklet essay I wrote as part of the National Humanities Center's online Medieval Africa and Africans course here.
This assignment is designed as a multimodal essay because we are studying drama, which itself is a multimodal form. Since we will spend most of our class time examining the texts of the plays, this assignment is designed to supplement students' understanding of drama as a medium. I want them to think about how lines are performed and how the visual elements of the play affect audience reception. As with Project's 1 and 2, I also want to place students at the center of the assignment. I want to signal that their interpretation matters, so they are tasked with bringing the plays into the 21st century.
Lesson Plan of Note
To end this section, I want to share a brief lesson plan for introducing Queen Elizabeth to students. I do this activity before introducing Elizabeth I's life and history and before Project 2. In this activity, I hand students printed copies of her portraits. I ask students to examine her portraits. What do they notice? What stand out? As they start noticing details of the portraits, I ask them to think of how those elements construct a version of Elizabeth I and ask them what do they think those portraits are being used to say. This is also a great place to ask them about pictures they or others use on social media and what those pictures say. The imperfect parallels help students begin to think about Project 2 and the visual construction of a person's identity.