Active & Abroad: Staying Busy Overseas
My recently finished teaching assignment at London's Regent's University gave me the chance to apply some of my active learning techniques and principles within somewhat different parameters, most of which, in the end, aided the active part of the learning. I had a class of ten students, which, of course, is a much more favorable ratio of students to teacher than usual for the core literature class I was
teaching. We met on Mondays and Wednesdays for three hours a session for six weeks. I devoted our Mondays to classroom activity and our Wednesdays to field trips: St. Paul's Cathedral, the National Portrait Gallery, Bloomsbury, Kew Gardens, and the British Museum. The last Wednesday we sacrificed to our final examination.
My first consideration, then, was to integrate our field trips into the larger course theme, Empire and Identity, for our British Literature after 1789. I wanted to bring our travel into conversation with our reading. So I began by dividing the class into two excursion groups, each initially with a different prompt to explore and to share with the other group the following week. Later, the groups worked on the same excursion assignment. On our first visit to St. Paul's, for example, I asked the Gold Team (as they named themselves) "In what specific ways has St. Paul's been a marker of identity for many British people?" I asked the Red Hot Chili Peppers (their chosen name), "As a material object, what qualities does this late 17th-century building have that might appeal to an imperial outlook?"
In the classroom on Mondays, we usually devoted ourselves to one or two authors in each hour, with small breaks between, and as usual for me, I distributed five discussion prompts for each hour, only this time between pairs of students rather than larger groups due to the smaller class size. I changed the pairings each Monday as well. And, as usual, these prompts became the principle components of the final examination.
There were some variations. The day we looked at the poetry of Matthew Arnold, the Brownings, Christina Rossetti, and Gerard Manly Hopkins, we did a carousel exercise on the whiteboards with guided reader response. On another day, we examined Katherine Mansfield's "The Garden Party," the moral crux of which is whether or not the wealthy family living atop the hill should cancel their garden party when the working class family living at the bottom of the hill has unexpectedly suffered the loss of a family member in an accident. I divided one group of five into two pairs, one pair to argue for canceling the party and the other for continuing with it, making the fifth member of the group the arbitrator to determine who had made the more compelling argument. Several students in their papers later chose this text to include in their analysis because this exercise brought out so clearly the issues of class and privilege embedded in the story.
Of course, my writing assignments continued to build on each other: a reading memoir, a preliminary plan of literary analysis, and the final analysis paper. Our goal, as in my recent, previous classes, was to build a narrative combining personal and professional analysis, this time augmented by incorporating their travel photos among their artifacts, into eportfolios that would record their academic progress over the summer. Having now executed these course plans once, I hope it won't be too long before I get a chance to implement them again on a study abroad trip now that I'm a bit more sure about what will work under these peculiar circumstances and what might need further refining.
