The Classroom and the Crowd - by Al Filreis

About the Book

In The Classroom and the Crowd, Al Filreis reflects on his decades of experience as a founder of participatory literary communities and teacher of online courses, demonstrating that student-centered education offers new possibilities for humane social networking.

Book Synopsis

For more than a decade, Al Filreis has taught a free online course about experimental poetry, known as "ModPo," that has drawn some 435,000 students from 179 countries. Online classes even a fraction of ModPo's size have been criticized as impersonal and unengaging. But the citizens of ModPo have formed a generous and enduring intellectual community as together they read poems typically dismissed as difficult and inaccessible.

In The Classroom and the Crowd, Filreis reflects on his decades of experience as a founder of participatory literary communities and teacher of online courses, demonstrating that student-centered education offers new possibilities for humane social networking. Introducing readers to ModPo participants and their open-ended, round-the-clock conversations, he shows how online learning can not only be accessible and educational but also deepen our commitment to democracy. Filreis argues that the emphasis on collaborative learning, space for discussion, and the inherent openness of poetry allows for a sense of community, continuity, and even intimacy that often eludes other online educational endeavors. ModPo embodies principles underlying both modern poetics and cooperative education: Writers and readers, like teachers and learners, create meaning together; many voices are clearer than one; and democracy is a creative practice. Proposing an optimistic vision of mass learning, this book contends that asynchronous education has surprising advantages over the traditional classroom, that panics about a crisis of attention and the death of reading are overblown--and that instead of logging off, we should all start reading with a crowd.

Review Quotes

Open to interpretation -- open to learners online -- open to a campus and neighbors in West Philadelphia -- poetry-based communities unfold in this book in intertwined, compelling stories. The Classroom and the Crowd shows how to escape from oubliettes established by both disruptors and traditional educators.--Nick Montfort, author of All the Way for the Win

Al Filreis's revolutionary pedagogy overturns complacent, monodirectional closures of official lecture and lyric culture. Learner-centered teaching and reader-centered poems open democratic vistas for intimate, individualized, aesthetically charged, resounding interactive education--on a mass scale.--Charles Bernstein, author of The Kinds of Poetry I Want: Essays and Comedies

In The Classroom and the Crowd, Al Filreis examines the groundbreaking experience we call ModPo from every angle. With his characteristic curiosity, he turns this puzzle over and over, eschewing hyperbole, disinclined to make grandiose claims. So, as a ModPo participant myself, I will make one: this course changed my life. Now, I have much more insight into all the carefully considered components that made this possible.--Laura Lippman, New York Times best-selling author

About the Author

Al Filreis is Kelly Family Professor of English, founding faculty director of the Kelly Writers House, director of the Center for Programs in Contemporary Writing, codirector of PennSound, and publisher of Jacket2 magazine, all at the University of Pennsylvania. His recent books include 1960: When Art and Literature Confronted the Memory of World War II and Remade the Modern (Columbia, 2021), and he is the host of the podcast PoemTalk.