To the Teacher, From the Teacher
Dr. Kristen Poole
Welcome to the website developed by my seminar ENGL468: Undergraduate Research, taught at the University of Delaware in the spring of 2015. This page provides a narrative account of the course structure and pedagogic strategies.
This course began as a fantasy. In the fall of 2014 I had a particularly strong and enthusiastic group of students in my Renaissance Literature course. At one point the students asked me what my dream course would be. I had been watching "The Hollow Crown" series, so I answered, "Watching the 'Hollow Crown' movies, reading Shakespeare's history plays, and working with the sixteenth-century chronicle histories in Special Collections. And eating doughnuts." Perhaps this last item was the clincher, and many of the students leapt at the idea. With some quick coordination on the part of the English Department, the Office of Undergraduate Research, and the library's Special Collections, we were able to make the dream course happen for the following semester.
The particular alignment of the stars that made this course possible – and, to my mind, a huge success – naturally cannot be exactly replicated. But in the interest of sharing pedagogical ideas, I will outline here elements of the course that might be of use to other educators.
The Hollow Crown: How do I love thee? Let me count the ways. Brilliant performances, high production values, accessible Shakespearean language, great drama. Although I have studied, taught, and written on the history plays for decades, "The Hollow Crown," like any great interpretation of Shakespeare, made me see new angles and dynamics of the original texts. My students (and, indeed, my own middle school-aged children) loved them, too. The movies made texts that can be difficult to read appear as riveting stories. Because the films have a medieval setting, and because our class happened to have a few people with extensive knowledge of medieval English history, for the first part of the semester our discussions concerned these stories as if they were from the early 1400's, not the late 1500's (the date of their actual composition, and the area of my actual expertise). I decided to just run with it, and we returned to the sixteenth century later on.
In planning the course, I initially imagined students watching the films on their own and then discussing them during class time. But I have been encountering a major hurdle in assigning film: paradoxically, in this day and age of extreme access to movies, it has become more difficult for students to watch films on their own. How were they to watch "The Hollow Crown" movies? On DVD? The library owns a single copy of the discs, but most students no longer have DVD drives on their laptops or DVD players in their dorms and apartments. On Netflix? Perhaps, but it seems unfair to assign something that requires a monthly subscription. On an illegal download? I've been assured repeatedly by my students that they can illegally watch pretty much anything, but I obviously can't assign illegal viewings. On YouTube? I was horrified to learn from other classes that this was how students were watching films I assigned. They watch it in segmented, incomplete form – and sometimes on their smartphones. What a way to massacre an excellent film!
It was very important to me that they watch the films in a sustained, concentrated, and intelligent way. The best venue was therefore the Media Viewing Room of our library. Screenings outside of class time, though, were logistically difficult, since the students have such packed schedules (and, per our university's licensing agreement, the instructor needs to be physically present for all screenings, which wreaks havoc with my own packed schedule). So we watched the films during class time. The class met twice per week for an hour and fifteen minutes; with minimal chitchat beforehand, we were just barely able to squeeze in one film per week for four weeks (Richard II, Henry IV, Part I, Henry IV, Part II, Henry V).
Basecamp: But if we were using class time entirely for film screening, how would they read and discuss the plays? I experimented using the online collaborative project management platform Basecamp (https://basecamp.com/.) At the time that I write this, educators can get access for free.) For each week, the twelve students were divided into four teams of three students; team configurations changed weekly, so that by the end of the month they had experience collaborating with nearly everyone in the course. Students were to read the play on their own, and then, in collaboration with their team (online or in person, or both) students had to generate a document with exam questions, and provide a rationale for why their questions were good ones. Students knew that I would be making up the actual exam from their questions, so these documents also functioned as collective study guides. The team documents had to be posted on Basecamp by Saturday morning of each week. I was blown away by the quantity and quality of the discussions and the documents each group produced (ranging from 2-7 pages).
This assignment gave the students particular motivation for closely reading the plays, and a real goal for each week. Having once taken an online course myself, I wanted to make sure that there wasn't just an obligatory posting of comments on a blog, which I did not find intellectually useful; I wanted the student work to be driven by a tangible, collaborative, and substantive outcome. Since Basecamp allows everyone to see everything on the site, students could also follow each other's discussions; I could track everything, and nudge or join in as appropriate.
In addition to the weekly exam discussions on Basecamp, there was also a discussion thread for film buffs to talk about "The Hollow Crown." This thread grew to include commentary on useful YouTube sites, such as interviews with Tom Hiddleston and Jeremy Irons, programs by the Royal Shakespeare Company on speaking Shakespeare's language, clips that showed alternative interpretations of Falstaff, and documentaries on the Battle of Agincourt. All told, I think that there was actually more thoughtful discussion through this Basecamp format than we would have had time for in a typical class. At the end of the first four weeks of watching "The Hollow Crown," the students took an essay exam on the plays.
Basecamp was an amazing teaching tool. It replaced e-mail, allowed for the posting and sharing of documents, and facilitated meaningful discussions. It is a project-oriented site, so it was perfect for our two projects: exam construction, and website creation. But an important caveat for this teaching format: With one exception, I had taught all of these students before, some of them in multiple courses. Most of them had been students as incoming freshman English Majors in my linked courses of 101, "Tools of Textual Analysis" (which I centered on King Lear) and attendant sections of first-year composition. Other students had been in my upper-division Renaissance Literature or "Elizabeth's England" (a course on the cult of Elizabeth and Spenser's Faerie Queene). Not only had they studied Shakespeare and/or Renaissance literature with me before, they all had extensive traditional training in close reading and textual analysis. They were therefore well-equipped for studying the plays without direct classroom guidance. Online platforms like Basecamp are great, but there is no substitute for the slow, patient, and in-person process of learning close reading and writing. This course was possible because we had already done that type of learning.
Special Collections: Thoroughly grounded in the history plays, the class then proceeded upstairs in the library, where we settled in for the next seven weeks in the library's Special Collections seminar room. Our new "textbooks" were sixteenth-century chronicle histories and other rare books. I have found that many students are initially hesitant to actually work with archival materials, which can be intimidating. They are centuries old, somewhat fragile, and printed in a seemingly impenetrable font. They look like they are from the Restricted Section of the library at Hogwarts.
We spent time learning about the books as material objects, studying how they were built. Students had to transcribe a page in blackletter font from Holinshed's Chronicle. (We have uploaded the pages and our transcription for others to use.) They also had to give mini-reports comparing the portrayal of a character from Shakespeare's plays to the representation of that personage in the chronicle histories; this made students spend some one-on-one time with the books in Special Collections. Having these archival materials ever-present, and having lots of hands-on exercises, made the books familiar to the students, who began to refer to Hall, Holinshed, and Fabyan as "The Big Three."
In the last month of the course, students did independent projects. The only specifications for the projects were that they needed to somehow address the Henriad; they needed to use materials from Special Collections; they needed to use scholarly books and articles as part of the research; and they needed to be a minimum of 3,500 words. Students had loaner iPads for the semester, which they were required to use for downloading PDF's of scholarly sources from university databases. We used the PDF reader app "GoodReader," which allows for the annotation and organization of PDF articles. Reports on the experience with the iPads were mixed, although from my point of view the strongest projects were from students who had used them to seriously gather and annotate secondary scholarly sources. As I hope you will find elsewhere on this website, the students produced excellent work on an eclectic array of topics.
This Website: Again, in order to give the work direction and real purpose, I had decided at the beginning of the course that our final product would be a course website. I had no idea how we were going to do this, or how involved it would be, only that it would be populated by the independent projects. Based on the skill sets and talents I saw emerging during the preliminary part of the course, I assigned a Project Manager, General Editors, Web Gurus, and a Copyediting Team. After that, the students largely drove the bus, with my general guidance. It was an excellent chance to learn procedures of professional writing; the general editors wrote a detailed style sheet specific to web-based publication, and the independent projects went through copyediting and fact-checking. Students also learned about the workflow and dynamics of a collaborative project. The project turned out to be much more ambitious than I had foreseen, but the students rose to the occasion and we even finished early. In fact, many of the students went above and beyond the call of the duty, as I hope the quality of the website demonstrates.
Doughnuts: "Donut Hour," which I thought would be a one-time beginning of the semester event, became a weekly occasion by popular demand. I supplied the doughnuts; students supplied the conversation. Attendance was completely optional, and topics ranged from t.v. shows to attitudes towards social media to university politics to film adaptation to the meaning of art. I hadn't really engaged with students before in this type of weekly conversation, and my sense was that they hadn't conversed this way with faculty, either. "Donut Hour" not only provided important cohesion to the group that carried us through periods of independent study and website construction, but it allowed for the small liberal arts college experience inside of a large state university.
This course began as a fantasy. In the fall of 2014 I had a particularly strong and enthusiastic group of students in my Renaissance Literature course. At one point the students asked me what my dream course would be. I had been watching "The Hollow Crown" series, so I answered, "Watching the 'Hollow Crown' movies, reading Shakespeare's history plays, and working with the sixteenth-century chronicle histories in Special Collections. And eating doughnuts." Perhaps this last item was the clincher, and many of the students leapt at the idea. With some quick coordination on the part of the English Department, the Office of Undergraduate Research, and the library's Special Collections, we were able to make the dream course happen for the following semester.
The particular alignment of the stars that made this course possible – and, to my mind, a huge success – naturally cannot be exactly replicated. But in the interest of sharing pedagogical ideas, I will outline here elements of the course that might be of use to other educators.
The Hollow Crown: How do I love thee? Let me count the ways. Brilliant performances, high production values, accessible Shakespearean language, great drama. Although I have studied, taught, and written on the history plays for decades, "The Hollow Crown," like any great interpretation of Shakespeare, made me see new angles and dynamics of the original texts. My students (and, indeed, my own middle school-aged children) loved them, too. The movies made texts that can be difficult to read appear as riveting stories. Because the films have a medieval setting, and because our class happened to have a few people with extensive knowledge of medieval English history, for the first part of the semester our discussions concerned these stories as if they were from the early 1400's, not the late 1500's (the date of their actual composition, and the area of my actual expertise). I decided to just run with it, and we returned to the sixteenth century later on.
In planning the course, I initially imagined students watching the films on their own and then discussing them during class time. But I have been encountering a major hurdle in assigning film: paradoxically, in this day and age of extreme access to movies, it has become more difficult for students to watch films on their own. How were they to watch "The Hollow Crown" movies? On DVD? The library owns a single copy of the discs, but most students no longer have DVD drives on their laptops or DVD players in their dorms and apartments. On Netflix? Perhaps, but it seems unfair to assign something that requires a monthly subscription. On an illegal download? I've been assured repeatedly by my students that they can illegally watch pretty much anything, but I obviously can't assign illegal viewings. On YouTube? I was horrified to learn from other classes that this was how students were watching films I assigned. They watch it in segmented, incomplete form – and sometimes on their smartphones. What a way to massacre an excellent film!
It was very important to me that they watch the films in a sustained, concentrated, and intelligent way. The best venue was therefore the Media Viewing Room of our library. Screenings outside of class time, though, were logistically difficult, since the students have such packed schedules (and, per our university's licensing agreement, the instructor needs to be physically present for all screenings, which wreaks havoc with my own packed schedule). So we watched the films during class time. The class met twice per week for an hour and fifteen minutes; with minimal chitchat beforehand, we were just barely able to squeeze in one film per week for four weeks (Richard II, Henry IV, Part I, Henry IV, Part II, Henry V).
Basecamp: But if we were using class time entirely for film screening, how would they read and discuss the plays? I experimented using the online collaborative project management platform Basecamp (https://basecamp.com/.) At the time that I write this, educators can get access for free.) For each week, the twelve students were divided into four teams of three students; team configurations changed weekly, so that by the end of the month they had experience collaborating with nearly everyone in the course. Students were to read the play on their own, and then, in collaboration with their team (online or in person, or both) students had to generate a document with exam questions, and provide a rationale for why their questions were good ones. Students knew that I would be making up the actual exam from their questions, so these documents also functioned as collective study guides. The team documents had to be posted on Basecamp by Saturday morning of each week. I was blown away by the quantity and quality of the discussions and the documents each group produced (ranging from 2-7 pages).
This assignment gave the students particular motivation for closely reading the plays, and a real goal for each week. Having once taken an online course myself, I wanted to make sure that there wasn't just an obligatory posting of comments on a blog, which I did not find intellectually useful; I wanted the student work to be driven by a tangible, collaborative, and substantive outcome. Since Basecamp allows everyone to see everything on the site, students could also follow each other's discussions; I could track everything, and nudge or join in as appropriate.
In addition to the weekly exam discussions on Basecamp, there was also a discussion thread for film buffs to talk about "The Hollow Crown." This thread grew to include commentary on useful YouTube sites, such as interviews with Tom Hiddleston and Jeremy Irons, programs by the Royal Shakespeare Company on speaking Shakespeare's language, clips that showed alternative interpretations of Falstaff, and documentaries on the Battle of Agincourt. All told, I think that there was actually more thoughtful discussion through this Basecamp format than we would have had time for in a typical class. At the end of the first four weeks of watching "The Hollow Crown," the students took an essay exam on the plays.
Basecamp was an amazing teaching tool. It replaced e-mail, allowed for the posting and sharing of documents, and facilitated meaningful discussions. It is a project-oriented site, so it was perfect for our two projects: exam construction, and website creation. But an important caveat for this teaching format: With one exception, I had taught all of these students before, some of them in multiple courses. Most of them had been students as incoming freshman English Majors in my linked courses of 101, "Tools of Textual Analysis" (which I centered on King Lear) and attendant sections of first-year composition. Other students had been in my upper-division Renaissance Literature or "Elizabeth's England" (a course on the cult of Elizabeth and Spenser's Faerie Queene). Not only had they studied Shakespeare and/or Renaissance literature with me before, they all had extensive traditional training in close reading and textual analysis. They were therefore well-equipped for studying the plays without direct classroom guidance. Online platforms like Basecamp are great, but there is no substitute for the slow, patient, and in-person process of learning close reading and writing. This course was possible because we had already done that type of learning.
Special Collections: Thoroughly grounded in the history plays, the class then proceeded upstairs in the library, where we settled in for the next seven weeks in the library's Special Collections seminar room. Our new "textbooks" were sixteenth-century chronicle histories and other rare books. I have found that many students are initially hesitant to actually work with archival materials, which can be intimidating. They are centuries old, somewhat fragile, and printed in a seemingly impenetrable font. They look like they are from the Restricted Section of the library at Hogwarts.
We spent time learning about the books as material objects, studying how they were built. Students had to transcribe a page in blackletter font from Holinshed's Chronicle. (We have uploaded the pages and our transcription for others to use.) They also had to give mini-reports comparing the portrayal of a character from Shakespeare's plays to the representation of that personage in the chronicle histories; this made students spend some one-on-one time with the books in Special Collections. Having these archival materials ever-present, and having lots of hands-on exercises, made the books familiar to the students, who began to refer to Hall, Holinshed, and Fabyan as "The Big Three."
In the last month of the course, students did independent projects. The only specifications for the projects were that they needed to somehow address the Henriad; they needed to use materials from Special Collections; they needed to use scholarly books and articles as part of the research; and they needed to be a minimum of 3,500 words. Students had loaner iPads for the semester, which they were required to use for downloading PDF's of scholarly sources from university databases. We used the PDF reader app "GoodReader," which allows for the annotation and organization of PDF articles. Reports on the experience with the iPads were mixed, although from my point of view the strongest projects were from students who had used them to seriously gather and annotate secondary scholarly sources. As I hope you will find elsewhere on this website, the students produced excellent work on an eclectic array of topics.
This Website: Again, in order to give the work direction and real purpose, I had decided at the beginning of the course that our final product would be a course website. I had no idea how we were going to do this, or how involved it would be, only that it would be populated by the independent projects. Based on the skill sets and talents I saw emerging during the preliminary part of the course, I assigned a Project Manager, General Editors, Web Gurus, and a Copyediting Team. After that, the students largely drove the bus, with my general guidance. It was an excellent chance to learn procedures of professional writing; the general editors wrote a detailed style sheet specific to web-based publication, and the independent projects went through copyediting and fact-checking. Students also learned about the workflow and dynamics of a collaborative project. The project turned out to be much more ambitious than I had foreseen, but the students rose to the occasion and we even finished early. In fact, many of the students went above and beyond the call of the duty, as I hope the quality of the website demonstrates.
Doughnuts: "Donut Hour," which I thought would be a one-time beginning of the semester event, became a weekly occasion by popular demand. I supplied the doughnuts; students supplied the conversation. Attendance was completely optional, and topics ranged from t.v. shows to attitudes towards social media to university politics to film adaptation to the meaning of art. I hadn't really engaged with students before in this type of weekly conversation, and my sense was that they hadn't conversed this way with faculty, either. "Donut Hour" not only provided important cohesion to the group that carried us through periods of independent study and website construction, but it allowed for the small liberal arts college experience inside of a large state university.