In a post some time ago, Steve asked about whether or not the the composition of our students may have something to do with class dynamics. A very interesting question, indeed, and I’d like to address this.
Our students are majoring in a wide variety of disciplines (Anthropology, Biology, Latin, Italian Studies, Political Science, et al.), but most are either double-majoring in one of the three concentrations in Classics or Italian Studies. The course has 4 sophomores, 8 juniors, and 12 seniors. I’m not sure how we achieved such an interesting distribution of levels (all divisible by 4), but the course has a fairly high level of concentration of upper division students.
I would like to work on the dynamic in our course a little more–to draw their voices into the daily dialogues–esp. on Wed., since Mondays we tend to introduce the topic in a broader comparative way, and on Wed. we pursue more detailed lines of inquiry. Participation is interestingly erratic; modelling dialogues seems to be effective in terms of getting the students to prepare and perform interactions with each other, but it is harder to pull in other voices during the average class period. I don’t think this is because the students aren’t thinking or interested–but, the structure of what we do may be a damper on other kinds of interactions.
Interaction on the course blog, though, has far exceeded my expectations.
