Susan Schweik

What this program opened up for us was the possibility of creative projects...that engaged these personal issues [of race and disability] in new and startling ways....The results were the best work I've gotten in 25 years of teaching this course.
Susan

Susan Schweik is a researching professor who brings in her interest in Twentieth-Century Poetry, late Nineteenth-Century American Literature, Women's Studies and Gender Theory, Urban Studies, war literature and children's literature into her Creative Discovery Fellows course, English 135AC, Race, Class, & Disability: An American Foundling Museum

This course engages in critical discourse central to analyzing race, ethnicity, and disability in American cultures, and explores, in particular, family separation in relation to these concepts. The project for the course asked students to curate an artifact for an “American Foundling Museum” with an opportunity to create the artifact in a variety of different mediums, ranging from a podcast to a conversational text to a graphic. In particular, this project sought to engage students in analyzing and applying writing and arts-based practices to generate a major project that respond to and participate in conversations on race, ethnicity, disability and family separation, incarceration, detention and reunion.

Veena (student project example)

English 135AC: “Race, Class, & Disability: An American Foundling Museum”

English 135AC: “Race, Class, & Disability: An American Foundling Museum” engages in critical discourse central to analyzing race, ethnicity, and disability in American cultures and explores, in particular, family separation in relation to these concepts. The project for the course asked students to curate an artifact for an “American Foundling Museum” with an opportunity to create the artifact in a variety of different mediums, ranging from a podcast to a conversational text to a graphic.