In the Fall of 2018, The Collaboratory initiated discourse with faculty and community partners on how to build a community scholars program, aimed at creating a co-teaching practice and scholarship program in graduate-level courses at The New School.
We were very excited to learn of the Civic Liberal Arts program at Lang, and recently sat down with four faculty/community partner pairs from the program to learn more about their experience and creative approaches to student learning and community impact through collaborative course design.
In this conversation, we speak with Jennifer Firestone, Assistant Professor of Literary Studies at Lang and Marcella Durand, poet and board member of Belladonna* to discuss their course, “Feminist Avant-garde Poetics”.
Course Description: Feminist Avant-garde Poetics (Fall 2018): In this Civic Liberal Arts course, students work closely with the New York-based avant-garde feminist collaborative, Belladonna, by reading, deconstructing and exploring what it means to be “feminist” and “avant-garde.” The Visiting Fellow, Belladonna board member and established poet, Marcella Durand, presents the history of Belladonna, and how it came to exist as a feminist, avant-garde collective. Students visit Belladonna’s Brooklyn art studio and attend Belladonna readings and events. Encouraged to create their own collectives, students curate a final event for the course in collaboration with Belladonna, exhibiting the students’ thoughtful and creative interpretations of avant-garde feminism.