Teaching Edwidge Danticat’s Krik? Krak! Through Global Learning Classrooms

Abstract

This chapter offers a pedagogical approach to teaching Edwidge Danticat’s fiction through connected global classrooms and interactive online practices. It describes a team-taught unit designed by Dr. Anita Baksh from LaGuardia Community College, City University of New York (CUNY), in collaboration with Dr. Schuyler Esprit of Dominica State College and Create Caribbean Research Institute. This global classroom exercise featured students from the United States (New York City) and the Caribbean (Dominica) engaging in virtual discussion via Skype and blogging to discuss stories from Danticat’s Krik? Krak!, specifically “Children of the Sea” and “Nineteen Thirty-Seven.” The collaboration was based on the Collaborative Online International Learning (COIL) model developed at the State University of New York (SUNY). It allowed faculty to integrate international perspectives into teaching beyond readings of global texts. Through online interactions, it facilitated students’ global awareness and cross-cultural communication. These global connections are particularly pertinent for institutions (like community colleges) where study abroad programs are scarce, non-existent, or too costly. In this chapter, we will outline the process of setting up the global classroom, designing assignments, formulating prompts for blog posts, facilitating virtual discussion, and reflecting on things we might have done differently. Drawing on in-class and virtual discussions, students’ blog responses, and post-activity reflections, we will discuss how students’ understanding of global issues were enhanced through dialogue with international peers. While the unit focused on themes of migration and war, the selected stories allowed for broader discussions on topics central to the concerns of this collection, including gender, nationalism, “cultural and communal identity,” religious difference, and “the violence of hegemony and imperialism in relationship with society, family, and community.” Moreover, students were urged to reflect on connections between the particular and the universal by considering how Danticat’s fiction contributed to their understanding of migration and war in other local and global contexts.