Back on May 12 I published a post commenting on my students collective volume, Addictive and Wonderful: Reading the Harry Potter Series (https://ddd.uab.cat/record/118225). Today, I’m announcing the publication of our second collective volume, Charming and Bewitching: Considering the Harry Potter Series (https://ddd.uab.cat/record/122987/).
The elective I taught last Spring, ‘Cultural Studies in English: The Case of Harry Potter’ has given me many satisfactions but also much work, as I decided to turn it as well into an experiment on teaching. I’m writing this post today with the aim of describing this experiment, in case it is useful for any colleague out there. I am repeating many of these innovations in my current elective subject (also fourth year), ‘Gender Studies (in English)’.
To begin with, I choose a handbook, on which I based my initial lectures: David Walton’s excellent Introducing Cultural Studies: Learning through Practice. I soon realised that there was no way I could write one or several exam questions to test my students’ reading of this ultra-rich volume. I asked them instead to produce their own exam question: read the book, select a topic, find a text related to it (not Harry Potter), e-mail me the question. On the day of the exam, they brought from home a printed page with the question, and if they wished so, a quotation to comment on. Then they wrote in class the 500-word argumentative essay planned at home. It worked beautifully, not just because, obviously, everyone passed, but most importantly because they learned to ask questions rather than simply answer them.
The short essays published in Addictive and Wonderful were not part of assessment for two reasons: a) I hadn’t planned to publish this before the course started; 2) I want students to learn that assessment is not everything and that it’s fine to produce ideas for free (I’m doing this here all the time). When I started reading the essays, the idea of the volume came to me as a sudden inspiration. I have just checked and, as happens, 492 persons have downloaded already this volume from its location at my university’s digital repository. I had no idea we could reach this kind of readership at all. Something else I have learned, then. This semester I’m repeating the experience, with a volume by my students on gender issues (currently at its very early stages).
The second volume Charming and Bewitching: Considering the Harry Potter Series, was clearer in my mind when I started teaching the subject but I think I miscalculated the effort it would entail from me. Not that I regret it, quite the opposite –once more, I’m trying the experiment again.
I offered my students a list of 50 topics, a wide-ranging panorama of Rowling’s series. I had no clear idea of the coherence the final volume might have but hoped for the best. My reasoning was that since I had to mark the papers anyway, I could turn my marking into preliminary editorial work, then use the corrected texts as the basis for a second round of editorial revisions before publication. I was quite sure from the beginning that I would not teach Harry Potter again, a decision I am going to maintain because there is no way I can reproduce the atmosphere generated by the happy convergence of a particular group of students and a particular group of guests. The volume would be a trace left for ever by that happy experience.
The papers were part of assessment and I awarded the corresponding marks. As it is my habitual practice, I asked for revisions in a handful of cases. Only one student among those who followed continuous assessment failed the subject, the rest passed but I decided to discard 5 of the 38 essays because they demanded a too extensive revision before publication. I was on the whole happy with the papers and awarded high marks.
The course was over by the end of June but I could not lay my hands onto the projected volume again until late August. This was good because texts need to cool down, if you know what I mean. When I took a second look, however, I almost gave up.
Even though I had provided my students with a template for their paper, thinking this would diminish my workload as an editor, and they had mostly used it well, I had to make the 33 final essays as homogeneous as possible in terms of editing. Luckily, I learned a few new tricks from Word which saved me plenty of time (like how to accept all revisions in the text). I spent anyway a whole week, Monday to Friday, working on the text. This included all aspects of text layout, including the cover, for which I had a wonderful illustration by the talented Genzoman.
In the preface I wrote that 85% of the text was my students, 15% mine. This is correct, I believe. Call me silly but I had not realised that the impression a student’s paper produces for the purposes of awarding it a grade has nothing to do with the impression it produces when you’re thinking of publication. I have by no means changed the nature of the papers but I have worked hard on the language, careful not too make it sound artificial for an undergrad. This has been a challenge: let it be as it is, but make it nicer. A little, yes, like applying a discrete layer of make-up.
What puzzled me enormously is that, once I saw the complete volume, it turned out to have much coherence. The essays are organised by students’ surname but –this must be yet another example of the magic haunting my Harry Potter course– they connect this way much better than in any other way I could have planned. I really think the volume is quite decent, a strange word, I know. I suppose other teachers have published similar volumes but the word that sums up how I feel is ‘proud’, very proud indeed. Whether this is a pioneering initiative or not, it doesn’t really matter.
Finally, without my university’s repository I may not have thought of publishing the volumes. I have my own professional website and I have published there plenty, yet I am convinced by now that the repository seems to work better. I wonder that people are downloading the volumes at all but it’s nice to see the count grow. I’ll be very happy if both Addictive and Wonderful and Charming and Bewitching reach 500 downloads.
I forget: this is as low-cost as it can be, and it is still a book. I have spent no money at all, just my own personal work and my students’. This, I believe, is how knowledge should flow: we have the instruments to generate content for the internet, and we must use them.
I hope this experience encourages and inspires other colleagues to do the same, in whatever courses they teach. And students as well.
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