The Guide to Teaching
 |
Creating the Classroom Atmosphere
Date: Sun, 21 Sep 1997 08:31:16 -0500
From: Gary Klass gmklass@rs6000.cmp.ilstu.edu
My Race and Ethnicity course, a small (10-20 student) seminar, is an unusual course in many ways. It is built around a reading list of some two dozen recently published books on race and ethnicity, many of which have been best-sellers and which span a broad spectrum of ideology and style. Each student reads and reviews four or five of the books and most of the classes are devoted to students presenting and critiquing the ideas in the books.
The course draws such a remarkable diversity of students - in terms of ability, temperament, and political ideology as well as cultural background. When I first taught the course I anticipated that there might be problems with the controversial subject. So far, I have had almost none.
I think that I have designed the ideal format for a seminar. In other courses I work hard to encourage student participation, in this course I merely attempt to control it - keeping the discussion on topic and making sure each student gets their say. I rarely lecture, usually at the beginning of class to put the works in perspective and most of what I teach involves helping them find ways to formulate their own arguments and critiques.
I know that others who teach courses addressing controversial topics sometimes devise sets of behavioral rules and contracts to guide the discussion. These approaches, I decided, would be counterproductive, serving only to sensitize the students to the fact that the instructor sensitive about what they might say. I tell them, without overemphasizing it, that two principles should guide both what they write and what they say in class: a) one should avoid offending other people, and b) one should avoid taking offense at what other people say. {Note that any complaint that another student has violated the first rule is usually a violation of the second}. I do stress that one of the advantages of this course is that every one can learn more from those they disagree with than those they agree with.
One of the purposes of the course is for the students to learn how to express their own ideas about these controversial matters in public. They do this both in the in-class discussions and by submitting their book reviews to a public internet discussion list (POS302-L) that I have created for the course. The public forum seems to force students to anticipate how others might react to their ideas and the manner in which they are expressed. It also seems to encourage them to write better.
Both the class and Internet discussions have been almost entirely civil. I've taught the seminar six times now, four times using the Internet book review discussion list, I do not recall any personal attacks or charges of racism every entering the discussion. This course is a delight to teach and I strongly recommend the format to others.
Note: The seminar is offered every spring, instructors are welcome to have their students submit reviews (and participate in the discussion of the reviews) to the discussion list. For information see: http://www.ilstu.edu/~gmklass/pos302-l/
--
Gary Klass
Editor, PSRT-L
Associate Professor
4600 Political Science
Illinois State University
Normal, Illinois 61790
http://WWW.ILSTU.EDU/~gmklass
(309) 438-7852
(fax) 438-5310
{ Top of Page }
Copyright for the messages in this section belongs to their author.
Teaching Politics is published by William J. Ball (ball@tcnj.edu)
