If nothing else, let it be known that a strong pun game helps in all circumstances.
Teaching during global pandemic means improvisation. This short article shares my experience of an improvised assignment that worked, how it worked, and what good came out of it: museum-style pamphlets. Take it if you like, adapt it as you will, and let me know what works better when you do.
The Backstory
The origin story of these pamphlets begins with a simple observation: poster sessions are cool. At the small liberal art college at which I taught this year, disciplines with a lot of majors – Economics, Biochemistry, Business Administration, and so on – pack the library at the end of each semester with glossy student posters and enthusiastic presentations. There is a bit of buzz and excitement, and it releases students and faculty alike from the cycle of paper research and editing.
So, I decided that for my seminar course this term – “The Rise of Religion and the Fall of Rome”; put the fall of Rome in your title, and they will come – I would move away from the final paper model and take the course into display space. Two reasons: first, I avoid compulsory formal research papers for undergraduates. They can be exceptional, even life-shaping, experiences for the right people, especially those of us temperamentally invested in long-form research writing, but they are also very time-consuming. In American academic existence, students and instructors – especially contingent and non-tenure track instructors – have so many competing demands on their time. For a lot of students, an extended research task is a gift. For a lot of students – and, for the instructor – it can become a chore. Second, visibility. The Religion department at Washington and Lee has very few majors, and it struggles to fill even the classes of established faculty. I figured raising the profile of the department, as visiting faculty, was a mitzvah.
Of course, neat as poster sessions might be, they become more difficult if adverse circumstances intervene. Like many teachers, the spread of SARS-CoV-2 and resultant state of pandemic meant I reinvented courses on the fly, including their final assignments. The library was closed, students were scattered to the winds, and as a small teaching-intensive college – even one with a disproportionately large endowment – the online resources available for research were limited.
In my survey courses, an alternative was simpler: a portfolio based final with miniature writing assignments. Students still get to develop writing expertise, while everyone saves the time it takes to write, read, and edit more extended research pieces. It takes just as much skill to write with concision. In my seminar course, however, I wanted three things.First, I wanted students to come away with the ability to communicate knowledge about their material with a degree of critical selectivity. Second, I wanted an assignment that combined knowledge management with visual display. Third, I wanted the final to be less work for everyone. Suddenly, faculty were juggling converted online-only courses and students were dealing all at once with the fallout from several faculty juggling converted online-only courses. So, what assignment ticked all the boxes?
My students pointed to a solution when they began to push for sources beyond the hyper-elite material that dominated much of the first half of our course. Our week on Ḥimyar and Aksum proved the crunch point. Students found the privileged position of much of the literary and epigraphic evidence, as well as the political and economic historical focus of modern scholarship, a tad frustrating. Say, for example, that we know from his Mārib inscription that the sixth-century Aksumite king Kālēb justified his pious militancy partly through repurposed psalms. Sure – but what did your average Ḥimyarite on the street think of Kālēb’s invasion? To respond to this student desire, I wanted to find a way to make this social-historical, even micro-historical, approach play into the final.
A possibility sprang to mind: what if students designed pamphlets? Visually appealing, they package up concise information, and are easy to read and share. The only one of my three assignment stipulations in question was the third: would they be less work? Pamphlets take more time than you might think – effective design was a second-order issue, but as anyone who has even ever “whipped up a poster quickly” for an event will tell you, even basic design is a skill. But it is a different type of labour: students were writing a lot, in the form of discussions forums and final papers, so visual design is good time spent. In a sense, to return to the beginning of the story, they are portable posters. Plus, pamphlets are one of my favourite things about museums, especially when they come with little maps, and even when (speaking purely hypothetically) they get deposited in a kitchen drawer only to be excavated when we need that drawer for cat food.
The Assignment
Having said a little about how the assignment came together (in effect, it improvised itself into existence), I want to spend a little time giving a short how-to, and then some practical critique on what needs future tweaks. I had the opportunity to discuss with students extensively, so a lot of this was possible because of close communication with a dedicated group. It was important to answer student questions early. I also provided a short rubric. The main things to note: first, I provided a concrete example of the format (thank you: internet). Second, I stipulated that this was “research-lite.” Third, I made sure to give them a list of starter resources. Students did use images from various sites, as well as going out and finding their own. Stars of the show included museum collections, especially Penn’s collection of Aramaic incantation bowls.
Students, as you can see from the examples, rose to the occasion. The assignment proved flexible. The students split half-and-half into folks keen to examine a particular type of object – amulets, magic bowls, graffiti, and so on – and those interested in telling a specific story – about the legacy of Paul, the legend of Frumentius in Ethiopia, and so on. Most students subdivided a Word document into three columns per landscape page; at least one student made use of the trial version of Canva, a handy design tool with lots of templates and (at time of writing) a flexible free plan.
There is no escape from Zoom.
The Debrief
No first attempt is perfect, and there are a couple of things I noticed for tweaking in future. First, I would stipulate more explicitly that students think about a pamphlet that might belong in a museum space. In general, students who engaged specific objects more easily adapted to the format. A couple of students chose topics better suited to research papers and ended up with something more like a paper compressed into six panels. Second, if planning to move towards a pamphlet assignment, I think I’ll encourage students themselves to find real-world examples of the sort of thing we’re talking about. Finally, I made very few tech suggestions: the student design was at their initiative, mostly to make this low-stakes in the current high-stress, high-pressure situation. I do think, in retrospect, more direction in terms of recommended method might have helped those who struggled a little with the format to engage with more confidence.
You heard it here first: resurrecting fish just doesn’t make the headlines like it did back in the way.
Perhaps the most valuable thing to come out of all of this was an opportunity to share a collective sense of humour. The shift towards a more visual presentation format seems to have helped students relax a little. This is also an issue with academic writing more broadly. With a few noble exceptions, academic literature is often not very funny. Student papers even less so. For some reason, especially odd given the hilarity threaded through much of our late antique material, we tend not to laugh at our sources – or ourselves – nearly often enough in writing. When scholars get together, the ability to crack a joke at John Chrysostom’s expense or to quip about the oven of Akhnai marks you as a good egg. In the classroom, nobody regrets a giggle at the apostle Peter’s resurrection of a smoked fish. So, why deprive us of that in writing?
In any case, the lack of levity common in academic writing was nowhere to be found with these pamphlets. Perhaps the form shifted the assignment into a genre less alienated from the ability to crack a joke. Maybe the emphasis on display meant students paid more attention to the rhetoric and style of presentation – a lesson for reading ancient sources if there ever was one. Possibly, the fact the assignment was fun meant it offered a little relief from their other final assignments. In any case, the payoff of the assignment for me was a light-hearted grading session. There might be no stronger a recommendation for a pedagogical choice than this: if it makes you and your students laugh even as you understand something better together, especially right now, it might well be worth doing.
I endorse no museum that lacks adorable demonic stuffed animals.
Matthew Chalmers is currently Visiting Assistant Professor of Religion at Washington and Lee University and Deputy Editor of Late Antiquity at Ancient Jew Review (Twitter: @Matt_J_Chalmers).