Citing My Students: Links and Recs

[ajnabieh]

As a teacher, I'm always struggling to figure out good assignments that will cause my students to think, engage with the material, explore their own interests, and, hopefully, present me with papers that won't bore me out of my goddamned skull while I'm reading them. (In case you didn't know, most professors consider grading the single most awful thing we do for our paychecks. I don't know, I think scanning articles for uploading is worse; occasionally papers are interesting.)

This semester, I gave my students an annotated bibliography assignment. Twice during the semester, they have to find 10 sources having to do with Middle Eastern diasporic communities, write a properly-formatted bibliographic entry for them, and then a short paragraph about how the material relates to class. A source could be anything--an event, a blog post, a YouTube video, a book.

I got a huge number of interesting sources from the students in their first round of assignments. From my perspective, this assignment worked--the students learned (mostly) how to use Chicago style to cite sources (a big problem in my previous classes), they read and watched other interesting things about Middle Eastern diasporas, and now I have a bunch of cool recommendations to read for later. I'll have to ask the students if they liked it, but this one might be a keeper for future classes.

(Incidentally, my attempt to do response papers was a total failure, as most of the class simply hasn't turned them in. Folks who are/were in American universities and colleges as undergrads: are several short response papers (2-3 pages) a part of your experience of humanities and social science classes? What types? I'm mystified by the fact that my students don't seem to understand that they have to do them.)

Here are some of the highlights from the assignment. From my students' computers to yours!



El Rassi, Toufic. Arab in America. Last Gasp Publishers: 2008.

Two of my students reviewed this one, and so it immediately got added to my to-read pile. It's a graphic novel about being Arab in the post-9/11 period. I admit that I'm Graphic novels are a genre I like, so I'm looking forward to it.


El Haddad, Laila, “Al Jazeera English – Focus – Interview: Joe Sacco”, Al Jazeera English – AJE, January 18, 2010, http://english.aljazeera.net/focus/2010/01/201011783113578937.html

My student, Skanda, gave me permission to quote him, so this is what he said about Sacco's interview:

In saying that he doesn’t “believe in objectivity as it’s practiced in American journalism”, reporter and comic book writer Joe Sacco points to the manner in which Middle Eastern diasporas are reduced to faceless antagonists in the Western lens. He elaborates upon this in his most recent work, Footnotes from Gaza, where he charges American media with inundating the public with false representations of the Palestinians, configuring an entire people as terrorists with murdering Israelis as their only motive. Sacco’s goal in his work to portray his subjects as human beings, with motivations, a style of life and, most importantly, legitimate grievances. He writes from his own subjective position, capturing everyday life and how it comes to enter the political realm as opposed to giving a top down portrayal centered on policy. This perspective strengthens his work because it leaves him little room to “sugarcoat” the Palestinians; Sacco’s position on the ground in Gaza forces him to recognize that the “oppressed aren’t angels”. They too are culpable for wrongdoing within the conflict, but that does not negate their subordinate status. Sacco’s approach to recounting a narrative here is vital because it invokes the ethnographic methodology, which is grounded in face to face encounters with the subject, vital to restoring the humanity of Middle Eastern diasporas in the eyes of Westerners by overcoming entrenched prejudices.

I'm interested in the dialogue between literary/journalistic and ethnographic methods here; this is definitely something I should take up in my methodological work...

Al Jazeera. The Arab Street in New York. Part 1 and Part 2

These are a really amazing series of on-the-street interviews with Arab-Americans in Brooklyn. What I love about them is how much diversity you see--diversity of appearance, diversity of dress, diversity of religion, diversity of opinion. Nearly ever location I could identify is along Fifth Avenue in Bay Ridge--Balady Foods, the jewelry store, the Arab-American Association, outside the masjid. I'm particularly interested in the answers to the questions about Arab-Jewish relations in New York; every single one is positive. I wonder what responses you'd get in Borough Park...


Aloni, Udi. “Judith Butler: As a Jew, I was taught it was ethically imperative to speak up,” Haaretz Daily Newspaper Israel, Febuary 24, 2010, http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/spages/1152017.html.

A really interesting (and I think accessible) interview with Butler about her Jewishness and its relationship to her moral theory. Also interesting for the ways in which it suggests but doesn't state that she's following the boycott guidelines, in not doing any public appearances in Israel.


Alsultany, Evelyn. "Selling American Diversity and Muslim American Identity through Nonprofit Advertising Post-9/11." American Quarterly 59, no. 3 (2007): 593-622.

I haven't had a chance to read this article yet, but I like Alsultany's work in general. According to the abstract, she compares three different types of campaigns focusing on breaking down binaries between "Americans" and "Muslims" in the post-9/11 period. I'm not enamored of these campaigns--I think they do little to convince people who really think Arab and Muslim Americans are totally unassimilable, and I think it has a slight air of compulsory patriotism, and may go on to limit the ability of Arab and Muslim Americans to object, vocally, to policies that damage them. If anyone wants the PDF of the article, I'm happy to email it to you.

Comments

[ilyena_sylph]

Oh yeah.

I was absolutely sick of response papers by the time I graduated, but they started freshman year and didn't end until senior.

[ajnabieh]

That was my experience as an undergrad, too! Yet, somehow, I'm at the end of the semester, and like half the class hasn't turned in the required number of papers. Of course, I had four students not turn in the midterm assignment at all, sooooo...

[littlebutfierce]

What a cool assignment!

I had to do loads of response papers as an undergrad. I think I would enjoy them more now but at the time I think they kind of stressed me out slightly. (Though I wonder how much of me enjoying them more now would be because now there's this online culture I'm immersed in where it's fairly normal for people to post their own thoughts & critiques of works? So I'd think some students now, at least, who might be more familiar w/blogs & blogging would feel the same way, but maybe not.)

[ajnabieh]

I really like it, as a teacher. And it reminds me of one of my favorite assignments in grad school; for a course on visual politics, we had to assemble a portfolio of images around any them or themes, and then write annotations talking about the politics of them. It was a ton of fun, and really allowed a lot of independent, creative thinking.

Though I wonder how much of me enjoying them more now would be because now there's this online culture I'm immersed in where it's fairly normal for people to post their own thoughts & critiques of works? So I'd think some students now, at least, who might be more familiar w/blogs & blogging would feel the same way, but maybe not.

THE RANT I HAVE ON THIS SUBJECT IS EXTREME. I'm teaching an online class, and...I keep expecting my students to be at the level of discourse I expect from all the time I spend on the internet, which is alternately spent in fandom and on acablogs. AND YET, THEY ARE NOT THERE. I don't know what is going on with them, sometimes...

[littlebutfierce]

I keep... boggling, in a "wow, I feel old" kind of way, at how kids these days grow up w/so much stuff that would've made my whole adolescence. Like, okay, OBVIOUSLY there is still homophobia all over the place. But being a kid able to go on the internet & able to find queer support stuff & slash & all that kind of stuff? Being able to have access to a whole bunch of stuff that would reinforce the idea that there's more out there than the narrow confines of high school? Ohhhhh maybe I have a little bit of bitterness. My family was online fairly early: I was on Prodigy in high school & that helped a lot in terms of finding peers (who were into zines & Riot Grrrl, two things that defined my high school experience). But nothing compared to kids these days BLAH BLAH.

Wow, I can't believe I'm making comments of this nature, ha! Anyway, though, your experience shows that just cuz the intarwebs are out there doesn't mean that they are using it to hone their communication skills!

[ajnabieh]

I have been having a severe case of KIDS GET OFF MY LAWN lately. Spurred on by the fact that I heard someone in the subway talk about how everyone at her office was really old, there was this one girl, well, she guesses lady, and she's cool and all, but she's got a husband and a kid. ASDFKJASDFKLADSJ HAVING REPRODUCED DOES NOT MAKE ME A GEEZER, DOES IT?!?!?!?!

I had a remarkably happy queer adolescence, but it's really amazing how much more is out there for queer youth now. That makes me really happy, and occasionally jealous.

[yasaman]

I've had to do a lot of different kinds of response papers over four years at college. The majority of my grad student instructors had us write about 200-300 words every week in response to whatever reading we were supposed to do. For my Persian class, our response papers are 2-3 page little essays on whatever we just read. I almost always did the responses, and didn't find them too onerous. They were part of the requirement in order to get credit for the discussion section part of the class, and in heavily reading based courses, they were pretty essential in proving to the instructor that we actually did some portion of our reading. This semester, I don't have to do response papers, but we do have to post a question relating to the reading on the online forum every week before discussion section.

[ajnabieh]

Yeah, see, I thought doing 3 2-page papers over the semester was a pretty basic and easy assignment. It's an online class, so they also have to make some sort of short post in the discussion forum every week, but some of them are confused about the distinction between the two, or what they actually have to write.

When I teach f2f classes, I have the students write down discussion questions on a card at the beginning of class, and pass them up to me, so I can flip through them and use them in class, or answer any confusions they have. It's a pretty useful tactic, plus it saves me having to remember who was there and who wasn't...

[holyschist]

I didn't take a lot of humanities/social science classes, but response papers were definitely a part of them.

Heck, I had to do reading syntheses in my science classes on a regular basis (those were usually longer and less opinion-y). Basically, I had to write a lot in every class I took that wasn't a foreign language or some of the sciences (but not my major, which is a pretty writing-heavy science to teach), and those had massively time-consuming homework of other types.

By comparison, I've barely had to write at all in grad school (aside from my thesis), but my grad program is deeply broken in many ways, and low standards is one of them.

[ajnabieh]

I'm so glad this is not an assignment I apparently made up, or that only got assigned at my undergrad school! Because it struck me as so, you know, normal, to have the students not be remembering to turn things in is driving me up the wall.

[holyschist]

Even if it were, it doesn't matter what other classes do--they should "remember" to do the work you assign and hand it in.