It's rare to hear Dartmouth students say that wish they were back in high school, but about 100 students have shown that they are willing to return, signing up for a class this spring that will send them over to Hanover High School at least once a week. College Course 10: Coming of Age, is something of a refresher course for young adults whose memories of adolescence may have faded.
Taught by English Professor Priscilla Sears and Education Professor Andrew Garrod, the course has 100 students enrolled already and covers a selection of literature ranging from Chretien de Troyes' "Yvain" to Alice Walker's "The Color Purple" in addition to various films and research studies.
The class is exceptional in that a parallel course is being taught concurrently at Hanover High School by high school teachers Andrea Alsup and Kate Curtis-McLane.
The classes grew out of a program attended by Dartmouth and Hanover High School Staff at Brown University during the summer of 1994, where with the assistance of professors in the Teachers and Texts program at Brown, a course was developed that allowed for collaboration between the Dartmouth and Hanover High students.
"We were supposed to collaborate on an interdisciplinary multicultural course which involved the College and high school working together," Curtis-McLane said. "We found places of intersection using some of the same texts and reading in the courses."
The teachers and professors spent two weeks reading the same set of texts and discussing them, said Curtis-McLane, a health teacher at the high school. The texts centered mainly on rites of passage and coming of age.
According to Alsup, there are about 25 schools in the nation teaching this course, but none of them have chosen to do it quite the way Dartmouth and Hanover High have.
Dartmouth and Hanover High added an interdisciplinary twist to what was primarily a literature course, by involving the more clinical aspects of adolescence.
Also, the two schools are the only ones in the nation to incorporate interaction between high schoolers and college students into the course.
The result is a course, that in addition to meeting three times weekly, spends Thursdays meeting with the 45 Hanover High students taking the course taught by Curtis-McLane and Alsup.
The meetings are spent discussing selections from Garrod's book "Adolescent Portraits" and other texts the courses have in common.
In addition, both professors will be lecturing at the high school and both high school teachers will be lecturing at Dartmouth.
Sears said she believes the collaboration is beneficial for both the high school and college students since both will be able to share ideas.
"Surely coordination is better for the high schools and the college and certainly the nation," Sears said.
Curtis-McClane said the course will be stimulating to the teachers, professors and all of their students.
Both Curtis-McLane and Alsup said the course will allow high school students to see what is expected of them in college and will give them access to additional resources."I have no idea how the college students feel, but the high school kids are ecstatic," Alsup said.
"I hope they will get a slightly more mature, independent view of the books they have read," Alsup said of her class' interaction with college students.
Sears said she believes the course and others like it are particularly beneficial because they help to make the teaching habits and information presented to students in high school and college more consistent.
The lack of contact between high schools and colleges can leave students not knowing what is expected of them in college and with information that is often obsolete, she said.
"We often get students here who have been given a lot of misinformation," Sears said. "Somebody who has not been able to maintain their scholarship in an area could be utterly out of date."
This new method, she said, is a part of an education reform movement that is on the rise.
"I think anytime teachers get together, you get a better course," Alsup said of the idea.
