This is the first in a series of (probably) two posts about a class I taught last semester and this. This one covers my general approach to the course.
My university has recently implemented a new general education program; faculty members design and propose courses in various areas that students can take to fulfill distribution requirements. For obvious reasons, here in the Department of English and Writing, we offer a lot of courses that fulfill the "text-based humanities" requirement. My colleague Claire proposed one called "Global Medical Stories," where the idea was that students would read different kinds of medical narratives, engaging in the "medical humanities." Classes in our gen ed program have to be able to be taught by a variety of faculty—they can't be classes just one person can teach—so I was asked if I was interested in the class when it was under development, and my name put down on the application. This mean that when a section came open in Fall 2024, I was asked if I wanted to teach it, and I said sure; I then taught another section in Spring 2025.
Going in I was a bit worried. I'd said "yes" on the basis that a lot of my scholarship ends up discussing medical issues, particularly my work on vivisection, public health, and biocracy. But was I going to teach Wilkie Collins's Heart and Science or Charles Kingsley's Two Years Ago or Fergus Hume's The Year of Miracle in a 200-level gen-ed class? It seemed unlikely. So what would I teach?
I plotted out a bunch of short stories (more on that in post #2), but felt like I was coming up short of enough to fill up a whole semester; in an act of desperation, I asked the bookstore to order Sinclair Lewis's Arrowsmith. I'd taught it a decade ago and it had worked well, and now, post-COVID, it was even more relevant.
Arrowsmith got me thinking about some episodes of Radiolab I had enjoyed, particularly "Every Day Is Ignaz Semmelweis Day" and "The Great Vaccinator," both of which I thought really explicated some issues the novel raised in a more nonfictional way. When I looked at my colleagues' syllabus, she had a lot of nonfiction about medical topics, but that's not an era I know a lot about... but Radiolab podcasts... now there I'm an expert! (And podcasts are obviously not fiction, but they are stories about medicine, so they fit the class anyway.) I decided to pair a number of course texts with podcasts as a way of showing that the issues in the science fiction stories were issues in the real world as well. Some I was able to come up with myself; a request for suggestions on r/Radiolab also jogged some others in my memory.
Here are the podcasts I ended up doing, organized by what unit I used them in:
- Public Health
- "The Great Vaccinator": the development of the mumps vaccine
- "Every Day Is Ignaz Semmelweis Day": the invention of handwashing
- "Playing God": ethical issues around who to prioritize when medical resources are scarce
- Disability
- "Unfit": people with low IQs and sterilization
- Genetic Engineering
- "CRISPR": what CRISPR is and how it works
- "Seeking Patterns": how a medication changed someone's whole identity
- Life Extension
- "The Bitter End": what lengths doctors would not go to to save their own lives
So, I had a class. Open with Arrowsmith, taking breaks for podcasts, and then do sf in the second half of the course, also with some podcasts. I think the first semester went pretty well, but I refined my approach for the second semester, which I think went even better.
The class requires three "Signature Assignments": two papers and a presentation. It was pretty obvious to make the first paper about Arrowsmith and the second about the sf. The first time, I had the students do video presentations about the topic of their second paper. I don't really enjoy watching video presentations, to be honest, and this seemed to add a lot of work for both me and the students in the last couple weeks of the course.
Inspired by what my colleague Nicole was doing for presentations in her text-based humanities course, the biggest change I made going into the second semester was to the presentations. This time, I had them pick a podcast I hadn't assigned (Radiolab episodes I hadn't taught, but also some others I knew as well as suggestions solicited on Facebook). I had students present on whatever one they chose, providing a summary of key points and a connection to a text from the class. (Students were allowed to present on ones not on the list as long as they got preapproval from me, but no one did.) I don't know what the students though, but I found them fun and interesting, though I think my prompt needs some slight refinement.
Like many classes, I think the first time went okay and the second time went quite well; I think the exams and papers reflect much more this time out that students are thinking about the kind of things I want them to think. But more when I wrap up my thoughts next time!
No comments:
Post a Comment