Literature Committee Meeting – March 13, 2025

• The meeting was called to order at 3:03 pm.

Attendance:

Lesley Broder, Robert Cowan, Elroy Esdaille, Monica Filmon, Stephanie Montali, Marylynn Navarro, Karen Niles, Frank Percaccio, Sara Rutkowski, Enid Stubin, Jane Weiss

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Approval of Minutes from last meeting- 11/26/2024

— The minutes from the last Literature Department meeting on 11-26-2024 were unanimously approved.

Curriculum Update

—Sara told us that we are considering the process for pathways and the new courses we are introducing.

–We have to consider enrollment trends and the best fit for our courses, so that they can run.

–There is a concern that for our literature courses, there could be slight encroachment with other courses from different departments. For example, courses from other departments also fall under creative expression, so we are also considering the usages of the domains like “Individual and Society,” and “US Experience in Diversity.”

— A Commentwas made that the word “society,” itself brings into play the idea of the social, so the domain of “Individual and Society,” for our literature courses might also conflict with the social sciences courses.

— More discussion about the domains will be ongoing.

— We are modelling a lot of our courses to be consistent with Brooklyn College.

— Brooklyn College does not have a course that combines Biblical Literature with Classical literature, as we do. The question was asked if we should consider introducing this course or splitting it into two individual courses. There was no consensus on this, and it was considered as something we should discuss another time.

Assessment Update

–Literary studies won’t be a concentration until Fall 2025.

–Middle States is coming in about two weeks, so we should be aware of that.

— Research was conducted on “Introduction to Literature,” and “Short Fiction.” It was small-scale research, and it was pointed out that this was not a large enough sample to accurately represent our students who took those courses on a whole. The research found that 80% of students are meeting the outcome.

–A comment was made that assessment is necessary, but it is not meaningful if we are only doing it just for compliance.

— Jane reminded us that Colleen Davy wants assessments course by course. Also, we should look into what happens with students who do more than one literature course, with different literary content. The concentration involves only three literature courses. We can write up a form that asks students what other literature courses they have taken. This might provide useful data.

— Rob mentioned that we should consider having new learning outcomes, curriculum map, a six-year plan, and 2025-2026 plan by May. This idea had traction, but more discussion is needed.

— Rob said that he, MaryLynn, and Jane would meet in approximately a week to iron out some details.

The Question of Modality

–A question was asked: what are our students getting out of the courses offered in non-in-person modalities.

–Instructors have to find ways to get the students positioned to pass the class, but knowledge acquisition on behalf of the students as whole seems to be suffering.  

— Different instructors have different preferences. Some instructors prefer to teach online asynchronous, others synchronous, others hybrid and others in-person.

–How do we keep consistency in our courses?  English 30 is the course in which we run the most sections. We should have discussions about how these classes are being taught.

–There are currently 17 Literature courses running in the Spring 2025 term: 6 in-person, 4 Hybrid, and 7 fully online.

— A comment was made that it is the nature of the courses themselves, for certain classes lend themselves to a specific modality.

— The fit between the professor and the modality is important.

–There are people who want to teach almost exclusively on-line.

— Also, the idea that composition with other courses is real, and sometime online classes get to run, while in-person classes may not. For example, students who need a writing intensive, and do not find the Literature class online, might choose to take a course in another subject area.

— We should be aware that AI is an ongoing issue and take steps to address it.

— Rob said that Annie has informed us that classes that straddle 12:30 pm are the ones that are harder to fill, because early-college students can’t take them. If courses conform to the ECI schedule, we are guaranteed about 9 ECI students in each class.

Program Promotion

–It was suggested that Amanda Kalin might be useful to invite to a meeting to share student data, but not everyone agreed that she was the best person for this.

—Plasma Screens: For course offerings and concentration promotion. We now know how to get it done, so we move on trying to have our information displayed that way. We can add information for each of our courses, about the program itself, and our classes. We can also put very short video clips of interviews with professors and students.

Vitrine: We should update our Spring Course offerings and be vigilant to change them depending on the semester.

Liberal Arts Webpage: It is imperative that we update our Liberal Arts webpage and make necessary changes when the need arises.

Working with Communication and Marketing: Marketing has assigned to us Xiaoting to work with. We should consider creating an effective social media campaign.

Sigma Kappa Delta Conference: There would be a Sigma Kappa Delta Conference in March 2026, to which we could possibly send students.

Faculty-student meet and greet: In September 2025 we are planning to have a faculty-student meet and greet. This would occur after our concentration starts.  It was agreed that we should use “The Cove” as the area to host this event.

Reading Series Invitations: We will restart our Reading Series:Kimiko Hahn and Nicole Cooley reading and Raffle (April 22, 3:00-4;30 pm, v-219). We would raffle 4 books for each of them.

–We may invite Said Sayrafiezadeh, the writer of “American Estrangement” to speak to us for Spring 2026.

–We should go back and forth between poets and fiction and non-fiction writers.

— It was mentioned that we should invite the writer of “A Contemporary Version of a Doll’s House,” Rolston Coppenger to come to speak to us.

Faculty Forum: The idea was brought up to create a forum for English department Faculty to present their research, in the respective domains: Literature, Creative Writing, ESL, and Composition & Rhetoric, open to the entire college.

Pedagogy

–How are we teaching what we are teaching?

–In upcoming Literature Committee meetings, we should be open to using these meetings to have more discussions about pedagogy.

–It was decided that in the next Literature Committee meeting we should make time to also talk about syllabi and assignments.

–The idea was brought up that we should be open to visiting other professors classes (With their permissions of course) and there was consensus for that. We will have to talk more about how we would go about doing that.

Any Other Business

–All of our web pages for the Literary Studies concentration need updating.

–It is time to bring back campus life, so we need to think about interesting way to that to help us push our department forward.

–For promotion, we can go back to giving Pamphlets to students. The old ones need to be reformatted, and we should create new ones. Elroy volunteered to reformat or recreate them if needed.

–For social media, if we can get our own handles we can do more promotion. Also, it is a good idea to utilize the students to help us with promotion.

— A question was asked, if it was possible to have our own plasma screens. The reason we don’t has to do with funding and other College logistics.

–It was suggested that we should start a Literature Club. Academic clubs get a start-up fee of $250.00.

–We should have QR codes created and add to our flyers, brochures or any other information we use. The QR codes, ones scanned by the students, can provide more information about a specific course. The question was asked if we need individual QR Codes for each course or just one general one. How exactly to approach this would have to be discussed further in the future.

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Next Meeting: The next meeting is scheduled for April 10, 2025, 3:00-4:30, in C-317. All meetings this semester will use the same Zoom link.

Meeting call to a close

• The meeting was called to close at 4:26 pm.