“Book Club” as a creative course assignment

This guest post comes from Dr. Olga Burlyuk, University of Amsterdam.

In the BSc course “The EU and the politics of Central and Eastern Europe” I teach at the University of Amsterdam, I use a creative assignment called “Book Club”. For this assignment, students need to: 1) read a book by an author from Central/Eastern Europe (CEE) written or published since 1989; 2) write a book review per my guidelines; and 3) prepare and present a book poster at the “Poster Festival” towards the end of the course. Below, I discuss my motivation for creating this assignment, the practicalities of it, the book review and the book poster components, and assessment.   

The impetus for including this as an assignment

There is no single explanation for why I’ve created this assignment. A few practices and realizations collided in my head over the years, culminating in this idea.

First, I read a lot myself and, coming from the region, I do specifically seek out literature by CEE authors. Gradually, I started including quotes from texts in my seminar slides or putting them up for in-class discussions. Then I started including excerpts from books among the required reading alongside traditional academic texts. Then I decided to embrace this fully and designed a separate “assignment on books”.

Second, in my opinion – and I tell students this much in the first class – “academics are not the intellectuals of our time”. Not of any time, really. Some of the great contemporary writers hold PhDs, occasionally in political science (I have to think of Elif Shafak), but these are exceptions that prove the rule. People generally turn to literature, art, music for articulating and understanding the complexity of contemporary human existence, societies and politics. There is no reason why students of political science shouldn’t.

Hand in hand with the above comes the third point: I honestly do not expect students to read academic texts after graduation. Do you? I do expect them to be bombarded with information in all formats – and they need to be able to process and deduce meaning from whatever it is they encounter. And so, generally, I make a point of including a variety of sources under “required readings” besides traditional academic texts: narrative articles, podcasts, recorded talks, non-fiction essays, documentaries, news and books – which we then discuss through the concepts and theories we are studying.

Fourth, I once attended a meeting with four Romanian writers dedicated to the 30^th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall. One of the writers remarked: “Western Europe and Eastern Europe have one thing in common: Western literature. We both have read it. You guys have not read our [Eastern European] literature, though. So we’ve got a huge advantage there.” And I would add to that: societies in CEE do not learn much about each other either; so there is that, too.

Fifth and linked to the above, this assignment works to “decolonize the syllabus” and is a simple and practical way to emancipate the “object” of study to the status of the “subject”. The Central and Eastern European can speak. It can think. It can write. So let’s read how the authors from the countries in question articulate the experiences (western) academics analyse with their “objective gaze”.

Sixth, in my opinion, there is insufficient attention to developing and harnessing creativity, associative and abstract thinking in political science studies, even compared to other social science studies (think of what colleagues do in sociology and anthropology), let alone compared to studies in the arts and humanities. I am thus on a personal-professional mission to cha(lle)nge that at least in my own teaching. Besides the “book club” assignment discussed here, I use “creative foreign policy speeches” and “news portfolio” in my other courses.

Finally, and simply: Vast majority of students don’t read books, period. My students openly admitted that much. Some said they have not read a book since high school. Some said they genuinely believed they were unable to focus long enough to read a book (!). Some said it never occurred to them to read books from the regions/countries they were studying. Some said they genuinely believed they could not read female authors/books in English/books in translation/… An keen reader myself, I find that tragic. This assignment allows me to shake students up a little.

Therefore, when I found myself in a position to design a course from scratch, I knew I wanted to try out this assignment. It has now had three successful editions.

Practicalities

I use this assignment in an elective 3^rd year BSc course that runs over 14 weeks (3-hour weekly seminar) with a cohort of +/- 25 students.

Timing-wise, students sign up for a book by week 2, submit their book reviews in week 11-12 (one week before the “Poster Festival”) and present their posters during the “Poster Festival” in week 13-14 (which then serves as a culmination of the course). I reserve a separate lengthier session for this (4-5 hours, to allow for breaks) and book a classroom with enough wall space to hang up all the posters. I deliberately work with one extra-long session instead of two shorter ones, because I see added value in the sheer scale and it fosters dialogues between the books. There is no pre-agreed order of speakers: someone starts, and we roll from there. Frequently, a student would exclaim, “I believe I should go next, because this or that idea echoes in my book!”, and we indulge.

Students need to pick a book from the list and sign up online on a “first come, first served” basis. The list is essentially a document containing 3-10 books per CEE country covered in our course (that is: Visegrad, Baltics, Western Balkans, Eastern Partnership). Last year’s list contained 82 titles, so there is ample choice.

The list consists of books by CEE authors (incl. in diaspora or exile), written or published since the end of the Cold War, addressing important social-political-historical-memory issues, and available in English (although students are allowed to read the book in any language). These can be novels, books of short stories, memoirs, or books of essays. A book makes it on the list if it fits the parameters and if I have read it myself or it came highly recommended by a colleague/friend/former student. The list is a living document: I add and remove books from one year to the next.

Importantly: No two students are allowed to read the same book in one year. (Students have read the same book in different years – and produced entirely different posters!) Students are allowed to read different books by the same author, though, and this generates interesting discussions during the Poster Festival. I ask students to pick a book they haven’t read yet. Students are not allowed to pick a book from their country of origin/birth, so that everyone reads into a new context.

Book review

The purpose of the book review is to prompt students to “analyse” the book “in the context of our course”. The book review that students need to write is thus neither a literary review, nor a book review in the academic sense, but something else. I ask students to fill out a “book review form” that contains 12 questions:

1. Author and title of the book
2. Motivation for the choice of this book
3. Situating the book in the context:
   • Person: Author’s positionality
   • Place: Country set/written in
   • Time: Plot set in/ book written/ published/ translated
4. Plot (very briefly)
5. Key themes addressed by the book
6. Possible linkages to the themes addressed in our course, course readings
7. Key message of the book
8. Impression it left on you as the (foreign) reader
9. One-two quotes that struck you (quote(s) and a brief reflection)
10. What you enjoyed about the book most/least
11. What surprised you most/least
12. Anything else you wish to mention

As you can appreciate, except for the author and book title, these are all (very) open questions. The review form thus gives students some structure – and gives me some consistency/resemblance across students and books for grading – but remains open enough for students to tailor it to their book of choice and “speak their mind”.

On the one hand, this part of the assignment is familiar to students as it is a piece of writing. On the other hand, it is very much unlike their other written assignments and requires (much) more (personal) reflection.

I ask students to be brief and focused in their reviews and emphasize that there is no premium on extra pages. Commonly, the reviews are 3-4 pages long.

Book posters

The purpose of the book poster is to prompt students to give their book and analysis thereof a visual expression/representation. It is about how they “see” the book and how they wish for us to see it.

Students need to produce a physical poster (i.e. not a digital one), size A3 or bigger, to be hang up on the wall and viewed/discussed during the Poster Festival. I underline that ours is not an art/design class, so it is the creative idea that counts not the technical execution. I also emphasize that there is no need to incur expenses: a poster can be on a newspaper, on the back of an existing poster, on four A4 sheets glued together, on a piece of a card box, etc. We discuss the basics of “how to” during one of the seminars. However, I am reluctant to give too much guidance as I believe it would undermine creativity.

Students are allowed to use graphic design software, but this is not required – and in fact I advise students against it and encourage them to keep it as analogue as possible and enjoy the process. The use of AI is forbidden. Surprised at first – “This is the first time since secondary school that I need scissors and pencils!” – students mostly prove to be extremely creative and handy, surprise themselves and discover each other in a new way. I’ve observed that students carefully wrap their posters to take home afterwards, which is in itself a sign of how meaningful this exercise is for them.

During the Poster Festival, students present their posters one by one (and we all move through the classroom like a group touring an exhibition. They get 5-6 minutes to speak, with another 5-6 minutes reserved for questions from the class.

Assessment

The Book Club assignment constitutes 20% of the final grade (with 30% reserved for seminar participation and 50% for the final paper). The grade consists of the book review, book poster and presentation during the Poster Festival, and I provide ample feedback on all three in the online portal alongside their grade.

A practical note: I take pictures of the posters during the Poster Festival (one in close-up and one with students next to their posters) to assist me in grading later.

I also ask students if I may use photos of their posters on social media, and I have made long Twitter/X threads discussing the assignment and featuring the most creative posters in 2023 and 2024. More so: I have tagged writers of the books as relevant, and some have engaged or reposted (to the great excitement of students).

This is a genuinely and thoroughly fun assignment that triggers students at a deeper analytical, empathetic and simply human level. Many shared that this assignment has been transformative for them in how they engage with ideas across media and how they express their own thoughts on a subject. Some said they have discovered the worth or joy of reading. Best of all: This year’s students initiated a book swap (they brought their hard copies to the Poster Festival and swapped books they found compelling based on the poster/discussion) and asked in the course feedback that I design a Film Club assignment for the course’s next edition. Could I wish for more?