Spinning the Well-Wrought Urn: Developing Successful Course Assignments

I believe that there is a kind of Occam’s Razor principle about teaching: when designing pedagogical tools, the simpler, the better. Instead of seeking out brand new models for assignments that dazzle with their use of technology or attempt to captivate with their uniqueness, we might spend our precious labor capital as effectively by honing ideas that already work well—in other words, by spinning the well-wrought urn.¹ I have found that students actually respond better to a model they already recognize; they respond better, that is, if I modify it to sufficiently defamiliarize their experience and attend to their specific needs as a group. As Paul McEwan eloquently remarks in his introduction to a 2007 In Focus on “Teaching ‘Difficult’ Films,” “effective teaching might be best understood as an act of intellectual empathy, depending as it does on our ability to understand what our students do and do not know.”² The real challenge is to identify which of our assignments serve a useful pedagogical purpose, and to refine them so that they (ideally) serve several layers of objectives at once.

The aim of the following essay is to share concrete examples of exercises that have been successful in my film classes and to discuss how I developed them. I should give the caveat that I consider these assignments to be neither revolutionary nor cast in stone—in fact, I am calling here for an ongoing effort to craft and reshape the course assignments we use every day. To present course assignments as works in progress is driven by a challenge that all committed teachers face: how can we be effective without creating so much work for ourselves that our scholarly and personal lives suffer as a result? It is in the spirit of cooperation and collaboration, then, that I offer up a few assignments in the hope that they will spark further revision and enhancement by readers.

The assignments I will discuss include an assigned screening before the start of the semester and a New York City screening journal exercise with very specific instructions about content that I require students to keep. In another assignment at the introductory level, freshmen systematically and quickly review films they have screened in class, and then exchange and critique one another’s reviews as half of the grade for the assignment. For upper level courses, I give the example of a weekly e-mail response assignment that I have used successfully at both Yale University and Purchase College—it not only encourages contact and community among students, but also requires a more composed level of prose than Blackboard assignments. Finally, I will describe an in-class writing assignment I have developed to replace exams in my upper level courses.

Anchoring a Course with a Question

During the spring of 2006, I was asked to teach an upper level course on the western at Purchase College, State University of New York. Since my research specialty centers on European cinema, I approached the course with all of the trepidation and zeal that accompanies teaching material outside of one’s purview. Yet it was this lack of natural affinity for the genre that also ultimately helped me to tap into the anxiety that students often feel, too, when entering into a new subject. I decided to begin the class with something we all had some knowledge about already: I e-mailed enrolled students a few weeks before the semester began and asked them to see Ang Lee’s Brokeback Mountain (2005) on their own before the start of the semester, which by happy coincidence was still playing widely in theaters. During my first lecture, I explained that we would begin and end the course by asking an apparently simple question: Is Brokeback Mountain a western? Given the relatively provocative content of the film, students dove headlong into this first discussion, many arguing passionately against its inclusion in the genre. Then, after a semester that took them from dime novels, William S. Hart, and John Ford’s Iron Horse (1924) all the way through to “eastern westerns” such...