Of Posters and Progress

I’m getting ready to head to CCCC in Chicago (nothing like geriatric rock), and that means the class won’t be physically meeting till next week. Just enough time off for the students to finish Discipline & Punish (notes are never as good as the real thing).

Let me just say that the poster presentations really impressed me. I’m going to try to take some close-up photos to post. Perhaps I should have asked the students to say a few things about each of their works, but I was really happy with the products they put on display. Even students who have been struggling a bit with the course material pulled it together for this project.

And all this tells me a few things that support some of my general ideas about education. First off, students are interested in finding alternative forms for their intellectual work—and alternative audiences. They want to engage each other, and they realize that traditional academic forms don’t help that cause much. Second, connecting course materials to the kinds of texts students encounter all the time creates excellent space for inventiveness and creativity. And smarts. The annotations on the posters were thoughtful and full of voice. These students claimed this assignment in all the ways I hoped they would.

We need to continue to make education about ownership, about what it means to claim one’s own ideas and to thrust them out into the public sphere. Too much of what we do is private and safe. And I understand that we want college to be a place where students can learn without the threat of reprisal and public scorn. But I also understand that education needs to crackle with the nervous energy of engagement.

More soon from the Windy City…