#s52 #citepedagogy #cureateaching
Organizers: Rebecca Frost Davis (@FrostDavis)), Matthew K. Gold (@mkgold), Katherine D. Harris (@triproftri))
The syllabus plays multiple roles in academe: it serves as a guide to a course for students; an intellectual provocation; a description of a field; a representation of scholarship; a contract. With the advent of projects such as the Open Syllabus Project and repositories such as Humanities CORE, along with the popular use of social media, the syllabus has emerged as an open and connected space for conversation and argument. It renders pedagogical labor visible as it is shared, along with other materials, in repositories and social media streams. Such openness carries with it both possibilities and risks.
Positioning the syllabus as a key artifact in the modern academy, one that encapsulates many elements of intellectual, scholarly, social, cultural, political, and institutional contexts in which it is enmeshed, this session on the “State of the Syllabus” provides us with an opportunity to reflect on this ubiquitous document and its many features. It will also allow us to consider how the syllabus has changed over time, particularly in recent years as syllabi have been shared with increasing frequency in social networks, and particularly as a number of scholarly publications have begun to engage the syllabus in new ways (see the journals Syllabus, Pedagogy, The Journal of Interactive Technology and Pedagogy, and Hybrid Pedagogy, as well as the forthcoming MLA publication, Digital Pedagogy in the Humanities containing 79 syllabi, and the MLA’s Humanities CORE database).
The session will be structured around six provocations on the various roles that the syllabus plays, preceded by an introduction to the syllabus in the context of digital pedagogy and followed by a response that will help frame discussion with the audience. Each of the six presentations will be short and provocative five-minute talks that will take a pointed argumentative position -- that the syllabus, for instance, is an activist document; a shared negotiation; an occasional instrument of abuse; an opportunity to show one’s sources; an establishment of tone; and a piece of handwork. Each presenter will consider the following questions in their brief talks:
- What roles does the syllabus play in the modern academy?
- What elements of power, authority, and control does the syllabus tend to reinforce? How can it be used to reveal such mechanisms of power so that they might be questioned and interrogated by students?
- How do syllabi position academic fields? How do they position students? How do they position faculty?
- To what extent can syllabi in particular, and the work of teaching more generally, be considered research?
- How can we think imaginatively and creatively about the possibilities that the syllabus offers to us and to our students?
- What changes should we, as members of the profession, consider as we plan our courses and construct our syllabi?
- What is the impact of openly sharing the syllabus online and what role does the syllabus play in the world beyond academe?
The session will be structured in the following way:
Introductory remarks by Katherine D. Harris, which will contextualize the panel within recent developments in Humanities pedagogy and digital pedagogy, such as required online publication of syllabi at public institutions; trigger warnings; statements about inclusive classrooms; the hashtag syllabus collaboratively created across social media; and the github syllabus with versioning to track changes,.
Six five-minute provocations by Brian Croxall, Matthew K. Gold, Andrea Quaid, Angela Sorby, Ethan Knight, and Matthew Cheney. Each of these presenters will consider the questions above as they present a concept of "The Syllabus as ____." Answering an open call for proposals, these scholars proposed the following arguments, which they will outline briefly during the session:
- Brian Croxall -- “A Syllabus is a Chance to Show Your Sources” (@briancroxall)
- Matthew K. Gold -- “The Syllabus as Shared Negotiation” (@mkgold)
- Andrea Quaid -- “The Syllabus as Activist Document” (no Twitter)
- Angela Sorby -- “The Syllabus As Handwork” (@SorbyAngela)
- Ethan Knight -- "The Syllabus as Establishing Tone”
- Matthew Cheney -- "(Against) The Syllabus As Instrument Of Abuse" (@finiteeyes)
Following these brief presentations, Rebecca Frost Davis will offer a response, drawing parallels between the presentations, highlighting themes and contradictions, and setting the stage for a robust conversation with the audience. Among the questions we hope to ask the audience:
- What is your "The Syllabus As ____" concept?
- What strategies for changing pedagogical practices did you hear during the presentations and which seem possible for you to integrate into your own teaching?
- What difficulties do you see in connecting your own teaching practices to the ideas surfaced during the session?
- What institutional pressures (size/nature of your school; departmental requirements; tenure/promotion requirements) inhibit your agency to make changes in your pedagogy? What institutional factors might enable change?
We hope to encourage a wide-ranging conversation among the audience, and we intend to follow best practices for accessibility throughout the session -- asking all presenters and Q&A respondents to use microphones; making hard copies of slides available; asking ahead of time for attendees with impairments or difficulties to contact us and let us know how we can best accommodate them.
We are excited to report that based on the strong interest we saw to our call for proposals, and the strength of the responses we received (not all of which could be included in this session proposal), we will publish 12 "flash essays" (500 words) with Syllabus (@syllabusj), a journal that focuses on the syllabus in the academy, to create a special issue of the journal based on the session. We are happy to have received a warm and encouraging response to our query and look forward to sharing an exanded cluster of essays on this topic.
The session itself, in addition to these follow-up activities, will serve to return attention to an everyday object of our academic practice that has received far too little critical attention to date.