Teaching Early Ibero/Anglo American Studies
3. One Page Summary
4. Narrative
4.A.1
Rationale—Intellectual Motives
4.A-2.
Rationale—Project Design
4.B.1—Design
Summit
Creation of
Pedagogical Tools
Pilot Programs
4.B.2. Humanities content
4.B.3. Plan of work
4.B.4: Teaching and Learning in the Humanities
4.B.5: Database and Interactive Technology
4.B.6: Materials
4.C Institutional Context
Society of Early Americanists
University of Arizona
Maryland Institute for Technology in the Humanities
University of California, Irvine
Brown University
Early American Literature
4.D: Staff and Participants
4.E: Evaluation
4.F: Follow-up and dissemination
5. Project budget (budget forms)
5.A: Salaries and Wages
5.B: Consultant Fees
5.C: Travel
5.D: Other Costs
5. Appendices
This
application seeks support for the consolidation of a pedagogy for teaching a
hemispheric “literature of the Americas.” Since 1985 a number of intellectual
and cultural forces have moved scholars and teachers toward a more
comprehensive, hemispheric understanding of American cultural legacies. The increasing number of Hispanic citizens
in the United States have inspired an search for Ibero-American artistic and
cultural legacies, and the growing interest in interdisciplinary and
multi-cultural methodologies has created a need for fundamental changes in the
way early American history and culture are taught at all levels of our
educational systems.
Teaching Early Ibero/Anglo American Studies
projects a series of activities taking place over the next three years that
should translate the current coalescence of historiography among Ibero-American
and Anglo-American early American studies scholars into classroom practices enabling the instruction
of American literature from an international perspective on the college level
and eventually in K-12. The collaborators in this effort are The Society of
Early Americanists (SEA), the
University of Arizona, the University of Maryland, The Maryland Institute of
Technology in the Humanities (MITH), the University of California at Irvine,
Brown University, and the journal Early American Literature. Since 1999,
persons from these institutions have discussed what can be done to bring into
being a comparative, international way of presenting American literature. The Society of Early Americanists, because
of its omnibus interest in research and pedagogy in this field, assumed the
lead in organizing this initiative. It
proposes the following project plan:
Summit: The Society of Early
Americanists and the University of Arizona will host the first international
summit of scholar/teachers of Ibero-American and Anglo-American colonial
literature on May 16-19, 2002 at Tucson Arizona. This summit will gather 112 scholars from both fields to use the new research examining
American literature from a hemispheric perspective to develop a collection of
texts, model curricula, and teaching materials that embody a hemispheric
approach to the study of the early Americas. A second task of the summit will
be to select a seven-person steering group
for the development of a curriculum and classroom materials.
Support
System Development:
From June through February 2002, this
steering group would design and refine the apparatus to support use of those
texts in the classroom (including reliable editions of previously unpublished
material). The immediate objective will
be to establish an on-line repository and collection of resources with
introductions and teaching suggestions. The
long-term objective will be to develop curricula and teaching materials
based on that collection. A prototype
for the collection of primary materials
is currently housed on the MITH website
http://www.mith2.umd.edu/summit/Ibero_Anglo.html.
Prof. Ed Gallagher of LeHigh University host a syllabus exchange of summit
participants. This and other curricular materials will be housed and
distributed from the SEA website at the University of California, Irvine. All
resources will be linked through the SEA website at This work will begin at the
summit on a special panel with which the conference concludes, and it will be
continued by e-mail over the fall and winter.
In spring of the following year (2003), the group developing these
materials will convene to review the
collection and discuss its presentation for a public audience on the Web and
CD-ROM. This group will also plan the
subsequent development of curricula and teaching materials for all levels,
pending funding for the extension of this project as described below.
Pilot
Instructional Projects: During the academic
year 2003/2004, pilot programs teaching American literature from a hemispheric
perspective will be undertaken at Brown University and the University of
California, Irvine. These will make use of SEA’s web-based instructional
materials. These pilot programs will proceed by different approaches: the Brown
courses will be team taught by instructors
from English, Hispanic Studies, and Portuguese Language Departments and
will be concerned with both graduate
and undergraduate-level pedagogy. The Irvine courses will build off of existing
programs and extend instruction into K-12 education. This stage will include
cooperation with existing outreach and teacher-training programs at
participating universities, linked together to create a national laboratory for
the coordinated development of curriculum units and professional-development of
teachers experimenting with this new material.
Funding
Request: Funding is requested for the first year, May
2002-June 2003, to partially subvent the organizational summit in Tuscon, to
underwrite the collection and development of a text archive and classroom
materials, and to establish the Web-based format to support their collection and dissemination. Monies are
requested to fund a one-course relief for faculty working on the materials
during the academic year; and support for a follow-up meeting of participants
in the Exemplary Education Project in Spring 2003, when attention will also
turn toward the application of these materials in the collaborative pedagogical
projects during the following year.
Further
funding is requested for a second year (2003-04) to support the refinement and
extension of these materials in collaborative pedagogical projects with
participating universities and K-12 schools. Funding for a third year (2004-05)
is sought to create a continuing, Web-based repository of materials for schools
across the nation and around the world that may wish to adopt part or all of
the texts and courses developed in the second year of this project. This resource will include curricula and
case studies based on work done in the second year of this project.
4. Narrative
4.A.1 Rationale—Intellectual Motives
Why American literature from
a hemispheric perspective? Since 1985 a number of intellectual and cultural
forces have moved scholars and teachers toward a more comprehensive,
hemispheric understanding of American cultural legacies. The increasing number of Hispanic citizens
in the United States inspired an search for Ibero-American artistic and
cultural legacies. The tremendous
archival recovery of British American literature during the last generation led to the
recognition of an extensive British imperial
tradition in the international context of the Spanish, French, Dutch,
and Portuguese imperial projects of that era than as an anticipation of the
mentality of the United States.1 The rise
of Atlantic studies among historians promoted a scholarship that was
international in scope and concerned with cultural exchange. A growing fascination with borderlands as
zones of cultural mixing, creolization, and creation has led scholars
interested in the question of what is distinctively American about life, art,
and work in the New World to look beyond single national or cultural
traditions. Furthermore, an awareness
emerged of the anachronism of writing proto-nationalist literary and
intellectual histories for a pre-national era.2 2002 seems an appropriate moment for a
summit of scholars looking into the larger patterns of American cultural
origins and expression. Migration, decolonization, and multinational capitalism
have all been dissolving the local, ethnic, demographic, and economic bases of
modern national boundaries, traditions, and canons. Academic disciplines must
necessarily confront their own limits to arrive at a more profound and
comprehensive understanding of the roots of contemporary life in early modern
motives and projects.
The interest of early writings in
the Ibero-American and Anglo-American traditions is particularly intense. Many
of the defining themes of life in the Americas were articulated in the colonial
prospectuses, reports, epics, autobiographies, and lyrics penned by men and
women. The crucial questions remain remarkably similar throughout the
hemisphere: How cultivation of the land provokes environmental crisis. How religion impinges upon empire and
nation. How commerce drives the civilizing process. How slavery informs racism.
How differing schemes of land distribution promoted or inhibited political
equality.3 How cultural improvisation and
processes of transculturation throughout the hemisphere resulted in similar yet
distinct cultural formations in the early Americas. How exchange between
indigenous peoples and communities of European settlers gave rise in all
cultures to creole American customs of extraordinary variety and local
distinctiveness.
While the Hispanic American tradition of
literary scholarship and pedagogy has managed to look beyond questions of
national legacy to the larger Spanish and Portuguese imperial tradition, early
American literature in English has until quite recently been taught as an
anticipation of the literature of the United States. Until the 1990s there was no concerted effort among scholars to
view Anglo-American colonial literature in the British imperial context,
viewing it as being culturally and politically continuously with the literature
of the 17th & 18th-century West Indies or Canada.4
The pressure of political and cultural scholarship and the critiques of
theorists such as William Spengemann altered the situation in the 1990s giving
rise to a new scholarship remarkably parallel in concerns and methods to that
prevailing among students of early Ibero-American letters. Despite this convergence in subject and
style, there remained a disengagement between the two inquiries, brought about
by disciplinary and institutional constraints.
The two bodies of inquirers remain unfamiliar with each other and with
each others’ work. Their knowledge of
each other’s bodies of canonical texts
is not as extensive as should
be, and not sufficiently deep to permit persons to teach courses covering the
literary development of the Americas broadly conceived. The quickest and most
efficient way to bring both groups of scholar/teachers up to speed on each
other’s work is to convene a general summit of active persons in these fields
to edify one another.
4.A-2. Rationale—Project Design
Since
1998 an informal assortment of scholars in early Ibero-American and Anglo-American
literary and cultural studies debated how a hemispheric treatment of American
writings might be brought about. This
group realized that three problems had to be overcome: the general unfamiliarity with the current
literary canon and scholarship in one tradition by teachers of the other; the
lack of readily accessible primary materials that could permit comparative
treatment of texts; the lack of readily accessible lesson plans and syllabi for
courses examining the Literature of the Americas. This project proposal aims to overcome all three
difficulties. The quickest way to
communicate knowledge about the state of scholarship and teaching in the
parallel fields is to bring a number of their most active members together in a
summit designed to explicate the
current state of study and discuss the current teaching concerns within the
traditions. The lack of readily
accessible primary materials will be overcome by a web-based electronic text bank supervised by SEA and housed
at the Maryland Institute for Technology in the Humanities. The lack of
concrete models for curriculum, course design, lesson plans would be addressed
by pilot programs at Brown
University and the University of California Irvine. The former would explore a literature for the Americas employing
a team-teaching model across departmental boundaries, the latter would use
existing programs at the University to develop curricular materials for K-12,
distance learning, and college settings.
SEA would maintain a syllabus exchange and curricular materials
collection that could be used by any college interested in adopting the
hemispheric approach to American letters. All three elements of the project
would be supervised by a governing board drawn from SEA and senior
scholar/teachers .
4. B.1—Design
Teaching Early
Ibero/Anglo American Studies projects a program comprised of three elements:
the convening of a summit of scholar/teachers, the creation of web-based
pedagogical tools for classroom use, and the promotion of pilot programs of
instruction.
The
Summit: In 1999 a
Program Committee was formed to organize the program for this summit and to
outline the broader effort to
institution a new pedagogy of American literature with a hemispheric scope. Dr.
Ralph Bauer of the University of Maryland, whose scholarship encompasses Anglo,
Hispanic, and Germanic traditions of early American literature, was appointed
chair. He is assisted by Dr. David S.
Shields, editor of Early American Literature, Dr. Rolena Adorno of Yale
University, Dr. Michael Clark,
Associate Executive Vice Chancellor of University
of California Irvine, and Dr. Raquel Chang-Rodriguez, editor of the Colonial
Latin American Review. The
program committee designed the summit to be a large workshop on the comparative
understanding of early American texts.
It was purposely not conceived as an event for the airing of scholars
current research, but as an occasion for instructing colleagues in the works,
approaches, and teaching methods associated with genres, subjects, and
discourses common to the literatures. [The Program for the Summit appears as
Appendix 1].
One hundred five scholars were invited and
have accepted to meet in Tucson on May 16-19, 2002, and engage in the
initiative to create a pedagogy for a hemispheric literature of the America.
The participants were selected by the program committee upon the recommendation
of experts in the various fields, based upon the quality of their scholarship
and reputation as teachers, or the promise of their dissertation projects. The program committee thought it important
that graduate students be included in the scholarly conversation, so twenty have
been invited. The faculty and
independent scholars are drawn evenly from the ranks of Ibero-Americanists and
Anglo-Americanists. [Brief CVs of the
participants are included in appendix 2.] Participants are drawn from every
region of the United States and have an extraordinarily various cultural and
ethnic backgrounds. These would be the persons most interested in attempting to
teach a hemispheric “literature of the Americas.”
SEA and its collaborators request only
partial support for this conference.
The home institutions of the participants will pay for the bulk of the
expenses to hold the summit. Yet we are
concerned that graduate students, independent scholars, and scholars from
smaller institutions without adequate development support not be excluded
because of the inability to secure institutional backing to travel.
Consequently we request $20,000 to fund 30 of the 105 participants. This request is less than one quarter of the
$101,544 total cost of travel, lodging, meals, and rentals for all participants at the conference.
Creation of
Pedagogical Tools: One difficulty that the exchanges enabled by the summit won’t
overcome is the lack of teaching tools for a new American literary
pedagogy. At the university level,
most humanities programs are still organized along national lines, as are the
curricula they offer and the textbooks that support those courses. Increasing interest in interdisciplinary
research and teaching has built bridges among programs devoted to those
different national literatures and cultures, and a few anthologies have emerged
that support an international approach to the study of the early periods of
American history in English (see section 4.B.5 below, "Materials").
While these anthologies do make brief excerpts of a few texts from the early
American period available, their apparatus is limited to information about the
authors and historical background.
There is little or no attempt to provide instructors with advice about
how these excerpts might be presented within their immediate national or
colonial context, or about how the national tradition behind a particular text
might be associated with another tradition in a different language, or how the
colonial experience of the Americas as a whole provides yet another, crucially
different, perspective on the separate linguistic and national traditions
associated with it.
Institutional inertia and a lack of
pedagogical tools and guidance often result in an inevitable drift back toward
national and linguistic boundaries in the teaching of early American culture in
many universities. This tendency is
even greater in community colleges and K-12 school systems. For even the most ambitious teachers,
isolation from the most current research (and researchers) often results in the
repetition of older, more familiar approaches to material or, at best, the
incorporation of new material from anthologies and other textbooks into older
paradigms that do not support that material effectively or accurately. In the K-12 system, where the topics and
texts of early America often have an almost iconic status as founding documents
of our society, pedagogical change is even more difficult. In addition to the overt ideological
objectives that so often accrue to this material and reinforce the status quo,
pedagogical change is inhibited by an overwhelming workload that limits time
for independent innovation and the expansion of a teacher's pedagogical
repertoire, and by administrators and parents reluctant to experiment with
unfamiliar texts and perspectives.
"Teaching Early Ibero/Anglo
American Studies" will directly address these issues in three ways:
by
collecting key texts from the Iberian and British traditions of discovery and
colonization of the Americas, editing them for Web-based publication where
feasible, and developing a scholarly and pedagogical apparatus to accompany
each text; by supporting collaborations among scholars and teachers at all
levels to develop applications of that material in courses, classroom
presentations, exercises, research projects, and curriculum units for
universities and colleges, community colleges, and K-12 schools;and by
developing a Web-based delivery system (under the auspices of the Society for
Early Americanists [SEA] Teaching Site and the Distance Learning Center at the
University of California, Irvine) for those courses and curricula that will
make them a permanent and free resource available to an international audience.
Concerned about the feasibility of
constructing a web-based text bank of primary sources, Ralph Bauer spent the
last year consolidating a prototype web-based collection housed at MITH to be
premiered and critiqued at the Summit. Currently including 230 texts, this
password-protected archive suggests the viability of such an assemblage. This prototype archive contains texts in
English (Anglo-American writings and English translation of Hispanic-American
and Luso-American writings). If funded, the future archive will house texts in
Spanish and Portuguese as well.
Pilot
Programs: Some practical testing of materials and approaches must take
place in order to determine the most efficacious ways of organizing and
presenting a comparative view of American literature. To this end, we propose
to undertake two pilot initiatives. (1)
Prof. Nancy Armstrong, Chair of the English Department, and members of
the Hispanic Studies department have agreed to undertake a pilot team-taught
graduate and undergraduate courses in the “Literature of the Americas”
employing materials generated by SEA and his collaborators. [See her letter in
appendix 4] Besides Prof. Armstrong, Brown University personnel participating
in the project include Prof. Leonard Tennenhouse, Prof. Philip Gould, Prof.
James Egan, and Prof. Chris Clayton. It will promote an interdisciplinary
approach to the subject, stressing the integral and distinctive features of
each linguistic tradition as well as the areas of commonality. (2) By extending existing programs (detailed
below in appendix 3) at the University of California at Irvine, Prof. Michael
Clark, aided by Prof. Ed Gallagher of Lehigh University, will develop K-12
applications and a delivery system for course materials.
4.B.2. Humanities content
"Teaching
Early Ibero/Anglo American Studies"
will contain three different kinds of content related to the Iberian and
British presence in the Americas during the early colonial period: (1) the
development of a collection of texts, edited with apparatus and, ideally, in
both English and Spanish, from the Iberian and British colonial experience in
the Americas from the fifteenth to the early nineteenth centuries. (2)
collaborations between scholars from the Summit and teachers from four-year
universities and colleges, community colleges, and K-12 schools to develop
instructional material based on the collection of texts. These materials will include entire
curricula, individual courses, curriculum units, assignments, research projects,
and exercises based on one or more texts.
A small-scale model of such collaboration is discussed below. (3)
establishment of a Web-based resource and delivery system to archive the
material described above and make it available free of charge to teachers and
scholars around the world. A key
feature of this resource will be constant updating and refinement by
participants.
4.B.3. Plan of work
May
2002: at the Ibero/Anglo American Summit, scholars
will meet in a series of panels designed to foster discussion between
specialists from the Iberian and British traditions and outline those materials
needed in a useful text bank of primary resources and debate pedagogical
approaches to a comparative treatment of the literary traditions. A governing
board, including Prof. Ralph Bauer, Prof. Michael Clark, and persons selected
by participants in the summit, will be impaneled to oversee the implementation
of the project.
June
2002-April 2003: The
governing board will propose a set of texts to be added to the electronic
archive at Maryland and to oversee the development of apparatus by scholars
assigned to these texts. The
apparatus will be developed by the scholars, but in cooperation with a
specialist in the development of Web-based instruction from the beginning.
Cooperation with current on-line pedagogical resources in this field will be
established as well, such as the SEA Teaching Site
(http://www.lehigh.edu/~ejg1/topics. html), Common Voice (http://www.common-place.org/), and Do
History (http://www.dohistory.org/). While those materials are being developed,
participants in the pilot programs at Brown and University of California,
Irvine, will receive drafts of the texts and apparatus and begin planning the
pedagogical application of that material in consultation with our Web
development specialist. Other schools may be recruited as participants at this
juncture.
May
2003: a meeting will be held at the University of
California, Irvine, to convene the teams working on the texts and apparatus
with the aim of refining the materials for application in the classroom through
the case studies the following year.
June-August
2003: the collaborative teaching teams will
develop lesson plans and curriculum units for trial in the coming academic
year. The Web-based repository will be
prepared for use.
September
2003-June 2004: trials
of the materials and the Web-based delivery systems at all educational
levels. The trials will include
systematic evaluation of student outcomes, student attitudes toward the
material, apparatus, pedagogical material and delivery system.
July
2004: a meeting in the U.S. for collaborative
teaching teams and the scholars who developed the texts and apparatus to assess
the trial applications, and consider further adjustments, additional texts.
August
2004-May 2005: refinement of the Web-based delivery system
for public, world-wide dissemination of pedagogical materials under the
auspices of the SEA.
(NB: We are also be seeking funding from other
agencies to support collaboration with teachers and scholars in
trial-applications of the material in schools and universities outside the
U.S. If those activities are supported,
we hope to run a parallel program in Europe and/or Latin America, and then to
bring participants from the U.S. and the other program(s) together in a
capstone conference.)
4.B.4: Teaching and Learning in the Humanities
The
hemispheric approach to teaching early American culture is intended to present
that period in a light that is more accurate historically, particularly
regarding the continuity between North and South America as objects of
"discovery" and colonization by European peoples. In addition to historical accuracy, this
approach also intends to focus attention on the role of the New World in the
formation of European national identities, and of the extent to which those
identities are connected to images of American exceptionalism, whether that
exceptional status be imagined in terms of hybridity or the melting pot. At the university-level, such an approach
opens new paths of research to students and scholars across national
lines. In K-12 schools, the hemispheric
approach helps students to historicize ethnic affiliations (and hence their own
cultural identity), and to understand the importance of a global perspective on
the origins of America, its past, and its future.
The pedagogical application of this
approach on a limited scale has been the focus of three projects sponsored by
the University of California, the DeWitt Wallace-Reader's Digest Fund, and
other external agencies. These are
described in appendix 3 as a model for out pilot program.
4.B.5: Database and interactive technology
Technological
support for this project will be provided by collaboration between the Maryland
Institute of Technology in the Humanities at the University of Maryland, and
the Distance Learning Center at the University of California, Irvine. The MITH
will develop the digital textual archive based on the Summit conference in May
2002. The DLC at UCI will support the development and delivery of pedagogical
materials associated with that archive.
The Maryland Institute of Technology in the Humanities (MITH), an NEH supported
inter-disciplinary institute of scholars devoted to exploring the use of new
technologies in university teaching, research, and community outreach located
on the campus of the University of Maryland, has provided the server space for
the prototype web-based Anthology and has expressed interest in further
supporting the development of the digital archive into a more publicly
available teaching and research resource after the Summit by providing
technical support, leave time, and editorial and legal assistance and advice.
MITH's involvement in this project has been enthusiastically endorsed by
director, Martha Nell Smith.
The Distance Learning Center at the
University of California, Irvine,
supports the development and delivery of on-line courses and instructional
programs for UCI, including individual courses offered in the regular
curriculum, a graduate degree program in Criminology, Law and Society (Masters
of Advanced Studies) for working professionals in that field, and other courses
and curricula offered through the UCI Extension Program. The DLC specializes in
the technology, software, and staff-expertise as described below to support
on-line delivery systems for academic courses and programs developed in
collaboration with teachers and scholars from a wide range of fields and for an
even broader range of audiences (including K-12 teachers seeking formal
credentials). The pedagogical materials supported by the DLC will be based on
the World Wide Web and hence platform independent. No specific downloads will
be needed by those who wish to access the materials and courses. In addition to
hosting the materials and curricula, a “tag, search, and retrieval” mechanism
will be employed in cooperation with the MITH so visitors to either site can
seek out the specific materials as needed. The pedagogical materials will
reside in a database hosted by the UCI Distance Learning Center. To update or
modify any materials, the originator or a designee simply copies the document
to his / her desktop, makes the desired changes, and uploads the new document
to the database. The course and curricula content and interactivity will be
housed within the electronic learning courseware system licensed by the
Distance Learning Center. Called “Prometheus,” this flexible and easy-to-use
software was developed at George Washington University by faculty for faculty.
It is accessible by anyone with an Internet Service Provider from anywhere in
the world.
Specific technologies to serve interactive needs
Storage and organization of texts and other media files require a system of
document meta-tagging for the purpose of systemized retrieval. This system
needs to be developed in collaboration with MITH to ensure smooth connections
between the texts and the pedagogical materials derived from them. We have set
aside money in the budget for the Distance Learning Center (DLC) database and
Web experts to support this collaboration. The pedagogical applications of the
stored media files require instructional design expertise. The DLC staff will
work collaboratively with participating scholars and teachers to determine the
most effective instructional aids and plans for the intended audiences:
graduate, post-secondary, secondary, and K-6. The technologies to support these
pedagogical collaborations include pdf files, Dreamweaver, Flash, as well as
synchronous and asynchronous communication tools. The online delivery system,
as described above, is the courseware Prometheus. This CMS (course management
software) includes the interactive tools of threaded discussion (message
board), individual and group email capabilities, simultaneous text and voice
conferencing, and an interactive whiteboard feature in which groups or
individuals can pull up a document into the “whiteboard” space and discuss it
over the Web from anywhere in the world at a shared time.
4.B.6:
Materials
Materials
to be developed through this project will differ in two important ways from
those presently available: texts will be presented in their entirety whenever
possible, with apparatus to guide users through the whole work and to
contextualize any pieces that may be used in a class; the Web-based delivery of
materials makes possible hypertext versions linked to visual and audio material
as well as related texts and scholarly sources.
The use of whole texts, or at least
substantial portions of very long documents, distinguishes the materials
produced by this project from related materials presently available in print
form. For example, the print anthology
most close related to the topic of our project is The Literatures of Colonial America, edited by Susan Castillo and
Ivy Schweitzer (Malden, MA: Blackwell,
2001). This book is an immensely
valuable collection of material ranging from pre-Columbian myths to the early
nineteenth century. It is also huge,
602 pages and almost two inches thick.
Together with the historical range, the physical and financial
constraints of print publication have resulted in excerpts that are very
short: Columbus gets four pages, as do
Cabeza de Vaca and Gaspar Perez de Villagra; Jonathan Edwards gets ten pages,
Crèvecoeur nine; and so on.
Introductory apparatus is usually less than a page.Other related
anthologies face similar constraints.
Needless to say, these print materials cannot reproduce much visual
material, and none in color, and no audio is available to give students a sense
of how the poems and songs sound, let alone to incorporate music from the
periods. The high expense of these
anthologies also makes their adoption in K-12 schools impractical, as does
their format and intended audience for the apparatus. 4.B.6: Intended beneficiaries
The
Web-based delivery of materials produced in this project creates a range of
beneficiaries that ultimately includes teachers and scholars around the
world. More immediately, we have
applied for funds to support the Ibero-Anglo Summit and then to fund
course-relief for the scholars developing texts and apparatus based on material
presented at that meeting. The second
stage of the work would support the scholars and teachers from all levels who
collaborate in the development of curricula, lesson plans, assignments and
exercises based on those texts, and the trial application of these plans in
selected classrooms. These
collaborative trial applications will be based in the participating
universities and colleges, with general oversight by the Society of Early
Americanists. However, the point of
this project is to produce and maintain a repository of Web-based, interactive
texts, apparatus, and applications that could be adopted by a wide range of
educational institutions at all levels, so it would be designed from the
beginning with this broad application in mind.
4.C Institutional Context
"Teaching
Early Ibero/Anglo American Studies" is a project sponsored by the Society
of Early Americanists, in collaboration with the University of Arizona, The
Maryland Institute of Technology in the Humanities, the University of
California at Irvine, Brown University, and Early American Literature.
Society of Early
Americanists: This
project is central to the mission of the Society of Early Americanists: "The purpose of this Society shall be
to further the exchange of ideas and
information among scholars of various disciplines who study the
literature and culture of America to
approximately 1800." Founded in 1992, SEA is a non-profit interdisciplinary
organization that holds biennial scholarly meetings, publishes a newsletter,
hosts an electronic discussion group EARAM-L, sponsors scholarly panels at
meetings of the American Literature Association, the American Society of
Eighteenth-Century Studies, ASA, and other organizations, and bestows prizes
recognizing scholarship. It maintains an award-winning Website filled with
scholarly resources for scholars and teachers. This Website, which will house
the Web-based delivery systems, includes two sections directly related to this
project: "Teaching Early American
Topics (http://www.lehigh.edu/~ejg1/topics.html); and "Additional
Resources," a collection of Web-based resources for the study of Early
American topics (http://www.lehigh.edu/~hwh2/resource.htm).
University of California,
Irvine: UCI provides the
server and technical support for the SEA Website, and it will provide the
server-space, other equipment, and technical support for the Web-based delivery
system described above. Funding for
this project will purchase time and expertise of personnel in the Distance
Learning Center at UCI, including specialist in the development of nationwide
delivery systems for educational materials and on-line courses.
UCI has supported other projects
related to the topic of this application.
As described above, one quarter of the previous cycle of the year-long
Humanities Core Course was devoted to Ibero-Anglo perspectives on early
America. A seminar in UCI's Santa Ana
Teacher's Institute was devoted to the same topic and included collaboration
with 10 teachers from that district.
Maryland Institute for
Technology in the Humanities
(see description in previous section)
Brown University. Brown University is home of the John
Carter Brown Library, perhaps the single most important source of primary
materials from the colonial period in both North and South America. The JCB is
a gathering place for experts treating every aspect of early America and would
supply an ongoing resource for employment in a hemisphere program of studies. Brown envisions both graduate and
undergraduate offerings in hemispheric American literature. Its Hispanic
Studies and Portuguese Departments are ranked in the top five nationally. Its English Department contains three
scholars pursuing transatlantic investigations of early American
literature. It possesses the personnel
and the institutional desire to provide strong
leadership in the development of curriculum materials.
Early American Literature, now in its 37th year of
publication is the journal of record for scholarship treating American
literatures pre-1820. It will publish
in print summary reports of the experiment and oversee elements of the print
publicity of the effort. Editor David
S. Shields is one of the group who designed this initiative.
4.D: Staff and Participants
Project
Director—Ralph Bauer, Department of English, University of Maryland
Coordinator, Collaborative Pedagogical
Projects--Michael P. Clark, University of California, Irvine
On-Line
Educational Resource Supervisor--Ed Gallagher, Lehigh University
SEA
Liaison and project publicist—David S. Shields, The Citadel
Participants
Brown University Pilot Program:
Nancy
Armstrong, Leonard Tennenhouse, Philip Gould, James Egan, Chris Clayton
SEA
Officers:
Philip Gould, President,
Zabelle Stodola, Vice President,
Executive Coordinator, Dennis Moore.
Summit
Program Committee & Participants (see appendix 2).
Clerical
and Administrative Staff
SEA,
Assistant to Project Director
Faculty
Coordinator Assistant
Website staff
support (UCI Distance Learning Personnel)
Dr. Gary Matkin Dean, Continuing Education and Summer Session
Dr.
Jia Frydenberg Director, UCI
DLC
Larry
Cooperman Director,
Instructional Design and Technology
Billy
Ryoo UCI
DLC Program Representative, Delivery expert
Community
Colleges participating in the collaborative pedagogical projects to be named
later
K-12
Schools participating in the collaborative pedagogical projects to be named
later
4.E: Evaluation
"Teaching
Early Ibero/Anglo American Studies" will be evaluated at several
points. The Summit meeting in May 2002
will be evaluated by participants immediately following the conference. The collection of materials developed
following the conference will be evaluated by scholars in the field not
associated with the project in summer 2003.
Each of the collaborative pedagogical projects will be evaluated by
participants and one independent reviewer for each project upon completion of
the trial applications, summer 2004.
The Web-based repository and resource will be reviewed by independent
experts in on-line education, working with a team of scholars and teachers
expert in the subject area of early American studies, in summer 2005. A report and discussion of the evaluation
will form part of the agenda for the international conference proposed for that
year as a basis for expanding the pedagogical collaboration internationally.
4.F: Follow-up and dissemination
As
described above, most of the proposed activities in this project are a
follow-up to the initial conference in May 2002. Dissemination and development of the materials presented at that
conference is the heart of this proposal.
The last planned activity, an international conference to present and
discuss the materials and Web-base delivery system developed in this project,
is intended to extend the influence and scope of this project after the funding
ends.
Routine maintenance of the Web-based
repository and resource will be supported by UCI, which will provide a
permanent archive for the materials and facilitate their periodic updating.
5. Project budget (budget forms)
5.A: Salaries and Wages
5.B: Consultant Fees
5.C: Travel
5.D: Other Costs
6. Appendices
1 See Forum: Philip F. Gura, “Early American Literature at the New Century,” William & Mary Quarterly, 3d Series, LVII, 3 I(July 200): 599-646.
2 David Saldívar, The Dialectics of Our America: Genealogy, Cultural Critique, and Literary History (Durham: Duke UP, 1991).
3 Hortense Spillers, ed., Comparative American Identities (New York: Routledge, 1991). Gustavo Pérez-Firmat, ed., Do the Americans have a Common Literature? (Durham: Duke UP, 1990).
4 William Spengemann, A Mirror for Americanists (Boston: Northeastern UP, 1994).