Community Colleges and the Future of the Humanities

This paper elaborates on a fall 2017 COIL experience between LaGuardia Community College and the University of TÄtouan, Morocco. This virtual online exchange allowed two very different college communities (a first-year liberal arts cluster and a second year Masters Program in English Literature) to come together to discuss difficult topics and cross cultural bridges. We hypothesized that literature could provide an alternative way of analyzing extremism. Therefore, the collaboration focused on the novel Horses of God written by the Moroccan author, Mahi Binabine. The novel traces the lives of four childhood friends growing up in the Sidi Moumen slum, near Casablanca, navigating poverty, violence and religious fundamentalism.

Our collaborative project draws on three pedagogical initiatives: learning communities, global learning and online mediated virtual exchanges. Learning communities involve an intentional restructuring of students╒ time, credit, and learning experiences in order to build community and foster explicit connections across disciplines. Clearly, an international conversation between American and Moroccan university students is a global learning experience that has the potential to build community and foster international dialogue.

As professors of language and literature, we were especially interested in the role of literature as a transformative agent.