Global College
17.3180/8-001The Making of Peace & War in Literatures
Experimental, Interdisciplinary Course offered by Debbie Schnitzer and Kathleen Venema during the 2006-07 Academic Year.
Course Description:
This course evolves out of our shared interest in the diverse, intersecting communities that university students engage in but rarely see reflected in academic classrooms. The course focuses on the tradition of literary and cultural representation of conflict, both the extensive tradition of war literature and the less well-known body of literature that examines peace as something other than the absence of war. It engages a variety of forms including children literatures, documentary films, visual art and popular theatre. Theoretical perspectives will engage representations of violence, death, justice and hope in relation to gender, ethnicity, nation, culture, creative identities, colonialism, imperialism, memory and mythology. Throughout, the course explores the potential of the university as a site of peace-making.
Specific components include informal lectures and discussions, explorations of diverse modes of inquiry, discovery and analysis as practiced within a range of learning traditions, and a practicum component. The discovery traditions may include learning circles, meditation, body-based healing, Iyengar yoga, and responsible resource practices. The practicum requires that all course participants work within existing community-based projects focused on social justice and activism involving adult and family literacy, peace work, environmental issues, and Aboriginal, immigrant, and refugee rights. We hope to offer this course during in 2008.
Principles of the course:
We base the course on a set of principles that we expect will themselves evolve as the course develops, though currently they are five:
(1) first, we consider as a highest value the interdependence of grassroots, arts-based, and scholarly cultures, the research that these cultures produce, and the resources they offer; we are eager, therefore, to generate and foster local and global partnerships
(2 = 1) we are equally committed to creating an environment in which diverse learning styles, experiences, orientations, political views, cultural norms, and cultural belief systems are welcomed and respected
(3) we are, relatedly, committed to developing the curriculum in partnership with our students, which will include inviting our students to consider and experiment with multiple modes of assessment, including self-evaluation, group evaluation, contracting, prior learning, and the generation of learning portfolios; we are, by the same token, committed to a process of ongoing self-critique and revision as we learn from our students and from one another
(4) we are also unabashedly biased in favour of integrating theory and practice and seek to develop the course according to a model best described as reflection-action-reflection
(5) we are, finally, committed to sharing the knowledge that we gain from the experience of this course, both within our own learning communities and within the communities with which we partner; we look forward to developing, with our students, various ways to document and archive the experience of the course, possibly through a student-run blog, a student-produced video, and/or a variety of “copyleft” opportunities