In a recent Tip of the Day, I urged teachers to “Make your course a story.” Perhaps I should expand on that idea a bit (the sort of thing Pedagogishness was originally supposed to be about before I became obsessed with promoting the idea of postmodern humanism).
Often, I think, teachers—old and new alike—think of their courses in terms of material to cover, facts to introduce, concepts to explain. All of these things are part of it, but I believe the best courses embed facts, concepts, and other “material” in the context of a story.
And by this I do not mean an illustrative anecdote. Rather, I mean a narrative that unfolds over the whole semester and puts your facts, concepts, and other material into a narrative context which is also a social, cultural, and historical context.
I can provide some examples from my own recent teaching.
Last semester (the fall that just ended), I taught a very vaguely described course in the Western literary tradition. Call me crazy (lots of people already do), but I decided I wanted to teach the course as a survey that would cover everything from Homer to Toni Morrison. Selectively, of course, but touching on most major eras: Hellenic Greek, Hellenistic Greek, Roman, Renaissance, Early Modern, 18th century, 19th century, and 20th century (I decided to skip the Middle Ages this time around, although we did read selections from Boccaccio’s Decameron, which is arguably a swing text between the late Middle Ages and the emerging Renaissance).
So that was my “material,” the “content” that I wanted to “cover.” But the story I wanted to tell was a story about cultural subjectivity. How do you narratize the idea of cultural subjectivity? Well, I’m sure there are many ways. The way I chose to do it had to do with the story of a kind of subjectivity called The White Male Christian Subject of Western Culture. He did not come out of nowhere. He was preceded by a Greek Male Subject of Heroic Culture. In this part of the course, we read Book 1 of the Iliad, Book 1 of the Odyssey, Theocritus’s Idylls 1, Herodas’s Mimes 2 and 6, and Lucian’s True History. I introduced a lot of facts, explained a lot of concepts, and covered a lot of material, but that’s not really the point of this post. The point of this post is the story.
The Greek Male Subject of Heroic Culture was eventually absorbed into the Roman Empire, but his subjectivity remained—Horace’s famous dictum about the conquered Greeks having captured their uncivilized Roman conquerors. Essentially, the Roman Empire was a Latin-speaking Hellenistic culture. (You might not like my story or think it accurate, but that’s another matter.) In this part of the course we read Ovid’s Heroides 1 and 3 (because Penelope and Briseis connected nicely with the Odyssey and the Iliad, and my students could see the Roman appropriation of Greek culture at work). We also read Juvenal’s ninth satire, because I wrote my dissertation about it and it’s one of my favorite texts of all time, from any time, in any language, and I wanted to share its awesomeness with my students and convert as many of them as I could to Juvenal 9 fans. I think I was actually pretty successful in this regard, but who knows?
Then came Western Europe. Western Europe was born on the remnants of the Western Roman Empire. In the East they spoke Greek and became Byzantium. But in the West, they spoke Latin and became Western Europe. The Greek-speaking Byzantines were Eastern Orthodox Christians. The Latin-speaking Western Europeans were Roman Catholics. Over time, these Latin-speaking Western Europeans came to speak the Romance vernacular languages, French, Spanish, Portuguese, Italian, and Romanian; and they also came to speak German and English. And Dutch, of course, but we did not end up saying too much about Dutch language, literature, or culture in this particular course. Same for Irish, Scottish, vel sim. I guess I kind of sold the Celts short. Oh well, maybe next time.
Among these Western Europeans, there emerged a new kind of cultural subjectivity, which I called The White Male Christian Subject of Western Culture. The emergence of this White Male Christian Subject of Western Culture really took off in the Renaissance. In a sense, we could say that’s precisely what the Renaissance was: the birth of the White Male Christian Subject of Western Culture. He (and he was surely a he) traced his roots back to twin Greco-Roman and Judeo-Christian traditions. And he believed he was uniquely entitled to dominate Western Europe and that Western Europe was uniquely entitled to dominate the rest of the world.In this part of the course we read the aforementioned selections from Boccaccio’s Decameron, Shakespeare’s Othello, Goethe’s The Sorrows of Young Werther, and Dostoyevsky’s Notes from Underground.
By this point in my story, the poor old White Male Subject of Western Culture is really hanging on by a thread. On a moment’s inspiration, I threw T.S. Eliot’s “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” at them, so they could see the White Male Subject of Western Culture literally waking up from a self-deceiving slumber underwater and drowning. Our main text for this part of the course, and our final text of the semester, was Toni Morrison’s Sula. This novel, or so my story went, marked the eclipse of the White Male Christian Subject of Western Culture by the emergent Multicultural Subject of Postmodern Culture. I blogged about that in another recent post.
So that’s what I mean by making your course a story. Of course I gave my students lots of names of authors, titles of texts, dates of composition, and a great deal of social, cultural, and historical context. All of it, however, was embedded in this story of the background, rise, and eventual fall of the White Male Subject of Western Culture and the emergence of the Multicultural Subject of Postmodern Culture.
I would greatly appreciate your feedback on this whole idea of making your course a story. Is it something you do? Do you think it’s so obvious that I need not even have written this post? Do you think it’s an important strategy, tactic, technique, whatever, that deserves to be described and promoted to other teachers everywhere? Please…comment!