By Jennifer Burek Pierce and Micah Bateman
[ Alex Robbins for The Chronicle Review ]
Thus began a semester in which our teaching and learning roles alternated with the day of the week. I taught our graduate seminar in the “History of Readers and Reading,” while Micah moderated online conversations in the MOOC created by the International Writing Program and two university faculty members. Our quite separate enthusiasm for poetry turned into mild trepidation before the overwhelming wonder of 2,000 voices pulled us into conversations with each other and with the rest of the students. Unbeknownst to each other, we both adopted the mantra “What would Whitman do?” to guide us.
MB: In preparing for the MOOC, I tried to imagine the ideal student. The open nature of MOOCs posits one: an eager student who doesn’t have access, whether because of money or geography, to college. Like Whitman himself, our student would be an autodidact, a hungry, undisciplined, self-taught savant. Or in high school or the military, or a stay-at-home parent, a widow, a person who was looking for something and would find it in poetry.
As a teaching assistant, that was a student I thought I could handle. After all, I had a shiny new M.F.A. from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and had taught parts of “Song of Myself” in an upper-level undergraduate English course. Could I moderate discussion of Whitman for some retirees and high-school students? No sweat.
[ Full article available at The Chronicle of Higher Education: http://chronicle.com/article/Trading-Places/150985/ ]
