Sharing Stories and Experience 3

One of my concerns in designing this paradigm was the readings that would be included. In previous semesters, we essentially had only four shared readings: essays by Zora Neale Hurston and Richard Rodriguez, and speeches by Nelson Mandela and Martin Luther King, Jr. I proposed offering a selection of short readings each week which address the week's theme. I wanted to get away from the lengthy and scholarly readings we'd offered in the past, partly because our students experienced varying degrees of difficulty with this material since they lacked the level of reading skill necessary for it. My idea was to substitute student writing for most of the reading – personal narrative essays and excerpts from the previous year's Sharing Cultures Project postings. The important thing here is that the readings represent the voices and experience of students themselves. Each week, students would have a choice of selections (which would be posted in Blackboard with short descriptions of each reading). The overriding concern here is to offer readings that can be digested quickly but that offer succinct insight into pertinent issues, at least enough to give students a kind of overview of the theme/issue and enough to get them started in thinking about how the theme relates to them individually and expanding from there to considerations about how culture influences personal and collective identity.

In this paradigm, I devoted fully three weeks for the exploration of cultural traditions and two full weeks to the exploration of history, political, social, and economic issues. These are vast areas, and I identified several ways in which students might explore them. For example, based on their particular interests, they might choose to explore music within cultural traditions, or perhaps they might choose to explore fashion or art or customs. The idea here is to encourage students to base their exploration on their own unique interests. I like the idea of giving them lots of choice here, partly because I think if they are allowed to gravitate toward what most interests them, they will engineer their own understanding of culture based on personal curiosity, and I believe that students are always more motivated when they get to choose. (I think it's also possible here to have instructors choose a focus for a given theme. For example, someone might want to focus on Economics or Oppression or the AIDS issue during Week 10, and this would allow individual instructors to make the best use of personal familiarity or interest in particular issues.)

This paradigm also enables students to think in a more focused way about personal and cultural identity. One of the most successful outcomes last spring was that students began to learn about and come to appreciate their own cultures in ways they never had before. And, of course, this leads to greater understanding of personal identity and the ways in which it is shaped by culture.