The final weeks of the semester will be given over to group teaching projects, which will involve groups of between three and five of you taking over the classroom for one class session. Note that these are not “presentations”; no talking heads, please. Instead, I’ll be looking for some sort of interactive experience for both me and your colleagues.

The subject matter for the teaching projects is negotiable. Listed below are several possible topics you might consider, as well as several possible formats for the classroom experience. You’re of course free to select from this list if something there intrigues you; you can also revamp or adapt anything on the list to suit some other focus that you’d like to pursue. You should feel perfectly free, however, to develop topics and approaches of your own; I only ask that you run your ideas past me for feedback and advice.

Procedure: The first order of business will be to select or develop a topic, and to find others in the class who are also interested. I’ve added a link on the forum page to a Group Teaching Project forum. Please use this site ASAP to float ideas and to troll for like-minded souls. Folks can either contact each other directly by e-mail (by clicking on the names of forum posters), or use the forum itself to conduct a conversation about a particular topic and negotiate a concensual agreement.

I’d like these groups to consist of no more than five people, since dividing the labor and coordinating schedules in larger groups can get a bit byzantine. If more than six people are interested in the same topic I’ll ask you to figure out a way to subdivide the topic so that two groups can be formed, each working on some more specific aspect of the larger topic. If there turn out to be more than five groups, then we may need to schedule two groups on one or more of the days available for “class takeovers.”

I’m hoping that the groups will have sorted themselves out by next Wednesday, March 31st (gulp!). I realize that this is a very short time from now, that we’ll still have a couple of texts left to read at that point, and that you may later regret having made such a hasty decision; given our time constraints, however, I’d rather get the groups sorted out earlier than later.

I’ll tentatively plan on surrendering the Thursday, April 1st class session for initial group meetings. By this point you should have discussed (again, via e-mail or the forum), some possible classroom activities. (Once the membership of the groups has stabilized, I’ll set up a private forum for each one.) I’ll ask you on this day to indicate which day you’d like to take over the classroom, and I’ll hope to finalize the schedule as soon as possible after that. I may also try on that day to schedule meetings with each group outside of regular class time, so that I can serve as a consultant to help you flesh out your more promising plans and rethink your less auspicious ones.

The projects themselves are provisionally scheduled for weeks 14 – 16 (April 27 through May 11). I’ll figure out at least one other day before then to designate for in-class group meetings of the groups, but be advised that you will probably need to do considerable planning outside of class, as well.

Unbelievably Ambitious Calendar:

• Groups declared: Wednesday, March 31
• In-class group prep meeting: Thursday, April 1 (no fooling!)
• In-class group prep meetings: part or all of one or more class meetings later in April
• Group teaching projects: April 27, April 29, May 4, May 6, and May 11

Potential/suggested topics and formats: again, these are just suggestions—you’re free to use any of these ideas exactly as they appear here, or as inspiration for your own topics/approaches.

Topics:

1) Revisitations: return us to a text or pair of texts we’ve already read, focusing our attention on some question or issue we haven’t yet considered as a group. (You could, for example, look over the forum postings for a given (pair of) text(s) and see if there are any recurring concerns that didn’t get addressed in our class discussions.)

2) Enhancements: return us to a text we’ve already read and teach some additional material (that you’ve discovered on your own or among the web resources that I’ve assembled, for example) that would enrich our understanding of it. You might, for instance, teach us something about Victorian culture that puts a new spin on Heart of Darkness; or you might explore Annette Kolodny’s ideas about gender and the ideology of the American frontier in such books as The Lay of the Land and The Land Before Her. Research anti-imperialist movements in England and the United States around the turn of the 20th century; find out more about Shakespeare’s involvement with various colonial ventures; learn something about the notion of “The Vanishing Indian” (sometimes “The Vanishing American”) in mid-nineteenth-century America. Think about what information you wished you’d had as you read one of our assigned texts, devise a research project that would help you get such information, and figure out an engaging way to share the results of your research with the rest of the class.

3) New texts/new issues: feel free to introduce us to some (excerpts from) new texts that further illuminate the themes and issues at the heart of the course. Exceptionally quick and highly motivated readers might want to take on E. M. Forster’s A Passage to India along with Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children. A less ambitious plan might involve Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre and Michelle Cliff’s “Caliban’s Daughter” (or perhaps Gayatri Spivak’s essay “Three Women’s Texts and a Critique of Imperialism”). But I also mean “texts” in the broadest sense of the word. Salman Rushdie’s essay on colonial nostalgia, “Outside the Whale,” might help you do an interesting reading of Indiana Jones or the latest Range Rover commercial. Or Chinua Achebe’s essay on “Colonialist Criticism” could help you critique the prevailing popular reception of such media texts. There’s a fascinating documentary called “Trobriand Cricket” that explores how Pacific islanders have appropriated the most colonial of sports, and a quirky little film called Perfumed Nightmare by a Filipino director named Kidlat Tahimik that sends up imperial notions of technological “progress.” (The library has copies of some of the above-mentioned texts; I have copies of others.) Music, print ads, or personal experiences could also provide fodder for a good class, as could the recent, post-Iraq debate among the pundits on the propriety of America’s unabashed assumption of the status of “Empire.”

Formats (not mutually exclusive; these might be combined or tweaked in various ways):

1) Guided reading, with discussion: distribute questions, along with a reading assignment, ahead of class, and use questions to promote class discussion.

2) Blogs, with discussion: create an annotated weblog for your topic, listing selected web resources. This could be distributed in a paper format, or made available online; think as well about how you’d incorporate the blog into a classroom experience. (That is, what kind of homework assignment would you give the class beforehand, and how would that prepare students for a classroom experience?)

3) Staged debates: assign various class members with positions to argue, or specific topics to consider, ahead of time; class session should be organized to put these areas of expertise in dialogue

4) Lesson plans: for the aspiring teachers, you might prepare an entire lesson plan for teaching a text (one of ours, or a new one) in a high school class.

5) Workshops: identify a local (community, campus, departmental, etc.) problem, issue, or concern that relates to our critical discussions of culture and empire (and/or resistance to & critique of empire), and facilitate an exploration of the issue through various classroom activities and discussions.