At Oberlin, I have taught a wide range of courses, ranging from conventional academic classes to performance classes and those that are hybrid. Fall 2021 will mark the 20th different course in fifteen years. I keep dreaming up new courses as I constantly reexamine and revise the curriculum with regard to shifts of broader disciplinary currents and the needs of my students.
I offer a range of experiential learning opportunities, from immersive trips to Indonesia to soundscape studies of Oberlin, digital humanities projects using archival materials, and community-based learning projects working with local communities. I have offered a class at the intersection of literary, visual and performing arts that involves Oberlin’s wayang (Javanese shadow puppet) collection, now stored in Special Collections. In that class, students learn about wayang structure and its context before creating their own play within the idiom, from collaboratively designing a story to writing the script, designing the puppets, and performing it. Like wayang in Indonesia, it included references to current events, which in this case included COVID ogres who roamed the land. Originally designed to have live music, the pandemic necessitated a shift to a virtual collaboration and performance, including pre-recorded gamelan rather than live music.
I also believe that teacher-scholars have a moral responsibility to make curricular and pedagogical interventions in the face of increasing social inequities. This has led to the development of community-based learning courses and components in classes, along with encouraging public-facing student projects. To date the most successful of these have included podcasts, a digital humanities site on ethnomusicology’s colonial legacies, and an instrument installation of the sustainability of materials.
