ENGL361 - Recovering Oral Histories

Service-learning course that gives students an opportunity to develop writing, interviewing, and communication skills as they contribute to the work of a community organization.

In the classroom, students will reflect on the process and do background research to understand the particular context of the organization's work. In the field, students will interview (or have informal discussions with) young people helped by the organization in order to construct a narrative about their lives, their perceptions of themselves, and their experiences.

This course examines 20th- and 21st -century fiction, particularly novels, from South Asia, Africa, and the Caribbean, focusing particularly on issues of migration and the refugee crisis. The novels will range in genre from realism to science/dystopian fiction to graphic novel. In addition to critical response essays, students will have the opportunity to write a creative piece, book review, opinion piece for a newspaper, or other mode of public writing. They might also develop a multimedia project in which writing is just one component and in which they respond to films or art from the various regions alongside the novels we read.

Section(s):
0201 - Sharada Balachandran Orihuela