What "collaborative investigation" means is that the members of the class work together to explore and learn about the subject (in this case, the "subject" is primarily plays and a bit of writing about theatre, all produced between 1660 and about the time of the French Revolution, and their social, intellectual, and physical contexts). We do it by exploring together, rather than reading, listening to lectures on, and discussing a pre-decided list of texts. I think of it this way: if there were a group of people who wanted to find out about a subject -- in this case, this literature and this society -- how would we best go about doing that if there were no formal course, but that all the scholarly, electronic and library resources, and a helpful expert, were available? This is, in fact, how most independent, "real-world" learning is conducted -- in fact, it's how I go about finding out about a new subject.
While this sort of course doesn't require more work than other literature courses, it involves a different kind of work, and it makes different assumptions about what it means to study and understand literature. Explaining that is what this document is about.
It 's important to say at the top that it creates a situation in which the day-to-day activities of the class are quite different from what you may be used to. Because of all this, I think you'll find it worth reading this description with some care. After we've spent some time with it you should have a fairly clear idea what to expect. For example, you should have a better notion what I mean by "collaborative investigation," and how (and why) it will be conducted in significant part on line, through various kinds of information technology. And you will, I hope, have a clearer idea of whether you want to stay with it. I'm aware that this way of learning is very uncomfortable for some people; if you know you're one of them, you need to decide whether it's worth trying to extend your repertoire of learning styles, or find a course organized in a way that's more congenial to you -- or, maybe, recommend this course to someone you think would like it.
Each of the headings below takes up a different aspect of the course. Let's start with the basics.
Subject Matter:
Our main concern will be with the dramatic literature of the period between the Restoration of the Monarchy (which happened in 1660) and the end of the eighteenth century (which, incidentally, didn't happen in 1799 -- at least not for literary purposes). We'll pay attention not only to the plays but also to their artistic, intellectual and social context. In other words, we'll read some scripts -- but we'll also learn about the theatres they were performed in, the society that supported the theatres, and the ideas about drama and literature voiced by their practitioners and their critics. We'll consider the physical theatres, the music, scenery, costume, and acting styles. Most important, we'll pay attention to the nature of literature written for performance -- for example, to the way the social and intellectual context influenced the kinds of texts that got produced. We'll also attend to performance. This is not a course in drama production, but there will be opportunities to watch filmed productions, to read scenes for the rest of the class, and in other ways to experience as well as understand the performative and public implications of the texts.
Methods:
As I've said, the central method of this course is what has come to be called "collaborative investigation." One thing this means that what actually happens in class meetings is quite different from what happens in many courses. There are, for example, no formal lectures, term papers, or midterm and final examinations. There is a minimal amount of full-class discussion, and I do an equally minimal amount of explaining of background (as far as possible, I do this only in answer to questions). The primary activities during the course are individual and group investigation of the dramatic literature of the eighteenth century. That means that members of the class read plays and other material, watch performances, do library and online research, interpret, describe and comment on texts, and -- most important -- share what they learn in writing (mostly on line) and performance with the rest of the class. We learn, that is, from and with each other.
Why do it this way?
There are at least two reasons I use such methods. First, I believe that people learn far more effectively when they're actively trying to find things out, and explain and demonstrate them to others, than when they sit and listen to them. Second, I believe that there is no one authority on the nature of eighteenth century theatre -- certainly no professor (absolutely, not me) nor any textbook has the final word. In fact, there is no final word -- as you'll have a chance to discover, people are continuously coming to new understandings and discovering new things about this field. Thus it's at least as important to know how to learn about such a subject as it is to be aware of what others think they already know. This course, then, is organized to promote -- indeed, to require -- the active engagement of each member of the class in the process of investigation. The course is based on the presumption that every member of the class is interested (or is willing to become interested) in learning about the theatre of the eighteenth century; and it tries to build on, extend, and deepen that interest.
What will we do?
Although a few central plays -- we will decide on them as we go -- are read by the entire class, most are read only by individuals or small groups, who share them, and what they find out about them, by arranging readings and by writing descriptions, commentaries, summaries, or interpretations, which are then circulated (usually, posted on the computer network) for reading by the rest of the class. By dividing our efforts in this way, and using writing to share what we learn, we can cover a far wider range of works and ideas than we could otherwise. One practical thing this means is that there are regular, short, focused research and writing tasks. Even more important, these tasks have as their purpose spreading knowledge and understanding around the class, rather than demonstrating to a teacher that the writer has learned something.
I do not comment on or grade the documents which are written in connection with such tasks (often, in fact, I don't even have a chance to read them). They are, however, read and used as part of the course by others in the class who need to understand what they say in order to get on with their own work, and thus they are tacitly (sometimes explicitly) evaluated by everyone involved. The viewers of the performances or readers of the documents are convinced, amused, informed, or engaged by them -- or they're not, and they may say so. At first, I create and assign some of the writing and research tasks, but as early in the course as possible, assignments are derived from, and arise out of, the developing interests of members of the class.
A good deal of the work of the course occurs in the library, at the keyboard, in the computer lab, or in attending to performances (readings or videos). The scheduled class time is occasionally used for such work rather than in full class meetings in the classroom. One way to characterize the "collaborative investigation" approach, in fact, is to say that it is a course in how to use a range of resources, such as the library, and the various forms of ideas, opinions and information available through the Internet, to learn about a scholarly field such as eighteenth century theatre. (It is also, in effect, a course in writing in various forms and media, for various audiences, and for various purposes.)
There are two ways in which this investigation is "collaborative." First, members of the class learn from, and teach, each other through research, discussion and writing; and, second, many of the actual assignments are undertaken and completed by groups rather than individuals. There are a number of reasons for this. One is that in many cases it's more efficient to spread a task among a number of people. Another is that doing things with others can promote conscious reflection on what you're doing, and why. And finally, learning how to organize and work in and through groups of people is often a difficult task -- and it's worth it.
I can state the basic aims of this course pretty simply. At the end of it you should be much more comfortable reading and viewing the dramatic (and other) literature of the eighteenth century than you probably are now. You should have a substantial store of information about, and understanding of, the time and its literature, and about the way people at that time thought and felt and used language and attended the theatre. Much more important, you should have a clearer idea of what it means to study such a field -- what literary research and understanding is all about, in other words -- and you should be a more confident and more skilled learner. And maybe most important, you should be a better writer -- more resourceful, flexible, and engaged -- about this subject, and other subjects as well. You should, that is, have enriched many of the skills and knowledge necessary to begin learning about any new field, not just eighteenth century dramatic literature.
Writing:
Writing is central to this course, but it probably will not be the kind of writing you're used to. There are no term papers or exams, but there are frequent occasions to use writing -- so frequent, in fact, that you'll probably write a good deal more in this course than you have in any other course. As I said above, writing is used to explore subjects, as a tool for thinking, and to share information, ideas, feelings and learning, rather than as a way to demonstrate and measure knowledge.
This writing is quite different in style and in content from that done in more conventional courses. It regularly describes or reports or argues rather than analyzes or interprets, and it always has as its audience other members of the class who do not already know what the piece of writing has to say, and who need to know in order to continue their own learning. In most classes, in my experience, written text is produced for (and written to) an instructor who, it is presumed, already knows what it has to say and whose aim is to evaluate it. Here, however, it's written to serve an immediate practical purpose -- to inform someone, or persuade her, or even to amuse or distract her. Much of the writing in the course is circulated in "first draft" form; also, however, everyone spends some time editing their own and other people's writing for "final publication" in more formal reports or in final public texts.
Computers (a "blended" course):
This course is IT-based, in that everyone will be required to participate in online discussions and to circulate their work to the class via the university computer network and the Internet. You'll need to enter text and edit it, save it in appropriate forms and appropriate locations, regularly send and read email, use wikis and blogs, and participate in electronic discussions. You may be surprised to find computers so central to an English course. The reason I make them so is that I believe that the ability to handle written language confidently and flexibly (as a reader and as a writer) is central to education; I believe just as strongly that being comfortable with the tools we use for handling it is important. And computers are the most important tool we have for that. Saying "I want to study English, or become an educated and literature person, but I don't want to deal with computers" is rather like saying, "I want to be a carpenter but, sorry, I don't want to touch a power saw."
Texts:
This course does not use (or require you to buy) a printed and commercially published textbook. Texts (anthologies, literary histories, and other works) which might be used in an eighteenth century literature course will be on reserve or otherwise available in the library or on line, and you will be consulting them regularly. Common texts -- i.e., works everyone reads -- will be decided by the process of investigation and discussion I describe elsewhere in this document. Bookstores and libraries have various editions of these. Sometimes there are problems getting copies: learning to solve such problems (by finding copies in the library, on line, and elsewhere, by sharing them, etc.) is part of the work of the course.
Workload:
The university's schedule says this course meets for 150 minutes a week -- 75 minutes on Wednesday and Friday. Because it is organized as a "blended" course, however, we may not use all those class sessions. Much of the learning of the course (like any course, really) occurs when students are not in their seats in a classroom. This does not, however, mean that the course requires fewer hours of work a week.
My basic rule of thumb for figuring out how much work a course should take is this: since a full-time professional job -- like being a student -- is usually expected to take about 40 hours of a person's week, and since this class is one-fifth of a full time load, I expect a student to put in about eight hours every week -- to be clear, that's including time spent in class -- on work directly connected with this course. I should say, as well, that in my experience no one who has actually put in that amount of time has ever done badly in a course of mine.
Thus scheduled class time may well not be spent in traditional classroom activities -- or, indeed, in the classroom at all. The bottom line is that you budget eight learning hours per week. It may well happen that during scheduled class time you'll often actually be in the library, or home at your keyboard, or working in a group in the cafeteria. Much of the organizational work of the course will be done online, mainly through email: you will need to be checking your university email very regularly.
The question of evaluation is probably one you're already thinking about. People often ask, "In a course organized like this, how can I have any idea what mark I'm likely to get? I need to get some minimum mark to stay in school [or maybe to keep my scholarship, to get a job, etc.]. In the usual class, I know what I can expect and I know pretty well what I need to do to be pretty sure of getting that mark: here, so much is new that I feel very vulnerable."
My primary concern in evaluating a student's work in this course is that the process be fair and open, that it be directly related to what the course is actually about, and that it not poison the learning process by focussing everybody's attention on marks. I believe people learn better when their attention is on the subject, on learning, and on helping others learn what they've learned, rather than on demonstrating to an authority what they're learning. Members of the class should be able to feel confident that they will get a mark that makes sense to them, that they won't be surprised at the end of the course, and should be able to forget their anxiety about marks and get on with the work of learning.
One way in which I try to achieve this is simply by making the consistency of each student's engagement in the course a central factor in determining her mark. One reason for this is that the course is founded on the assumption that to be involved actively in such a process is the best way to learn. If someone's genuinely, consistently and actively involved, and still doesn't learn, I think it's fair to argue that that's a problem with the course design, rather than with the student. But I should caution you: I take seriously the STU calendar's definition of an A -- and, even more, what I look for most to justify a mark in that range is initiative: you don't get an A by doing what you're told. You get it by being engaged, starting things, assuming responsibility, demonstrating curiosity and involvement, and reporting on what you learned through being engaged and going beyond the merely required.
Yes, you're probably asking, but really, how do I get a mark in this class?
First of all, let me be reassuring. If you're used to getting a particular mark -- if you usually get Bs, for instance, or even if you usually get As -- you can be confident that if you work consistently and responsibly in this course, if you take initiative and assume responsibility for your learning, you'll get at least the mark you'd usually get. You won't, of course, if you don't put in the time and effort and thought -- but if you do, my experience with courses organized this way is that you have nothing to worry about. Let me explain how this works. It's not complicated, but it's very different from most schemes for determining marks, so it can seem confusing at first.
An individual's mark in this course is determined by two factors: (1) time and effort; and (2) how much of your own learning you can explain and demonstrate and convey to others. How are these measured, and how do they fit together to produce a mark?
Quantitative factors (time and effort):
First, there's simply time and work put in. As I said in the note on scheduling, I expect this class would normally take up about eight hours every week. I try to estimate the various assignments and tasks so that they can be done in that amount of time, and if people report that they're consistently taking longer I change things.
Basically there's only one way I can know if you're putting in the time beyond simple attendance (since -- like other professionals -- you don't have a time clock to punch or a desk to be at). It's whether you produce the necessary work: electronic mail, reports, postings to discussions, engagement in organizing and presenting performances, finding and presenting texts, etc. I keep pretty thorough records of how much work people produce (and I keep them publicly, on a "records" page on the course Web site), and I use these records to generate, mathematically, a minimum mark somewhere from C- up to a B. If someone does every single thing that it's possible to do her mark cannot fall below B. Not many people ever do that much work, of course -- we all get sick or have bad days. But usually almost everyone in a class does enough work to guarantee a mark of C or higher.
It's important to be clear, though, that having done something in this course means having it done it when it matters: deadlines are determined by the process. If you produce a report too late for it to be used, there's no point in producing it, because it won't be any use (and, to reiterate, tasks are not done for me; they're done to contribute to a process of learning). There's a more thorough explanation of this policy, which I apply to all my courses, on my Web site, here.
This minimum mark is calculated mathematically, and adjusted to make sure that anyone who's worked adequately gets a minimum of at least a C-, and that anyone who's worked consistently enough to complete what, in my judgment, would be all that could be reasonably expected, will get a minimum of a B. This, then, constitutes a floor or minimum grade.
But how do you get a mark higher than that minimum? The first thing to remember here is that this is in large measure a course in learning how to be aware of what you're learning, of knowing when you've become able to do or understand something you couldn't do or understand before. Also, it's a process of learning things yourself so that you can help others learn them. I believe the best way to learn is to teach.
But of course this raises a couple of problems: how is it possible for me to know whether you're becoming a better monitor of your own learning? How would I know whether you helped other people learn? In general, it happens because you think and write about the process, and that thinking and writing is used to generate a second mark, which may well be higher than that minimum mark (and, if it is, will replace it). Here's how this works.
As the course gets underway we begin a process whereby one of your tasks every week is to add to an accumulating reflective journal (sometimes called a learning log) on your own learning. You'll get some suggestions from me about how to do this, posing some particular questions -- about different kinds of learning, and, equally important, about the processes -- about what you learned, how you learned things, who else in the class produced work that was important to your learning, and how it was important.
You'll write this document and save it on the Web (when we start the process, I'll have detailed instructions for setting up your journal). As you do the first one or two entries, I'll be reading them and responding with suggestions about ways to do this better or more effectively, and I'll suggest now -- and frequently later -- that people read each other's (the learning logs will be public), but except for that you'll be on your own in writing them. To help you remember to write them, each week I'll count a new posting to your learning journal as a task completed. Twice during the course (at midterm time, and at the end), I'll ask you to spend some time considering them and use them as the basis for a synthesis, focusing on the most important things you've learned and explaining how you learned them (and how you know they've changed your understanding or abilities or behaviour.
I'll read this and make my own judgment about how convincing and concrete your descriptions of your own learning are, and determine a mark according to my judgment of the amount and quality of learning demonstrated. Finally, I'll also watch for how many times, and how substantially, each person in the class is mentioned by others as having contributed to their learning. Often others in the class notice things I have no way to be aware of. I'll make the same judgment about concreteness and convincingness, and raise the mark if it seems warranted. Together, the two will make up another minimum mark, a qualitatively based one. You will receive whichever of the two marks is higher.
Two things about this process need to be very clear. One is that the minimum marks that are generated by simple participation in the work of the course can't be lowered; the other is that my judgment about the quality of people's work and learning plays a very limited, but very specific, role in this process. Most of the mark is generated by factors outside my judgment, but there are a couple of places where my judgment is crucial. First, below the B guaranteed by doing everything I have records of, I decide how much work is necessary to generate a given minimum mark (not on an individual basis, but for the class as a whole). Second, there's no way for me to evaluate the convincingness and concreteness of your learning log except subjectively: I simply make the best professional judgment I can. I'm guided by the statements in the STU calendar about what constitutes work of varying qualities.
What will this require from you? Once every week you'll need to spend some time -- perhaps a half hour -- writing a journal entry identifying and explaining the most important learning you've experienced in the preceding week, and the people or activities through which you learned it, and how.
By their nature, it's true of these learning reflections (like other assignments in this course) that there's no way to do them later. So one of the things you'll need to do is budget the time to do this at least once every week. I think you'll find it more than simply a task to get done: in my experience, this kind of journal is the best possible way to make you feel more confident about your own learning -- and, in fact, to reinforce and solidify it.
I expect (or at least hope) that all this will make you able to forget about "grade anxiety" and get on with the work, and fun, of learning. One of the worst things about courses where you are often working with other people, or where you're expected to do the actual learning on your own, is the poisonous effect of not knowing how you're doing, and your suspicion that other people are "getting by" with little work and you're not getting credit for all your own effort and ability (if you've worked in groups in a conventional class, where the group was marked as a whole, you've probably felt this). In this case, though, you'll know what your minimum mark is, and you'll also have a clearer idea than in most classes of how much you're learning.
It's probably obvious by this point that sheer persistence counts for a lot in this course: if you simply work regularly and consistently at it, you can't do badly. On the other hand, it's important to be very clear about this: the course structure simply doesn't allow for a strategy which works quite well for many other courses -- that is, to take it easy through the middle of the term and then work really hard in the last few weeks. Work intended to inform others and help them with the next step in their learning can't be "made up later" -- it's like coming to a party the next day.
Further, if you're looking for a mark above the quantitative minimum (and most people will be), it won't do merely to do what you're told: you'll need to take initiative, to formulate questions and strategies -- in general, to be an active, curious learner.
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 courses 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, performing 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.