Experiential Learning in the Classroom and Beyond
Experiential Learning in the Classroom and Beyond
Since the start of April, students in Professor Carl Stahmer’s graduate seminar have spent their Monday afternoons hand-setting metal type and printing literary works on a nearly two-hundred-year-old printing press housed in UC Davis’s Shields Library basement. “The ethos of the course itself is experiential learning,” says Stahmer, who created the course after a transformative encounter with a printing press pushed him to question why literary scholarship on textual mediation was often so divorced from material practice. In turn, he has encouraged his students to use their lived experience of manually creating analog and digital text to inform their reading and scholarship.
Stahmer is one of many English Department faculty who have developed experiential learning opportunities in the classroom. Over the past few years, Professor Gina Bloom has focused her efforts on developing an undergraduate seminar course on Shakespeare and K-12 education with former undergraduate student Amanda Shores. With generous funding from alumna Margaret Bowles, the pair structured the course around the digital game Play the Knave that Bloom co-created with Colin Milburn and others at the UC Davis ModLab. In its first iteration, the course taught Shakespeare’s plays with this digital technology and theater-based activities. Undergraduates applied what they learned through community engagement in local schools and public-facing digital essays and presentations published on the Play the Knave website teaching portal. This quarter, Bloom’s ENL 189 class helped her test and rework lesson plans she developed to show how these lessons can fulfill the Social Justice Learning Standards that many California schools have begun adopting.
In recent years, annual departmental awards have been created to enable more undergraduate and graduate students to access experiences beyond the classroom. Established in 2021, the Deirdre Hackett Award supports students whose education would benefit from unique research trips, professional workshops, and internships. The endowment has already brought a variety of projects to fruition. Last summer, MFA candidate Harrison Dietzman used the funds to photograph Northern California wildfire burn scars and print them using traditional silver-gelatin chemistry. Documenting the burn scars using this analog technology stemmed from his dual interests in labor and wildland firefighting, two subjects that are central to his MFA thesis which recounts the experiences of a wildland fire crew during a fire season. Meanwhile, to begin her dissertation research, Ph.D. student Grace Hayes traveled to Wisconsin to visit the eclectic art environments housed at the John Michael Kohler Arts Center. She spent a considerable amount of time exploring the Mary Nohl House—a cottage perched on the shores of Lake Michigan bursting with sculptures and paintings—and interviewing the home’s site steward, Alex Gartelman. Hayes will use this site visit and the conversations she had there as a methodological framework that will be applied to the other art environments discussed in her dissertation.
Like Hayes, Ph.D. candidate Kirsten Schumacher discovered that place-based fieldwork enabled her to engage in Robert Rouse’s concept of emplaced reading—the act of conducting research at the location in which a literary work is set. Funded by the Russell J. and Dorothy S. Bilinski Fellowship at the Bodega Marine Laboratory, Schumacher spent a few weeks in the fall combing through old student reports of the site in the lab’s archive and comparing them to early modern descriptions of the area, such as Sir Francis Drake’s “Nova Albion” which recounts his landing in what is now Point Reyes. From this research, she is creating a digital exhibit that illustrates how language and beliefs about the coast have shifted.
Born out of their own respective experiential research at the Bodega Marine Laboratory funded by the aforementioned Bilinski fellowship, Ali Maas and George Hegarty teamed up to run Coast as Crisis, a multi-campus humanities graduate working group supported by the UC Humanities Research Institute (UCHRI). Through a combination of virtual meetings and place-based fieldwork at Bodega Bay and at nuclear-generating stations near San Diego, the working group is creating a digital map with an overlaid video that constructs a narrative about intersecting histories, ecologies, crises, and politics of the California Coast.
Over the next year, the department looks forward to seeing new experiential learning projects come to fruition with support from the Professor Jack Hicks Award. The new award provides support for undergraduate and graduate students in English to pursue avenues of learning that stretch the traditional definitions of literary scholarship, creative writing, and media studies. Screenwriters Christopher Markus and Stephen McFeely (Chronicles of Narnia, Captain America: First Avenger & Winter Soldier, Avengers: Infinity War & Endgame) established the award in honor of Emeritus Professor Jack Hicks. In their time as graduate students at UC Davis, Hicks gave them “permission to stray” from more traditional careers by encouraging them to pursue a path toward Hollywood. Reflecting on the notable creative successes of Markus and McFeely, Hicks said: “Those two are living, flourishing proof that our training, research, and talents are often brought abundantly to life when we dare to take them down paths not previously taken. Coloring outside familiar lines may first scare us off, but smart Crayola use can bring all sorts of excitements, satisfactions, and rewards.”
The department congratulates the award’s inaugural winners, whose projects are listed below.
Spring 2023 winners of the Jack Hicks Award in English
Stacey Baran, Jeremy Freeman, and Rosette Simityan (PhD students in English) will produce four episodes of a co-produced, co-hosted podcast, tentatively titled "Rated," centered on the discussion of film in the context of popular and critical reception, cultural proliferation, and historical modes. Examining both Anglophone and global cinema from the early twentieth century to the present, this podcast will consider the reception histories of various films and engage in productive debate over their culturally perceived value and recognition in a public-facing scholarly/conversational format.
Katherine Rosen (a junior and a double major in English and Cinema and Digital Media) will create a full-motion video (FMV) game that uses pre-recorded video, typically live-action, as its primary visual. The game will take inspiration from the 1992 FMV game Night Trap, which presents itself as a parody of B-grade horror movies but features heavy subversions to the genre that were overlooked during its time.
Melissa French and Lani Lam (both sophomore English majors) will co-produce an English-major-based podcast that will cover topics relevant to navigating school and life as a literature student, aiming to create a central hub where English major students can access information and find community.
Natalie Robertson (a PhD student in English) will help support graduate students considering a non-traditional dissertation project by creating an archive of such dissertations, theses, or similarly qualifying projects in the field of literature, and then producing a document drawn from her analysis that can provide guidance both to students pursuing such dissertations and to their faculty advisors.
Hans Wagner (an MFA student in English) will mix an album of experimental rock music, titled "Spumoni Jets," recorded last summer (May-August 2022) in Los Angeles. The album prioritizes the lyric, but sets it against an adventurous canvas of instrumental composition.