The idea of a law course terrified and intrigued me at first, since I had no prior experience at all with law coursework. In retrospect, this is a very good way to to begin a course. Working completely outside your own larger discipline intensifies the learning experience. In my case, the leap was between Humanities and Law. Rhetoric and Law is a reasonably well established research area, as is Rhetoric and Intellectual Property, and I had worked with both of them before. Still, thinking like a lawyer is completely different from being a rhetorician who thinks about law. I had to find a rather different part of my brain that hadn’t been used in awhile, dust it off, and figure out how to get it running again. This is the test-taking part that runs on pure logic, and I hadn’t had to use it much since I finished my core undergrad requirements and started doing coursework that was mostly theoretical and essay-driven. I came out of that course knowing much more about the actual nuts-and-bolts of copyright law and with a completely different perspective on the scholarship my own discipline produces in this area. It was one of the most intellectually stimulating courses I’ve taken, and I’m still running off some of the steam from it. Learning that I could succeed in an academic environment so different from my usual one was also a confidence-booster, and I ended up being acquainted with several leading copyright scholars who work over in our Law School.

The next semester, I was so intrigued by Collin’s posts about his upcoming networked rhetorics course that I finagled my way into it. This was mostly serendipitous: Collin was willing; he had planned for a large part of the course to take place on the network, which meant I could participate via blogging; and my department was willing to credit the work as an Independent Study. Several good, lasting effects came out of this involvement:

• I was able to benefit from Collin’s perspective and interests, which are rather different from those of the internet researchers in my own department. (Not better/worse, just different.) The books he assigned are almost never assigned here, and the questions he asked were of a different bent. This gave me the opportunity to gain a broader perspective than I might have otherwise.
• I was able to meet a bunch of great Syracusans, quite a few of whom I still stay in touch with, either through email, IM, or blogs. A couple of us have submitted proposals and begun other projects together, and I hope we’ll continue to do this sort of thing in the future.
• It reminded me of the challenges of being a distance-learning student, which is useful because I teach online more often than not.

I’ll be busy with the course in the English Department this spring, so there isn’t much to say about it yet. It’s another bit of a challenge to me because of its departmental affiliation. I did my time as an undergrad English major, and hold a BA in Literature. Managed to graduate cum laude, even. But I was never a really good English scholar, not in the hard-core sense that Mister Husband or Scott are. One of my professors at the time chalked it up to the fact that I was working full time as I made my way through that degree. I dunno. But this is a sort of chance to redeem myself a bit, if only in my own eyes. After all, the course doesn’t involve literature per se. I’ll report back on this one as it proceeds along.

Both of my previous experiences have been valuable, and I have high hopes for this next one. I talked about this with a friend at lunch today, and her experiences weren’t similar at all. I wonder what other people’s external coursework has been like, and if other departments also encourage students to step out of the department the way ours does.