A number of interesting (personal/professional) developments in the last few days. But they’ll have to wait until Monday, when I give a definitive answer. But my days at Dickinson are winding down, w/ only five more weeks left to go. It is, in many ways, a wonderful relief.
So now I’m just winding down my over-loaded teaching schedule. So far, it’s turning into an interesting semester. The research methods course is not what most of the students envisioned, I think. But I remember that my first methods course as an undergraduate was so out of left field. Rather than learning information, we were learning concepts: operationalization, research design, hypothesis testing, sample framing. The last few days have shown an interesting change. And I’m proud of the ones who are struggling through, making time for office hours, and perfecting their abilities. They will go on to write amazing senior theses.
I’m also enjoying my introduction to Latin American studies course. This second half of the semester we’re looking at various “texts” for reading Latin America. Yesterday, we discussed Mariano Azuela’s Los de Abajo as a way of “reading” the Mexican Revolution. But we also listened to two corridos: “Gregorio Cotez” and “El Cuartelazo” (both available from the Smithsonian’s online corridos exhibition). We also watched a short snippet from the film, The Ballad of Gregorio Cortez. We had an amazing discussion.
My Latin American politics course is also going well. We’re now focusing on an in-depth look at the Nicaraguan democratic transition—with a book that asks the question: “Why did Ortega & the FSLN lose the 1990 election?” (Anderson & Dodd’s Learning Democracy in Nicaragua). The students are starting to work on their semester research paper, so we’re using this book (and, later, Timothy Power’s The Political Right in Postauthoritarian Brazil) as models for how to write a single-country case study based on an interesting “research puzzle.”
