"American Film: The Essentials"
English 191

An Orgy of Community Activities

• I started with an old-fashioned "open house," requiring students to come to my office during specified times the first week to insure that they had initial face-to-face and hand-to-hand contact with me and at least some other students who might also be there.  A "touch of the flesh" to symbolize community.
  

• I began each class with a "group hug" or a "group huddle," on the order of football teams on the sidelines just before kick-off.  I asked students to break the often impenetrable invisible plane between lecturer and audience in the lecture hall, come to the front, circle around me, have some visual contact with others, and establish a feeling of ownership for the whole room.

• Instead of (literally) speaking up to and shouting at the students from the podium deep in the pit of the auditorium, I stood on the waist-high writing-surface wall dividing the first row of seats from the stage, bringing me closer to and eye-level with most of the students, again signaling that the separation between "the speaker" and "the ones spoken to" was broken.  I was "in" the community.
  

• I used the iPod in rather conventional but undeniably useful fashion to off-load lectures and explanatory material (on the five eyes and nine legs, for instance), freeing class time for interaction.

• Almost every class, in order to have students feel the positive power, the palpable force of a big class when it acts together (65 unified voices can rattle windows), I led the "English 191 Chorus" in "song."  I copied high-quality short quotes from online postings of several identified-by-name students each class (making sure that everybody was included equally over time), passed out the sheets as if they were the "music," and had the class stand and, under my direction as maestro, read aloud together, in unison, with gusto -- in effect, "sing" -- the good words of their classmates (which we would then bounce off to discuss).

• Twice in the semester I arranged the "common bowl": on the way into class, students dropped some sort of small "gift" with their names attached into a large empty wastebasket by the door, and when departing they picked one out.  The idea was to encourage contact between strangers.

• Twice in the semester, during class time I sent the students, armed with coupons for freebies, out to popular nearby eating locations on campus with orders to fill those spaces with intellectual conversation, to experience talking in groups about serious matters in public like my Amtrack exemplars, perhaps engaging others there in the culture of conversation as well.

• In reverse fashion, but with similar intent, that is, to break down the classroom walls and to foster a larger culture of conversation on the campus itself, I used the iPod in what I thought was a more creative way -- to bring outsiders in to the course.  The idea was to show the students that "real people out there," especially people in their fields, not just English teachers in sound-proof classrooms, cared about the films we were studying, recognized their personal and cultural impact, and enjoyed engaging in intelligent conversation about them.  So I recruited twenty-some volunteers, went to their offices or work places, and recorded 5 -15 minute "cameo-casts" available to students on iTunes University.  Among the recruits who did cameo appearances in the course modeling intelligent conversation this way were our provost, a Chemical Engineer, who talked with me about Streetcar Named Desire; our dean, a geologist, whose favorite film is The Wild Bunch; and only the untimely death of her mother kept our president from offering comments on High Noon.

• I always had a half-dozen or so wiki's with colorful names (Techneek of the Week, Wee-Deetails, Prospecting, The Fun House, Fork in the Road, the Pooling Place, The Artful Dodger) operating where students would post, sometimes seriously, sometimes in jest, sometimes mandatorily, sometimes voluntarily.  For instance, in order to dramatize the rebel nature of the early Brando, the students pooled (in The Pooling Place, of course) 78 entries on the early 1950s that ranged from a YouTube video of Patti Page singing "How Much Is That Doggie in the Window," to a photo-spread on Levittown, to a look at the Doomsday clock, just two minutes from nuclear nightmare in 1953.  The wiki's provided a variety of spaces in which students actively composed "texts" for the course.

• We watched the films together, as they were meant to be seen, in the dark, prisoners of the big screen, surrounded by sound, feeling and often expressing collective emotion -- the group gasp of sorrow, shock, anger.  I wanted students to feel the shared sensibility that a powerful film can generate in a contained space, wanted them to participate in the occasional group emotional orgasm at that power.  In short, I wanted the class to experience the sense of being one while watching the films.  And so I resisted the "but, Gallagher, I can watch the DVD on my room computer between classes."
  

• We watched the films together at night, and to capture immediate and spontaneous reactions (rather than the more formal and "conscious" ones they would make, probably the next day, on the Good Conversation board using, say, the five eyes), I encouraged students to blog right away, before going to bed, while feelings were fresh -- and some even did so from laptops while watching the film.  The blogs, then, provided students with a space for sharing with the whole class that first buzz of response to a film that they might share with a smaller group leaving the theater.
  

• The purpose of a final "Good Conversation" assignment was to encourage the students to be missionaries for the culture of conversation.  They were to choose a film, find a partner or partners outside the class, watch the film with that person or those persons, talk and discuss as they watch, spend at least 1/2 hour in good conversation afterwards (using the five eyes as prompts), and report on that conversation to me.  My strong suggestion, though, was to use Skype or other new technological tools as means to hold that discussion with someone far from campus, and, surprisingly, about 20% of the class did so, mostly with parents, and, to be specific, mostly with mothers.

• The final assignment was the creation of a necessarily hastily designed and therefore somewhat rough class "Yearbook" on the web, with pictures we took with our cell phone cameras when others were not readily available, as a way of seeing us all together one last time as a community.  The pictures were accompanied by a short text relating to the course subject matter, usually from a Good Conversation board post, and students were encouraged to "sign" each other's yearbook with an audio response to the entry (recorded with my handy iPod again) as one last and lasting example of the culture of conversation we had created.