As a writer, I approached my first syllabus many years ago as more “to-do” list than work of imagination or meaning. My goal was to divide up the fourteen weeks of the semester into rational, discrete chunks. Once I did that, I soothed myself, it was only a matter of managing weeks, not wrestling an entire hairy, unruly, terrifying school term.
Why did I choose this approach? I thought there is enough unpredictability to go around in any given semester. There are the known unknowns, as one US Defense Secretary once said, and the unknown unknowns. What are the known unknowns? Fluctuating class sizes, when a formerly popular reading doesn’t resonate or when a student goes AWOL. And the unknown unknowns: hurricanes, campus unrest, unexpected illnesses and the like.
But I’ve modified my view recently, allowing more flexibility into my planning. Over time, I’ve learned that a good syllabus is more like a piece of writing than I realized. Not only does it (or should it) have imagination and a fair amount of reflexivity in these troubled times. Ideally, I’ve come to see, the syllabus should lead the class toward a shared set of meanings. By shared, I mean that I think of myself as a learner, too, coming to a new and hopefully interconnected set of learning goals with my students.
If I had to distill those meanings for one of my classes — Introduction to Human Rights — it would be that the development of human rights has been a centuries-long struggle that each generation grapples with and reshapes. A second take-away is that the rights story is largely about who gets to be human and when (peasants, slaves, women, LGBTQ, immigrants). But how that reflects each individual group of students changes depending on factors that come to the fore in the course of a class — not before it even begins, as I struggle to finalize a syllabus.
The third meaning I’ve glimpsed came to me most vividly — and caused me to throw away the syllabus entirely — for a LAMP class. The central question of the class was how the atrocities of the past shape our physical environment at Duke and what can we propose to reshape the bricks and mortar of the campus. The class, part of Bass Connections Brain and Society, followed on a more formal structure where I prepared a syllabus with readings on memorials and debates over how different societies address — or not — painful periods in their histories.
But then the “semester of no syllabus” started — a leap from the high-dive into how students would grapple with these questions and create the content they thought could reshape our lived space. Some classes felt a little like I imagine walking a high-wire — except with a mist obscuring the destination and exactly how many steps I had to take to reach it.
We did have the “wire” of concrete tasks. Students mapped the campus, so that we could see who is memorialized and where; we collected stories from the University Archives not only about Duke’s origins in the segregated South, but of firsts (first African-American to receive an undergraduate degree, first women engineers etc); and students created their own memorials, deciding on how certain figures or moments should be designed and where they should be placed.
There was a natural sorting that took place based on skills and interests. Some students gravitated to the archives while others found that artistic expression was the best way to contribute. Far from simply doing what was asked, students started to add elements to our list of goals that fit their idea of what they wanted to accomplish.
For instance, students decided they didn’t want to wait for the Spring 2018 report to show others what they’d done. For them, this class was transformative, permanently changing the way they look at campus. So a sub-group designed a virtual tour of the campus that includes a proposed statue of Carolina Barnes, a slave owned by the Dukes.
Unlike similar discussions at Yale, Brown and Georgetown, students insisted that we include not only Duke’s roots in slavery and the segregated south, but also examples of activism, like the push to unionize Duke workers and the creation of Student Action with Farmworkers.
One of our best moments was at a Family Day sponsored by Bass Connections. We had to think hard about how we could translate our work into a format that would be attractive to kids and their parents. It was the students who came up with the idea of coloring books with our proposed monuments, including a portrait of Duke architect Julian Abele.
At the Sunday event, as dozens of kids colored and stuck glitter and google eyes on Abele’s portrait, the students engaged in deep conversations with their parents on their work. I could actually see the students getting a little taller as they spoke — and realized that this material was not something they’d been told about and had to memorize, but something they helped create — and believed in.
Going without a syllabus — and putting students into the driver’s seat of the appropriate class — isn’t the least scary way to teach, I can say. But with the right subject matter, it can be among the most satisfying.
IMAGE CREDIT: Photo by Cory Bouthillette on Unsplash
ABOUT THE AUTHOR: Robin Kirk is the Faculty Co-Chair of the Executive Committee of the Duke Human Rights Center at the Franklin Humanities Institute and is a founding member of the Pauli Murray Project, an initiative of the center that seeks to use the legacy of this Durham daughter to examine the region’s past of slavery, segregation and continuing economic inequality. An author and human rights advocate, Kirk directs the Belfast program for DukeEngage, in partnership with Healing Through Remembering, an extensive cross-community project dealing with the legacy of past conflict and human rights. She directs Undergraduate Studies for Duke’s International Comparative Studies major, where she teaches, and is a lecturer in the Department of Cultural Anthropology.
