January 18, 2024: Spring Semester Previews: The Short Story Online

[As thisnew semester gets underway, it does so amidst a particularly fraught moment forteaching & learning the Humanities. So for this week’s Semester Previewsseries I’ll highlight one thing from each of my courses that embodies the valueof the Humanities for us all—leading up to a special weekend post on MLK Dayand the Humanities!]

I couldeasily reiterate much of what I said in Tuesday’s post about my Am Lit IIcourse in this post, as my Short Story syllabus includes some of the greatestAmerican stories (from some of our most important authors) and all of them havea great deal to tell us about us and our world—perhaps most especiallycontemporary gems like Danielle Evans’ “BoysGo to Jupiter” and Jocelyn Nicole Johnson’s “ControlNegro,” but certainly also enduring classics like James Baldwin’s “Sonny’s Blues“ andToni Morrison’s “Recitatif.”But in this post I want to talk instead about the mode of instruction for thiscourse, which is the latest example of something I’ve done at least once everysemester since 2017: teaching anall-online course (this one is also accelerated,something I do roughly half the time with these online courses). My many postshere about teaching online, including the two hyperlinked in that lastsentence, make clear the challenges that this mode presents when it comes toliterature courses (and probably any courses, but those are the ones that I’vehad experience with), challenges in response to which I continue to work onstrategies. But at the same time, what I’ve seen time and time again in theseonline courses, at least at Fitchburg State, is that many of the folks taking themquite simply would not be able to take in-person Day classes—they workfull-time, they have families, they are in the military, they havecircumstances of all kinds that make these courses not just the best but reallythe only option. One of the reasons I love teachingat a public university is the chance to help every American who wants acollege education to get one—and what could be more vital to the Humanities andto America than finding ways to help even more folks do so?

Lastpreview tomorrow,

Ben

PS. Whatdo you think?