The Work of the Class

When I started my MA Program, the work we were assigned in our seminars was mostly structured like this: read a lot of primary texts and critical articles; lead the seminar once; write a big seminar paper at the end. If we got feedback on our work, it was mostly confined to comments on the final paper that were returned to us with our grade. For the semester. In retrospect, I suppose that an ambitious student might have used those comments to revise their work to submit to a journal, but this wasn’t suggested or even implied.

Though some faculty develop all kinds of creative assignments for their seminars, this structure is still typical of many graduate classes in English. And I suppose this is fine if students already know everything, but that was not the case for me, and I know it is not the case for many others. Most people pursue an MA in English because they love the subject matter and want to learn.  And in my experience, classes can be structured to allow learning to happen.

Fortunately, I took two classes as a graduate student, one in the second year of my MA program and the other when I was getting my PhD, that were structured very differently. The work of these courses—both research methods classes—revolved around specific tasks that the professors wanted us to learn through practice. We wrote frequently, and the assignments were returned to us promptly with terse and useful comments. Short assignments built upon one another and led to longer assignments.  If the work was graded, work later in the semester was weighted far more heavily than work at the beginning had been.  For me, these classes allowed me learn by doing, to progress quickly, and to experience scholarship as a recursive and evolving process that can be taught—and learned.

If you’ve read through the syllabus for our class, you’ll notice a few elements that I’ve cribbed from these professors.  Frequent short writing assignments allow you to practice communicating your ideas in writing and to allow me to give you frequent and rapid feedback. If you want to revise your work, you may. You will always have had the opportunity to practice a task you will be graded on—that’s where the minilessons come in. Big projects come later in the semester and build on work you have already done.

The structure of this class reflects two parts of my teaching philosophy: most students are capable of doing excellent work and it’s unreasonable to expect excellent work without allowing students an opportunity to practice, to take risks, to make mistakes, and to be evaluated on their most successful work instead of punished for not having already known everything on day one.

Obviously, we have an ideal situation for this kind of structure: motivated and mature students, freedom to design (and revise!) classes and assignments, an institutional position that allows me to experiment without fear of getting fired. I’ll explore structural challenges to this kind of teaching philosophy in other posts; for now it’s worth thinking about the ways in which course design communicates beliefs about teaching and students—and considering how we might shape our classes to reflect the philosophies we hold.