Semi-Final Draft of Mildly Anarchist Teaching Encounter

This past week, I’ve made some revisions on a paper that I wrote about a class that I taught exploring the two Wesley College buildings that formerly stood on the University of North Dakota campus. It’s for an edited volume that will survey teaching the archaeology of the contemporary world.

The paper is titled: Documenting Wesley College: A Mildly Anarchist Teaching Encounter.

You can download a copy of it here.

I basically committed almost every mid-career, guy-scholar, sin in this paper. First, it overshot the word limit and then I included too many images. Today, I’m going to submit my revised version of the manuscript (which is still a bit long and includes too many images) in an effort to avoid the cardinal sin, which is turning the paper in late.

The paper considers the “mildly anarchist” approach that I used teaching the Wesley College class which not only eschewed formal grading and course design but focused on experiences and encounters rather than outcomes and objectives. The results were good even if the model that I present here was not readily adaptable to other, more formal, teaching environments.

That said, I’ve adapted some of what I did in this class to what I’m doing this semester in my “Thinking with Things” graduate seminar in the English Department. I hope to also take some of what I did in this class to my editing and publishing course next fall. So… stay tuned (or not… it’s really up to you!).