At my university we have a junior-level interdisciplinary seminar, which can be on any topic a professor wants to teach about. I have taught versions about places -- Istanbul, Cairo, London, and this semester, the Silk Road; I prepared a proposal for one on Jerusalem/Al Quds. which a colleague has taught several times. I have also taught a Gender and Culture class on Women of the Middle East.
These are fun to teach as they do not lead into anything, do not count for many majors, and if you get the right students it can be a great group of people. I happened to be teaching the class on Cairo during the semester of the Arab spring, a class which happened to have two Middle East Studies majors in it, and we spent a lot of time following the news and discussing current happenings. We were meeting in the library classroom on the day that Mubarak resigned, and the students were almost bouncing with excitement, as we watched the celebrations in Tahrir Square as the news spread.
I really didn't want to teach that class again, as it was such a good teaching memory to hold onto, and I don't have any desire to supplant it. So I taught London the next time through, a very under-enrolled class, which was okay because every Thursday I would bring in high-quality tea if they wanted to partake (we were doing the class at 3 pm, so it really was time for tea).
This year I decided to try something to support one of the interdisciplinary minors we have on campus, in this case Asian/Asian-American studies (these classes generally don't count for majors but can for minors). Hence the course on the Silk Road.
Follow me beyond the convoluted orange silken highway for a discussion of what I think the students should get out of this class and how I am going about helping them achieve that outcome.
We have recently had an uptick in the number of foreign students at our university, so I was not surprised to find I had a Chinese student in the class. But he dropped it very quickly, probably because he was taking it for interest only (didn't need it to graduate) and it has a relatively heavy writing requirement as it fulfills the "writing enhanced" category of courses. I still have 10 students in the class still who are in 10 different majors, several students who are from out of state, and ones whose hometowns range from very small (population under 2000) to someone whose parents recently moved to Washington, DC, so with a very very large hometown. The class is evenly split between men and women in the class, unusual for my university, particularly in the humanities. Several of the students are science majors and when they introduced themselves they said that they were taking the class because they wanted to take something that was more heavily humanities-focused. So I think we will have a good mix of people in the class, and I am looking forward to it.
The outcomes of this type of class are pretty well specified by the university: to focus on the method of inquiry and analysis in a variety of disciplines, help student learn how to apply multiple disciplinary methodologies to the process of understanding a given object (including a question or a person or whatever the instructor chooses), and to have students write 20-25 pages of revised writing. There are a wide variety of topics for these courses across campus and they are taught by faculty in all departments. For example, someone in Business teaches a class on "Historic Trials" and someone in Physic teaches about "weird science" and faculty in Nursing and Philosophy both teach "Death and Dying," approaching the subject matter in different ways. Both a benefit and a potential challenge for these courses is that they don't have any specific prerequisites other than junior standing, nor do they feed into any major, so there is nothing content-specific that is shared across the university. As long as I work with them on their writing.
I have approached the Silk Road as the interconnected web of trade routes that stretched from China to the Mediterranean and the website of the mid 2000s that sold drugs for bitcoin payments. The first part of the class looks at the trade networks through different "lenses" such as religion (how was religion transported across the Asian continent -- the religions that went east included Buddhism and Islam; the ones that went west were Mithraism and Taoism. Why did the ones going east prove to be more successful and long-lasting than those heading west? And what caused the downfall of Manichaeism, a world religion of the first millennium CE that is no longer practiced? Anywhere). I will look at art and technology transferred from one region to the next, and politics, geology, and this and that.
But I want to go beyond knowledge and work more on skills and attitudes, giving them something that they will take with them and be able to use, no matter what classes they still have to take or what jobs and careers they have ahead of them. So they will revise and proofread their own and others' texts. These steps will help them improve their writing. They will have presentations of different types (video and standing on their feet and giving a more scholarly talk). And I will work with them to develop non-verbal methods of recording information and events -- we will discuss and practice sketching as a way of taking notes and analyze photographs for information and aesthetics.
The main thing I am hoping students to take away from the course, however, is inspired by the fact I could not find a really good fictional text for students to read. For the Cairo course, I used the wonderful novel The Yacoubian Building by Alaa Al Aswany. For London, I used by far my favourite of Dickens' novels, A Christmas Carol. Both novels captured multiple levels of society and have a very strong sense of place, as well as being, each in their own way, real page-turners. But I couldn't find a comparable book that worked for the Silk Road. I thought about using something by Khaled Hosseini, whose most famous book is The Kite Runner, but nothing really worked.
Instead, I decided to look at the concept of the journey, and use travel writing, non-fiction, as a choice of text, rather than a novel. This means that the approach we would be taking was that of an outsider. The obvious example of a Silk Road narrative is the account left by Marco Polo, but there are others who traveled across Asia in the early second millennium, including one of my favourite travel writers, Ibn Battuta. But I wanted students to have a more modern account. The one I chose is Ted Rall's delightful narrative of his journeys in central Asia, Silk Road to Ruin. As one would expect with Ted Rall, a major part of the book is presented as cartoons. This text works well with my goal to get students to use multiple ways of recording and communicating information.
The next question was how I could provide students with an opportunity to travel somewhere new, experience something he or she has never done before. I wish I could take them to the places we will be studying, but as I teach in a public state university, one that emphasizes not only the quality of the education delivered but also our inexpensive tuition and fees and room and board, there is no way we could take the Thanksgiving holiday and travel to Urumqi or Samarkand, or Kabul (in a country I have always wanted to visit, but I know it is probably unlikely I will ever get there).
So I am using the local environment. I am asking them to go outside of their comfort zone, to experience new things, and to record those in the form of a journal or blog entry that includes visual records as well as verbal ones. I ask them to go to a larger or smaller town than they have ever spent time in, to do one or more of a set of possibilities, including attending a country auction, eating in a local greasy spoon, or participating in a town or harvest festival. There are a lot of possibilities. Another assignment is:
Assignment: Experience/Writing: Diary/Blog Entry #3
Over break you should eat something of a type you never have before. The more adventurous you are the better. Go to a restaurant of food you have never tried and do so (I recommend going with a friend, so you have someone else to take pictures). Write the entry about your experience. Record what you think you will experience going in and what it was actually like. This does not have to be expensive. The idea is to go as far out of your comfort zone as you can. There are taco stands that serve real Mexican tacos, with tongue or tripe. It is relatively easy to find a British or Irish breakfast in a big city – try black pudding. You don’t have to eat all of something, but you need to try it. Have you eaten Ethiopian? There are restaurants serving this type of food in Kansas City, St. Louis, and Ottumwa. Have you eaten shellfish? How about octopus? You can often find that in Greek or Japanese restaurants. If you haven’t had sashimi (raw fish), try that. Have you ever eaten lamb? Or jerk goat? How about bugs? Some of these are gross but some are really good, and you may not know which is which until you have tried it. The entry is due October 22, with images.
So the students in this class will achieve knowledge (the first textbook is a history one only about 100 pages long,
The Silk Road: A Very Short Introduction). They will gain skills through the required writing, presentations, and preparation and critiquing of visual images. And in my opinion, the most important thing the students will get out of the semester is a better understanding of being a "stranger in a strange land" and a sense of what the rural midwest is like outside of the cities.
It is an ambitious undertaking, and one that is less focused on content than the versions of the interdisciplinary seminar that I have taught before. But I am hoping it works to give them a better sense of adventure and a desire to seek out something outside their comfort zones.
We'll see how it goes.
What is the most creative class you have ever taken? What is the weirdest experience you have had in a class (that was connected with the class content -- there are weird experiences at college all the time!)?