This challenge may be impossible…

As a student, I discovered that some professors are great lecturers: they will tell students everything they need to know about the reading in class! In fact, for someone like Kant, a good lecture might be far more comprehensible than the anything Kant ever wrote. So I learned NOT to read the book. And I got better grades than my friends who read, but checked out of class.

Fast-forward 20 years and I’m now a college professor. I know my students are inclined to be just as smart and lazy as I was, so I don’t lecture on assigned reading. We discuss assigned reading and students present their understanding of readings to the rest of the class, but I work very hard to avoid spoilers or do anything that will replace a student’s own reading.

But now I have to teach online. Asynchronously. With student loads that are WAY bigger than the bloated 20-30 person “seminar-style” classes that are so common at private liberal arts colleges.

So, how does a teacher guide students through at book—through (hopefully) engaging and (at least a little bit) entertaining videos— in a way that encourages engagement, that is encourages students to read, reflect, and respond rigorously without the classroom?

It isn’t so simply as assigning reading and asking students to write papers. Anyone who has ever read a book, watched a movie, or watched a TV show knows that while our first encounters with texts are fun, it is only after we have talked through stories with others—after we have gone through the process of considering the plots and characters, the imagery and tone, the camera angles and paragraph structures, the allusions and symbols and jokes and editing—that we really understand a text. As an online professor, if I lecture on all these things, students will come to see how the text works and appreciate its ideas and artistry (that is, if they listen to the lecture). But there is a good chance such lectures will at least short-circuit students’ own reflection on the text…and quite possibly replace reading the text itself!

My challenge this term, then, has been to create short 5 to 10-minute lectures for George Fox Digital’s “HUMA 205: Philosophy and Literature” that first frame each novel and then guide students through these texts in a way that helps students see important textual features they may have missed, models ethical reasoning in response to the moral dilemmas the texts sometimes present, and ultimately fosters students’ own reading and reflection.

In this post, you’ll find six short videos’ on Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale.

In two follow-up posts, i’ll share video’s on George Orwell’s 1984 and Colson Whitehead’s The Underground Railroad.

Watch the video’s and let me know via the comments below if I have met my challenge and enticed you to go and read the book?

grace & peace,

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