By Mira Sucharov, Associate Professor, Department of Political Science
Part of the job of higher education is getting students to shift from being consumers of knowledge to producers of it. The syllabus, or course outline, is one way in which we provide students with information and perspectives we expect them to master. But what happens when we give students the opportunity to create the syllabus themselves?
For the last couple of years, I’ve been doing just that in my fourth-year seminar on graphic novels and political identity. I assign the list of novels — one per week. And then, each week, one or two students are responsible for assigning auxiliary reading to their classmates. In selecting these articles — one or two journal articles and one or two op-eds — the students are required to extract themes — or perhaps comparative cases — for discussion.
In revealing the breadth of connections made, and the ability for students to hit on cross-disciplinary work that can animate the source material, the results have been amazing.
For the Holocaust memoir Maus by Art Spiegelman, students assigned works on second-generation survivor attempts to erode the collective silence of their parents. Dropsie Avenue, an early graphic novel about neighbourhood transitions, led students to assign a critical grappling with Jane Jacobs’ s urban planning theory. Alison Bechdel’s Fun Home sparked a discussion of Judith Butler’s writings on gender performance.
A graphic novel on contemporary Israel led students to assign a scholarly work on how conflict can constitute individual identity. A novel on the author’s experience with bipolar disorder sparked students to share a clinical study about how nostalgic feelings can mitigate the negative tendency to stigmatize those with mental illness. And for a graphic novel on the subject of Hurricane Katrina, in which the prized comic book collection of one of the characters was destroyed, students led their peers farther afield — specifically to investigate the insidious Nazi-era practice of identity-stripping by looting everyday objects in Jewish households.
Having students create the syllabus enables them to link a creative work to higher-order analytical thinking; reveals that when it comes to learning and discovery, the idea that there is a single scholarly “canon” might be overly limiting; and most importantly, instills in students confidence in their own voice as shapers of the scholarly conversation.