Day eleven and twelve: students who actively wrestled with the question and created something on their own probably got more out of the exercise than students that simply found someone else’s example of postmodernism

Ahh – I hate falling behind in keeping up with this blog. OK – so the subject for last class was a discussion of Holy Grail and John Barth’s “Lost in the Funhouse,” and Eco’s Postscript essay on irony. Unfortunately with the movie and then a discussion day following it we have gotten out of the warm up and exercise rhythm. I suspect we won’t get back to it until we discuss the Master Narrative projects on Thursday. I find the discussion days crucial to how the course progresses. Projects and examples are great, but there needs to be space to analyzes them also. I really don’t want to resort to things like quizzes and tests so we start these days with students talking about one thing that caught their eye in the articles to be read for today. I learned the lesson of getting them away from their books the first time we did this – it was far too easy to just thumb through the reading and randomly pull something out on the spot. I am disappointed when students do not do the reading – which means that their understanding of the discussion is significantly affected. On the other hand I am always impressed when students bring in a list of ideas from the readings.

The main point of the discussion was to establish a number of useful postmodern ideas – things like metafiction, intertext, and double coding. The Barth short story and the film are great examples of these ideas. I am struck by the fact that we often do not pay enough attention to how a story is told. We tend to get caught up in what is being told instead. The Funhouse and Grail examples fragment the narrative and draw attention to construction in such a way that it is hard to ignore the structure. Sowing doubt in the role of the narrator or storyteller is a clear indication that something different is happening in these stories.

All of this was designed to be inspirational material for the project due today. Students were asked to draw on the growing list of postmodern terms and ideas that we have been developing and use them to change, alter, deconstruct, re-tell a fairy tale. A number of students took this suggestion literally and re-told familiar tales. This offered a nice collision typically between the rather antiquated values and structure of the stories and contemporary material added to or filtering the stories. Some took it as a challenge to create alternative ways of exploring these stories – power points with a great deal of information packed into them, videos, boxes to open up and explore, performance art, and mashups. I do struggle with courses like this not to grade or elevate “good” projects at the expense of “poor” projects, but that dynamic does exist – you can feel it during the presentations. Some students simply develop the ideas more fully than others.

The difficult part with this is that the projects exist as a challenge on a couple of levels. The first one is simply coming up with an answer to the question, but beyond that it involves the public display of the answer. This structure of the course is designed to create an environment that is not just teacher/student centered, but class or group centered. My hope is that students can see the more developed answers and then aspire to do something similar with the next project. If that works or not remains to be seen. I do need to mention in class on Thursday that students who actively wrestled with the question and created something on their own probably got more out of the exercise than students that simply found someone else’s example of postmodernism. Just pressing play is not the same as assembling something.

The next step to this is to get the students to begin weaving the ideas we have been discussing into their write-up of their projects. The first three I really only expected descriptions – the last four I expect analysis. Whereas the first three responses I was concerned if they had been posted. The remaining responses I will offer more specific criticism.

I felt that the Dissonance class that I taught last year had peaked too soon. We ended up exploring the ideas of indeterminacy right before spring break and couldn’t get the momentum back.  I have deliberately slowed the pace of this class down to allow the elements to come together later in the term. After the break we need to do a great deal more exercises and in-class projects. The goal is to lead up to the final project where all of these pieces are pulled together.