“Relating to the Book: Increasing Student Engagement with Book Culture” - Leith Davis
Channel: Bibliographical Society of Canada
Date: 2021-06-25

Leith Davis, Simon Fraser University

This paper discusses a methodology for increasing student interest in and engagement with book culture: an approach which implements media labs alongside more traditional methods of analyzing literary texts. We begin by analyzing the theoretical and methodological parameters of this approach which we call “embodied humanities,” noting the way it draws from but differentiates itself from experiential learning methodologies. We next discuss the “embodied humanities” approach with reference to a course created in 2019 on “Old and New Media in the Early Eighteenth Century: An Embodied Humanities Approach.” The course was designed to explore connections between the media changes we are currently experiencing (from print to digitally-based communications) and the media changes of the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries (from oral and manuscript culture to a marketplace of print culture). Three media labs were incorporated into the course in order to introduce students in an embodied manner to the three kinds of eighteenth-century media that we were studying: ballad-singing for a perspective on oral culture; letter-folding and writing with quill pens for a perspective on manuscript culture; and letter-press printing for a perspective on print culture. The primary materials that were read were organized around the three labs. The results were very positive, and student-centered and observational data indicate that many students developed a new appreciation for and understanding of the materiality of media and that many were eager to explore the area further. A remote adaptation of the course was offered in Fall, 2020, with very positive results, particularly for the manuscript culture unit, and we discuss this in the context of online learning during the COVID-19 pandemic. Research suggests that there is a clear connection between engagement and educational outcomes (S. Christenson, A. L. Reschy, & C. Wylie, eds., Handbook of Research on Student Engagement [New York: Springer, 2017]). By boosting student engagement, the course also positively impacted educational outcomes as well; in the remote version, the course also contributed to student wellness.