The intercultural poetry exchange’ started and was designed as part of two university literature courses, Fiction for Engineers in Sweden and World Literature in the US. The exchange came about due to personal contacts between Magnus Gustafsson, the head of the Division of Language and Communication at Chalmers University of Technology, and Art Young and Donna Reiss two teacher/researchers at Clemson. The colleagues met at a conference and decided to set up the exchange in order to enhance their respective literature courses.
The Engineering students at Chalmers come from a variety of engineering disciplines and are principally MSc students with most of their engineering programme completed. Students are taking degrees in computer science, mechanical engineering, biotechnology, chemical engineering and interaction design. They have a range of electives to choose from and one of these is the course ” Fiction for Engineers” taught by Magnus Gustafsson. In a weekly class, the set texts are discussed and students are prepared for their portfolio assessment including a term paper assignment. Although English is not the first language of these students, the course is conducted in English like all the MSc courses at Chalmers and some of the electives.
Although it may seem curious to engage engineering students in a telecollaborative exchange about poetry, Magnus has a clear vision of why such projects are useful and relevant. He explains: ” All engineering programmes have an MTS (Man, Technology, and Society) requirement. Courses offered under that requirement tend to be superficial attempts at showing engineering impact on society. The blog exchange gives students first a real authentic audience with which to interact in interpreting society (the poetry has had an angle on society/man/progress – Eliot, Tranströmer, Dickinson). Their encountering, sometimes for the first time since upper secondary, students from the humanities tends to serve as powerful insights into MTS and that their technologically infused perspective is fruitfully combined with other perspectives.”
Their partner university, Clemson University, is a land-grant institution focused largely on the sciences and engineering, but also having a commitment to the arts and humanities. The students taking part in the exchange are mainly English majors in the first or second year of their university coursework who are taking part in courses including World Literature, Introduction to Literature, Victorian poetry, or teacher education. The class meets twice a week with the aim of developing skills in critical thinking, close reading, and interpretation through assignments based on a series of eight works spanning a literary history from the epic Beowulf to Aravind Adiga’ s White Tiger (2008).
