Features
Thinking Beyond the Book
Combing the streets of downtown Miami with a notepad in hand. Analyzing the cultural significance of a Hollywood blockbuster. Producing a multimedia autobiographical presentation. Discussing an engaging topic on an interactive blog. What’s the thread that runs through this list?
These are all activities that MDC professors are using to teach literature and writing in innovative and compelling ways. MDC faculty members are transforming students’ encounters with literature and writing into a dynamic, multidimensional process.
Some incorporate the latest technology to enhance literary discussions. Others encourage students to hone their own powers of expression. Still more are bringing novels and short stories alive by connecting them with community service projects.
The result: College students are learning to appreciate the power and beauty of the written word and its ability to open new intellectual and creative realms.
Writing Across Borders
MDC’s enterprising literature and writing professors regularly capitalize on the College’s tremendously diverse community in designing their curricula. Wolfson Campus professor MaryJane Maxwell has her students use Aurora Levins Morales’ poem, “Child of the Americas,” as a model for writing their own poems about cultural identity and belonging.
This format gives students a forum and framework for examining and assessing the significance of their unique backgrounds. For example, Jamaican student Keisha Francis managed to compress some very powerful images about her sense of self into a few lines of poetry:
Patois is my flesh,
It ripples from my tongue.
The language of ackee and saltfish and the run-dung.
Maxwell follows up this assignment with an invitation for students to create multimedia presentations chronicling the journeys of the first person in their families to come to the U.S. The resulting compositions are rich tapestries of text, images and music that give their authors a newfound appreciation for the empowering qualities of self-expression.
Professor Carolina Hospital of Kendall Campus invites celebrated authors like Chris Abani, Oscar Hijuelos and Lola Haskins to visit her classes so that her students can ask direct questions about the creative process.
“When they meet the author, especially in such an intimate setting, the [previously assigned] text becomes more relevant, vibrant and stimulating to the students,” Hospital explains. “For example, students were fascinated by Chris Abani’s passion and his willingness to share personal details about his imprisonment and torture in Nigeria.”
Creating Literary Homelands
Like Hospital, Wolfson Campus professor Cheryl Clark has seen how broaching the topic of cultural belonging can electrify class discussion in her writing and literature courses. For example, she often assigns an autobiographical essay by Indian author Bharati Mukherjee titled, “Two Ways to Belong to America.” The essay chronicles the conflicting relationship that she and her sister – both immigrants to the U.S. – have with their country of origin. While the author has fully embraced American life, her sister struggles with an ongoing sense of loss and displacement.
Many of Clark’s students strongly relate to these themes, which they are encouraged to explore further by crafting their own autobiographical essays. Students pour themselves into this project, experimenting with specific phrases and word choices until they convey the intended meaning.
One student, who is originally from Havana, Cuba, movingly writes: “Little by little, I realized that reinventing myself meant to forget. … Learning how to live without memories sometimes made me feel like a traitor.”
Other students view their situation differently – the important thing is that the assignment allows students to begin to see the act of writing as a supple and supremely powerful means of self-expression.
A number of campus-based literary and arts magazines gives students ample opportunity to find and develop their authorial voices. Many of these publications – such as Kendall Campus’ Miambiance, under the tutelage of literature professors Marta Magellan and Ricardo Pau-Llosa – have garnered numerous national awards.
Reading in the Digital Age
In this era of iPods and the Internet, many MDC professors are changing the way students interact with literature by incorporating the latest technology into their teaching approaches. One such professor is Kendall Campus’ Louis Molina, who has been leading a pioneering study of how iPods can be effectively integrated into literature classes.
Molina discovered that his students more successfully retain the themes and concepts related to the works of literature he assigns when they have access to a variety of supplementary multimedia podcasts. These podcasts are then uploaded to iTunes U, an online portal devoted to multimedia educational content.
“As a result of this new Web-based repository,” says Molina, “MDC is gaining worldwide exposure.”
Kendall Campus professors David McGuirk and David Tulloch are also playing a major role in adapting the teaching of literature and writing to today’s new media. McGuirk and Tulloch will soon launch an online version of Kendall Campus’ writing center, allowing students to log on and receive feedback from tutors in real-time.
Other literature professors – such as Jennie Olaguibel-Lundahl at North Campus – have used online classroom management applications to add depth and dimension to class literary discussions and debates.
For example, after assigning Rassundari Devi’s Amar Jiban, Olaguibel-Lundahl’s students participate in interactive online discussions on the text’s key themes. She also provides links to relevant articles as well as exercises that encourage her students to engage more dynamically with what they are reading.
“This use of technology augments classroom discussions and allows students to interact on a variety of levels,” Olaguibel-Lundahl explains.
High vs. Low Culture
This willingness to implement new technologies is rapidly changing the conventional notion of the literature professor as an ardent devotee of the printed page. Many of today’s most innovative professors are eager to make connections between printed pages and popular consumer products.
North Campus literature professor Edward Glenn falls into this category.
“What I hope to do is to show students that literature is relevant,” he says. “It deals with human emotions, relationships, social issues. But so do romance novels, pop songs, Hollywood movies and Hallmark greeting cards. Literature just does it with depth and craft.”
Glenn thus cuts across the boundaries that traditionally sequestered these cultural forms in hermetically sealed categories. He places an emphasis on having his students develop into critical readers who can spot connections and complexity beneath the often seemingly superficial veneer of popular culture. For example, he sometimes uses the The Police’s 1983 song Every Breath You Take to illustrate the importance of analyzing the singer’s word choices very carefully.
“When students do this, they realize that the song is actually about stalking someone, which certainly adds a twist to its meaning,” says Glenn. “This exercise helps to illustrate the importance of paying attention to the actual meaning of literature rather than to what we want it to mean.”
As a result of this productive foray into the realm of popular culture, Glenn’s students become more savvy, close readers, an ability that helps them to delve more deeply into “serious” works of literature.
Literary Excursions
Some professors complement this movement between genres with assignments that require students to make physical journeys into the community. The aim is to make reading and writing into proactive processes that require hands-on engagement with the outside world in order to assume their full significance.
Hialeah Campus professor María Vargas-O’Neel frequently focuses on environmental issues in the writing assignments she gives her students. In order to bring this subject to life, Vargas-O’Neel requires her students to participate in the Adopt a Tree project at Hialeah Campus. In the project initiated by campus librarian Glenda Phipps, students raise and eventually plant young trees. Students draw on this first-hand experience of environmental stewardship when composing their essays. The results are fresh, crisp prose. Also, they are able to see how writing about personal experiences can help to fully extract their significance.
Wolfson Campus professor Michael Hettich is equally inventive in his approach to teaching writing. One assignment of which he’s particular fond is giving students two days to walk around downtown Miami and compose a journalistic narrative based on what they encounter. Students from professor Joseph Tamargo’s photography class accompany Hettich’s students in order to add a visual component to the final project.
“This kind of assignment encourages students to probe for the visceral truth of experience,” says Hettich. “This endeavor lies at the heart of good writing, whether fiction or non-fiction.”
Writing the World
InterAmerican Campus professors Carlos González and Alejandro Salinas connect the teaching of literature and writing to community service by holding classes at Phillis Wheatley Elementary in Overtown, where the College students tutor and mentor fifth-graders participating in the I Have a Dream program.
“Being at the Phillis Wheatley setting allows us to more actively and organically read and write about issues like race, ethnicity and civil rights,” Salinas says.
MDC students prepared for the course by reading articles on the history and socioeconomic realities of Overtown. When the semester began, they traveled to Phillis Wheatley for collaborative tutoring and mentoring sessions with the fifth-graders and for an interactive discussion with their professors and classmates.
“Our collaborative Wednesdays are a living story that students think about, respond to, relate to their lives, feel happy and sad about and, ultimately, write about,” Salinas says.
The goal is to inspire students to write more vibrantly by creating opportunities for them to develop meaningful relationships with the fifth-graders.
“Our teaching philosophy is to give all concepts a personal, embodied and lived quality,” says González.
On a recent afternoon, González asked the fifth-graders to write a story on a theme of their choice based on a list of words he gave them – among them, “tiger,” “crazy,” “cheat” and “street.”
The students then gathered in a circle to share their stories.
Later, the College students, who keep a record of the lesson, discussed their journals with one another – both online and in person – often relating the themes to those of the assigned course texts, such as Jonathan Kozol’s The Shame of a Nation: The Restoration of Apartheid Schooling in America.
They then shape their insights into formal writing assignments – but not before first putting them through a long stream of drafts.
“Part of becoming a good writer is negotiating the line between word and world,” says Salinas. “Our course really brings these two realms together.”
Despite the varied and individualized approaches taken by the College’s writing and literature professors, there is an unmistakable unifying theme. In each case, MDC faculty members are finding innovative ways to connect reading and writing to the realities of students’ daily lives.
As a result, students are learning that the practice of reading and writing – when undertaken seriously and passionately – can be a vehicle to new frontiers of experience, understanding and creativity.
— Christopher C. Gregory-Guider