extend your understanding of what "literature" means to include journalism, to deepen your understanding of what it means to be a serious, literary journalist, and to help you learn to appreciate ambitious, extended journalism more actively and to read it more intelligently and responsively;
to develop and extend your ability to read responsively and actively in general;
to become a more flexible and fluent writer; to write more effectively, with more conscious attention to particular audiences and actual situations; and
to develop your abilities to find out about literature (and other things) and to learn independently of classes, curricula, and teachers: in other words, to do more effectively the kind of learning you'll spend the rest of your life doing.
Because this course is probably very different from what you're used to, I invite you to explore this document at length and with some care. From this page you can access an extensive description of the course, how it works and why I organize it this way. To begin with, here are some basic principles:
This course will require you to budget about eight hours every week -- please note, that's including time spent in class meetings -- for library work, reading, writing, working in the computer lab or at your keyboard, discussions. As you'll see in the section on evaluation, if you actually put in eight hours every week, it's virtually impossible to get a mark lower than a B in this class.
This course will not tell you things and ask you to remember them. It won't give you rules and recipes. It will, on the other hand, help you learn how to ask increasingly useful questions and find increasingly useful answers.
This course will invite you to reflect on and assess your own learning rather than using tests and formal essays; it will guarantee that consistent and engaged effort will produce a decent mark; more important, it will also promise that it will support your learning.
If they do seem outrageous or impossible (for instance, if you depend on courses to provide lectures and require examinations and term papers), you should seriously consider finding an alternative. This method of conducting a course does not necessarily require more work than other literature classes, but it requires a rather different kind of work, and it makes rather different assumptions about what it means to study and understand literature. It also creates a situation in which the day-to-day activities of the class are different from what you may be used to. Thus -- to repeat -- I think you'll find it worth reading this description with some care. After you've spent some time with it, you should have a fairly clear idea what to expect. For example, you should have a clearer idea what I mean when I say that it is conducted as a "collaborative investigation," or when I say that it's "blended"; that is, it will be conducted in substantial part through various forms of information technology, using the STU computer network and the Internet.
Each of the headings below takes up a different aspect of the course. Click on the link to read further.
Subject: what we'll be reading, discussing and exploring
Methods: how we'll do it
Rationale: why I do it this way
Evaluation: how marks are generated in this course
Workload: how much time this course should take, and what kind of work
Information Technology: how we'll use it, and why we'll use it so much.
a final note:
It probably won't be clear from this rather exhaustive description that the course is supposed to be fun -- but, according to many students who've taken this course or others like it in the past, it can be. At least it can if you think hard, meaningful work and fun can be compatible.
Learning, talking, reading and writing are all, in the most fundamental possible way, social activities, activities that put people in touch with each other and with their world, making them part of an increasingly wide and rich social fabric. This course is designed to make those activities as social, as fruitful, and as enjoyable as possible. I hope you'll find them so. I also hope you'll come to admire and enjoy this kind of writing at least half as much as I do.