Creating Classes

by Barbara Danish and Laura Brown

Introduction

How do we create our classes? Here is a brief look at the development of our two courses for this semester.

Then racism changed our path.

We’ve taught courses at Bard LLI for more than 15 years. For the first 10, we focused on learning how to see differently, through reading poetry, looking at art together, and allowing these investigations to transform us. In 2020, the murder of George Floyd pushed us to take on social justice issues as another way to transform and build a learning community.

Our first course was Who, Us?: What White People Can Do to Face Racial Injustice and Build a More Just America. The months of course research profoundly changed us, as it did the LLI members who participated in the course. Bard LLI’s DEI/Social Justice Team, renamed Civic Engagement, was one of the legacies of that course.

Today the Problem is Fascism

Now, in 2026, again we feel an imperative to meet this frightening time through a course. We began with Erica Chenoweth, a prominent American political scientist and Harvard professor, whose research into civil resistance gave us hope that there is a nonviolent way to counter the move towards authoritarianism. This was a focus that challenged us personally and intellectually.

So, you have a Focus. Now What?

So there we were with a focus: the mess America is in and how nonviolent resistance could push back. We began to read, read, read, watch videos, start a resource list, not considering the course but learning, tracking what really interested us, our questions, insights, and connections.

The videos we found were remarkable: India, Nashville, Serbia, and more told stories of bold campaigns against repression. We began to understand and be moved by how civil resistance works and why it is more powerful (and successful) than violent resistance. This seemed a subject that might be compelling to LLI people.

Meanwhile, we had a Problem

We wanted to reach a lot of people with what we were learning, but we usually limit enrollment to 25 to allow for in-depth discussions that dive deep into the complexities of the readings we assign. How would that work with more people with less time for outside reading?

And then the lightning bolt struck: movie night. Movie Night! What if we were to show the spectacular documentaries and interviews we were finding? Yes! We would have movie night–in the afternoon! The talk wouldn’t be so extensive, but perhaps we could still find a way to foster discussion.

Enter Session Managers Extraordinaire

We called our brilliant session managers, Susan Christoffersen and Collin Lovas. Together, they offer an incredible combination of technical wizardry, artistic flair, and creative problem-solving. We explained our proposal, and we all immediately got to work figuring out the details.

Meanwhile, we took a cue from a video about the Highlander School, founded by Myles Horton in the 1930s, which trained people in civil resistance, in part by showing them movies of people desegregating Southern lunch counters: What do you notice about the protesters’ actions when they’re taunted and beaten? What do you notice about police actions when one group of protesters is arrested, and another comes to take their place? This noticing became tremendously useful as we considered how to talk about what we were watching.

Two Classes?

We were getting somewhere with our planning. In the movie class, we wouldn’t be able to go into a depth of discussion, but watching the videos a second and third time, we felt they would certainly inform and inspire. And talk would help us form a community investigating what John Lewis would call “good trouble.”

As for the seminar class, we would use the movie night framework and deepen it with assigned homework. And that one Zoom screen of 25 people would crackle with our intense conversation. (Participants in the small class are welcome to also take the movie class.)

What we hope

One thing we have noticed is that studying civil resistance challenges us to think about our role in this fight for democracy. What are we doing? What might we do? Can we meet this call for courage? What part does fear play? Can we overcome it? The more we learn, the more we read the news, the more we believe in civil resistance as a way to think about hope and action. We hope that both classes, in their different ways, will inform and inspire and engage participants in the private and public struggle to embrace nonviolent resistance to the growing autocracy in America.