Team-Taught English Class Takes on Community Project
This winter quarter Professors Galey Modan and Ray Cashman asked students in their team-taught English class-367.05 (The U.S. Folk Experience) and 571S (Studies in English Language)-to step off-campus and into the community to interview long-term residents and business owners around Ohio State's campus. The class, with support from both the Ohio State Center for Folklore Studies and the surrounding neighborhoods' University Community Association, was thus able to expand our knowledge of the complexity of communities outside the university.
As preparation, the students were taught the methodology behind ethnographic interviewing, with Professors Cashman and Modan sharing examples from their own work in the field. Students were given a name from a list of long-time residents supplied by the University Community Association, as well as asked to identify one resident on their own, and then sent out into the community to record their stories.
"Most of the students had no experience doing interviews or even talking with strangers, so they were pretty nervous at the beginning, but they've made really good connections with people," said Modan, Associate Professor of Sociolinguistics. "They are starting to see what ethnography is all about. They feel what they are doing is not just for a grade in the class, but is going to have a larger place in the world outside the classroom."
"I get the feeling from their reflections that the students aren't simply telling us what they think we want to hear," added Cashman, Assistant Professor in Folklore Studies. "They're generally having epiphanies about the world."
One of those epiphanies, the professors agree, is the idea that a community is a more complex entity than is first realized. "They are starting to see faction and fissions and tensions, and coming to a different idea of community than they came in with," said Cashman. "Community isn't necessarily all about mutual affection and everyone thinking the same way, but has more to do with a commitment to engagement and interaction."
Julie Stuart, a nursing major with a minor in English, said the class was challenging, but worth it. "It was nice to learn how to prepare questions, how to elicit narratives, and I think it will help me in future interviews for jobs or scholarship. Now that I've been on the other side of [the interview process] I understand the process better and I think I'll be a better interviewee," she said. Stuart interviewed the former owner of Gordon's Ice Cream, a popular North High Street business in the seventies and eighties, as well as the former owner of Rubies on North High.
Team-teaching was part of the learning process of the class-for both professors and students. "It's been stimulating, particularly because our students are doing collaborative projects and I think we're able to model for them what the benefits of collaboration are," said Modan. "Often students are wary of collaborative work. But I think having a class where the whole inception of the class is about collaboration showcases the benefits."
The resulting oral interviews will be archived in both the Center for Folklore Studies Archives, as well as the archives of the University Community Association. Martha Sims will teach a section of English 367.05 next quarter that will continue the work begun in Cashman and Modan's courses. For information on course offerings in the English Department, see http://english.osu.edu/students/undergrad/courseInfo.
