ROLL CALL

Location

We’ll meet at NYPL’s Stavros Niarchos Library Foundation, 5th Ave + 40th St, Room 604 (the conference room along 5th Ave — hang a left when you exit the elevator!) at 4pm!

Agenda

This week we’ll denaturalize the form and “content” (such a reductive term!) of our class by analyzing a key apparatus for study: the syllabus. We’ll consider the syllabus as a contract, a promise, an invitation, a “boundary object,” a genre, a medium — one we might liken to a map, a blueprint, a timeline, a score, a collage, a recipe. We’ll assess the epistemologies, logistics, social relations, conventions, and values embodied in the conventional syllabus — how it crystallizes certain understandings of the classroom and the academy, and certain understandings about learning and knowledge — and we’ll imagine how things could be otherwise. The syllabus also gives us an opportunity to think about citation: who do we cite, how, when, and why? What are the aesthetics, economics, and politics of citation? 

Then, we’ll think beyond the syllabus-as-bureaucratic-document to consider how it also expresses the expertise and tastes of its creator(s), and how we might approach the syllabus as a creative format. Each of you will have an opportunity to experiment with the syllabus as an autobiographical genre that’ll allow us to get to know one another a bit better — and survey our common and complementary areas of interest and expertise. 

To Prepare for This Week

• Please read Hua Hsu, “A Celebration of the Syllabus,” The New Yorker (October 22, 2021); here’s a pdf if you can’t access the site (thanks, Symphony!).
• Read Collective Question and Liz Park, “F: Reconstituting Tolstoy College,” MAS Context (March 9, 2022). 
• And please explore as many of the following as you like:
  • Skim these excerpts from Lynda Barry’s Syllabus: Notes from an Accidental Professor (Drawn & Quarterly, 2014): 1-11, 34-9, 55-63, 89; and, if you’d like to see more, watch this flip-through video [N.B. I’ve put some copyrighted material, like the scans from Barry’s book, in a secure folder; you all have access to this password-protected folder via the email address you use for our class!].
  • Skim the archives of the Syllabus Project and read two or three.
  • Peruse the examples in our “Syllabus” Arena channel — If you need a little curatorial assistance: the Anthropocene Curriculum, La Escuela’s Semesters, the Pirate Care syllabus, the Soil Syllabus, and The Syllabus represent disparate but complementary case studies. As you explore, consider how the sites’ user experience and interactivity either exemplify/activate or undermine the values these schools espouse 🙂 
  • Check out our colleague Silas’s PDF Institute!
  • Explore Darren Raven’s pedagogy decks, either on Instagram or via his Google Doc index (you might also be interested in his Lecture Zines). 
• We’ll engage with more syllabi — specifically, June Jordan’s, Audre Lorde’s, and Adrienne Rich’s teaching materials — in our week on the “Power and Poetics of Pedagogy.” 
• Now, please create a one-page syllabus on/about yourself— both as a means of self-reflection and liberation from the syllabus’s disciplinary conventions, and as an opportunity for us to get to know you and learn what you already know. Folks like Beyoncé, Karl Marx, Donna Haraway, Bad Bunny, Octavia Butler, Michel Foucault (so. many. examples.), Judith Butler, and Dolly Parton get their own syllabi. Why not you?
  • You’ll find guidelines for this self-syllabus exercise HERE.