Inter-Campus Pedagogy: The Looking For Whitman Project

As we move through the semester, we hope to use this web space to let everyone know about interesting experiments in education happening on both on our campus and on other campuses. This particular project we are highlighting today was brought to our attention by some of our friends at the University of Mary Washington.

One of the interesting things technology makes possible is experimentation with changing the traditional boundaries of the classroom and the institution. The Looking For Whitman project that is going right now at four seperate campuses around the country is one of the better examples of this. The project combines a traditional teaching approach (making connections between the work of a local author and the immediate environment of the college or university) with a new technological twist -- the students are working in sync with students at other campuses studying their own slice of the author's work:

Each school involved in the project has been carefully chosen for its lead faculty members, its location, and (of course) for its students. ”Looking for Whitman” centers on three locations, each very important to Walt Whitman’s life and work.

In New York, where Whitman lived from his birth to mid-life, students from the New York City College of Technology, CUNY will explore Whitman’s connections to the Brooklyn Waterfront, Lower Manhattan, and Long Island, and will focus particularly on Whitman’s early work, including the landmark 1855 first edition of Leaves of Grass. At the University of Mary Washington in Fredericksburg, Virginia, students will consider Whitman’s mid-career experiences as a nurse in the Civil War, and will focus on his war-related writing of the 1860s. Students in two classes at Rutgers University-Camden will explore Whitman’s late career as they investigate Camden, the city in which Whitman spent the final decades of his long life. Our fourth location, in Serbia, is a wonderful addition to the project that will make it international in scope.

The technological piece is in how the classes are able to interact with one another. Students can listen to shared audio of selected lectures from other institutions and have inter-campus conversations via twitter and blog posts. They can follow the discussions happening in the other classes, and even participate. They are currently sharing photos from their individual classes on the web (via Flickr) and will later post pictures of some of the local landmarks associated with Whitman to share with all the concurrent classes.

In a recent blog post, Jim Groom talks about some of the experiments they are doing to create open classrooms for this project at UMW, and I encourage those interested in the technology aspect to read how technology is enhancng this course (Among other things, it looks like the course may include a project where students collectively annotate work of Whitman's).

The project is partially funded by a larger NEH grant promoting multi-campus experiments. You can read the CUNY press release on the project here. All products of the project (technological and otherwise) will be shared freely with any other campus that wants to use them.

If you are interested in starting a multi-campus project, but don't know where to start, come and talk to us, and we will try to help you put something together.

And if you know of other similar projects, happening here or elsewhere, please note them in the comments...