Building Community through Commonplace Books: Engaging English Majors at the Community College

By Alina Romo, Allan Hancock College

Creating meaningful experiences for students in my English classrooms has become increasingly important for me for two key reasons: declining enrollments in literature courses and increasing online course offerings at Allan Hancock College, a community college on California’s central coast where I teach. Since fewer and fewer students are declaring the English major, our core literature courses have not filled in-person modalities for as long as I have been teaching at the college, which is almost ten years. Our courses’ failure “to go” isn’t due to a shortage of trying. It is a numbers game, plain and simple, and our department is losing. The result of failing the numbers game is that the bulk of our literature courses have been moved online to ensure enrollment baselines are met by drawing students from across the California community college and California State University systems. What this means is that English majors at the college will complete every single lower-division course specific to their major via Canvas discussion boards and recorded lectures, an experience that can be isolating and downright uninspiring. (I should note our students consistently complete degrees from UCLA, Berkeley, and other high ranking universities, so our online coursework prepares students; they just don’t like it very much.) These interrelated issues have made being an English major a lonely endeavor at the college, which is the only institution of higher learning between UC Santa Barbara, sixty-six miles to the south, and Cal Poly San Luis Obispo, thirty-four miles to the north. This geographical remoteness is compounded by the “no there, here” of their classrooms. My students often remark on the isolation of their digital studies and the immateriality of their classrooms. Gertrude Stein’s nostalgia for Oakland aside, my students crave experience. I saw in this craving for experience an opportunity: for the first time in over ten years, “Early American Literature: Beginnings to 1865,” one of our core courses for the transfer-bound undergraduate English major, will be offered in-person because it filled. And the reason for why it filled is commonplacing.

After having taught the same course online last year, I concluded that my class was frustrated after several conversations with students who said as much. These bright first-and-second years wanted a “real classroom,” at least for some of their key courses. It isn’t that online education doesn’t work or that they disliked online learning altogether; although, to be honest, many despise it. It is that after the pandemic, these students, many of whom had spent years in front of Zoom screens, were simply over it. They wanted “real” experiences. That was the word they often used: “real.” To be equally honest, I am over online life, too. I also want a “real” space within which to teach and work. I want to get my hands dirty, literally. After thinking about it and talking my dean and department chair into giving it a shot, with an online twelve-week version waiting in the wings just in case, I decided to move forward with developing an in-person class. I had commonplacing on my radar due to the K-SAA public outreach initiative and conversations at conferences, so I determined that if I made constructing physical objects in a real classroom the nucleus around which the course’s interrogation of texts, forms, and concepts revolved, that I could, perhaps, draw students in, even non-English majors, who would be crucial for hitting the enrollment baseline.[1] At last count I had six non-English majors enrolled along with eleven majors. 

I went on a public relations blitz, papering the college with posters describing what this literature course was going to do: make things. Real, physical, tangible, material things. This fall, we are going to make paper, for example. I am in the process of building screens to press wet, shredded scrap paper through, and I have commandeered a classroom in our Fine Arts complex for drying them. We are also going to make woodblock prints (probably out of potatoes) to print with when we read The New England Primer. We are going to do rubbings of leaves and press flowers as we study early American naturalistic writing. I recently spoke with a student who is enrolled in the course, and he mentioned enthusiastically that he would like to include samples from his collection of seeds, a fitting inclusion when reading Letters from an American Farmer. This English major-adjacent student is majoring in economics and has a background in the agrobusiness industry, but here he is, buying into the idea of commonplacing to study early American literature. Apparently, he wants to get his hands dirty, too.

Along with project-based lessons, students will be asked to think about the organizing features of their commonplace books. With Bacon’s The New Organon in mind and on the syllabus, I plan on pitching commonplacing as an “everyman’s approach” to information organization within the trajectory of empiricism from 1620 on. Our classroom is going to be a physical space for experiencing historical knowledge and information, and the students’ commonplace books will be a physical repository for their experience of organizing it all as they see fit. The last component will be to develop an index and organizational structure of their choosing, composing a statement outlining their thinking behind the method. Then, we will bind our commonplace books with layers of Elmer’s glue and clamp them together until they are dry. (It works. I’ve tried it.)

What I hope to make clear for my students by the end of the semester is that commonplace books aren’t just objects from the past that help them understand history, literary or otherwise. They are material objects that embody historically emergent forms of organization, and contemporary forms of commonplacing aren’t too different. Material objects and all the concepts and forms they can embody aren’t just receptacles of history to be interrogated and learned from in a passive manner. History and experience and physical forms should not be separated, especially within a classroom setting. By making commonplace books, my students will move from being passive recipients of historical knowledge, sitting in front of computer screens all alone, to active participants with history’s materiality in a real classroom and, most importantly, with each other. Commonplacing in the classroom merges experience with history and, when one thinks about it, reconnects the meaning of history to its earlier conceptual form: experience, which is what my students want more than anything.[2]

Notes

[1] I want to thank Bethany Qualls for sharing her commonplacing materials and assignments with me. Her course assignments inspired the basis for my own. You can view Qualls’ and her colleague Jessica Gray’s materials here.

[2] See Reinhart Koselleck, “Transformations of Experience and Methodological Change: A Historical Anthropological Essay” in The Practice of Conceptual History: Timing History, Spacing Concepts, trans. Todd Samuel Presner (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2002), 45-47.

About the Author

Alina Romo is Associate Professor of English at Allan Hancock College. She earned her Ph.D. in English from New York University where she was a Halsband Fellow in Eighteenth Century Studies. She also holds a master's degree in Scandinavian Literature and Languages from UCLA, specifically 18th- and 19th-century Norwegian literature. Alina works in conceptual history and her current project argues for the linguistic centrality of 18th c. translation theories within the development of the period’s aesthetic ethos, that of the “Spirit of the Age.”  She holds a seat on the MLA Higher Education and the Profession Community Colleges Forum and is a frequent reviewer at Nordicum Mediterraneum, a journal of Nordic and Mediterranean studies.