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Teaching with MoEML: Three Parts of King Henry IV

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15 July 2016

Note by MoEML

Sujata Iyengar from the University of Georgia was one of twenty-five enthusiastic participants who attended Kim McLean-Fiander’s Teaching Shakespeare to Undergraduates Using the Map of Early Modern London workshop on 14 June 2016 at the Folger Shakespeare Library. The MoEML workshop was one of nine offered in association with National Endowment for the Humanitiesʼ (NEH) micro-grants scheme. The workshops were designed to provide scholars and librarians, who were part of the various First Folio Tour teams from across the US, innovative ways to inject new life into their Shakespeare teaching. (KMF)

Pedagogical Reflection

Teaching a completely online, asynchronous, cohort-based class split between undergraduates and graduate students this summer for the first time, I was determined to use as many internet-based, open-access, multimedia open educational resources (OERs) as possible. We hear many complaints about the distractibility of students raised with social media, the world wide web, and internet search engines, but I don’t think that what some call the rabbit-hole1 of Google or the labyrinth of hyperlinks are in themselves bad things. On the contrary, I think that these distractions can encourage intellectual curiosity in students and in faculty and occasionally foster that sense of immersion in another world that we can derive from the activity we call browsing―whether we are browsing print books on a library shelf, photographs of early books projected in a microfilm reader, or web-pages and hyperlinks within an online text.
MoEML provides an excellent space for this kind of productive and immersive distraction. Its easily browsable interface (which more than one student likened to Google Maps) and pop-up windows from the Encyclopedia conceal the real intellectual and historical travail of archival work behind the façade of virtual travel. It permits students to synthesize their learning by letting them create new maps and mark them up for their own purposes. For example, one student, finding Doctors’ Commons missing from the MoEML, collated the Agas map with another early modern guide to London and then went back to MoEML and created a map of her own that included where she thought Doctors’ Commons ought to appear, based on her additional archival reading.2
My institution adheres to the Quality Matters rubric for online learning and likes us to include elements from Bloom’s taxonomy (and the revised taxonomy by Lorin Anderson) in our online classes as objectives and outcomes for student learning.3 I generated a three-part scaffolded discussion assignment for my online students that I hoped would encourage the following course objectives through the various outcomes or written, drawn, audio, or video products made by students:
  • Expository Writing Demonstrate comprehension, application, analysis, and synthesis by producing two to three 150-300 word postings explaining how you used the map, applying it to find a location, extending it to direct a character, and critiquing a classmate’s directions.
  • Creativity Demonstrate creation and synthesis by producing screencast, podcast, blank verse, or prose imaginary scenarios directing fictional characters from one space in early modern London to another.
  • Content Demonstrate comprehension, application, analysis, and synthesis of the geo-spatial contexts for Shakespeare’s 1 Henry IV and 2 Henry IV by using MoEML.
  • Close Reading Demonstrate your close attention to the texts of the plays (which we read in the Bedford Shakespeare, edited by Lena Cowen Orlin and the late Russ McDonald) by including references to the texts of the plays and by analyzing and contrasting the different settings of the plays.
  • Evaluation and Application: Demonstrate that you can evaluate your classmates’ directions by applying them to a route that their character takes and seeing where and how the route they suggest proves difficult, easy, or counter-intuitive to navigate.
I also like to include Social and Emotional learning outcomes, although these are not measured on Bloom’s taxonomy, because it seems to me that humanities classes excel in these so-called soft skills.4 The social and emotional learning objectives I wanted this assignment to include encompassed:
  • Engagement Demonstrate your caring and your engagement with your learning community by writing a post responding in detail to a classmate’s assignment
  • Metacognition Demonstrate that you are learning how to learn by writing about what challenged you in this assignment and how you might approach it another time
  • Reflection and Integrated Learning Demonstrate that you are learning how to learn by reviewing, reflecting, and perhaps revising your original assignment in light of what you have learned by following a classmate’s directions.
The outcomes of this three-part assignment included, then, at least three written documents of between 150 and 300 words each; at least three two-minute screencasts or set of three screen captures; and (for some of the graduate and undergraduate students) a potentially publishable piece of creative or archival scholarship.
For the full text of the assignment I gave to my students, see . My students Kara Joyce and Jennifer Guyre took me up on the proposal to write her directions in blank verse and gave me permission to share their work with MoEML.

Student Responses

Kara Joyce

I tried my hand at using blank verse! The scenario I’ve imagined is that Falstaff is drunk as a skunk in a bar near Eastcheap, and has sent a note via some pageboy to Mistress Quickly in the hopes that she’ll come rescue him and return him to the Boar’s Head Tavern. I had Falstaff guide her entirely by churches so that he could get in a dig at her character in the same moment that he pleaded for her help.
My Mistress, Hostess, Quickly, come at once
Away from your sweet warm and cushioned stool.
A left onto Knight Ryder Street, and then,
Swift, bustle past St. Nich’las Cole Abbey.
Go on, go on, turn left at Baptist John’s
Then right–for Candlewick does call your feet.
Keep east towards Eastcheap, then you’ll find you’re here.
I hope you noted that I named places
Wherein you might find some salvation from
Your tendency to break the tenets of
God’s holy rules of hospitality.
Please come for me, for I have lost my way
And all my coins I meant to use for food.
My love for beer has bested me once more,
And yet my love for you has yet to die.
Be quick, be quick! Please start along your way.
I am in need of a more faithful friend
Than liquor has been to me as of late.
Your fav’rite old fat man and all his flaws,
Click here to view map of Mistress Quickly’s route to Falstaff’s location.

Jen Guyre

I decided to try my hand at Iambic Pentameter in redirecting Bardolph from Eastcheap to Bell’s Inn. Here goes
My dear Bardolph,
’Pon some consideration of thy state,
Methinks thou shouldst complete avoid Cheapside,
Since the allure thereof might’st prove thy doom.
Instead thou should’st take Cand’wick Street to Budge,
Passing along the way the London Stone,
That old and ancient relic of Roman birth.
From Budge pass straight to Watling Street, and then
Keep on until it ends at old St. Paul’s;
Whereat thou may’st consider looking for
New gainful employ, knowing as thou must
That old Falstaff will likely waste his life
Out of his years with drink and whores quite soon.
Or if thou art quite satisfied with him,
Thou mayest purchase books t’enrich your mind,
Since I quite fear for the poor state of it.
Eight churches in addition to St. Paul’s
Wilt thou forsooth along thy way pass by;
I recommend you take advantage of them,
Lest through neglect your soul be damnèd quite.
Once past St. Paul’s turn right and thank Our Lady,
Ave Maria passing through, and thence
Up Warwick Lane and into the Bell’s Inn,
Which, standing on thy left, is plain to see.
I will await thee there; please be not late.
Thine sincerely, and thy future King,
Hal
Click here to view map of Bardolph’s route to Hal’s location.

Notes

  1. Kathryn Schulz has written a charming essay on the figure of the rabbit-hole for online distractibility: The Rabbit-Hole rabbit-hole, The New Yorker, http://www.newyorker.com/culture/cultural-comment/the-rabbit-hole-rabbit-hole, accessed 6 July 2016. (SI)↑
  2. MoEML has since used this student’s research to create a Encylopedia entry for Doctors’ Commons and draw it on the Agas map. (JJ)↑
  3. Patricia Armstrong at Vanderbilt University’s Center for Teaching and Learning provides a useful overview of the original and revised taxonomies at https://cft.vanderbilt.edu/guides-sub-pages/blooms-taxonomy/, accessed 6 July 2016. (SI)↑
  4. I adapted my social and emotional learning outcomes from L. Dee Fink’s guide to designing courses with significant learning; his useful diagram appears in many places online, including at BYU-Idaho’s site Significant Learning, http://www.byui.edu/outcomes-and-assessment-old/the-basics/step-1-articulate-outcomes/dee-finks-taxonomy-of-significant-learning, accessed 6 July 2016. (SI)↑

Cite this page

MLA citation

Iyengar, Sujata, Kara Joyce, and Jen Guyre. Teaching with MoEML: Three Parts of King Henry IV. The Map of Early Modern London, Edition 7.0, edited by Janelle Jenstad, U of Victoria, 05 May 2022, mapoflondon.uvic.ca/edition/7.0/BLOG21.htm.

Chicago citation

Iyengar, Sujata, Kara Joyce, and Jen Guyre. Teaching with MoEML: Three Parts of King Henry IV. The Map of Early Modern London, Edition 7.0. Ed. Janelle Jenstad. Victoria: University of Victoria. Accessed May 05, 2022. mapoflondon.uvic.ca/edition/7.0/BLOG21.htm.

APA citation

Iyengar, S., Joyce, K., & Guyre, J. 2022. Teaching with MoEML: Three Parts of King Henry IV. In J. Jenstad (Ed), The Map of Early Modern London (Edition 7.0). Victoria: University of Victoria. Retrieved from https://mapoflondon.uvic.ca/editions/7.0/BLOG21.htm.

RIS file (for RefMan, RefWorks, EndNote etc.)

Provider: University of Victoria
Database: The Map of Early Modern London
Content: text/plain; charset="utf-8"

TY  - ELEC
A1  - Iyengar, Sujata
A1  - Joyce, Kara
A1  - Guyre, Jen
ED  - Jenstad, Janelle
T1  - Teaching with MoEML: Three Parts of King Henry IV
T2  - The Map of Early Modern London
ET  - 7.0
PY  - 2022
DA  - 2022/05/05
CY  - Victoria
PB  - University of Victoria
LA  - English
UR  - https://mapoflondon.uvic.ca/edition/7.0/BLOG21.htm
UR  - https://mapoflondon.uvic.ca/edition/7.0/xml/standalone/BLOG21.xml
ER  -

TEI citation

<bibl type="mla"><author><name ref="#IYEN1"><surname>Iyengar</surname>, <forename>Sujata</forename></name></author>, <author><name ref="#JOYC1"><forename>Kara</forename> <surname>Joyce</surname></name></author>, and <author><name ref="#GUYR1"><forename>Jen</forename> <surname>Guyre</surname></name></author>. <title level="a">Teaching with MoEML: Three Parts of King Henry IV</title>. <title level="m">The Map of Early Modern London</title>, Edition <edition>7.0</edition>, edited by <editor><name ref="#JENS1"><forename>Janelle</forename> <surname>Jenstad</surname></name></editor>, <publisher>U of Victoria</publisher>, <date when="2022-05-05">05 May 2022</date>, <ref target="https://mapoflondon.uvic.ca/edition/7.0/BLOG21.htm">mapoflondon.uvic.ca/edition/7.0/BLOG21.htm</ref>.</bibl>

Documents relating to Sujata Iyengar’s 2016 MoEML classroom mapping exercise

Iyengar refers to the assignment in her blog post and the blog post provides additional context for the assignment.

Personography

Locations