Portland Community College | Portland, Oregon

Class Meetings: Fully online (no scheduled meetings)

This course is fully online and there are no required Zoom meetings.

Textbooks: None

There are no textbooks you need to buy, as I use Open Educational Resources (OER) and provide materials through our course learning management system (D2L Brightspace).

Grading: Student work is assessed using a grading contract. [https://writingcommons.org/article/so-your-instructor-is-using-contract-grading/?doing_wp_cron=1635441724.6528089046478271484375]

Course Description: 

Why study fiction? Current popular sentiment extols the virtues of reading stories to develop empathy. Reading about other people’s experiences that are strange and unfamiliar to us, the thinking goes, allows us to put ourselves in the place of the other.

Yet, when taken too far, the belief that reading enables us to inhabit another’s experience can be reductive and silencing, imbuing us with a false sense of our own entitlement to speak on things we haven’t experienced directly. In How to Read Now (2022), Elaine Castillo explains that “if we need fiction to teach us empathy, we don’t really have empathy, because empathy is not a one-stop destination; it’s a practice, ongoing, which requires work from us in our daily lives, for our daily lives.”

This introduction to fiction course focuses specifically on texts addressing the healthcare experience—whether that be someone’s experience with healthcare as a recipient, caregiver for a recipient, provider, or any combination of these. You will be reading primary sources—original works of fiction—as well as secondary sources—analyses of those original works of fiction. Part of completing the readings will require you to use hypothes.is, which is a software you will access through our course D2L site that will allow you to annotate the assigned readings and see your classmates’ annotations, as well as mine.

In addition to these readings, weekly assignments will include shorter writing assignments. You will also be asked to complete longer writing assignments—a mid-term and a final—specific instructions for which you will receive as the term progresses. The work of this course is designed to further develop your reading comprehension skills, deepening your ability to engage in comprehensive, ethical analyzations of how a text produces meaning. The overall goal of this course is to examine the responsibility we have as readers when encountering another’s story.