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American Literary Traditions / Randy Bass
Executive Summary
{The purpose of this Summary is to provide an overview of the basic shape and argument of the course under review, as well as provide for the online reader a quick narrative guide to all the parts of the portfolio linked together by hypertext. For a comprehensive non-narrative listing of the parts of the portfolio, see the Portfolio Navigation Guide and Index. }
Why a course portfolio and why this course?
In the Cover Letter section to the course portfolio I outline the reasons I have for choosing this course as the subject of a course portfolio, and my reasons for doing a course portfolio to begin with. The course portfolio "genre," as I discuss in the section "About the Course Portfolio," is intended to provide a reflective outlet for articulating the intentions and experiences involved with teaching particular courses at a given time in a person's career. When I designed a new course, ENGL 210: American Literary Traditions, early in 1997, I wanted to test a set of assumptions that I had about new approaches to teaching an introductory American literature course. Specifically, I wanted to introduce the use of new technologies into a mainstream, introductory American literature course setting, and I wanted to see if these technologies, in combination with other pedagogies and methods, could successfully support an approach to American fiction that emphasized the complexities of literary and narrative form, but in a way very accessible to students who were new to the subject.
As I discuss in the section on Contexts, this course's use of technology in a mainstream literature course at Georgetown makes it relatively isolated in the curriculum. I have been teaching with technology for several years, experiencing both the positive and less than positive sides. In creating this course I have drawn on these experiences, as well as several areas of the discipline related to the teaching of narrative as well as teaching with technology. In the Contexts section I also discuss and point to some other cohort courses on the Web with related interests in hypertext and narrative form. In writing a reflective course portfolio, then, I could situate this course in my individual and institutional contexts; by putting the course portfolio online I could enhance its utility for the field at large.
The Course: Its Purpose and Design
Throughout the Argument section of the portfolio, I lay out both my pedagogical intentions for the course overall, the course design that I felt would facilitate those intentions, and a summary of claims that I make about what appears to work well and still need revision in these approaches.
In short, as I discuss in the section on "Intentions," I hoped to help students improve their understanding of American narrative in five ways: to broaden their paradigms of narrative form; to get them to see narrative fiction as functioning with "complexity" and as a system of meaning that has an internal coherence, as well as multiple discourse contexts; to engage them with the World Wide Web and hypertext tools both as a resource and as a metaphor; to help students "slow down" their experience of reading and writing; and to open up their notions of American literature as being constituted by multiple traditions and a history of playfulness with narrative form.
I hoped to accomplish these goals through a variety of course settings and activities that would draw significantly on hypertext and electronic tools. As I discuss in the section on course design, as well as the "annotations" in the online "Annotated Syllabus," we would work toward these goals by working both inward and outward with literary texts, using traditional classroom settings and close reading contexts to think about the novels as coherent artifacts, and a networked classroom setting and nontraditional assignments and writing projects to open up questions of form and connectivity. In the traditional classroom settings, our work would be aided by a variety of distributive and collaborative activities, drawing on Reading Questions and writing prompts, especially in the first half of the course. The culmination of the class would be the two significant hypertext writing projects, the first on Moby-Dick, and a second synthesis paper at the end.
So, what happened?
I discuss the unfolding of the course and my overall reflections about its relative success and shortcomings in several places. A succinct narration of the course --unit by unit--is laid out through the "pop up" annotation windows in the online syllabus. In the latter two subsections of the Argument component, I attempt to represent a sampling of student reflective and evaluative feedback, organized according to my initial goals. In this section, which I call "Indications," I elaborate on my sense from student direct reflections and their work, that the course was at least modestly successful in achieving all five of its goals. Most students seemed to feel that they learned something significant about the openness and complexity of form and literary narrative; most students saw continuities between technical and literary aspects of the course, and were able to articulate, in their reflections or their projects, significant connections between their engagement with nontraditional and nonlinear narrative paradigms on the one hand, and narrative and literary complexity on the other; and finally, for most students, the chance to use electronic tools (and hypertext writing), while difficult for many, was interesting and expansive.
In the section entitled "Complications," I discuss the areas of the course that are still in need of adjustment and revision. Most importantly, I am still in search of the right balance between the technology work and nontraditional writing, on the one hand, and an emphasis on analysis and rigor in critical reading and writing, on the other. Overall, I believe that the positive aspects of the course are endemic to its design and its combination of pedagogies (including the technology), and that nearly all of the difficulties or concerns can be addressed through adjustments in structure.
Finally, I address both the positive and negative aspects of the course, specifically in the context of student work, in a major section called "Learning: A Narrative Analysis." Here I review a number of examples of online student projects in light of certain learning outcomes and behaviors, many of which are desirable and compatible with my goals, but some of which represent lingering concerns. In the Learning section, I look at examples of student work that evidence a facility and playfulness with form, a focus on close reading and language, an engagement with dialogic connections either to their peers' work or external sources, and evidence of paradigm shifts that involve thinking about the web-like interrelatedness of key ideas and themes in the course.
The Portfolio Navigation Guide and Index provides links to all of the online documents and pieces comprising the portfolio and the course. These materials range from the Course Prospectus, to the full reflective data from Hypertext Project and End of Semester reflections, to materials I've authored for students to help them visualize nontraditional work, such as the Hypertext Template and Sample Moby-Dick Hypertext. I welcome any and all feedback on this portfolio.