I have published this week not one but TWO books gathering works written by my students. As I have been narrating here, I started publishing students’ work back in 2013-14, when I edited two volumes on Harry Potter. I became then hooked on project-oriented teaching for BA and MA subjects, mostly electives, and these new two books are my thirteenth and fourteenth projects. You can see the complete list here. And download any volume you like for free, adding thus to the more than 54000 downloads the first twelve books have generated.
I grant that walking second-language students through the process of writing minimally publishable texts in English is not easy, but after so many years it seems I more or less know what I’m doing. An indispensable part of the process is providing students with sample exercises that they can imitate and that give them a very clear idea of what I need from them. I usually include the sample texts in the corresponding volumes, for my students to see that the book we write together also matters to me as a scholar, not just as a teacher. If I have time, I write as many essays as they contribute, though lately I’ve been a bit lazy in that regard.
I call the publications ‘books’ with good reason because they are very extensive. Properly speaking, they are e-books, as I publish them in the digital repository of my university as .pdf, .mobi and .epub files, and they don’t have a print edition. But, then, this happens with many books today. Of the fourteen books, five have been written by MA students and nine by BA students, both in English Studies degrees. The topics vary (please, see the list), but I focus mostly on contemporary literature, cinema and TV.
The most successful volume is so far Reading SF Short Fiction: 50 Titles (2016) with more than 12000 downloads. I have no idea why Songs of Survival: Men in 21st Century Popular Music has only interested 232 potential readers. I must clarify that apart from announcing the publication to the national English Studies association AEDEAN through our mailing list, and posting on Twitter and now on Bluesky when they are available, I do nothing to promote the books. I trust the student authors use their own social media and contacts to generate more downloads. UAB’s DDD allows to see in the statistics page for each publication where they have been being downloaded, and it pleases me to see that the fourteen books have reached an international audience.
It’s now time to comment on the two books I’m publicizing here. I’ll begin with the book by the MA students, Body and Gender in 21st Century Miniseries. This corresponds to work done in the MA elective ‘Body and Gender in Narrative’, which I have started teaching this past semester. This is a 5 ECTS subject in principle designed for 12-15 students. In the end, 17 registered though I’m sorry to say that two did not finish the course work.
I am not of a theoretical disposition and tend to focus my subjects on textual analysis. This academic year I wanted to do research with the students on SF novels written by women, having written myself a book on SF and men, but the MA coordinator asked me to focus on audiovisual texts. Having taught cinema last year (see Beautiful Vessels: Children and Gender in Anglophone Cinema) I decided to focus on the very much neglected miniseries. The inspiration came from watching the amazingly accomplished miniseries Shōgun and Fosse/Verdon; actually I chose the latter for my own essay. I drew a list of about 50 outstanding 21st century miniseries checking similar lists online, and adding my own recollections and preferences. I then assigned two of these series randomly to each student, and asked them to provide a third title.
The classes consisted of three ten-minute presentations by the students of their corresponding miniseries followed by debate until completing the 80 minutes of each session. The presentations acted as drafts for the 2000-word essays which students submitted two weeks later. I must explain that students propose their final mark on the basis of a rubric and I don’t grade their work (I just validate or not their proposed final mark). If the essay is not apt for publication, I return it and ask for a second version. This usually happens in about one third of the cases, which means that I have corrected and edited about sixty essays (120000 words). The final book has 46 essays and is about 100000 words long.
I have no room here to comment on the 46 miniseries represented in the book (please, download it!), but I will clarify two points. One is that the focus falls, as you can see from the title, on how body and gender are dealt with in each series. The book does not offer Wikipedia-style entries, but textual analysis focused on these two concepts, with bibliography (mostly reviews, interviews, and, yes, academic articles and chapters). Having said that, since the miniseries represented are quite well-known, the book also acts as a guide for anyone interested in watching very good examples of this type of narrative. Something we have discovered is that, sadly, some of these excellent miniseries are now almost impossible to find. They have not been edited in BluRay and the streaming platforms do not archive them. The platforms pay taxes depending on the value of their catalogue, so they often shed remorselessly a good number of films, miniseries and series to keep afloat.
Funnily, although the students did a very good job in their presentations and essays, we did not manage to reach clear conclusions. My general impression is that the quality of the miniseries as audiovisual narratives is very high, but they do not follow a specific body and gender discourse. Or at least, not one that goes beyond the heteronormative, only occasionally. The miniseries are, in short, less woke than right-wing critics of current TV suppose and not as liberal as should be expected from 21st century television and platforms. Most miniseries we analysed are US productions, with just a handful from the UK, and a reason for this common middle-ground might be related to US business practices. The model in which TV was dominated by big national channels (ABC, CBS, NBC) and, later, cable TV, seems to have produced more daring narrative than the current platforms (Netflix was launched in 2007 as a streaming service). UK’s BBC is quite another case, as it appears to be ideologically more progressive.
The other book, Reviewing Contemporary Anglophone Fiction and Nonfiction, gathers together 106 book reviews (800-1000 words each). These correspond to novels of all types and to nonfiction published in English between 1990 and 2023. The volume is the result of the work carried out by students in the new fourth-year compulsory subject ‘Contemporary Anglophone Literature’ in our BA in English Studies. In this subject, I assigned to each student a set of four books (I mean that each student read books no other classmate read): a) a literary UK or US novel; b) a literary novel in English not from these two countries; c) a novel in a popular genre; d) a non-fiction volume. I subdivided the sessions in two parts: a 40-minute lecture followed by a 40-minute interaction session, in which students spoke to 3-5 classmates about the books they were reading. There were 21 interactive sessions in total, and students had between 62 and 84 conversations with classmates (a total of 38 students registered). In the final tutorial, I asked students to comment on the ten books they most would like to read apart from the four books they had been assigned, on the basis of their classmates’ recommendations.
I have taught students to write reviews of their four assigned books. My error was that I assumed they knew what a review was, and that they used GoodReads all the time, but that was not the case at all . I read very good reviews from magazines and newspapers with them, and we used class time to write a review together, but even so, things were not easy particularly for the students whose first review was for a nonfiction book. In the end, everyone passed the subject. I marked 152 reviews, of which 106 ended in the book, with only two students failing to produce at least one publishable review. My impression is that the reviews were all of their authorship, though I have no doubt that in some cases they used AI, not quite ChatGPT but perhaps Grammarly. Before publication I asked them to please withdraw the reviews which were not their own, promising I would not alter the final mark, but they all kept mum.
As in the case of the book on miniseries, Reviewing Contemporary Anglophone Fiction and Nonfiction is intended to be a guide, in this case to the very rich 1990-2023 period. Since students are no longer buying handbooks and introductions, I have not found any guide to the period; the existing volumes, besides, only cover the literary novel and I wanted my subject and the book to be far more inclusive, not only mixing UK, USA, and transnational fiction but also embracing the popular genres and the always neglected nonfiction. I don’t know what I’ll do next year, however. I might withdraw from the reading lists the books already reviewed, or I might publish them in a second volume. I need to think hard about how to progress.
As a teacher I couldn’t be happier today. I simply love the two volumes, and I’m very proud of my students’ work. I hope they are also satisfied and happy to have collaborated with their peers. To, precisely, my peers out there, let me stress once more that there is a small step between marking lots of exercises nobody else sees and students don’t find useful, and using project-oriented teaching, always being careful to provide samples and assigning work on an individual basis. I could have chosen a few miniseries and a few books and base the two subjects on them, having everyone see and read the same, but my students have been exposed from a much longer corpus, and have interacted far more intensely among them than if they had just listened to me lecturing.
I know my method works best with contemporary texts, but it can be applied to very many subjects in different disciplines, I’m sure of that. Please, accept the challenge to do so…