The Journal of Multimodal Rhetorics

At their very roots, the Liberal Arts and Humanities traditions are transdisciplinary. Still, over the centuries an artificial intra-disciplinary drift has occurred where many Liberal Arts subdisciplines do not naturally collaborate and avoid appreciating our shared academic ancestry. At the institutional level of Tennessee State University, particularly within the College of Liberal Arts, we promote both ‘Integrative Learning’ and ‘Creativity,’ as tied to our brand of facilitating the University’s mission of “A Broad Education for Achieving Big Dreams.” At an HBCU dedicated to promoting inclusion and diversity, our task is bringing evergreen topics and themes, omnipresent within the Liberal Arts, to the forefront and building a critical pedagogy to bridge content to a minority-majority student body. One of the cornerstones of the Liberal Arts tradition is to question the established status quo in a way that promotes broader understanding and societal advancement.

Looking at the learning objectives of our specific programs, English and Political Science, and the shared goals of the College of Liberal Arts, we began designing a team-taught transdisciplinary course primarily for upper-division Political Science majors, but open to all interested students. The learning objectives for the Political Science degree program are drawn directly from the baccalaureate goals of our College of Liberal Arts: (1) Knowledge of Human Cultures, (2) Intellectual & Practical Skills, (3) Personal & Social Responsibility, and (4) Integrative & Applied Learning. Within our two programs of study, areas of overlap include early modern political theory and early modern literature. That periodization is a shared space for much of our respective content, and the literature therein features transdisciplinary themes like human nature, power, fate vs. freewill, race, gender, class, marginalization, and social exclusion. These themes are all fertile ground for critical approaches, discussions, and writing across the disciplines for our students. Designing a transdisciplinary course accessible to all students, regardless of their specific academic discipline, provided an excellent opportunity to incorporate integrative learning, critical consciousness, and creativity into a transdisciplinary space.

Branding our cross-listed English-Political Science course around the theme of magic and witchcraft served as attractive packaging for exploring the early modern content we enjoy presenting. Dr. Emily Murray is an associate professor specializing in early modern drama, and Dr. Kyle Murray is an associate professor of political science specializing in political theory. The curriculum responsibility of the political theorist in a Political Science degree program is to cover the humanities side of an otherwise social sciences discipline. It is incumbent upon the political theorist in a social sciences program to carry the liberal arts banner by emphasizing transferrable skills such as critical thinking, critical reading, and writing across the disciplines. The role of political philosophy, in the curriculum of a political science degree program, is to complement the emphasis on quantitative research methods with an emphasis on the humanities and liberal arts tradition. Much of the content of an upper-division historical political philosophy course overlaps with the early modern era and the literature therein. Furthermore, the largest cohort of this shared course was Political Science majors, several of whom included English as a minor as a part of their program of study.

Thus, the working title of our course became ‘Witchcraft, Religion, and Political Theory in Early Modern Literature.’ This was an alluring way to establish course content and objectives and brand it in a way that would draw students from both programs, as well as stand out as an attractive elective for non-English and non-Political Science majors. Magic and witchcraft as presented  in popular culture served as a launch pad for discussing issues of power and representation present within the texts we used, as these continue to be relevant themes. The incorporation of contemporary popular culture was designed to facilitate student-led discussion on power and representation as a departure point for viewing these concepts in the context of early modern literature and generating transdisciplinary writing topics. 

We removed the sole emphasis on Eurocentric texts and situated that literature alongside broader, more critical theoretical texts that offer different ways to understand how and why early modern concepts and texts remain relevant. This approach promoted the wider tradition of the Liberal Arts to include a critical engagement with the flaws of its past, as well as the progressive tendencies of its evolution into the current scholarship of the present era. By incorporating current and more critical approaches to early modern literature and philosophy, we could develop a discourse with our students to directly engage themes of social exclusion, thus inviting students to grapple with ideologies and assumptions about witchcraft, religion, power, and to articulate specifically how Eurocentric narratives are framed. This was done not only to demonstrate how to navigate early modern language and display universal human experiences in the texts, but also to challenge representations in the texts and to grapple with language or narratives that can be dehumanizing or that reinforce discriminatory ideology.  We confronted an historically dominant culture that has perpetuated the perception that topics like Shakespeare, for example, are only for the classically educated, and illustrated, through the analysis of early modern language, how reading such texts can produce more diverse perspectives.

 

Theory & Pedagogy

We prioritized the probing of marginalized representations within texts whilst attempting to engage with the missing perspectives of those characters whose identities have been undervalued because of inherent class, gender, or racial biases. This approach centralizes the experiences of previously silenced voices, drawing students to question the texts along the lines of: whose voices are uplifted? Whose are silenced or underrepresented? From whose perspectives are the stories being told? How are early modern writers using language to reinforce or challenge negative stereotypes? Exploring these concepts through an interrogation of power structures, allows us to open the floor to questioning how these ideas, human relationships, institutions, and dynamics still influence and impact our current lives and experiences. Paulo Freire’s concepts, introduced in Pedagogy of the Oppressed, inform the power of marginalized voices.

Freire’s problem-posing concept of education, outlined in his chapter “The Banking Concept of Education,” is of value here, as he explains that students are not containers to be filled with information, but ‘co-creators’ of knowledge. This collaboration does not occur in a hierarchical relationship in the classroom but rather in communication. Redefining this student/teacher relationship opens the door to genuine and authentic learning and students “become jointly responsible for a process in which all grow” (Freire, 1968/1972, p.80). In this way, teachers and students can share knowledge and collectively investigate ideas, power structures, race, and constructions of gender.

Pedagogical approaches like Friere’s assist with forming connections with course material that may seem inaccessible, unrelatable, or uninteresting. This type of interactive approach is imperative to teach through dialectical communication so that “the teacher’s thinking is authenticated…by the authenticity of the students’ thinking” (Freire, 1968/1972, p.77). Thus, the presentation of the course is not information to be memorized as ‘facts,’ but instead a space to interrogate, explore, question, and re-frame antiquated discussions of the texts. Teaching becomes an exercise in communication and thus, as Freire points out, a path toward critical thinking and liberation. Freire explains, “Education as the practice of freedom—as opposed to education as the practice of domination—denies that man [students are] is abstract, isolated, independent and unattached to the world; it also denies that the world exists as a reality apart from people [students]” (ibid, p.81). A dynamic theoretical approach supports our course objectives specifically centering on creativity, critical thinking, and reasoned judgment. 

Students demonstrate a written and oral comprehension of historical cultural contexts of early modern texts, as well as to comprehensively analyze texts from historical and literary perspectives. Students begin to develop the ability to apply political, socio-cultural, and economic theory to the way in which they view, reflect upon, and express scholarship in the wider disciplines of Liberal Arts and the Social Sciences through civil discussions and the production of originally written academic work. As a result of this focus, students are led to distinguish different political, socio-cultural, and economic theories regarding the spheres of ‘State’ and ‘Society.’ This corresponds directly to the shared learning objectives of our College of Liberal Arts and the Political Science degree program: Intellectual and Practical Skills and Knowledge of Human Cultures.

Similar to Freire, Antonio Gramsci promoted active learning engagement to facilitate critical thinking and personal agency for our students in the learning process (Condon & Young, 2016). In terms of Gramscian pedagogy, Gramsci viewed folklore as a learning space rich with avenues of conveying new ideas to populations that have experienced historical marginalization and social exclusion. Folklore was viewed as componential to any student’s individual, or a particular population’s collective worldview, or “conception of the world” (Gramsci, 1985, p.191). Other components of the mosaic that forms any worldview, individual and/or collective, include popular religion, languages/vernaculars/dialects, and “common sense,” that is the shared understandings of a particular community as il senso commune, or the sense of a specific community.

For a teacher “to know ‘folklore’ means to know what other conceptions of the world and of life are actually active in the intellectual and moral formation of young people…” (ibid). To that end, “folklore must not be considered an eccentricity, an oddity or a picturesque element, but as something which is very serious and is to be taken seriously” (ibid). In our own present context, and a century beyond Gramsci’s life, we must take popular culture equally as seriously as folklore and/or popular religion when introducing new concepts for students. Understanding our own students’ sense of folklore and engagement with popular culture helps to create pathways for reaching them with our content.

Synthesizing early modern sources with contemporary writers as well as popular cultural references to witches and magic creates a more complex dialogue of the texts and highlights thematic issues that recur throughout. We wanted to intersect important aspects of antiracist pedagogy, directly confronting the history and perpetuation of social exclusion as an element of all political studies: the concept of power and systems of power. From there, we could then branch off from the concept of power to analyze the themes of human nature, colonialism, oppression, trauma, subjugation, and the concept of fate vs. freewill. Synthesizing these concepts enabled us to engage these themes with a critical lens and put a spotlight on the past and present issues of race, gender, class, and social exclusion. In addition to establishing these avenues of critical inquiry, we also sought to establish a fun, engaging learning space.  By centralizing the topics of magic, witchcraft, sorcery, and religion, we effectively packaged early modern literature, political theory, and modern critical approaches into bundles for our students to readily embrace. 

What we did not anticipate in our course planning, however, was COVID-19 changing higher education and, indeed, the world around us during the 2020-2021 academic year when we launched the course. As this suddenly became a synchronous-remote course delivery method, we were then tasked with facilitating our course live, but virtually, a very new instructional method for us, without a traditional classroom setting. Reaching our students “wherever they are” has always been a clear pedagogical mission statement of our university. That mission does, however, take on even more layers of meaning during a worldwide pandemic that features synchronous-remote learning. We not only needed to reach students with the content wherever they were in terms of their academic development, but we also literally needed to connect with them wherever they were via virtual classes and maintain their engagement for fifteen weeks.

First, we committed to one of our institutional objectives of using only open educational resources. We had a wealth of early modern primary source texts at our disposal in the public domain. Secondly, we determined what types of exercises and activities we would incorporate whilst tailoring our expectations around the nuances of a global pandemic. Lastly, we wanted to implement ways to make early modern texts as inclusive as possible. Ultimately, we sought to package content, discussions, assignments, and activities that would not just tiptoe around the themes of gender, race, class, and exclusion, but rather to confront them head-on.

By structuring a course that confronted social exclusion and discrimination, we posited that we could use these issues as tools, rather than obstacles, to create bridges between our students and the content. The context of the global pandemic cannot be overstated in terms of the anxieties that faculty and students were experiencing. It only reinforced our effort to provide a virtual learning space that was a relaxed, seminar/workshop-type environment. In light of these circumstances, we reaffirmed what our actual goals for this course were, in relation to the spirit of promoting transdisciplinarity and our shared Liberal Arts learning objectives. Prioritizing remote student engagement, accessibility to course materials, and structuring each live class session in a way that would drive student-led discussions was paramount.

 

Course Content and Delivery

After introducing the course, we gave students the opportunity to collaborate through an association exercise. We were curious about what characters, pop culture or historical, came to mind when it came to their conceptions of magic, witches, and witchcraft. That opened each of them up to engagement and created the type of comfort we sought to establish in a virtual setting. We gave the students a short writing assignment the first week that would allow them to continue to build on that discussion and enable them to stretch out their impressions a bit more in written format. We presented a survey of ancient and early modern symbols and imagery associated with magic, alchemy, astrology, sorcery, and witchcraft, as well as a Braudelian historical materialist virtual tour of the early modern world in terms of culture, politics, and economics (Braudel, 1982).

Introducing the cultural and religious landscape of the period established context for the primary sources covered across three thematic units. The first unit was designed to explore the concepts of fate/destiny vs. freewill through the medium of Renaissance and early modern magic, specifically the portrayal of the sorcerer archetype in literature. The second unit, entitled ‘Exploration and Exploitation’, centralized the othering of non-Europeans and corresponding proto-imperialist trends and attitudes. The third unit focused specifically on the persecution and social exclusion of women through the medium of witch trials and the portrayal of witches in early modern texts. Each unit had its own bundled content that included primary early modern sources, both plays and political documents, as well as an overlay of modern critical theory for contextualization.

The course development was informed by a rich scholarship in exploring ideas of race in the early modern period. This scholarship informs the overall pedagogical approach showing students how “othering” and silencing functioned in early modern literature and new ways to approach texts that reclaim those voices. Kim Hall’s seminal work on race brings to the forefront previously marginalized or silenced voices and ideas. Hall argues that “descriptions of dark and light, rather than being mere indicators of Elizabethan beauty standards . . . became the conduit through which the English began to formulate the notions of ‘self’ and ‘other’” (Hall, 1995). Kyle Grady looks at notions of ‘self’ and ‘other’ in the context of teaching and the classroom, pointing to the ways interpretations of early modern literature are “cultivated by a dominant culture that is often unaware of its participation in such a process…and conditioned to see oppositional approaches as nonobjective” and thus reasserts the “so-called universal [ity] of a white positionality” (Grady, 2019, p. 28). Our course design and learning objectives centered on pushing back against this ‘white positionality’ of early modern writers and creating spaces for emphasizing student input and fostering access to texts previously assumed boring or simply inaccessible, particularly due to language. David Sterling Brown posits, “simply reimagining how we teach sixteenth- and seventeenth- century literature . . . is essential for increasing the appeal of early modern studies for students who might not otherwise see themselves as fully interested in, comfortable with, or capable of succeeding in the field” (Brown, 2016, p. 105). An important aspect to “reimagining” these periodized texts is not only to look at representation, but also to interrogate whiteness as a framework for approaching various texts and understanding those power structures and dynamics we sought to illuminate.

The first unit examined the characters of Faust from Christopher Marlowe’s Dr. Faustus (1604/2005) and Prospero from William Shakespeare’s The Tempest (1623/1996), and the work of the historical figure John Dee together to contextualize the period and offer a more dynamic view of early modern drama. The concepts of fate vs. freewill, human nature, and dualism tie directly to the introductory themes of an historical political philosophy course. Therefore, we both introduced and discussed some excerpts from Plato (375 B.C.E./1905), Aristotle (350 B.C.E./1966), and Cicero (44 B.C.E./1853) along those same lines of inquiry. After generating the conversation across these foundational texts, we turned to a close reading of the plays. Marlowe’s Dr. Faustus (1604/2005) was an ideal starting point because of the discussions we had with students on the types of imagery they associated with the concept of Abrahamic dualism, ‘the Devil’ archetype, and the origin of the ‘horns and pitchfork’ imagery that hitherto persists in popular culture. The character of Dr. Faustus also struggles with the idea of fate and freewill within Marlowe’s establishment of thematic dualism through the “good angel’ and “bad angel” in the opening of the play. In our examination of this binary paradigm, we challenged the students to examine and question along the lines of: who has power or control? Does Faustus, who so desperately desires control through power, have any, or does magic create the illusion of power?

Marlowe’s play closes with Faustus’ demise and as he begs for redemption, notably lamenting that his books be destroyed: “I'll burn my books! —Ah, Mephistopheles!” (ibid, V.ii.120). Faustus’ call to burn his books mirrors the end of William Shakespeare’s The Tempest (1623/1996), when Prospero describes the overarching power he wielded but now benevolently “breaks his staff” and “drowns [his] book” (ibid, V.i.56). The similarities of the endings show each character’s response to magic—connected to nature or connected to evil, and power—the relinquishing of trying to control their fate specifically articulated in the image of the book as a symbol of knowledge, power, and control.

The Tempest continued our class conversations on the themes of destiny vs free will. By allowing students to identify these examples and explain their significance in the context of the play, we bridged the textual analysis to an exploration of how these themes and concepts are relevant in a more immediate context. One of the popular cultural references that many of our students invoked was the recent Netflix streaming series, The Chilling Adventures of Sabrina (2018-2020). In that production, the titular character of Sabrina experiences conflict between her destiny to become a witch and reject her high school friends vs. her abandoning what has been decided to forge a path for herself. We then asked students to make connections to current events, situations, or popular cultural examples as a means of creating relevance to our lives today and, furthermore, explore the impact of these power dynamics.

The second unit, entitled ‘Exploration and Exploitation,’ investigated the contradictions and stereotypes produced by early colonial expansion. We focused on the ‘othering’ of non-European peoples encountered by Europeans on their journeys. Another significant textual pairing and close reading examines Hakluyt’s (1589/1972) Voyages and Discoveries and Anthony Ashley Cooper’s (1699) Inquiry Concerning Virtue alongside Prospero’s conquest of the island. Having already established the character of Prospero, we turned to how Caliban was portrayed in the context of the ‘noble savage’ interpretation of indigenous peoples during the early modern and Enlightenment eras. It was established that the concept of ‘evil’ in the context of Abrahamic theology in the first unit was inclusive of those practicing sorcery and magic. Sorcerers represented a perceived perversion or inversion of Abrahamic religions by utilizing the powers of ‘darkness’ over the powers of ‘light’ in the dualism within that theological construct, with the example of Dr. Faustus ‘making a deal’ with the Devil. The unit was utilized to expose the contradictory nature of projecting this same concept of ‘evil’ upon peoples unfamiliar with the dualistic contexts of Abrahamic theology.

The Tempest, read alongside excerpted travel narratives describing European explorers’ first impressions of natives demonstrates the dehumanization of different cultures, as well as proto-imperialist attitudes. This concept is best illustrated when Hakluyt (1589/1972) states, “No greater glory can be handed down than to conquer the barbarian, to recall the savage and the pagan to civility, to draw the ignorant within the orbit of reason, and to fill with reverence for divinity the godless and the ungodly”. The explicit goal is to ‘conquer’ and to force the submission of perceived primitive peoples that do not fit into the Judeo-Christian paradigm but are nevertheless cast as subhuman. We introduced Franz Fanon’s (1965) The Wretched of the Earth, to give the perspective of those being cast as "others," as well as some long-term context for the destruction that colonialism caused the consciousness of the colonized.

In The Tempest, Caliban extends hospitality to Prospero when he is marooned, only to become enslaved on his own island and expresses the regret he feels for introducing him to the beauty and resources there:

This island’s mine by Sycorax, my mother,
Which thou tak’st from me. When thou cam’st first,
Thou strok’st me and made much of me, wouldst give me Water with berries in ’t,

and teach me how
To name the bigger light and how the less,
That burn by day and night. And then I loved thee,
And showed thee all the qualities o’ th’ isle,
The fresh springs, brine pits, barren place and fertile. Cursed be I that did so! All the charms
Of Sycorax, toads, beetles, bats, light on you,
For I am all the subjects that you have,
Which first was mine own king; and here you sty me
In this hard rock, whiles you do keep from me
The rest o’ th’ island (Shakespeare, 1623/2005, I.ii.331-344).

Prospero’s power is not aligned with devils or black magic in the Faustian sense. Instead, he represents discovery and the conquest of a “new world.” Notions of man versus nature, slavery and freedom arise throughout the text of the play and embody the Eurocentric and supremacist mindset described in Hakluyt’s Voyages. This proto-imperialist worldview in the context of representations of subsequent colonialism and institutionalized supremacy, sparked engaging class discussions on current topics of systemic racism and demeaning stereotypes. Furthermore, we discussed how women and nature were quite often synonymously portrayed as entities that needed to be mastered.

For the final unit, our instructional focus segued to how women were represented and portrayed as witches to illustrate their marginalization and portrayed their threat to the status quo. We focused on excerpts from Shakespeare’s Macbeth (1623/1996) as the classic stage portrayal of the witch stereotypes that persist into the present era, along with the Berwick Trials, found in the appendix to King James’ (1591/2016) Daemonologie. We turned our focus on the punishment of the human, and mainly female, body for those accused of witchcraft. Daemonologie was the core primary text that would anchor this unit in terms of illustrating the types of corporal punishment brought down upon the accused.

Students made connections across the historical political climate of James’ ascendancy and his inherent fear of witchcraft, as documented in Daemonologie (1597/2016) and the Berwick Trials (1591/2016), in which women were accused of practicing witchcraft and sabotaging his sea travels to secure the passage of his royal bride-to-be. Students gave examples of ways in which the play reflects accounts of witchcraft in Newes from Scotland, as well as examples of how Shakespeare used this play as a deterrent against political intrigue. By identifying connections between James' ascendancy and the witch trials, students focused on the misogyny of his rule and the marginalization and social exclusion of women during the period.  Read alongside James’ primary historical texts, the opening of Macbeth describes sailors as “tempest-toss’d,” not unlike the details of the difficulties James experienced in the transport of his bride, which was blamed on witchcraft.

Through the characters of the “Weird Sisters,” with “weird” specifically meaning fate or destiny, students were able to draw parallels to those same themes from earlier readings. This allowed students to make connections to pop culture representations of witches, including Sabrina’s nemeses in the series who are also named the “Weird Sisters.” Students identified pop culture examples that tied directly into our discussion of fate and free will, a theme that persists throughout Macbeth.  Students enjoyed wrestling with the question of whether Macbeth was controlling his own agency or whether his destiny was determined by the witches. Like Faustus and Prospero, the Weird Sisters are imbued with the power to both manipulate nature and influence the fate of others. This echoes James’ own fear of witchcraft and is reflective of his deep-rooted misogyny. Thus, the Weird Sisters embodied James’ fear of women, the perceived corruption of human ambition, and the dangers of political intrigue.

Additionally, students identified the physical characteristics of the witches described in the play and compared these descriptions with the scholarly and ambitious representations of the male characters investigated in Dr. Faustus and The Tempest. Women, however, were deemed witches and ostracized based on their appearance and social standing in society. For example, in Macbeth, Banquo, notes they “look not like the inhabitants of the earth” with “skinny lips” and he states, “you should be women, but your beards forbid me to interpret that you are so” (Shakespeare, 1623/2005, I.iii.41, p. 45-47). This dehumanizing rhetoric further works to paint these characters as marginalized and otherworldly.

Furthermore, the term “discovery” did not just mean that some witches were “happened upon,” but rather the torturous evidentiary aspect of those being accused and put on trial. This was to illustrate the traumatic physical aspect of producing evidence from the accused. To establish a modern discourse on these issues, we incorporated excerpts from Foucault’s (1975/1995) Discipline and Punish for theoretical context on bodily punishment and the body as a subject in general. As morbid as the content seemed, the students showed a great level of engagement with the details of these trial accounts, and we were able to reflect on the horrors of the Jacobean period that would extend from that historical point through the institutions of slavery and colonial enterprise, and even into the root system of the modern criminal justice system.  

To conclude the semester, we tasked students with tying primary texts and contexts of the early modern period to pop culture examples where they saw parallels, or thematic similarities, and expound on the significance of the connections they established. The major written assignment allowed students to develop a character analysis, analyze a particular setting, or explicate a theme of language or imagery to fulfill the learning objective of “Integrative and Applied Learning.” They created their own discourse across at least two of the primary texts, as well as including at least two secondary sources to produce an original argument. We introduced this assignment gradually by first having the students craft a topic proposal that included a preliminary thesis and an annotated list of proposed sources. This was to ensure that they were on the right track in identifying the tasks for the larger assignment. We also incorporated a multimodal presentation component that included peer reviews to keep everyone engaged. These activities and assessment were all designed to assist students in the development of the transferable skills common across the liberal arts tradition.

Facilitating a cross-listed transdisciplinary course in this regard was a way to highlight the connectivity of the broad family of disciplines within the liberal arts and provided a space in which the common transferrable skills of our respective programs of study could be developed by students with ties to both programs of study. Team teaching across disciplines offers several benefits for students, including the ability to combine different perspectives and expertise, enhancing the overall learning experience. The goal is to demonstrate the value and relationship of content outside of an individual course to emphasize the relevance of course content outside of the specific classroom. Explicitly demonstrating how to make connections across classes and think critically about the ways that content is relevant within the context of the course as well as outside of the course in a student's educational journey. For example, students can see Caliban in The Tempest as dehumanized and treated as an outsider. In the language of the play, readers see how the character describes Prospero as taking advantage of the hospitality shown to him to overpower Caliban and the island. In the larger cultural context, students see how this fictional moment comments on the historical moment of  imperialist expansion of England during the time period and invites them to question those power dynamics in the early modern period as well as in the current moment of their lives and their own culture. We accomplished this collaboratively using lectures, workshops, breakout rooms, and the Socratic method as well as assessment methods representative of our respective courses.

In the online synchronous classroom, both professors attended every class period and shifted from close reading and literary analysis to a broader study of theoretical approaches. Team teaching allows for a more comprehensive exploration of topics and fosters a collaborative approach to education, an approach I modeled for students as a transferable skill beyond the liberal arts classroom. Furthermore, team teaching encourages the development of integrated and diverse learning environments, ultimately leading to more enriched educational outcomes. As an educator, I was able to gain insight into pedagogical methodologies in disciplines outside my own and share course development and execution responsibilities allowing more time for student interaction and support. Challenges in team teaching from a teaching perspective include the blending of teaching styles. Often the class felt disjointed as each professor planned and executed the respective content of expertise and lacked cohesion in the classroom. While having two professors I believe benefitted students, personality differences have the potential to make team teaching difficult. Challenges for students seemed to be based on assumptions and expectations from previous experiences with a particular professor. Communication often and clearly was imperative to student success. Ultimately, we covered more ground, made more connections and provided more support for our students in a team teaching environment.

Based on student feedback at the end of the semester, we found that the main obstacles centered on pandemic-related anxieties and technological problems students experienced as they struggled to find quiet spaces with available bandwidth, whether they were operating on campus or from home. Several students lamented that they wished the course could have taken place in a traditional classroom setting, and we certainly concurred with that sentiment. In response to those concerns about narrow bandwidth, we became flexible about the requirement of students needing to have their cameras turned on for class. In some cases, they were operating from multi-generational homes where other family members were also engaged in remote learning at the same time. We knew we needed to provide ample opportunity for asynchronous access in addition to our synchronous live sessions to facilitate engagement and participation. By using primary public domain open-source course materials, we circumvented students having to engage remotely with our library system to access sources and we provided those texts via PDF files on our course site, with and audio files of some of the sources, as well as video links to many of the early modern plays we covered. We also took great care to provide our students access and open channels of communication with us outside of our standard office hours and the use of applications, such as GroupMe, to provide even more avenues for interaction with both instructors and each other.

In terms of the content, however, students deemed the course as interesting, engaging, and fulfilling. A couple of students expressed that they were very religious and had initial reservations about the content of the course, but that those reservations were quickly alleviated as the semester unfolded. Again, since inclusion was the primary aim of the course, the fact that these students did not feel alienated from the content was a source of pride for us. The nature of our online platform made it challenging to livestream multimedia as we would have done in a traditional classroom.

In terms of positive feedback, students expressed genuine interest in the witchcraft and religion theme. These focus areas fostered a willingness among students to engage with seemingly difficult texts along that thematic terrain. They conquered fears of engagement with early modern texts that they previously thought were inaccessible because of the language. Students expressed that they learned that one of “the values of reading early modern literature, even if it not related to [their] field of study, is that it teaches you the timeline of theories and different social changes,” that “early modern literature helps you better understand the thoughts and views in present day times and readings.” Another student stated: “from engaging with these texts, I can learn how to better understand the control society has over certain views and trends to better understand how the world is changing.” Students affirmed that they developed better close reading skills, sourcing competency, and that the content helped them to develop a deeper understanding of some of the pop culture representations they were already familiar with.  According to one student, “I surprisingly learned that the texts are not as hard to comprehend as I first thought.” Another stated: “reading early modern literature gives you a perspective into the different ideologies people operated under.”

We were delighted by the student feedback and to have had the opportunity to develop a transdisciplinary course that aligned with our interests and our college’s learning objectives and collective mission. The positive feedback we received led us to believe that our critical approach was indeed successful. This was one of our imagined dream courses that we were able to see come to fruition. Our university was not only open to us developing a course that focused on early modern texts, but also allowed a team-teaching format that enabled us to create an environment that not only drew attention to the intersections of literature and political theory, but also the development of transferable skills and serve as a venue for integrative and applied learning that will carry with them through every stage of life.

 

Conclusion

With our course design, we sought to promote transdisciplinarity within the Liberal Arts tradition for a diverse audience of undergraduate students. Our approach to reaching this goal was to creatively pair political and cultural early modern texts, aspects of modern popular culture, as well as contemporary critical theoretical approaches as lenses with which to view the content and stimulate writing across the disciplines. Religion, magic, and witchcraft were attractive and engaging areas of subject material that drew interest and served as touchstones from which students could build a better and critical understanding of early modern ideas, cultures, and institutions. This type of approach to the content is the very essence of the Liberal Arts tradition, and the feedback that we received from our students indicates that this was successful as far as students being able to both access and enjoy early modern texts. Adding contemporary critical theoretical approaches as lenses through which to analyze such content only enhances accessibility for all students and moves away from the types of pedagogical rigidity and stagnation that can calcify what is meant to be a vibrant and mutable Liberal Arts tradition.

Most participants in this course were junior and senior pre-law students who take great pride in being students at an HBCU with aspirations of being future community leaders. Our students were proactive and academically curious, possessing natural critical thought. We sought to harvest these attributes and assist in their development to enable them to apply these skills through writing across disciplines and driving thoughtful discussions. Since our course concluded, several have since moved on to postgraduate law programs, and it is our hope that this course in some way assisted them by equipping them with the transferable skill of applying critical thought through academic writing and that they move on into the world with an appreciation of the transdisciplinary nature of their matriculation. We took great pride in their engagement, their written coursework and input, and we feel like we learned just as much from them and the experiences they brought to the table in the course. Despite all the difficulties that the COVID situation presented, we believe that the course was a great success and a model for a transdisciplinarity in Liberal Arts education that has the potential to be facilitated through multiple instructional delivery methods, if necessary.

 

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References