International relations major Maria Gershuni ’17 is true (Geneseo) blue when it comes to singing the praises of faculty on campus. However, this semester she has discovered talent and knowledge beyond the valley, courtesy of COPLAC (Council for Public Liberal Arts Colleges), of which Geneseo is the sole New York institution in the 30-member consortium.
“Geneseo professors are amazing, talented and knowledgeable — some of the best in the world — but I have thoroughly enjoyed being taught by faculty at other schools,” she said, reflecting on her participation in the COPLACDigital Liberal Arts at a Distance program. “Dr. Matthews and Dr. Owens could fit in well at Geneseo.”
She’s referring to Mary Beth Mathews, associate professor of religion at the University of Mary Washington, and Ken Owen, assistant professor of history at the University of Illinois Springfield, who are team-teaching a digital seminar, “Divided Houses: Secession and Separation.” Gershuni and fellow IR major Rachel Gdula ’18 are enrolled in the class. (Note: The deadline to nominate students for a COPLACDigital course in fall 2017 is March 22.)
Gershuni, who had studied about separatism in other countries such as Ukraine and represented the separatist state of South Sudan in a Model UN simulation, found the topic quite relevant and appealing. “I was eager to learn how that idea, which I applied to places far away, can be applied to my own backyard,” she said.
Gdula is equally enthusiastic — and not only for learning more about secessionist and separatist movements in the United States versus the more traditional international focus in her courses.
“I am also eager to develop my skills with digital tools, and learn more about how to use these tools to make information and academic research more accessible to the public,” she wrote on her blog, created to fulfill a class requirement.
Both students are involved in a research project focusing on Upstate New York separatist attitudes and New York Secessionists movements, which they will present at GREAT Day April 24.
The course is among six offered in the 2016-17 academic year as part of the COPLACDigital program, first introduced in 2014 and funded through a generous grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. The collaborative teaching model connects COPLAC member institutions’ faculty and students through teleconferencing technology and innovative digital tools to explore various topics in the liberal arts.
Faculty from COPLAC member institutions may nominate as many qualified students as they would like, but only two students per campus will be accepted for each course. Interim Provost and Professor of English Paul Schacht hopes that Geneseo will be represented in his forthcoming class, “Into the Woods: Experiments in Community, Sustainability and the Examined Life,”
that he’s co-teaching with Debra Schleef, professor of sociology at the University of Mary Washington.
“A theme of modern life since the industrial revolution has been that our lives are too hurried, too complicated, too burdened by technology,” Schacht noted in an informational video on the COPLACDigital website. “We’ve fallen out of connection with nature. A writer who wrote about this famously as far back as the 1840s was Henry David Thoreau who went into the woods in order to live deliberately.”
In this course, students from Geneseo and COPLAC institutions will form and study in their own intentional virtual community.
"This course is an examination of those kinds of (intentional) communities,” said Schleef. “We expect that students who are interested in sociological, historical and philosophical understanding of community will be interested in taking this course. And we’re interested in students from all majors.
The course excites Schacht because students will learn about the nature of community, “in part by comparing these virtual communities to physically, geo-located intentional communities.” Schacht has been instrumental in creating, sustaining and promoting Geneseo’s own Digital Thoreau initiative, complemented by the efforts of faculty colleague and Professor of English Ed Gillin, who leads the Thoreau-Harding project, an ongoing course dedicated to “constructing a cabin modeled on the home cemented into historical and literary fame in Walden by Henry David Thoreau … to serve as a tribute to Professor Walter Harding, Thoreau scholar and beloved SUNY Geneseo educator.”
Two other courses will be offered in the fall: Conflict in America: Case Studies in Peace-Making and Cultural Crossroads: Migration & Community Transformation.
Just like physical classes, students enrolled in a COPLACDigital seminar meet on designated days and times, gathering via teleconferencing, blogging and websites which they design to share ideas.
“During the online portion of the course, we all collectively provide feedback on each other’s ideas,” Gershuni explained. “Because we are all creating websites, it’s good to hear what other digitally-literate people feel about design concepts and tools we can incorporate. I never considered myself technologically savvy … but slowly and surely, I am learning how to embed code and create interactive timelines. When it all comes together, I think I will be very proud to have something I can show others that I have created.”
Amanda Wentworth ’18, majoring in English with a minor in medieval studies, shares a similar reaction regarding the connectivity and technology afforded by COPLACDigital seminars. “The most interesting aspect of this class was definitely the subject matter — I mean, ‘The Social Life of Books’ just sounds like a good time, at least for someone looking to pursue a career in library science, such as myself,” she said. “I was also really interested in the idea of connecting and working with students from schools around the country.”
Wentworth acknowledged that that distance has been a challenge, but only at the beginning when everything was still “a bit hectic, vague and confusing,” she said. “Fortunately, that didn't last long. The flexibility of the professors to email and video chat with us outside of class eases a lot of anxiety.”
Geneseo has been well represented in the COPLACDigital program. In fall 2016, Emily Buckley-Crist ’17 and John Panus ’17, both English majors, enrolled in “Narrating the Public Liberal Arts” (NAPLA). Working together, they researched and shared the foundations of knowledge at Geneseo. The experience left an indelible impression upon both.
“I had a great experience in the course,” said Buckley-Crist. “I've done some work within digital humanities (DH) before, and knowing that we would be learning and using DH tools to display our work was probably the most appealing aspect of the course for me. The opportunity to learn about the college’s history — of which I knew next to nothing prior to this course — was also exciting.”
Echoing his classmate, Panus described his experience with COPLAC as outstanding, especially the “freedom to be intellectually playful.”
“NAPLA was unlike any class I’ve taken,” he recalled. “It allowed for a huge amount of experimentation and individual exploration. Even if we weren’t collaborating or responding per se (with students from other COPLAC colleges), our thinking was constantly influenced by the work we saw our classmates doing. This course taught me to enjoy the process, not the product. The process is where the magic happens. Too often, we see a polished final project and fail to see the labor, struggle and creativity that created it.”
— By Tony Hoppa