The Liquid Syllabus: Cultivating Student Agency

Reconceptualizing my syllabus, discarding the contractual document outlining assignments, policies, and penalties, in favor of a liquid syllabus designed in Story Maps transformed student learning.

“Black Girlhood in French Cinema” is a seminar course that examines the entanglement of race, gender, and age through the representation of Black girl protagonists in French films. Two core questions underlie our class discussions for the semester: 1) What place have Black girls historically occupied in the construction of the French Republic? 2) How are they represented in contemporary visual media? From coming-of-age stories in Parisian suburbs to narratives of migration from former colonies, the course illuminates how filmmakers have imagined and represented the joys and pains of Black girlhood in the City of Light.

In my literature courses over the years, I have found that students can struggle quite a bit with close reading and analysis, and they often fall back on plot, relying on the action of the story to propel their interpretation of a given work. Unsure how to guide them towards more generative readings that dwell on how writers use language to make meaning, a course focused on film seemed like a promising way to focus students’ attention on the visual and the aesthetic, on art and craft beyond plot and action. My first attempt at teaching Black Girlhood was not terribly successful. My students seemed to watch films the same way they read books: to find out what happens and why.  

I applied to the Bacca LAMP fellowship to try to address this problem. One of our first tasks as Bacca fellows was to write a story spine describing what we hoped to achieve. Mine is a testament to my initial conviction that the solution to my pedagogical problem lay in more creative assignment prompts and clearer rubrics:

Once upon a time, my students wrote 3-5-page reflection papers about a course film in which they mostly summarized the plot.

And every day I would wonder how to move them from answering the question “what happened and why?” to exploring “why is this important and how does the film signal to you that it is important?”

Until one day I asked them to make a 3-5-minute video in which they react to a 3-5-minute extract from a film.

And because of that they told me how they felt and how the film made them feel what they felt.

And because of that they told me how the film was eliciting thought and feeling in its characters and its viewers.

Until finally cinematography outweighed plot.

And from that day on…something something close viewing.

I had identified my ideal progression through the Black Girlhood course, and by extension through the Bacca fellowship. I would spend my time as a fellow crafting an assignment in a medium that mirrored the primary source, and by having students immerse themselves not just in the content but also in the process of producing that content, I would somehow bring them closer to the desired practice of close viewing and analysis. But therein lay the rub. The end of this imagined pathway was unclear to me, suspended in the ellipsis that signaled my own inability to clearly articulate for myself how one gets from assignment to desired learning outcome.

I spent most of the first semester of the fellowship sitting in the discomfort of the ellipsis, thinking with Nan Mulleneaux’s creative prompts for our discussions, and, most importantly, listening to the other fellows in my cohort. I was inspired by the boldness of Lisa Mershcel’s forays into AI-use in foreign language teaching; the playfulness of Elaine Guevara’s boardgame to teach evolution; and the initially disconcerting but ultimately very generative flexibility of David Landes’ course. Might it be that the answer to my problem lay, not in more rigidly crafted assignments and rubrics, but rather in remaking my course entirely be to bold, playful, and flexible? And goodness, what would that even look like?

When in doubt, begin at the beginning.

I reconceptualized my syllabus, discarding the contractual document outlining assignments, policies, and penalties, in favor of a liquid syllabus designed in Story Maps. Mapping out the course this way (still trying to arrive at the elusive destination of the ellipsis) allowed me to incorporate “waypoints” or stopping points on our semester’s journey. We marked each waypoint with a community forum at which we reflected on where we had come from (what skills had we learned? How had we arrived here and what caught our attention on the way?) and where we wanted to go (what support did we need? Had our goals changed?).  A liquid syllabus meant that I could also play with the very process of building a syllabus by leaving some of the class sessions and course policies blank, and offering students a low-stakes way to contribute to those sections—anonymously if they wished—by throwing all their ideas into a hat and then discussing each.

Feedback from student evaluations.

Allowing students to design a portion of the course also gave them the space to identify the kinds of assignments that would best allow them to engage with form, narrative, and aesthetic. Half of the class opted to make creative dossiers that included a script, a storyboard, and a trailer for their own original films. The other half of the class chose to co-author with me an article that we are submitting to a peer-reviewed journal in French Studies and that is based on our recent conversation with France’s first Black woman Oscar-nominated filmmaker. I could not have foreseen this waypoint at the beginning of the journey because it evolved organically over time.

So, what did students take away from the course?

Feedback from student evaluations.

And what did I come away with?

My biggest takeaway from reconceptualizing Black Girlhood by mapping the course onto a liquid syllabus is that the assignment format doesn’t matter. Not really. What matters more is student agency. I had been struggling to teach students how to analyze creative work, when what I should have been doing all along was teaching them how to learn.

IMAGE CREDIT: Annette K. Joseph-Gabriel

ABOUT THE AUTHOR: Annette K. Joseph-Gabriel