I like closure.  And I left something unclosed.

In the October 2006 issue of Lehigh Lab Notes, still in the saddle as Lehigh Lab Fellow, I offered a preliminary look at "American Film: The Essentials," a new, seventy-five student, introductory, non-major course I was teaching as part of Greg Reihman's ITaLLIC Project. In "A Fresh Look at Large Classes," I asked what I thought was an intriguing question: are there good reasons -- educational, intellectual reasons -- for bringing large groups of students together?  I wondered what would happen if we turned our present situation around -- that is, from accepting the fact that we must have large classes (for economy, efficiency, and the like) and finding ways to improve them (clickers, buzz groups, and the like) to actively developing large classes because there is "intellectual profit" in them for our students.

What "intellectual profit" might there be in consolidating large groups of students?  My provisional answer was diversity -- diversity of knowledge, background, culture, experience, skills, styles, visions, and so forth.  I wondered if we weren't wasting the opportunity provided by the large lecture course if we didn't engage that large diversity somehow on some level.  Well, you can read more about my preliminary wonderings in the "Fresh Look" article.  In short, armed with a combination of old-fashioned practices and what we would now call Web 2.0 technologies, in a course with units on Brando and the Western, I did a full-frontal assault on the almost inevitable student anonymity, depersonalization, and passivity of many traditionally organized large classes.  The result can only be called an orgy of community activities aimed at producing a culture of conversation -- activities, which, however, since health problems intervened, I never got a chance to report on.  So, herewith, I pay my debt to closure.

• 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 face-to-face contact with others, and establish a feeling of ownership for the whole room.

• Instead of (literally) speaking up to and almost shouting at the students from the podium deep in the pit of coliseum-like Sinclair 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.  We were "together."
  

• I used the iPod in rather conventional but undeniably useful fashion to off-load lectures and explanatory material --  especially on the procedures for posting on the discussion board, which I seductively re-titled the Good Conversation board -- freeing class time for interaction.

• The heart of the course was continual participation on the Good Conversation board in changing groups (that I enabled to find each other in class) utilizing a strategy to improve discussion made up of what I call the "five eyes" with which to begin posting and the "nine legs" to keep a conversation moving.
  

• Almost every class, in order to have students feel the positive power, the palpable force of a big class when it acts together (75 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 The Cup and the Hawk's Nest with orders to fill those spaces with intellectual conversation, to experience talking in groups about serious matters in public, perhaps engaging others -- non-class members -- 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 provost El Aasser and dean Meltzer.  Only the untimely death of her mother kept president Gast from participating as well.

• 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), 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 we had studied, 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, and report on that conversation to me.  My strong suggestion, though, was to use Skype, a blog, a video conference--any other new technological tool-- 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.  One student partnered with a brother serving in Iraq.
  

• The final assignment was the creation of a 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.

Like any orgy worth its salt, "American Film: The Essentials" encouraged students to be radically and playfully participatory among themselves as well as utilizing new social tools both to take their conversation out and to bring outside conversation in. In final surveys 75% of the students said they learned more than in their other large classes, 86% thought the class achieved a sense of community, and 90% affirmed the presence of a culture of conversation. One student even developed the culture of conversation idea into an ongoing project that won him a Young Entrepreneur award the following semester! The various strategies and tools in the course maximized interaction, in effect, normalized interaction in an educational environment usually hostile to it.  I must say that my experience made me radiantly optimistic that we have the means to transform the culture of large classes and to tap the latent pool of valuable diversity there.