Teaching Multilingual / Multicultural Adaptation in the Classroom

Case Study: Harry Porter and the Heretics of W.O.S.

Harry Porter and the Heretics of W.O.S. was a thirty day challenge By Professor Renee Fox to recruit an intrepid band of students from her LIT80Y Course and adapt J.K. Rowling’s characters and novels into a performance of some sort, recontextualizing the Harry Potterverse and using the material to speak to culture of The University of California Santa Cruz, Silicon Valley, and the conditions facing local students here and now, in their own pursuit of higher education and the mastery of “magic,” (whatever magic would signify or represent in the world of “Slugworts,” if you will…) Professor Fox’s highly anticipated and wickedly successful Textual Analysis megacourse: Literature 80Y – Harry Potter, was a ten week long journey through all 7 of Rowling’s Books, with over 380 students, eight Teaching Assistants (2 per House) on a collective mission to examine the similarities and differences between reading the series as a child and reading the texts critically, as adults and scholars and questioning what new significance emerges from the text, when one reads or transplants the world of Harry Potter to the U.S.A.

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