In this section, Professor Edoh ponders what worked best about the course and what she might do differently the next time she teaches 21G.026 Global Africa: Creative Cultures.
I’m teaching the course again next semester, so I’m starting to think about how I’m going to tweak it. There are a few places where there was more reading than necessary and there were a couple of pieces that didn’t quite fit. And that was about my selection of the pieces. Week by week during the course of semester I was taking notes about what was working and what wasn’t.
One possible change is that for the reflections, I may ask a question ahead of time for each week, now that I’ve run through it one time and I see the kinds of issues that come up. I could ask students to pay attention to something in particular in their reflections.
Aside from that, I liked the course’s structure. I liked focusing on different ways of making and doing over the course of the semester. It worked well to have it as a three-hour session once a week. It was an evening class, 7:00 to 10:00. By 9:00, the students had huge bags under their eyes and they were just fading in their seats, but they still participated and they were there until 10 o’clock every Thursday night.
So it worked well as a three-hour class. I don’t think I will change much. People spoke up a lot and built off each other’s observations really nicely, so it was easy to keep conversation going with 12 students. But then again, so much about how you structure a class depends on the students you have. The energy of the next group could be very different. It could be a smaller group, or a bigger group, and then that will require different strategies. If some people are too quiet, I could shake it up and break the three hours into some small group work.
