Work Post: Spring 2010 at USF

Looks like I’ll be adjuncting at USF again this coming Spring 2010. I will be teaching the Filipino American Arts course, which I am looking forward to. I need to make sure there is no overlap with the Barrio Fiesta course, which I have been teaching as a multi-genre ekphrastic writing course. For my Arts course, I will be reaching back into my files to see if I can find some of Allyson Tintiangco-Cubales’s old syllabi. She taught the Asian American Community Arts course at SFSU; this is the course Valerie Soe is currently teaching, and I will be visiting her class at the end of October. Allyson, as I remember, places a strong emphasis on group work, divided into different disciplines. The final project is a group effort and performance. So this is the substantial, concrete participation in the arts, which I will need to balance with the academic readings, lectures, discussions, and writing assignments. It’s always (for me at least) so much easier to assign creative work over academic writing, so now I just have to get over it and deal.

Whereas the course I am currently teaching is only two units and one hour per week, the course I have next semester is four units and three hours, good old fashioned seminar style to which I am accustomed. I have to cover specific periods of Filipino and Filipino American history, so already I am thinking of teaching texts and other sources. Marlon Fuentes’s Bontoc Eulogy, for example when studying the American colonial period. And do I do the obvious and assign Carlos Bulosan’s America is in the Heart? Anyway, so the challenge is to cover specific historical periods and to do so in various arts disciplines. Wow, I am starting to feel like a real professor.

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Today is crazy literature all over SF day. It’s almost time for me to put on my game face. Wish me luck. See you there and there.