FIELDNOTES Issue #13 3 April 2014 A happy event will occur for me very soon: Marie will arrive in the U.K. on Saturday, 5 April. I will meet her at Heathrow Airport, just outside London. We will stay in London for a night or two and then return to Swansea. In preparation, I engaged a house cleaning team to make my apartment in Mumbles habitable. Well, actually, I do keep the place pretty clean; but a thorough going-­‐over by professionals never hurts. The team, a husband and wife named Mark and Adele, turned out to consist of Mark only. A burglar had broken into their house a few weeks ago and Adele had not fully recovered from the shock and fear that followed from the incident, even though the burglar had not caught the couple at home. I came home from the university about an hour before Mark had finished the job. I watched him work for a few minutes. Mark appears to be in his early forties, In addition to owning a cleaning and maintenance business, he DJs and gigs around Swansea on guitar and piano. I noticed that Mark cleaned meticulously. He did everything but swab crevices with a Q-­‐tip. He detailed my place, much as an automobile detailer would for a vintage vehicle participating in the Grand Concours. A number of years ago I read that the Welsh value cleanliness. That did not surprise me. In 1974, when I first visited Wales, I noticed that in many small towns, where the clear air could sustain a multitude of stimuli for the nose, the smell of disinfectant (like Lysol) often prevailed. Not overpoweringly -­‐-­‐ just enough to suggest that the locals preferred clean surroundings. I came to associate with Wales the smell of disinfectant blended with the smell of burning fuel oil -­‐-­‐ a combination that I found pleasing, not acrid. On my present sojourn, I do occasionally smell burning fuel oil but have not encountered that distinctive smell of disinfectant. Nonetheless, perhaps the Welsh today favor alternative cleaning products because Welsh commercial establishments and living space (and, as I wrote last week, walking trails!) seem to be as clean as anyone would wish. This past Monday, I organized a dinner for the UNCW students studying abroad here in Swansea. We ate at the Toby Carvery, located a short walk from what the university calls the “student village,” where most of the international students live. Roasted meats are the Carvery’s specialty. And they are good -­‐-­‐ rarely in restaurants have I had pork or turkey more moist, and only in very expensive establishments had I had roasted beef as juicy and flavorful as The Carvery’s. You may order for a set price a choice of meats plus various side dishes; and The Carvery also has selections designed to appeal to vegetarians or light eaters. All twenty students showed up at the function -­‐-­‐ proving that students will attend an event if you offer free food. I wanted to touch ground with the UNCW crew before Swansea University’s Easter vacation period begins in a week or so. I knew that many of them plan to travel extensively in Europe, some of them aiming for Turkey and even Israel. Lots of territory to cover during a block of time amounting to little more than two weeks. But as one student told me at The Carvery, “Who knows when I’ll come back to this part of the world? I want to see as much as I can.” During the break, Marie and I will visit Ireland and then England’s Lake District. The Continent certainly holds much appeal for both of us. My assignment in Wales is a professional gig, though -­‐-­‐ not a pleasure cruise. Accordingly, I want to remain within easy reach of Swansea during the two weeks, in case I must handle issues or crises any UNCW students encounter on break. Marking the essays of my home students (i.e., the British students I am teaching) continues. I have noticed three ways in which the skill levels achieved by my home students and my students in North Carolina differ. First, most (although not all) of the British students tend to have developed basic competence in the fundamentals of university-­‐level composition: well controlled sentences, effective transitions, meritorious word choice. Second, their writing more often than not contains satisfactory spelling, punctuation and grammar. Third, most of my home students adhere closely to authorized formatting guidelines for citing sources and generating reference lists. In the UNCW Communication Studies Department, too many students do not meet those performance standards. I wish not to castigate my students in North Carolina, but to simply suggest that if the Swansea University home students can hit those wickets, so too should UNCW students. Last Saturday, my UNCW Honors class went on a field trip to Cardiff. One of the modules (courses) I teach here is open only to the UNCW study-­‐abroad group members, and eight of the twenty elected to enroll in it. By completing the module, they will earn Honors credit on their UNCW transcripts. In the module, we are studying the phenomenon of public memory -­‐-­‐ the process by which members of a cultural group of whatever size construct the group’s past. A variety of installations -­‐-­‐ monuments, memorials, museums and other buildings designed around themes of remembrance -­‐-­‐ reflect this process, and a variety of narratives and narrative motifs go a long way toward constituting it. The study of public memory has lately acquired some traction in the communication discipline. I have wanted to learn more about it and incorporate its models into certain courses I teach in the UNCW Communication Studies Department. I now would like to design and deliver a public memory course for our communication majors. In Cardiff, the students spent half a day searching out examples of Welsh public memory. Using tools they have learned in the module, they analyzed Welsh installations of their choosing. I required the students to interview strangers engaged in exploration or contemplation of the installations under scrutiny so that the field research would have notably ethnographic dimensions. The students’ findings -­‐-­‐ presented in informal speeches in class this past Tuesday -­‐-­‐ really impressed me. They made connections, drew inferences and proposed interpretations, with only a few weeks’ of instruction in the use of the tools. They articulated their ideas clearly and cogently. Almost every presenter stimulated classmates to ask questions and participate in dialogue about the analysis put forth. I had the pleasure of teaching graduate (at Swansea called postgraduate) students this past Monday. This is the second postgraduate group I’ve worked with here. The subject matter of the module was comparative journalism; the class session focused on how a nation’s core values influences the journalistic endeavor. (The previous postgraduate class I taught occurred in an interdisciplinary module titled “War and Society” and explored the concept of a “Good War.”) During a conversation I had with Dr. Wu, the comparative journalism professor, I described some problem-­‐based learning (PBL) simulations I had facilitated in my UNCW courses. Dr. Wu wondered how one could employ PBL in comparative journalism. I replied, “If I were teaching such a module, here is how I would perhaps use it…,” and a few minutes later I found myself agreeing that on the 31st I would facilitate the PBL experience that I had just concocted on the fly. I designed the simulation and then ran it this past Monday. Dr. Wu took extensive, almost moment-­‐by-­‐moment notes on process; the students had a great deal to say during the debriefing period; and so with that n of one, I am concluding that PBL works satisfactorily in comparative journalism.