Modern & Classical Languages, Literatures & Cultures Professor Adapts to Online Teaching

By Ryan Girves 

This week marked the start of online learning for University of Kentucky students across campus following the announcement from President Eli Capilouto suspending all in-person instruction through the end of the spring semester in response to the coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic. 

UK is one of many universities to move its classes online using channels such as Zoom — a video conferencing platform — as part of an effort to de-densify campus. 

Helping Online Teachers (HOT) Topics

Introduction

This is a space where I'm going to try to write about the next steps for anyone unexpectedly transferring their course to online.  For those teaching, the goal is to provide one idea each day that you can try with your class.  Topics will include ideas for leading a group discussion, eliciting and interpreting individual students' thinking, setting up and managing small group work, providing oral and written feed back, and many more. The topic today is participation and it is a little longer than usual and too much to digest in one sitting. Future entries will be shorter and more limited.  Feel free to send me comments and questions.

Participation

While most traditional instructors have an idea what participation looks like in their average class.  Many have not spelled it out completely hoping that a shared experience of "being in classes" helps to define the construct.  When students shift to online instruction, the shared experience of holding class no longer holds.  The first thing that instructors should do is to reevaluate what counts as participation.  

Saints and Stories in Tajikistan

Since the fall of the Soviet Union and the independence of the former Soviet Central Asian republics, public Islamic religiosity has proliferated; mosques have been constructed, forms of pious dress newly adopted, and previously-proscribed religious texts published. In Tajikistan, Sufi circles have been at the center of this so-called “Islamic revival.” I will discuss stories Sufis in Tajikistan tell about saints, both in oral narratives and print. In particular, I will describe the case of Mavlavi Jununi, a 19th-century poet and Sufi shaykh. During Jununi’s own lifetime and later during the Soviet period, his body of work was unknown save to his own disciples and immediate family. Now, chapbooks of his verse can be found in bookstalls all over the country. Among Sufis, Jununi’s poetry is often held in as high esteem as that of the classical Persian masters. I argue that figures like Jununi legitimate relatively new projects of Islamic piety. Stories about Jununi and others like him have created new notions of what it means to be Muslim in Central Asia after the enormity of Soviet disjuncture.

Sponsored by World Religions program and MCLLC.

Date:
-
Location:
Niles Gallery
Subscribe to