May 6, 2019
This semester, I taught a class called The Case of the Consulting Detective: Cultural Legacies of Sherlock Holmes. In the course, students read stories and novels from Doyle’s original work as well as adaptations like Laurie King’s The Beekeeper’s Apprentice. They submitted textual analysis with peer-reviewed sources, led discussions, and created and maintained their own blogs for the course.
I also used assignments that I haven’t used before.
I blogged about preparing a podcast assignment here and here, but ultimately let students take the reigns for planning topics and criteria for inclusion (and ultimately, assessment). Their final production, which will eventually be hosted somewhere, stuck close to the canon and looked at changing character relationships with an eye toward both Victorian and contemporary cultural values.
The podcasting assignment contained some challenges: students used different software, and not being well-versed in editing myself (or computer things in general), we encountered various obstacles ranging from inability to open the theme music file to difficult exporting edited tracks as MP3 files. The class day that I devoted to getting familiar with editing audio, with the goal that each student would record 1-minute explanations of their first impression of Sherlock Holmes and edit an intro, ended up entirely consumed by difficulties finding, downloading, and using the correct version of technology for each of the student’s different laptop operating systems. At least one student left in tears. I felt like a complete failure.
However, by the time rough draft episodes were due, things had gone a little smoother. We were able to share our episodes with each other, and we took two class days to workshop the episodes and provide feedback and suggestions. Some student pairs re-recorded their episodes while others merely performed edits like adding a quote or theme music.
These podcasts served as digital engagements with the material, and they impressed me very much. Listening to students converse easily about coverture in Doyle’s short stories, for example, or fridging as the BBC’s inappropriate handling of Mary’s storyline, made me realize how appropriate podcasting is as a way of talking through ideas. In short, their work allowed me unique insight into exactly what they had learned in the course so far. Analysis was spot on, and insightful. (I do plan to post the episodes here, soon!)
A student unrolls a timeline of Sherlock Holmes adaptations
The final project permitted student creativity. Students were asked to create multi-modal or multi-media engagements with the iconic figure of Sherlock Holmes. Students chose to adapt board games to the theme while others created a Sherlock-Holmes themed study abroad trip, plans for a hotel and amusement park, an additional podcast episode, a marketing campaign for a consulting detective business, or a timeline of Sherlock Holmes adaptations (pictured). These projects were additional ways students could participate in fan (a la Jenkins theories of participatory cultures) and maker cultures (see Whitson’s “Critical Making in the Digital Humanities”), engaging materially to suffuse their projects with knowledge synthesized across disciplines.
These projects reminded me of what students can do with freedom to create. While some freedom and choice in assignments offered in past classes did not turn out well (i.e. one student complained how sick she was of professors letting her choose to write about her interests, for example, because she had none), the projects submitted so far have been fantastic. We are even having an end-of-class dinner on this week to celebrate the class and play the games!
Sometimes, taking pedagogical risks don’t really pan out, but this semester, I am happy to say that the students surpassed my expectations!