What I wanted students to learn

Approaches to American Studies/Selected Topics in American Literature: Work in Youngstown is an upper-division, interdisciplinary course serving English and American Studies majors and fulfilling general education requirements for students from other fields. The course was originally created in 1999, in collaboration with Dr. John Russo, with whom I was writing a book about work in Youngstown. Since 1999, the course has been taught three times, always with mixed audiences but also always with one group predominating. In the first iteration, most of the students were business majors, because the course was cross-listed with a special topics course "Labor Studies Seminar." In the second round, we taught a small class at the union hall for United Steelworkers of America Local 1375, and most of the students were current or retired steelworkers. This round would serve mostly English and other humanities majors, many of whom were also planning to become secondary school teachers, and for the first time, I would teach the course alone. 

The basic course goals changed little over the three years, though they were more clearly framed (revision is a wonderful thing in teaching as well as in writing). My research on students' learning in interdisciplinary courses also affected the process of course development, the course structure, and the specific teaching strategies employed. My primary intentions in this course are to help students 

• develop awareness of the centrality of negotiation and conflict in American culture;
• understand that work and class are important issues in identity and conflict in the U.S.
• develop and practice strategies for using materials and insights from multiple fields to complete their own analysis of cultural negotiations related to work and class. 

First, the idea that negotiation of conflict is central to American culture emerges out of contemporary critical and social theory, especially the influence of what might be called "small m marxism," feminism, and multicultural approaches to the study of American culture. All of these emphasize not only the diversity of American culture but the fact that diversity involves constant struggle over power, recognition, and the freedom of thought and action. I think that many of my students, most of whom come from the primarily working-class, socially conservative local community, are uncomfortable with conflict, so I expect some resistance to this idea. Yet I also believe that if they can learn to recognize the negotiations involved in most events, texts, places, and interactions, then they will be more critical participants in American civic life, and they will be more powerful actors in their own lives. 

I approach this concept by defining literature and other texts as part of a cultural conversation, in which text creators are stakeholders in the culture and have reasons to want to "talk" with others. Thus, one of the stated goals of the course is that students should gain understanding that "literature exists within a cultural framework, not as something separate from its culture but rather as a set of texts that are intimately involved with culture." 

Second, I see the role of work and class as central, in part because of my grounding in working-class studies. I do not subscribe to a traditional marxist view of this, which would suggest that work and class are THE central elements. Rather, I see them as part of a complex matrix of issues, behaviors, and social structures that frame American culture. My students have not generally thought much about class, and their ideas about work are shaped by their sense of college as a stepping stone to "good work," which usually means good pay or better social status. 

On an affective level, I want them to think about what "good work" might mean besides money. On an intellectual level, I want them to become aware of the history of work and conflicts related to it, including class conflict and consciousness, which can make them more critical participants in their own economic lives. I want them to gain appreciation and awareness of their own family histories, but to see these histories not as idiosyncratic but as part of larger social patterns from specific times and places. By emphasizing work in Youngstown, I hope to help students gain greater appreciation for and understanding of their own community, which is often denigrated in local and national press, and about which many of them have very mixed feelings. So another stated goal for the course is for students to understand how "In American culture, and specifically in the Youngstown area, work and class help to form individual and community identity but are also sources of conflict within the community." 
 
 

Third, I emphasize interdisciplinary process for several reasons. The purpose of the course for American Studies majors is to help them develop a set of skills and strategies that they can bring into their work on senior projects. They need to know how to work with different kinds of materials and methods and how to combine and interlace them effectively. For students with single discipline majors, almost regardless of which field they claim as their home base, interdisciplinary experience can clarify their understanding of their own disciplines, in part because our discussions will address the very idea of what defines a discipline.

Yet I also believe that having a good interdisciplinary experience gives students in all fields flexibility and insight that they might not otherwise have. In part, it simply helps them become conscious that disciplines are grounded not only in content but also in methods and theories. The third course goal, then, is for students to recognize that "Interdisciplinary analysis can yield rich, complex insights into representations, including literary texts, and into the processes of identity formation, cultural negotiation, and social change." Behind this rather theoretical statement is the hope that students will not only learn to understand WHY interdisciplinary approaches are useful but also learn HOW to use them.
 

The role of students' prior learning

In many of the conversations I've had with colleagues about teaching and learning, a key issue has been students' prior knowledge, the understandings, assumptions, and practices they bring into a course from previous educational experiences. 

Most of the time, prior knowledge is seen as a problem. Students are seen as having acquired bad habits, what Sam Wineburg calls "schoolish behavior," often marked by passivity and the expectation that being a student isn't about learning but about completing the requirements laid out by the instructor and demonstrating that one has memorized (as opposed to having understood) the right data. Students are seen as having a variety of misconceptions, beliefs and models that are simply inaccurate but often deeply ingrained.

In more benign visions, and this is an especially important concern for interdisciplinary learning, students are seen as having learned how to do things in one way. Thus, English majors may have learned very well how to write a character analysis or how to read a text as a reflection of the author's biography, while they may struggle when asked to read a map as a text. 

In Work in Youngstown, most of the students were juniors and seniors, and only a few had significant previous experience in interdisciplinary courses. Most had experience interpreting texts and some basic historical knowledge, and some had experience with and knowledge of local history and/or thinking critically about work. But because the course would enroll not only English and American Studies majors but also students from other departments - Art, Political Science, Education, even Chemistry - students' experiences would be so diverse that I needed to be cautious about assuming too much expertise even in something as seemingly straightforward as analyzing a literary text.

At the same time, I have always been skeptical of the notion that students' prior knowledge is necessarily a problem. While some kinds of prior knowledge can obstruct new learning, prior knowledge also forms the foundation on which new learning occurs. And, in this course especially, prior knowledge could be a useful resource. Indeed, even though most of my students were significantly younger than I was, they had lived in the Youngstown area much longer and knew it in ways that I couldn't.

Because of this, I deliberately sought to make use of the local aspect of the course. Students began the course with some knowledge of, experience with, and connection to the local community. All but a very few of the students in the class grew up within 50 miles of downtown Youngstown, and many had relatives whose personal histories fit clearly within the local and national histories we were studying. While students' attitudes about Youngstown varied widely, none was indifferent. Their emotional and intellectual experience shaped their responses to the course, in most cases increasing their interest and ensuring that they began the class with a sense of the importance of what we were studying. 

Moreover, teaching a course about local history and culture meant that we could use not only published materials and on-line resources, but material and human resources available on and off campus, ranging from a large collection of local oral histories in the university library to the Youngstown Historical Center for Industry and Labor to students' own families and their day-to-day experience living and working in the Youngstown area. This brought in sources of information about students' experiences that they had not yet explored, including very immediate ones such as conversations with their parents. But again, prior knowledge made this possible. Students knew people, and they knew their way around town, and this was immensely helpful to them. 
 
 

Strategies to help students learn

In this course, I want to test three specific strategies for helping students gain deeper understanding of course content and interdisciplinarity:

1. Develop and make extensive, repeated use of a clear tool for analyzing texts

Because so much of this course is grounded in text analysis, and because I wanted all of our discussions of text to focus not only on the elements of the text but on how it fit into larger cultural negotiations, we developed and applied a 5-part rubric to almost every text we examined: 
• Intent: If we think of texts as part of a cultural conversation, what did this text's creator want to say, and why?
• Use: How would the audience for this text make use of it? What did they want from it?
• Memory: How does the text fit in with its audience's memory and associations? Or, to put in another way, what might the audience bring to the text?
• Signs: How do the images, sounds, language, and story of this text work?
• Structure: How does the text's organization - its order, arrangement, composition - work?

2. Present and discuss models of interdisciplinarity 

To achieve this, I developed a rough version of a website called "Imagining Interdisciplinarity" that included concept maps, definitions, and examples. I also planned to spend several class sessions discussing interdisciplinary theory and methods. 

This goal is the one I fulfilled the least, both in terms of classroom time and in terms of effectiveness. I devoted several class sessions to discussing theory, but these were not enough. I had hoped that the "Imagining Interdisciplinarity" website would help students with the concept, but because we didn't use it extensively in class, I'm not sure that it helped students. Down the line, I hope to revamp and strengthen the website and use it more extensively.

3. Lead students into interdisciplinary analysis slowly and incrementally

I developed a three-paper assignment sequence that moved from the most familiar activity (for most of my students) of analyzing a single written text to the more complex task of identifying links between texts of different kinds to the most complex activity of integrating texts with historical context.

This was the most successful aspect of the course. My own observations of students' work and their reports on their learning confirmed that they found the incremental approach very helpful, even though the process sometimes left students unsure about what they were doing. For a fuller discussion of my evaluation of this element of the course, see the portfolio section on Incremental Learning.