From Five College Ink, Vol 13, No. 1. 2000-2001.
Reprinted with Permission.
To the casual observer, it’s a typical college lecture class: some 50 students ranged about the auditorium facing a lectern behind which the instructor stands. He addresses the class, his figure backlit by the light on a screen displaying several quotes, among them excerpts from writings by Charles Taylor (Politics of Recognition), Noam Chomsky (Free Trade and Free Markets: Pretense and Practice), and Paul Krugman. “With these three points of view in mind and what you’ve learned in the last two discussion sessions of your class in either French, management, or Spanish,” he tells the students, “you’re going to break into small groups and figure out what happened in Seattle last December, and more recently in Washington, D.C., and Prague. Try to answer the question of how the perspectives of these cultural historians and economists differ from the journalistic accounts you’ve read of the demonstrations in Business Week, Newsweek, and the Progressive Populist.”
The students are enrolled in a course offered at the University of Massachusetts Amherst for the first time this fall. “Global Markets, Global Culture?” is something of a curricular experiment involving three courses. It’s innovative and, by all accounts, students find the three-course combination challenging, occasionally confusing, and even sometimes downright upsetting. Most find the readings demanding. Adding to the mix is not just one but three instructors, each of whom teaches a different course within the larger course structure. Robert Schwartzwald is teaching a French course that deals with Quebec in the Americas. His colleague Luis Marentes is teaching an advanced section of Spanish. And the third member of this instructional triumvirate is Marta Calás, who is teaching a course on international management practices.
They meet with their respective classes on Monday and Tuesday but when all three classes come together on Thursday, the instructors take turns lecturing, depending on the nature of the readings, with the other two occasionally interjecting to offer a conflicting viewpoint, a relevant comment, or another perspective. The readings for the different classes are different—and in three different languages—but they complement the readings all the students are assigned for the larger lecture section. Students are usually quizzed in their own sections of the course. Everyone is assigned a midterm paper and a final group project.
Review notes the instructors have distributed for the common midterm outline some of the major arguments covered in the first part of the course:
“Globalization” is both celebrated and contested: global integration—as reflected in regional agreements and trade blocs such as NAFTA—and disintegration, represented in movements against the World Trade Organization, IMF, and the World Bank, are happening concurrently. The local and the global constantly interrogate and rearticulate each other.
The central feature of global culture today is the mutual tendency of sameness and difference to cannibalize one another . . .
Columbus, Cartier, Champlain . . . (the CONTACTS session) show us how the local is always hybrid but also how ways of representing the local (the diaries and chronicles that were written at the time) do matter. How we understand and think about people in the world today is also a product of who got to write about whom and when, and of how such understandings were written.
It is, as one student observes, “heavy reading at times” and at times fraught with contradictions. Yet the students keep coming, and most stay engaged. Why? Elizabeth Johnson is a junior at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, a major in French who also happens to be earning certificates in both Latin American studies and international relations. She hopes one day to work for an international organization like the U.N. What she likes best about this course, she says, is “the idea of this one big class” and the fact that it’s being “taught from three different areas with three very different instructors.” As a French major, Elizabeth has never taken, and is not likely to, she says, a course taught by someone in the field of management. Marta Calás takes a very different approach to the material from the other two instructors, Elizabeth points out, “but I like that. They take the same idea and give it different dimensions, but ultimately they end up on common ground. If they don’t, they hear about it from us!”
The students in the class know they are part of a curricular experiment, says Marentes, and for that reason feel sufficient ownership in it to speak up when they think adjustments are necessary. Today, for example, the large group of 50 is being broken into small units that provide a mix of students from management, labor relations, French, Spanish, and education. This came about, he says, as the result of students’ expressed need for more open discussion of the issues and readings. “Some of the readings,” Elizabeth concedes, are “dense and difficult to follow” but by breaking into the small groups “we can talk to each other and that helps us all really get at the material.” She thinks the mix of students from different disciplines and majors is an added benefit. The idea behind the course, she says, “is to change our thinking, not to tell us what to think. The instructors try to make us see events as complex, and figure out why and how something is happening the way it is. In the regular class sections we’re getting small pieces and then putting them all together in the larger section. It’s a great course. A few quirks, but a great course.”
Creating a New Space
If the quirks remain to be ironed out, Marentes is clear that creating discomfort is all part of their plan. And in pushing the disciplinary boundaries for their students, the instructors, too, are being challenged. “This is different from team teaching,” observes Schwartzwald, “because it is so broadly interdisciplinary. It couldn’t be done within our own traditional disciplines. It removes the either/or frame—culture or markets, local or global issues. It doesn’t take globalization as a given and thereby frees us to engage it. What we’re doing is deconstructing globalization and markets, not to abandon the categories but to examine how they are co-present.” In other team-teaching situations, Calás adds, “we knew the pitch —this course has no boundaries. It’s like each of us has a portion of a map. We’re bringing our pieces together, trying to make sense of the whole, only to discover that we’re in a city none of us knows. We’ve created a completely new space with this course.”
What draws some students to the course is not necessarily what’s keeping them engaged with it. Pilar Schiavo is a second-year graduate student in labor relations. She liked the idea of having a chance to look at labor issues in the context of globalization. What surprised her, she says, is how much of the material deals with historical issues. “But that’s been really helpful because I’m learning about crossovers between different cultures and economies this way.” And history, she’s discovered, has a way of repeating itself when it comes to business practices. The early colonizers of the Americas, she argues, came for religious reasons but also seeking trade and passages for commerce. She finds that analogous to American companies going abroad seeking herbs to cure arthritis. “In both cases, unfortunately, indigenous peoples, the environment too often lose.” Having business students in the class with students in French and Spanish has been “really important” in several respects, she says. “In the beginning, the issue of ethics in business practices was raised by the instructors. Now the students are the ones bringing up questions about ethics.”
Unanticipated outcomes like this are part of the learning process for the instructors as well. “I’m always surprised at what has happened,” says Schwartzwald. “Everything we do affects what we do next. I think the students are still in shock. The sheer volume of material confounds them. But so do the readings. They intend to, and do, force students to call into question so many of their preconceived notions.” His colleague Calás agrees: “Certain disciplines, mine included, have taught students to expect ‘instructional recipes.’ And this course is constantly challenging that expectation.”
To illustrate her point, she describes the kinds of “packets” that international management companies often develop to prepare their employees for working abroad. The packets, she says, distill culture to a simplistic formula such as: “This is what Mexican workers are all about, this is their culture.” In the large lecture session taught by the three of them, says Calás, “we use readings from anthropology that challenge practices like this. Then in my regular class session I’ll present my management students with an existing ‘recipe’ that some company hands out and ask them to critique it. The lesson they take away from that exercise is that you cannot have a ‘recipe’ about a culture—it’s simply not the way the world looks.”
What this course tries to do, says Schwartzwald, is “present culture as something problematized.” The readings for the course, he says, “deal with the dynamics of national belonging in a global economy— ‘transculture,’ if you will. All cultures travel,” he points out, “and all cultures are visited, and with greater rapidity and frequency than ever before, so it’s impossible to think of them as self-contained entities. What does the movement of information and the displacements of people do to senses of ‘belonging’ and identity?” If students come to the class expecting to take away a single message, Schwartzwald says, “our aim is to have them take away a far more complex view of the world.”
Three Different Stories . . .
How did colleagues in disciplines so seemingly disparate as French and Spanish and international marketing find common ground, or even find one another in the first place? “I think we all shared the fact that we were not satisfied with the way our disciplines were perceiving the world,” says Calás. “We were ready to break with tradition in each of our own separate spaces. But each of us had to take our own path, so there are three different stories of how we found each other.” What provided the venue for their finding each other, Marentes says, was a new Five College Center known as CISA—Crossroads in the Study of the Americas. Its mission as a curriculum development center is to bring together scholars from differing disciplines and different campuses to address issues of culture and identity. Schwartzwald is currently serving as director of the center. CISA, he explains, uses the seminar forum to encourage intellectual “encounters” that make possible the kind of collaborative undertaking the course represents. Calás says that when she saw an announcement about a seminar being formed by CISA, “I was desperate for intellectual stimulation. I’ve always been interdisciplinary in my teaching. My doctoral work in organization studies involved anthropology as a supporting field, so my focus on international management has largely been theoretical. It’s why I sometimes chafe against the constraints imposed by international management practices, which in point of fact should be a natural for interdisciplinary approaches. So CISA was a spark, a way to recharge myself and meet people from the other colleges.”
Luis Marentes had been attending conferences and professional meetings at the University of Texas and elsewhere where there had been a great deal of discussion about NAFTA and its impact on North America. “I remember being particularly interested in the relations established between intellectuals from Mexico and Canada, particularly Quebec,” he says. The idea for the course he recalls emerging from a series of seminars sponsored by CISA over the span of a year. “It was at one of the retreat sessions, I think, that we settled on the idea that NAFTA and the whole question of globalization and what it really means could nicely coalesce around a course on international management that Marta was teaching at the time. And that’s when we first committed ourselves to developing some kind of course among the three of us.”
Schwartzwald points out that he and his colleagues were actually in different seminars being sponsored by CISA. When the seminar groups met in plenary session from time to time they identified possible “strands” that might serve as subjects for new courses. “One of them,” he recalls, “was displacements in the world today. And that was the topic that gave the three of us common ground. We began by redefining that idea in terms of ‘globalization,’ taking the Americas as our arena.”
Making a Commitment, Making a Course
It would take more than 18 months for that course to take shape. “We met regularly, sometimes at each other’s homes,” says Calás. “Of course, it helps that we’re all good cooks and enjoy good food.” Over good food, they talked about the ideas, about the common syllabus, about how to structure three courses around some common themes like The Americas, The Contacts, Culture, Markets, Globalization. “In the session devoted to globalization,” says Schwartzwald, “we challenge the notion that it’s all about free markets and free circulation of goods. The opening of borders to goods is not accompanied by an opening of borders to people—in fact, NAFTA explicitly says otherwise. That the nation-state is no longer relevant and is being superseded by global dynamics? That is not our perception at all. Yet we do want this course to demonstrate that new and different forms of identity are emerging as a consequence of globalization.” The image in the media, Calás adds, “emphasizes the global but the real tensions are at the local level. We had the idea of presenting globalization as a more complicated notion, one that produces a certain tension. There’s no real understanding at the received level about the fact that there is resistance to globalization at the local level that’s not being recorded in everyday life. People are re-creating their identities in the face of these new global pressures.”
Although Calás’s course in international management provided a kind of springboard for their thinking, in the joint course, they agreed, globalization should be looked at from more than just a management perspective. “We consider disruptions, the unexpected contingencies that result, and provide a historical perspective,” says Schwartzwald. “After all, globalization is not a new idea. In its own way, the Communist Manifesto saw the 19th century as an era of progress, thanks largely to the globalization of the relations of production, even as it saw these relations as exploitative. And the narratives of the 15th- and 16th-century explorers also speak of integrating newfound peoples into a universal faith and the lands they inhabit into an economy of resource extraction and transformation on an unprecedented scale.”
One of the readings that Calás assigns to her students in the management section of the course is “When Market Journalism Invades the World.” It’s an article, she says, that points up the misrepresentations perpetuated through the media. “In this and other articles assigned for the same unit, it’s clear that Mexicans are warning ‘Don’t misread me’ while Canadians are saying ‘Let’s not play Pluto to Mickey Mouse.’ And hearing that side of the equation is important for students,” says Calás, though sometimes she knows it’s a difficult message for them to receive. In a recent class, for example, several students walked out, she says, in the middle of a video of a performance piece by Guillermo Gómez-Peña in which he acts out dramatically (apparently some thought too graphically) the response of those on the receiving end of the “free market” formulas.
The course is, as Marentes puts it, “still becoming what it is”—even after a year and a half of planning, it’s still evolving, “still being enacted as we go.” All three instructors laugh at the notion that team teaching is somehow “easier” because there’s only half the work to be done. Moreover, having three instead of two instructors adds yet another dimension of complexity. “There is no doubt,” says Calás, “that despite all the benefits, this kind of approach takes much more work. The reading packet alone took more than a year to develop.” Building trust, they agree, has been essential to their ability to work so closely together. “By virtue of being drawn out of our disciplinary boundaries, we have been constantly exchanging ideas, talking,” Schwartzwald says. “It’s a perpetual process of negotiation in which each of us is learning, testing our positions and views. And that’s true in pedagogical terms, too.”
Teachers, says Marentes, are performers, “and we aim at different audiences. In this class we’re performing not only in front of our students but also in front of colleagues. So this is really an audience of peers.” Differences in teaching styles also emerge. “I have learned a lot from watching Marta and Robbie,” says Marentes. “Sometimes I’m taking more notes than the students.” Each contributes something to the style and structure of the class, and to its tone of open exchange. Calás, he says, “tends to be more structured,” so they’ve introduced use of the overhead projector and hand out notes on the lectures: “This gives students a handle on the material even as we work to complicate their understandings and shake up their preconceptions.” The course also has its own page on the Web where students can review the syllabus, find notes on lectures, download readings, and generally remain focused on the themes the course is exploring.
Schwartzwald puts the case for the course as a way to build critical thinking skills, too: “Part of the charm of this class is that we’re not disagreeing with each other but giving our students our differing perspectives. And this, I think, is doing them a real service. After all, it’s the kind of thing they are going to have to confront in the real world. We’re teaching them how to think critically when confronted with mixed messages, how to sort out their own position in the face of volumes of information, much of it conflicting, a lot of it confusing.”
