Portland State’s fall 2012 Chiron Studies course has been announced, and it’s appropriately idiosyncratic. The four courses chosen for fall are: Harajuku Cool, The World of Roman Polanski, Radical Home Economics and Resistance Literature: Literature of Social Change. They will be taught by Emily Connelly, Jared Rhea, Eric Robert Wilkinson and Genevieve Hudson, respectively. The courses were chosen according to the strength of their syllabi and the passion of their instructors.
Chiron Studies is a PSU program that began in 1968, and is designed to facilitate the plans of students who want to design and instruct their own college-level courses with the aid of faculty and peer mentors. According to the Chiron Studies website, PSU students can submit proposals for four-credit courses on virtually any topic, though they cannot repeat courses that are already in PSU’s curriculum.
The number of courses chosen fell from nine in spring 2012 to just four, but Chiron Studies Coordinator and Committee Chair Rozzell Medina said this was not an emerging trend. “Fall is historically our lightest term,” Medina said.
In fact, Medina feels encouraged by the strength of the students’ proposals and noted their enthusiasm for teaching and their willingness to explore tough questions.
“With the course proposals we did accept, we wanted to see organization and passion. We want the proposals to have a lot of interesting questions to ask and explore with the class. We also want to see that there’s interest in the course,” Medina explained.
Chiron Studies is looking to get more active around the PSU campus, especially with regard to diversifying departments and organizations within the university, according to Medina. He cited a recent collaboration with the art department as a key aspect of this movement.
“We want to find ways that Chiron Studies can help departments across the university and build a partnership across the community. The art department approached us and asked if we’d like to help in their effort to diversify the art community. We really think Chiron Studies can be instrumental in diversifying the university curriculum, and we want to do it at a more concrete level. We’re talking about how Chiron Studies can provide that concrete way of diversifying the art curriculum,” Medina said.
However, the program does have several potential obstacles standing in its way. One is that the classes can be relatively unorthodox compared to standard university curriculum classes and could find it difficult to achieve respectability. One publicly cited example is the course offered this spring, Exploring Buffy the Vampire Slayer, referring to a TV show that ran for seven seasons and achieved an extensive fan following despite low network ratings.
“It’s dangerous when you try to judge what’s ‘necessary’ in terms of education from the viewpoints of other people,” Medina said. “We offered the Buffy class twice and it filled up twice, so students found it appealing. A lot of the people in those classes are finding their community, and that’s a valuable tool that Chiron Studies provides and a valuable tool that education provides in general.”
Another obstacle the program faces is that the classes may be too controversial. In April, prominent Republican publication The Blaze took offense to the Revolutionary Marxism course taught by Wael Elasady and Grant Booth this term.
“One of the main criticisms was, ‘Why aren’t they teaching classes about the other political side?’ Well, any student can, if they want,” Elasady said.
Elasady and Booth both said that the media attention didn’t deter them from wanting to teach the course and cited their passions for teaching and enthusiastic class discussions as signs that they were succeeding in their mission.
“I don’t think that the incident has had any effect at all on our teaching of the class. I really enjoy teaching, and I plan on being a teacher someday,” Booth said.
Medina echoed Elasady and Booth’s comments and said The Blaze’s reporting of the story wasn’t thoughtful or insightful and lent itself to the unfortunate practice of “politicizing education.”
“The way it was reported by The Blaze made it into a one-sided political issue. Politicizing education is very potentially harmful. It really dumbs down the discourse of education if you attempt to politicize it. There was a lot of speculation from blog writers and Fox News reporters that we offered it because our program was pushing an agenda, as in, ‘I doubt they’d offer a class on the Tea Party,’ but we just weren’t getting those kinds of student proposals. And that is unfortunate, because we want a wide variety of proposals,” Medina explained.
Student leadership and community building, Medina said, are the two cornerstones of the Chiron Studies program, and he steadfastly believes that if students continue to propose and teach thought-provoking, insightful courses the Chiron Studies program can make a real difference going forward for PSU.
“We’re looking for student interest in this kind of work: education and curriculum empowerment. With our senior committee members graduating this spring, spots are opening up on our committee and we’re looking for new members. We’re looking for students who want to enrich the college experience,” Medina said.
Students interested in proposing a Chiron Studies course for the winter 2013 term can find more information at www.pdx.edu/chiron. The deadline for winter 2013 course submissions is Sept. 1.