• pedagogy

Our college arranged Alumni Networking day this week. Our department scheduled two hours of events.

One of those hours was during the sophomore-level "Introduction to Writing Studies" class that I teach. This week, a portion of the class is preparing performance-demonstrations to help the rest of the class understand Walter Benjamin's "Work of Art" essay. (One group is going to interview the Mona Lisa about changes in her life since the invention of photography. The other is setting out to explain the last section, about the relationship between war, politics and art. They have a bit more work to do.)

The remainder [non-performing] segment of the class I dismissed with the option to attend the alumni day.

Some of my colleagues expressed a desire that I take students to Alumni Networking Day events in lieu of the class activities. I understand that packing an event by bringing a class is a time-honored way of making some administrative effort appear popular. But the goals of the event were so far askew of what I was doing in class that day... I couldn't do more than the compromise I reached -- to release students to attend, but noting that, unless I abandoned my performers, I could not compel them to attend.

What is your standard or policy on such activities? Under what conditions do you bring a class to an extra-curricular event?

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