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Friday, May 17, 2013

Class project

I had a great idea for a class project, but couldn't execute it in time. The results are acceptable but not great. I will repeat the experiment next semester.

Here is the idea: the final project is a class project, an anthology of some sort. Students are graded by their individual contributions to it.

Instead of each student working in isolation, and nobody seeing anyone's work, we have a process in which students get edited by other students, and everyone knows who is pulling their weight.

So the project for next semester will be:

Contemporary Literature in Spanish: An Experiment in Translation

The topic of the course is translation, so the students will translate. The classroom will be flipped, except for a few days when I will lecture very formally.

Each student will have an author being translated. I suggest poetry and very short short-short stories.

The students not translating will be writing an introduction.

Three students will be editors. One student will be general editor directly under my supervision.

I want the weaker and the mediocre students to see what good work looks like. The best role model is a student who is at the same level course-wise but superior. I want the strong students to see what I have to go through in reading student work.

It is awkward that the introduction has to be in Spanish, since the target of translation is someone who doesn't know Spanish. So I am conceiving of the implicit audience as other Spanish majors. The next time the course is given there will be a model of what is expected.

1 comment:

Clarissa said...

This is a phenomenal idea. I'm usually wary of group projects but this one sounds very useful on a variety of levels.