Professor Emmanuelle Saada (Photo credit: Columbia University)
Professor Emmanuelle Saada is the Chair of Contemporary Civilization and Professor of French and of History at Columbia. She spoke with me in October about adapting to teaching the Core online, the direction in which Contemporary Civilization is headed, and connections between the Core and research skills. (This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.)
On the Core, online: We have thought long and hard about what it means for students to study and learn online. The first priority was to lighten the reading load because we know that many students are in difficult situations and that it’s difficult to study [during remote learning].
A second adjustment we’ve made regards the balance between the work that students do outside of class and the work that they do in class. Because Zoom can be frustrating, and because less can happen in the Zoom room than in a traditional classroom, we have developed forms of collaborative work that can happen outside of the Zoom room context: forms of collaborative work, like annotating passages or chapters of books together; preparing readings in small groups, in collaboration with the instructor. For the students to have a meaningful experience, more things need to happen outside of class.
We think about the Core as a community building experience. We want to create a sense of intellectual community beyond the classroom. We want students to be able to discuss Plato, Aristotle, all these important texts together, and in a normal year those conversations might take place over breakfast, outside of Butler, playing Frisbee on a Sunday afternoon. We really want the texts to continue to be part of students’ common experience. We don’t have this online, so we have created spaces for the students to collaborate together outside of class.
On the Core, responding to the present cultural moment: To recreate a sense of intellectual community, we’ve created a program called CC Chats: every Friday from 1 to 3, we invite all sophomore students to hear from a scholar whose work engages the texts of the week. But the discussion is not about the texts themselves; rather it’s about their larger contemporary resonances. So for example, this year we’ve
introduced texts on racial justice. Before we speak about Plato and justice in The Republic, we have 19th and 20th century texts that deal with race and justice in this country. This addition to the curriculum was very deliberate—it was a response to the movement for Black lives and the debates over racial justice currently taking place in this country. After considering these texts, we go to Plato to question whether Plato’s vision of justice can help us think about racial justice today. We invited a classicist, Dan-el Padilla Peralta, a professor at Princeton, and Bernard Harcourt, the director of the Eric H. Holder Jr. Initiative for Civil and Political Rights at Columbia to discuss ancient and contemporary concepts of justice. They brought a different light to the text, by showing the larger stakes involved.
In that sense, we can think of the CC Chats as an opportunity to discuss the texts a little outside of their shell. It’s been very successful, and for me, it has been a very exciting experience because it is a way of creating a kind of “free” intellectual community. There is no grade. It’s simply a place where students can come and speak about the texts about how much they have mattered in the past, how they still matter today, how they have shaped our present, which is a big part of what CC is about. We’re trying to make the best out of our current, difficult situation.
On what students should know about teaching online: It’s hard. It’s hard on you and it’s hard on your teacher. A lot happens in a classroom through personal communication, body language, a sense of personal connection. We lose a sense of improvisation [with online instruction]. When an instructor teaches CC, they have an agenda in mind, with issues and themes that they are excited to discuss with their students. And when those conversations take place, it is almost like being a conductor of a jazz band. It is about bringing everybody together, but there is also some degree of improvisation, and things you don’t expect. In almost every session, a student will notice something that the instructor and other students have not seen in the text. That’s the beauty of CC: the discussion ensues organically from the interest of the students.
It’s way more difficult to improvise online. It’s more difficult for the instructor to read the room, so the conversation is more scripted. But we want to make sure that students are as engaged in the interaction as they can be. To do so, CC instructors have prepared collective resources to share with one another as they teach online. We’ve done a lot of collective
work. In a way, we are a stronger community than ever because of these kinds of collaboration.
On the Core’s relationship to undergraduate research: I’m very interested in how people connect the Core to the rest of their studies. The Core is a foundation for later work. When I think about research, I think about people exploring new territories, exploring new questions, but that’s actually not what the Core is about. The Core is about very old questions—very trodden terrain. Then the question is: how do new questions and new directions emerge from this old terrain?
CC does two things. First of all, it exposes students to a long series of questions that continue to frame the way that many people, let’s say us in New York today, think about the world. I think it’s very helpful to have an idea of how questions of community—of political legitimacy, of power, of class, of economic production—how these questions came about and how they developed historically. CC provides a genealogy to explain how we come to be who we are. It’s not necessarily going to make you think about new objects or new things, but it gives you a sense of the state of things.
The other thing that CC does is help you read better, argue better. It is about providing those basic skills of reading the world, of arguing about your reading, both orally and in writing. I think those skills are very similar to those necessary to do research.
On gaining skills in a virtual setting: Despite being online, I think we are helping train students in those skills. For example, we got rid of the midterm and the final exam. It doesn’t really make sense in the online world to have closed books, time-limited exams, over Zoom. So we have more time to insist on the writing, so the papers are more important than ever. And we ask students to do projects and an exit interview instead of a written exam, to reflect on the work they have done. It’s a way of making students more in charge of their own learning.
We still want to work on those skills of reading, thinking and arguing together. I don’t think the format has changed very much. Those basic skills are still being honed in the context of online learning. You become a better thinker in a conversation with your instructor and your peers. We still train students in these skills, but in a different format.