For Thursday: Station Eleven, Part Three & Pedagogical Assignment for Station Eleven

 Remember to read Part Three of Station Eleven for Thursday's class, even though we won't have any questions for the book. Instead, the class will start generating questions for discussion when we come to class. These will form the basis of our discussions, and help us navigate through the tricky narration of Mandel's Novel. Groups can send me the questions before class if they want me to distribute it to the class ahead of time, but this is not necessary. The assignment is below:

Pedagogical Assignment for Station Eleven

As your penultimate assignment for class (only the final paper is left), I want you to get some practical experience running a demanding college course—or in this case, designing some of the questions that guide our discussions and responses to the text. I will no longer assign any questions of my own, or any in-class writing exercises. That will be your job! I’ve broken you up into groups of two to help run our discussions of Station Eleven for the rest of the semester. Each group has a very simple task to complete, though it’s harder than it looks.

THE QUESTIONS: I’ll ask your group to come up with FOUR discussion questions that we will discuss as a class, much like the questions I assign on the blog.  Your group is completely in charge of creating these questions, which you can do in one of two ways: (a) each member can create 4 questions (a total of 8), which you can then cull into 4 questions for the class, or (b) you can work on the 4 collaboratively. Either way works, as long as you come to class with the four questions in enough handouts for the entire class (there are 13 students). These do not have to be posted ahead of time; just bring them to class and we will try to tackle them as a class.

REQUIREMENTS: Of the 4 questions, at least 2 of them should be theoretical in nature. This means that they either should reference a passage or an idea from Culler, or should use an idea from ‘outside’ the text to examine an idea or passage in the book. For example, you might point out something meta-textual in the book (Shakespeare, Sartre, etc.), or you could simply point out an example of ‘performative language.’ Just try to vary your questions and avoid asking questions about the plot or something that can be answered without some degree of ambiguity or disagreement.

ALSO: On the underlined days below, those groups should select one of their questions for an in-class writing prompt. Bring all four questions, but ask us to write about one of them at the beginning of class. So make it a good one!

THE SCHEDULE:

R 2     Mandel, Station Eleven:  Jess, Josie  (Part 3)

T 7     No-Class: ECU Interscholastic Meet  

R 9     Mandel, Station Eleven: Christine, Joshua (Part 4)

T 14   Mandel, Station Eleven: Canaan, Madison (Part 5)

R 16   Mandel, Station Eleven: Morgan, Cody  (Part 6)

T 21   Mandel, Station Eleven: Dallan, Huston, Rebecca (Part 7)

T 28   Mandel, Station Eleven: Christian, Kaylyn  (Part 8-9)