Wednesday, February 22, 2012

New York Seen/Taught from a Distance


By Rodger C. Birt
In 1980 I was offered a rare opportunity and a pedagogical challenge:  the department I had recently joined at San Francisco State University asked me to prepare to teach a semester-long (15 weeks) course “on” New York City.  It would  become part of a group of courses constructed around this unifying theme:  a city is a specific, cultural artifact,  and the study of a selected city (in a humanities context) helps serve one of the educational missions of a large state university, namely to introduce