Textbooks and Teaching

Exploring the Wide World of Sports:
Taking a Class to the (Virtual) Olympics

Amy Bass

I teach cultural history at Plattsburgh State University, a regional public university located on Lake Champlain. The sixty-one hundred enrolled students are, without question, the faculty's top priority, so faculty constantly struggle to balance scholarship and teaching. When I was offered the opportunity to work as a research consultant for NBC Sports at the Olympics in Sydney, Australia, in fall 2000, I faced a formidable challenge: How could I, in only my second year at Plattsburgh, possibly obtain the time to travel "down under" for seven weeks at the beginning of the academic calendar? The answer I worked out, with help from my chair, my dean, and the Honors Program director, embraced the Olympic opportunity as a classroom experience that would benefit Plattsburgh students. The end result, a history honors seminar entitled "The Black Athlete," was a pedagogic innovation that combined distance and classroom learning by using contemporary and historical materials to enrich each other. Rather than a logistical nightmare, the course was an overwhelmingly positive academic experience for those involved and resulted in an impressive outpouring of original student research and writing on a variety of historical subjects. While all my courses deal with historical concepts of time and space, this unique learning experience required students to move constantly between figures and events of the past and those in the "real-time" present. With the Sydney Olympics as our focal point, we concentrated on historically grounded topics from my own scholarship: nationalism and internationalism, postwar mass media, alternative methods of civil rights struggles, and the varied and changing constructions of race and racism in American culture.	1
From a Distance: Designing a Course without a Professor
Since the students were going to be professor-less for the first weeks of the semester, I developed a plan to keep the course on track. At a meeting the semester before, I talked to students about what I wanted to accomplish. I recast my absence as an opportunity and emphasized how I hoped to bring them to Sydney virtually. I stressed their responsibility for making the seminar a success. Lastly, I conveyed the message that this was an experiment, and that it might not work at all.	2
That fall, a detailed reading schedule of scholarly historical articles greeted students. Their central task during the Games was what I designated the "Olympic Viewing Assignment." For the duration, students were to create personal, mixed-media journals based on multiple sources: NBC sports coverage, domestic and foreign news publications, the Internet, and (because of our close proximity to Montreal) Canadian print and television coverage. In addition, each student was to produce a written chronicle of the Olympics based on a set of common questions regarding media, celebrity, globalization, amateurism, commerce, spectacle, and, especially, identity. Specific questions included:	3
How are different sports represented? How are identities—nation, race, class, gender, age, ethnicity—performed in Olympic rituals? What is the role of the media in creating an athlete's identity? Which nations seem to dominate the media coverage? How is the culture of the host country represented? Electronic Conversations: Using the Internet as a Classroom . . .