JBP: When the University of Iowa’s first MOOC, a six-week examination of Walt Whitman’s “Song of Myself,” was announced, I clicked the registration link mere seconds later. Did I believe in MOOCs as a mode of learning? Did I have time for this sort of thing? None of those pesky thoughts intruded, only the lure of the world and words of Whitman: “I loafe and invite my soul,” etc. Registration completed, I eagerly looked for information about the schedule, the texts, and the assignments. There I found, listed among the six course instructors, one of my students, Micah Bateman.
Thus began a semester in which our teaching and learning roles alternated with the day of the week. I taught our graduate seminar in the “History of Readers and Reading,” while Micah moderated online conversations in the MOOC created by the International Writing Program and two university faculty members. Our quite separate enthusiasm for poetry turned into mild trepidation before the overwhelming wonder of 2,000 voices pulled us into conversations with each other and with the rest of the students. Unbeknownst to each other, we both adopted the mantra “What would Whitman do?” to guide us.
MB: In preparing for the MOOC, I tried to imagine the ideal student. The open nature of MOOCs posits one: an eager student who doesn’t have access, whether because of money or geography, to college. Like Whitman himself, our student would be an autodidact, a hungry, undisciplined, self-taught savant. Or in high school or the military, or a stay-at-home parent, a widow, a person who was looking for something and would find it in poetry.
As a teaching assistant, that was a student I thought I could handle. After all, I had a shiny new M.F.A. from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and had taught parts of “Song of Myself” in an upper-level undergraduate English course. Could I moderate discussion of Whitman for some retirees and high-school students? No sweat.
Enter students who had taught Whitman to undergraduates, who had Ph.D.’s, who were devoted Civil War buffs and 19th-century aficionados, or who had whole websites dedicated to Whitman’s life and work. Enter my own current teacher, “jburek”; enter any number of innocuous-seeming usernames who could take me to task over historical inaccuracies or rhetorical fallacies. I was sweating.
JBP: As the MOOC began, Whitman’s claim to “launch all men and women forward with me into the Unknown” seemed prescient. Was I providing the right answers to Micah’s questions? Was there, somewhere, a “How to MOOC” guide that I should be reading? I wanted to be a good student, but in this expansive, virtual, ungraded space, what might that mean?
Micah’s opening question focused on how the meaning of the first line of the poem shifted as Whitman revised and republished it over several years. As the hundreds of responses appearing in the discussion forum testified, the question was illuminating and provocative. I tried not to worry too much about whether my repeatedly revised and reconsidered post might be duplicative. Amid such a welter of responses, would anyone even notice?
MB: Whitman wrote, “I will not descend among professors and capitalists.” He wasn’t as curmudgeonly as that line suggests, and I adopted its easy posture of an outsider among insiders. I was a writer, not a scholarly historian. I began far too many posts with the qualifier “As a poet …" As a poet, I am offended by that practice. What does it even mean to think like a poet? Nevertheless, the class members adopted me as their Token Poet. They asked me different questions from what they asked the other TAs. As a poet, what did I think of _______? It delighted me to have some authority in a course full of smart, disciplined thinkers.
In our seminar on the history of reading, we read about the scholarly preoccupation with finding “real readers.” We discuss the possible research sources for discovering them. Some scholars have unearthed old library records, others the documents of women’s clubs. I’m thinking about this while 2,000 students’ every comment is laid out for us like a royal feast. Oh, the delicious victuals, each a fascinating read! This one puts Whitman in league with the Bible, that one in a league of ninnies, this one dubs him “America’s Rumi,” that one would’ve told him less is more.
JBP: In a subsequent discussion, I focus on a more open, responsive question to spare myself the anxiety of composing a lucid, accurate textual analysis while watching posts arrive in the discussion forum like stars in a deepening night sky or owls in a Hogwarts common room. There is beauty in my fellow students’ musings, as there is in Whitman’s references to the “beautiful uncut hair of graves” and his promises of life’s continuities. I hedge what I share about a friend who is dying while I read, write, and recover from a respiratory infection.
Micah finds a verse that captures the way I am living indoors, my laptop a lifeline to the outside world while I battle bronchitis. I decide against admitting, in real time, to 1,999 strangers, that my connections to others have been moderated by Skype, cellphone, email, and yes, the MOOC, for four days. I am no longer just reading Whitman; the digital conversation makes plain that Whitman is reading and writing me.
MB: Who is a “real reader”? Not me. Not “jburek.” Not even Whitman. Sieving the course for real readers, separating the professionals from the self-edifiers, proves easier than I had thought. The professional readers, though hidden behind usernames, often make themselves known. They refer to teaching or publishing, a student they had, a conference they attended. They mention scholarly journals or fashionable philosophies.
Others demur. They apologize for their thoughts before publishing them. “I’m just a beginner,” they write. As a poet, I can relate to their self-consciousness. “I’m sorry for what might seem some pretty simple thoughts,” one wrote before making a scintillating observation that none of us “professionals” had noticed.
The MOOC’s self-organizing hierarchy begins to trouble me. Had we just re-created the academy? I sign out from behind my username to send my teacher, “jburek,” another of Whitman’s poems. Just sharing it without comment, one identifiable friend to another, I feel better.
JBP: Much was made of Whitman’s contention that “He most honors my style who learns under it to destroy the teacher.” Despite not feeling settled in the world of the MOOC, I don’t feel undone as a teacher, nor inclined to unseat Micah either. Do we destroy the teacher not by undermining his authority but by befriending him, by finding him a fellow and a comrade?
A later line in the same stanza counters: “I teach straying from me, yet who can stray from me?” It reflects the way we have moved away from the classroom while attempting to master this poet; the way MOOC students craft literature that challenges or parodies Whitman, then proclaim their admiration for him and this novel enterprise; the way we are all gasping with the effort of this endeavor, yet feel reluctant to let go when it ends.
