Collins Living-Learning Center

Why are school narratives so important to culture today? And what can they tell us about modern education and how we might reform it for the future? This course seeks to answer these and other questions surrounding fictions set at schools. We begin with excerpts from classic school novels and trace their evolution into later centuries. Alongside this tour, we will often try out these novels’ proposed learning experiments on ourselves. And we will explore how these fictions became readapted into modern film and television including the Harry Potter franchise, Captain Fantastic, and Netflix’s show Sex Education (among others). The course will conclude by exploring various ongoing crises in education, particularly debates about critical race theory and school shootings, and how they have begun to impact twenty-first-century school stories. The course emphasizes college-level reading and writing, but will suit those interested in literature, film, media studies, cultural studies, and education.

Instructor: Jordan Bunzel

Collins Seminars: Selected by Board of Educational Programming (BOEP)

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