CCRA | CC Research Ambassadors

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. 

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