Teaching Philosophy - the Principle of Connection in Action

One exercise I use for any level of learning is called “How Do You Haiku?” Students are paired or grouped in three; I ask them to compose a haiku out loud to one another or to type it out in real time in a Google Doc. The idea is to (re)familiarize themselves with the popular poetic form, but more importantly, to experience writing as interactive, improvisational, and iterative. It’s okay to make mistakes. It’s fun to try again. These haiku are then published, with students’ permission, on a class Twitter account, where haiku fit wonderfully within the social media platform’s character limit. This assignment in particular reminds graduate students—who may be overly trained to view writing as a lengthy, solitary act demonstrating their individual talents—to open up their process to collaboration and spontaneity, to break open their sometimes calcified ideas and intentions. 

My favorite final assignment in intermediate to advanced courses is “And What About You?”, alternatively “A Form of One’s Own” or “FOO”—this involves students inventing their own literary forms, often by drawing on and remixing components of forms covered in the course, sometimes by reverse-engineering one of their own pieces to arrive at a set of key elements. These new forms usually require expanding or subverting what typically is called “poetic” or “literary.” We discuss how their invented forms might connect with their campus, local, and online activism. What about a poem written in collaboration with members of a community center? How about a personal essay documenting a graduate student protest? My graduate students tend to be already inventing and writing in their own glorious forms, so with them I dive into more advanced conversations about the literary traditions they are writing into or against, the social movements they are working alongside. 

Here are just a few of my students’ brilliant inventions: “the extended sonnet” (in which at one point the vastness of outer space must be mentioned); “the gushi” (from the Mandarin term for story, this form combines aspects of Chinese and Western storytelling); “the karaoke” (ekphrastic poem that transforms lyrics from a love song). Students then write a final piece in a classmate’s invented form. The way my courses end is always celebratory: presentations on these astonishing new forms; a reading that features pieces in these forms (a public event, if all students consent); posting quotes from these pieces on our class Twitter. And I ask my students all the time for their permission to share their astonishing new forms with other classes as well as at panels, readings, and other gatherings.